Ergodic Literature

Ergodic literature is a mode of textual organization in which nontrivial effort is required for the reader to traverse the text, beyond ordinary eye movement or the turning of pages. The scholar Espen J. Aarseth coined the term by adapting it from physics, building it from the Greek words for work, ergon, and path, hodos. He introduced it as part of his broader concept of the cybertext, which he presents not as a literary genre but as a perspective on textual machines that compute or permute outputs, arguing that the cybertextual process includes a semiotic sequence produced through the reader's own material actions, something conventional notions of reading do not fully capture. Although often compared to nonlinearity as understood in physics, Aarseth treats the nonlinearity found in hypertext as a topological, graph-theoretic property of nodes and links rather than a concept literally imported from physics.