Literatura electrónica en español: planteamientos estéticos de la conectividad
This doctoral thesis focuses on the study of electronic literature in Spanish language emphasizing its capacity for cultural transmission. Electronic literature is understood as an avant-garde art form that contains the seeds of the digital cultural future, as it is born within the digital ecosystem. In these technological-poetics, their fused media and languages are integrated as part of the same communication system with specific characteristics, the result of the interaction between the literary, the artistic and the technological, so this practice is seen as a fertile territory of research and experimentation, that is, a work laboratory where there is not only a juxtaposition of media and languages, but also a conceptual fusion characteristic of new art forms.
Synthesis:
The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the field of electronic literature in Spanish language using a dynamic and relational methodological model that combines two reading scales: a distant reading that attends to the system or network that makes up the field, and another close reading that attends to the artifacts, so that they configure a kind of dynamic map that works as a connecting tool between the system and the artifacts. In this sense, the aim has been to address the following problems with respect to the field of study: on the one hand, the development of a transdisciplinary methodology to understand a system immersed in digital or post-digital culture, dependent on digital logics of cultural circulation, dataification, the irruption of the visual and spatial turn and the hybridization of media and languages, among other circumstances. On the other hand, the visibility of a legitimated corpus of electronic literature in Spanish and the elaboration of an online and open repository, called Ciberia, that contains it and that serves as a basis for the dynamic reading that is proposed in the methodology of this thesis.
The creative corpus of this work is limited to Spanish as a linguistic frontier and as a substitute for the concept of nation that no longer responds to geographical or cartographic determinisms, but to data flow spaces. In this way, electronic literary creation can be used as a channel to analyze the role of text and literature within the digital cultural identity and also the changes that occur not only in cultural materials, but in the processes of circulation, transmission and significance that these convey.
These objectives are developed throughout three parts and nine chapters that form the body of this work. In the first part of the thesis, in chapters 1 and 2, the state of the art in the field of electronic literature in Spanish is proposed from three communicated debates: the terminological debate, the critical debate and the institutional debate. In this way, its tensions and the erasure of its limits are drawn and the need for the concept of the network –conceptually and technologically– is evidenced to encompass this phenomenon as a system. The development of the idea of the field of electronic literature from the concept of the network is elaborated in the second chapter of the thesis. The second part of the thesis, in chapters 3 and 4, elaborates a methodology that draws on the tradition of systemic theories of culture and is based on the interdisciplinarity of cultural studies and on the visual or spatial turn to elaborate the concept of connective map as an interpretive model of the electronic literature network. The third part of this work, through chapters 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9, applies this connective and relational model to the interpretation of the electronic literature network in Spanish, putting the artifacts into dialogue with the system in which it unfolds.
Conclusions:
In short, this work defends the need for an interdisciplinary perspective that is applied to the reading of a cultural practice that is already hybrid born. With this, the study of the network of electronic literature in Spanish language is carried out from a distant reading perspective, through the concept of the map and a close reading of a corpus composed of 59 works of electronic literature is elaborated, which dialogue under the concepts of reflexivity, spatiality, and performativity. These concepts not only serve to analyze artifacts but also allow us to relate these works to the network or digital ecosystem that contains them.