Digital Humanities and Society Studies

Articles

Fragile Interfaces: Electronic Literature and the Poetics of Vulnerability

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https://doi.org/10.54963/dhss.v1i1.2316
Volume 1 Issue 1 (2025)

Authors

  • Andrea Puchmüller

    Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias Humanas y Sociales (IICHS), Universidad Nacional de San Luis (UNSL), San Luis 5700, Argentina

Received: 17 August 2025; Revised: 30 September 2025; Accepted: 7 October 2025; Published: 21 November 2025

This article explores the concept of fragile interfaces to examine how electronic literature makes visible the socio-technical infrastructures that shape digital subjectivity. Situated at the intersection of Digital Humanities, media theory, and literary studies, the study addresses a gap in current scholarship by arguing that vulnerability in digital works is not only represented thematically but also embedded in their formal and material conditions. Drawing on N. Katherine Hayles’s notion of the text-interface and Judith Butler’s relational understanding of vulnerability, the article analyzes Alex Saum’s “Room #3” (2020) and J.R. Carpenter’s “Entre Ville” (2006). Through two distinct interface logics (platform simulation and hypertextual urban mapping), these works foreground fragmentation, exposure, and infrastructural dependency. The analysis adopts a qualitative interpretative approach grounded in close reading and rhetorical analysis of digital textual environments, emphasizing the role of interface design, navigational structures, and multimodal composition in the production of meaning. It reveals how digital interfaces structure vulnerability by shaping forms of perception, agency, and relationality, producing fragmented and technologically mediated subjectivities. In this sense, vulnerability emerges not only as thematic content but as a condition enacted through the unstable architectures of digital textuality. By conceptualizing fragility across material, structural, affective, political, and ecological dimensions, this article contributes to ongoing debates in Digital Humanities concerning mediation, platform society, and digital precarity in contemporary cultural production.

Keywords:

Electronic Literature Digital Interfaces Vulnerability Posthuman Subjectivity Digital Precarity

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