THe Sweet Old Etcetera

Allison Clifford’s The Sweet Old Etcetera demonstrates the unique navigational allowances of electronic literature, as the user begins on a blank, white landscape and navigates all the way to a full scene of word-shapes. This piece of electronic literature draws its visual inspiration from the poetry of E.E. Cummings and utilizes hyperlinks to navigate from one stage in the landscape’s development to the next. From a set of black parenthesis sprout lines of words in the shape of a sapling, and from its branches grow more word branches, forming a word tree. This transition between states is fully animated so that the user can see how their action caused the landscape to move from one position to the next. The tree begins to sway back and forth, and the words on the tree then grow organically, much like the thoughts of an author while writing. At the click of the mouse, the tree is overtaken by hopping and twirling letters that form an anagram for the word “grasshopper,” which is fitting considering the motion of the letters. While the letters continue to flutter around and bounce up and down, the user clicks on red word hyperlinks that cause the words to rearrange themselves again and again, moving slightly down the page each time. At each transition resonates a plucked-string sound, and a final click brings the screen to a word landscape full or word-seeds.

Clifford wants the reader to view the literature composition process as both natural and invigorating: ideas stem from the common groundwork of language, and seedling ideas develop into full-fledged literary entities with time and effort. Although the displayed words do not form sentences or cohesive thoughts, they are all within the category of an outdoor landscape; in this case, the movement of the words and the user’s interaction with them is more important than what the words actually are. Specifically, The Sweet Old Etcetera affords the reader the perspective of an author: the reader contemplates the lifecycle of literary works and the progression from words to ideas to sentences. Clifford invites the reader to visualize this development while they impact it, and thus, she utilizes two primary affordances of electronic literature: navigation and visual stimuli. Because the user’s click causes each transition of the word landscape, the user is able to control when the landscape transitions, how much time he or she spends on each page, and the manner in which the landscape transitions. Additionally, Clifford implements sensory stimuli in the form of kinesthetic motion and sounds: words and letters move across the page, and audible tones signal a state transition. The combination of these sensory elements draws the user into the piece of electronic literature — the user becomes a part of the process of literary development.