literatureor

Literatureor is a term used in contemporary literary theory and digital humanities to describe a class of texts and practices that foreground reader choice and multiple readings as central to meaning. It encompasses works that present reader agency through non-linear structures, modular segments, branching narratives, or algorithmic generation, so that a single text can yield several distinct readings or endings. The term functions both as a description of form and as a theoretical lens for analyzing how readers participate in meaning-making.

The name literatureor is a portmanteau of "literature" and the conjunction "or," signaling the central role of choice in interpretation and in how texts unfold. It arose in online scholarly discourse in the early 2020s, in discussions of electronic literature, interactive fiction, and AI-assisted writing. It is not tied to a single author or work but serves as an umbrella label for related practices.

Common features include open-ended plots, branching hyperlinks, reader-generated sequences, multimodal presentation (text, image, sound), and, in some forms, procedural or algorithmic generation. Works described as literatureor may be encountered in digital platforms, web-based narratives, interactive poetry, and hybrid print-digital projects.

Reception has been mixed: some scholars view literatureor as a useful analytic for understanding reader agency and textual interdisciplinarity, while others criticize it as overly broad or ill-defined, overlapping with existing terms such as hypertext fiction and electronic literature.

See also digital literature, hypertext fiction, interactive fiction, branching narrative, electronic literature.