The project of dissertation “Le Livre and the Sintext: The simulation of Mallarmé’s dream through the digital poetics of Pedro Barbosa” intends to evidence the connection between these two works, apart in time line but very intimate considering their poetic ideals: the unfinished Mallarmé’s work "Le Livre", ideated on XIX century and the digital text
synthesizer, “Sintext”, anthological cyberliterary project, conceived by Pedro Barbosa and
José Manuel Torres in 2001.
Mallarmé’s masterpiece, the poem “Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance”, is probably the closest poetic experience of the “Livre”. This poem is, first of all, a poetic process, which the verses, distant one from the other and printed in various typefaces lead to a not lineal and limitless reading that offers the reader many entries and exits.
The research approaches, at first, the development of cyber literature from hypertext’s
paradigm by going trough the multimedia digital poetics, the ergodic literature until focusing
literary occurrences generated from a computer: the digital poetry, the generative literature
and the hyperfiction, according to Pedro Barbosa's proposal.
In this trajectory, authors like Jay David Bolter, George Landow, Jacques Derrida, Lev
Manovich, Lúcia Santaella, Giselle Bielguelman, Janet Murray, Espen Aarseth, Pedro Barbosa,
Chris Funkhouser, Rui Torres e Jorge Luiz Antônio are related.
The dissertation proceeds with a presentation of the French poet’s poetic work, and it
proposes a comparison between the “Sintext” and the “Livre”, by coming into view the
coincident points between these works, with the support of the work of the authors Maurice
Blanchot, Jacques Scherer, Arlindo Machado, Octavio Paz, beside the others before
mentioned.
The climax of the project is a poetic experimentation in a digital medium wich Mallarmé’s
poem “Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance” is submitted to a text engine similar to the
“Sintext”. The process is put into practice by a combinatorial operation with the verses of
poem; it will enable innumerable possibilities of re-combining the verses, amplifying the
meaning of the work and playing, by the digital poetics, the multiple and infinite book once
conceived by Mallarmé.
(Source: Author's Abstract)
