memories

Memories are deeply rooted in the concrete: in space, gesture, and material objects. The cognitive processes of forgetting and recalling, the latter involving “action-oriented responses from a living subject to material triggers -- physical stimuli from external environment” (van Dijck 2007: 30), have not only been studied by neuroscientists, psychologists, and cognitive theorists, but have been addressed and examined by e-lit writers as well. Textual “instruments,” such as the app novella Pry (2015), which are activated by bodily gestures and manipulated like games (Luesebrink 2013), invite readers-players not only to trigger (through touch) the narrator’s, protagonist’s, or principal character’s interior thoughts -- thoughts which are verbalized and represented as the strobing words, or floating or stretched text. They also enable readers to experience, within the course of complex tactile interactions, the struggle of retrieving from explicit memory and from the unconscious, personal flashbacks (in Pry represented in the form of very short videos). However, these Bergsonian image-souvenirs, once registered by senses and stored in the faculty of the mind, are not fixed. Rather, while invoked, they are continually being submitted to (re)creation (Kordys 2006: 143, van Dijck 2007: 30). This paper focuses on memory (re)construction apps created within the field of new media art. The analysis will not be limited to the gestural repertoire used to interact with facets of someone else’s memory -- in the second half of the paper, the focus will shift to the reader-player’s own memory, which is subjected to the challenge of having to read a constantly transforming text: for example, the stretchtext technology implemented in Pry allows inserting phrases between already read ones, which changes the meaning of each sentence; similarly, readers of Pry come to realize that it is not possible to retrace sequences of already viewed flashbacks. In this context, I will address the question of whether the concept of haptic memory can be adapted to a ludosemiotic approach (Ensslin 2014: 53).

These days, commonplaces are repeated about contemporary literatures: new readers, new ways of reading, globalization, etc., because we are witnessing a global change in the way of leaving and interacting, an unprecedented acceleration of the circulation of products and materials, of people, texts and memories that make us learn and look into the world in a different way. The national and global imaginaries coexist and are producing literatures, but, in fact, we do not find enough contrasted experiences and studies that show us how these two imaginaries are working together. It is time for us to ask whether interrelations between global, regional, national, social, generational, sexual memories are modifying the patterns of production and consumption of reading of digital literatures in a very particular way and, in this case, it is also time to change the way in which we approach the text and the way we teach and learn literature. In the frame of the experiences and the research that our Research Group (Leethi) has developed on rituals for e-readings and strategies to read e-literatures and focusing on e-Literature written in Spanish, we will try to answer to these questions: - Concerning the extension and multiplication of media, Is this really modifying local, digital, literary production? Then, do they really exist local, rooted, national literary productions? How does it work with e-productions when the text goes beyond the language? - About our space in the Internet, do they exist national borders? How do readers need to carry across them to enter a global arena through mass media, social networks, blogs, video-games, virtual repositories, etc., to read digital literatures? It is the language the new boundary for readers? - What connective structures are activated to read e-literatures? Which one is the new global imaginary that let us read and understand transcultural productions? Is it related to science, networks or videogames? Which are the new cultural icons? Is there any kind of global memory which e-literatures are contributing to produce? - How could e-Literature help us as teachers to wide the view of our students and to show them a transnational world? In this contribution, we will try to ask to some of these questions by studying some very concrete hispanophone examples of e-literatures in which we could find signs of all these items.