globalization

Tempering the myth of global variety, David Golumbia processes the dominance of English in digital environments - and a highly standardized English at that.

(Source: EBR)

Caren Irr on ®TMark.com.

(Source: EBR)

"If you’re under the impression that Americans are wealthy, check out the capital city of Latvia."

E-lit narratives in Spanish have been developing at a steady pace with a profound embedded interest in denouncing some of the historical, social and political events which are commonplace in the Spanish speaking world. Their origins can be traced back to iconic works such as Extreme Conditions (1996) and The Wright Brothers’ First Flight (1996) by Juan B. Gutiérrez. Whereas the first e-lit work immerses the reader in a science fiction narrative which portrays the effects of capitalism, the second literary piece takes place in an isolated Latin American town deeply affected by corruption and the typical idiosyncrasies of a small Latin American town.  As a follow up to this declamatory gesture portrayed by these narratives, Gabriella infinita (2000) by Colombian writer Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez Ruiz brings to the fore topics that are common in many Spanish speaking countries, such as a civil war, censorship, repression, fear and exile. In turn, Golpe de gracia (2006) also by Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez Ruiz discusses the role of authoritarianism in society, as represented by one of its main characters. Though the topics discussed in these narratives are highly representative of issues that have taken place either in Latin America and/or Spain, they also reflect how these regional idiosyncratic events have transcended their boundaries to become commonplace circumstances in a globalized society. But it is the Peruvian-Venezuelan writer Doménico Chiappe who has transformed his e-lit pieces in declamatory narratives which entice the reader to reflect and act upon historical, political, social and technologically driven events which have drastically altered a region and/or a globalized society in general. In the polyphonic multimedia novel Tierra de extracción (1996-2007) Chiappe incisively depicts the enduring hardship of a small Venezuelan town and its people who have lived under the shadows of exploitation by the oil companies, whereas in Hotel Minotauro (2014), his latest and most declamatory piece, Chiappe addresses issues such as the financial crisis, human trafficking, the role of economic, social and political power as well as the role of social media. Even though the topics developed stem from a Latin American perspective, they are able to transcend to become topics of global significance, since they represent issues of a globalized society.  It is very clear that from its inception e-lit in Spanish has been influenced by its own unique voice which echoes its own geography, history and social and political essence. In spite of its rooted regional elements that clearly differentiates e-lit in Spanish from its American counterpart, e-lit in Spanish becomes global from a regional rather than from an English speaking or European hegemony. E-lit in Spanish with its regional perspective has been able to transcend to become global without losing its unique, intriguing and fascinating aspects that differentiates it from its American and European counterparts.

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.

Contemporary “format disruptions” (Savikas) lead to a new experience and practice of scholarly publishing: it is global, virtual, and instantaneous. How does this apply to electronic literature? Elit works exist in a field of publication, characterized by circulation, commentary, and archiving. They are subject to complex corporate toolchains, software updates, social media, etc. The work is no longer just the work but the entirety of this field. Publication is no longer a single event or a single thing. Think of this in terms of Luhmann’s systems theory: the differentiating distinction between artistic production and critical discourse is shifted; the difference made by artwork - its “poetics” - is now systematically linked to critical discourse.

Our essay is a call for editors and publishers of works on / about elit to become active participants in the process of creating the entire work and in creating the field around works of elit. Traditionally editors were invisible, working in the background. By contrast, the contemporary publishing situation - as well as the specifics of publishing on elit - enables publishers and editors to address the global with local realities of writers, the virtual with the material concerns of the text, and the instantaneous with the measured need for critical reading. We look at two case studies. The first is a discourse analysis of existing publications on elit. Scholarly publishing is already in a tight reflexive relation with elit works (e.g. the ELD). We recognize these contributions, but we also examine how in many cases the unevenness of the existing field of critical discourse re-distributes and re-names these works as dealing with “new media” or “electronic culture,” or similar topics. Our second case study is Po.Ex, a collection of essays on intermedia and cybertext by authors from Portugal, currently being co-edited with Rui Torres, and due to be published in 2013 by the Computing Literature series - releasing print and ebooks - developed at West Virginia University, in collaboration with the University of Paris 8. The three primary contributions of the book are: 1) a historical model of elit within a continuum of avant-garde writing stretching back to the Middle Ages; 2) a hermeneutic model for finding meaning in electronic literature through intermediality; and 3) a semiotic model for the computer as the cybernetic extension of human creativity and as an enabling medium for merging writers with readers as mutual authors (as wreaders). While these essays demonstrably shaped the field of elit, especially in Europe, their influence is limited because new generations of artists, critics, and students of elit do not have access to the works. Our case studies shows that scholarly publishing as a critical practice can address such limitations. Our overall claim is that publishing can organize and create the field of discourse for elit. We conclude with proposals and questions for future directions of critical publishing on elit.

(Source: Authors' abstract ELO 2013: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/editing-electronic-literature-global-publishing-system)

In this presentation I propose a close/distant reading of some Argentinean e-poetry works –Migraciones and Outsource me! by Leonardo Solaas and TextField, Eliotians and some of the works of The Disasters by Iván Marino– in order to pose a debate concerning the development of e-poetry in audiovisual electronic environments, particularly e-poetry created by artists/programmers who hardly would defined themselves as poets or writers.To what extent one should still speak about literature concerning this kind of works? Is it possible to find a literary impulse in contexts where literature has lost its privileges and migrates “out of bounds”? If the artists mentioned above lean themselves into literary traditions, why are their works more frequently regarded by visual art critics rather than literary critics? I argue that the works analyzed enable us to resituate literature in inter/trans media contexts, which nevertheless are readable in terms of literary effects. It is not that we should read this works only as literature, but it happens that nowadays critics who were educated in literary traditions can probably read in these works something that visual arts’ critics are not reading. I will not say that this situation provides necessarily better readings, only different. And after centuries of delimitations between artistic languages, even if 20th century avant-gardes opened the path to the dissolution of those boundaries, we still lack an educational system which could deal with the merging of languages. Meanwhile, I would consider how literary critics could collaborate in order to show how literary impulses could still be readable, and not invisibilized, when visual artists and programmers tangle languages and openly lean themselves into literary traditions to which they are more or less “outsiders”. In addition, I will propose a political reading of this “out of bounds” movement. In a world where migration is part of globalized capitalism, migration of languages, for instance merging languages, could be easily seen as going with the flow. But maybe we can reverse the argument: some works within contemporary electronic arts engage themselves with a “translanguage” politics which comments, reflects on and even deviate globalized flows in order to expose the false ecumenism of the globalized era.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO 2013: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/out-bounds-searching… )