Electronic Literature in Europe

I am pleased to announce an addition to the conference program. The program will conclude Saturday, September 13th with a closing keynote address at 4PM by the novelist and a leading figure in the sphere of electronic literature, Robert Coover.

Robert Coover is one of the most prolific and influential living American novelists. HIs most recent books include The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Directors’ Cut, Stepmother, A Child Again, and Noir. He is the recipient of the William Faulkner, Brandeis University, American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Endowment of the Arts, Rea Lifetime Short Story, Rhode Island Governor’s Arts, Pell, and Clifton Fadiman Awards, as well as Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Lannan Foundation, and DAAD fellowships. Coover is Visiting Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University. Coover created the pioneer electronic writing (hypertext fiction) workshops at Brown University in 1990-91, and has been working since 2002 with writers, composers, artists, modelers, and programmers in the immersive virtual reality of Brown’s “Cave” in a workshop called “Cave Writing.”

Coover lives in Providence, Rhode Island and London, England. Coover's work has been translated in France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Greece, Russia, Israel, Iran, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, China, Korea, Romania, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Serbia, Catalunya, and other countries.

Coover is one of the founders of the Electronic Literature Organization, and has been actively involved in shaping the field since the early 1990s. His 1992 New York Times Book Review essay The End of Books raised international awareness of electronic literary forms, and his 1999 Digital Arts and Culture Conference Keynote Address Literary Hypertext: The Passing of the Golden Age marked a formal shift in electronic literature correspondent to the popular move to the technology and culture of the Web.