Experimentation is central to the Irish literary tradition, so it is striking to see that many new forms of digital literature remain uncultivated on this island. Where Irish literature has engaged with the digital, it is usually in the form of film-poetry, fragments of text set to video and sound. Other national canons have long progressed to more technically sophisticated genres – literary games, walking simulators, interactive fiction set in immersive virtual worlds – but Irish digital literature remains dominated by the film-poem, and in many respects, seems stagnated. But the situation in Ireland is not entirely bleak: in the figure of Doireann Ní Ghríofa, now a household name after the success of A Ghost in the Throat (2020), Ireland has a high-profile author who has shown a willingness to embrace the digital, something which may encourage further support for multimodal writing among arts practitioners and policymakers. Through its emphasis on Ní Ghríofa’s e-lit works, this chapter explores the past, present, and future of digital literature in Ireland, its major impediments, and possible futures.

This chapter critically examines Latin American digital literature. First, it deals with the definition and main traits of electronic literature, arguing that electronic literature represents not just the emergence of a new modality that can be confined to a corner or “niche” of literature, but, on the contrary, an interrogation of the ontology of literature. Second, it discusses the specificity of Latin American digital writing. While some scholars claim that electronic literature is essentially a global phenomenon detached from the location where it is produced, others argue that “locatedness” is fundamental. The adjective “Latin American” should be understood as describing the dialogues that these works establish with central Latin American issues and concerns as well as their engagement with a cultural tradition that is considered as belonging/specific to the region. After presenting a brief genealogy of electronic literature in Latin America, the final part of the chapter analyzes four digital works that can be considered as canonical, or at least representative of a plurality of forms that characterizes electronic literature: Gabriella Infinita by Colombian author Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez; Grita by the Peruvian poet José Aburto; The IP Poetry Project by Argentinean artist Gustavo Romano; and The 27th/El 27 by the Mexican artist Eugenio Tisselli.

One of the underlying arguments of this book is that poetry’s value is bound up in its “negative capability,” in its presentation of complexity. It isn’t that the ambiguity or uncertainty embedded in a poem is part of some devious machination on the part of the poet, but that poetry is founded in a fissure, as the previous chapter show in a variety of ways. This argument comes under heavy pressure in a time of global political and ecological crisis. Never has it been more stupifyingly clear that “poetry makes nothing happen,” as Auden wrote. And never have the deep foundations of poetry seemed so precarious. The importance of nature for poetry is so deep as to be nearly unnoticeable, not only poetry’s reliance on the ideologies of the pastoral, but also poetry’s leveraging its own significance by way of the sublimity of the natural world. What happens when nature is under planetary threat? What is the status of a nature poem well after the death of nature? How might we understand poetry within the context of ongoing ecological devastation? This chapter considers these questions through reading of poems by Stephanie Strickland and Nick Montfort, Ed Roberson, and Juliana Spahr.