Literature created in and with digital media is often in flux and ephemeral, because it exists in the constantly changing timelines of social media, or because authors experiment with texts that glide across the screen, become illegible, or disappear after being read. And it is precisely these texts that challenge literary studies to develop new methodologies. In contrast to the fleeting nature of digital texts, traditional methodologies are based on a conceptually stable object: the text on paper or the book, which is designed to allow repeated access to the text.
The project addresses this paradigm shift by turning to theater and dance studies, as the ephemerality of their subjects is at the heart of academic engagement with them. By recasting methods from these disciplines, the project addresses the particular challenges that digital texts pose. It approaches texts with a flexible perspective informed by theater studies, while keeping an eye on the literariness and rhetoric of texts. While literariness concerns the specific procedures of individual texts, the project's focus on the rhetoric of the digital addresses the question of how rhetoric helps us to analyze digital structures and thereby enables—or prevents—the navigation of digital spaces.