A friend of mine believes that literally any kind of writing can be literature. Even the writing on the wall, or, as he puts it, the writing on the bathroom wall can be literature. Although this idea may be philosophically compelling, certainly society's ideas don't reflect my friend's. Just stop into any Barnes and Noble and you'll notice that writing is divided into neat columns and rows up and down the store. Within these sections we have literature, but we also have teen fiction, religious writing, graphic novels, cookbooks, self help books, and many others.
It is fair then to suppose that literature here is represented as a certain kind of writing, a certain quality of writing, and writing designed for a particular audience. In that particular regard, it may be easier to think about how bookstores help define what literature is not: instructions, books with graphics, or books that are supposedly "simplistic" in their aims or forms.
So this brings us then to the issue of e-literature and begs the following question: since e-literature contains elements vastly different than what we find in a bookstore model of literature, why call it literature at all? As N. Katherine Hayles notes in her article Electronic Literature: What is It?: "when a work is preconceived to take advantage of the behavioral, visual and/or sonic capabilities of the Web, the result is not just a Web 'version' but an entirely different artistic production that should be evaluated in its own terms with a critical approach fully attentive to the specificity of the medium" (14).
This particular attention to medium specific art brings into the question, especially when regarding Interactive Fiction (IF), if society's understood connotation of the word "literature" binds it to a medium best understood to be formed purely of text and presenting a certain artistic quality and skill beyond the uncreative and often vulgar elements we might find on the bathroom wall or the game like elements we see in interactive mediums that engage "behavioral, visual and/or sonic capabilities of the Web."
I see an interesting option here: we should consider moving away from the term "literature" and towards the term "Rhetoric" since the analytical possibilities and the possibilities regarding the understood definition of the term may lead to a better acceptance. Surely my friend would be justified in saying that there is rhetoric in the inky scrawl of a bathroom stall, just as there is rhetoric to the design and experience of e-literature that is different from standard print literature. If we can agree to discuss these different arts of different mediums under this umbrella, e-literature may just find its place in the world of writing.
So then perhaps the issue is simply lexical. The label, "literature" is currently used to help elevate the level of art of some of the different levels of e-literature, but why not give it its own name, divorced of the connotations that contain references to a more specific cannon. I don't know what word would work better instead of e-literature, but surely the creative minds producing these works could find a label that could stand proudly on its own and even neatly find its place or individual section in our bookstores and minds.