Portuguese

By focusing on hyperfiction, this paper presents some proto-hyperfictions, dealing with literature's combinatorial processes (ars combinatoria), and with its composition based on permutations. This practice, which continues today, although using different techniques and effects, I call factorial literature [l!]. My aim is to introduce the concept of factorial literature as a transtemporal genre that has been intensified in the context of electronic literature. In the analysis of hyperfiction, I return to the definitions of hypertext by Theodor Holm Nelson (1965) and Gérard Genette (1982). Referring back to essays by Italo Calvino (1967) on literature, mathematics and cybernetics, and articles by Robert Coover (1992, 1993) about the new literary practices in digital environments, I prepare the coordinates for a revaluation of hyperfiction's recent history and its software, namely through the transient concept of constant restart, associated with the reader's new role as user. This concept is catalyzed by the rewriting potential of the literary work and by a critical approach that participates in the same process: the artwork and criticism in progress.

The impact of hypertext and hypermedia on scholarly editing of our literary legacy, which is increasingly published in electronic formats, has fostered a conceptual shift from the archive as a classified hierarchical collection of texts to the archive as a decentred and reconfigurable network of texts. Another important set of questions concerns new methods for editing and organizing multimodal textualities resulting from combinations of materials and media (graphic, audio, video, digital). The convergent multimodality of digital textuality opens up a new editing and archival space for multimedia and intermedia forms of writing. In the current technological context, innovative and experimental literary forms become relevant, as many of the operations that the machine provides can be found in previous literary practices: from collages and automatic writing to narrative permutations and intermedia poetry. This issue of the journal addresses problems of representing, archiving, and publishing experimental literary forms in digital spaces. The fifth volume of Cibertextualidades includes research papers about processes and methods for representation, preservation, and dissemination of intermedia and multimedia literary practices using digital archival systems.

Source: excerpt from editorial

This essay is an in-depth analysis of Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves (2000). The novel, marked by digital textuality, is an encompassing multilayering system fictionally constructed by different authors and several narratives. Thus, these narratives form a major work that reveals and parodies aspects of the gothic novel, as well as other genres and modes. Nevertheless, its structure is formally connected as a hypertextual narrative. Therefore, it would be inexact to categorize House of Leaves as being either one or other literary object. I propose approaching this novel as “participating” in all these categorizations.
Finally, I read the concept of ‘echo,’ which is presented by Danielewski on Chapter V, as an essential notion to understand the characters' progression through the narrative. This perspective concludes that literature reaches its potential when there is a singular production of echo, or an unpredictable lack of echo, meaning discomfort and strangeness (ostranenie) in the reader’s consciousness.

The focus of many of my generative poetic artworks is identity. These works address this theme through the use of interactive systems, where the relationship between the viewer and the artwork is explicit and active. This act of interaction functions to raise questions concerning being and, through the process of communication, the linguistic foundations of identity.