National Fictions: Reading the Free Republic of Verdis as Electronic Literature
Proposal Type
Individual Talk
Location
Algorithms & Imaginaries
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
This presentation explores ways that electronic literature can be understood through frameworks other than text production by examining the importance of “worldbuilding” as a critical lens. Drawing from work from scholarship in speculative fiction, design, and civic literacy, it argues for centering participatory engagement rather than close reading as a site of audience reception. It considers how worldbuilding has been used widely in multiplatform works of e-lit, alternate reality games, and locative media. To demonstrate the potential efficacy of this approach for creating a more capacious definition of electronic literature, it considers the case of the Free Republic of Verdis, which was situated on the border of Croatia and Serbia on a small sliver of land on the shore of the Danube, owned by an Australian man who promoted virtual homesteading by other citizens on his TikTok channel, although he was later deported from the region. It looks at the role of digital discourse in the founding of the potential new countries today in contrast to the “print capitalism” described in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, which argued for the role of newpapers and novels in the project of nation-building.
National Fictions: Reading the Free Republic of Verdis as Electronic Literature
Algorithms & Imaginaries
This presentation explores ways that electronic literature can be understood through frameworks other than text production by examining the importance of “worldbuilding” as a critical lens. Drawing from work from scholarship in speculative fiction, design, and civic literacy, it argues for centering participatory engagement rather than close reading as a site of audience reception. It considers how worldbuilding has been used widely in multiplatform works of e-lit, alternate reality games, and locative media. To demonstrate the potential efficacy of this approach for creating a more capacious definition of electronic literature, it considers the case of the Free Republic of Verdis, which was situated on the border of Croatia and Serbia on a small sliver of land on the shore of the Danube, owned by an Australian man who promoted virtual homesteading by other citizens on his TikTok channel, although he was later deported from the region. It looks at the role of digital discourse in the founding of the potential new countries today in contrast to the “print capitalism” described in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, which argued for the role of newpapers and novels in the project of nation-building.
Bio
Elizabeth Losh is the Duane A. and Virginia S. Dittman Professor of American Studies and English with a specialization in New Media Ecologies at William & Mary, where she also directs the Equality Lab. Previously she directed the Culture, Art, and Technology Program at the University of California, San Diego. She is the is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press, 2009), The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University (MIT Press, 2014), Hashtag (Bloomsbury, 2019), and Selfie Democracy: The New Digital Politics of Disruption and Insurrection (MIT Press, 2022). She is the co-author with Jonathan Alexander of Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2013; second edition, 2017; third edition, 2020). She also edited the collection MOOCs and Their Afterlives: Experiments in Scale and Access in Higher Education (University of Chicago, 2017) and co-edited Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities (Minnesota, 2018) with Jacqueline Wernimont. She co-chaired the Modern Language Association - Conference on College Composition and Communication Joint Task Force on Writing and AI and is currently co-chairing the MLA Task Force on AI in Research and Teaching. Her forthcoming Guide to Gen AI will be out from Macmillan later this year.