romance language

The aim of this paper, titled “The magnificent Seven” as an echo of the homonymous film, is to introduce the works of different authors that have been included in the Electronic Literature Collection (vol. II) and that are not in English. Following the panel that the ELO introduced in Maryland that opened the e-lit works in languages other that English, here the step has moved convincingly forward since 12 authors from countries such as Brazil, Portugal, France, Israel, Belgium, Colombia, Germany, Perú, México, Catalonia and Spain have been introduced in the vastest English corpus. Some of these authors write in English or have had their works translated into English (Tisselli, Berkehenger, Kruglanski, etc.) but this paper, included in a specific panel that deals with e-lit works non written in English, will analyze in an exercise of “close-reading”, this “magnificent seven” works in Romance languages on the collection: Isaías Herrero’s La casa sota el temps and Universo molécula, Doménico Chiappe’s Tierra de extracción, Ton Ferret’s The fuguebook, Chico Marinho et al. Palavrador and Amor de Clarice and Poemas no meio du caminho by Rui Torres. It is interesting to see the sort of different variety of digital literature that emerges from the comparison.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)

This article looks at works of electronic poetry in French, Portuguese, and Spanish. While video and digital experiments in these languages date back to the 1970s and 1980s, the works considered here are mostly post-World Wide Web, i.e., produced between the mid-1990s and 2009. The article discusses the work of Philippe Bootz, founding member of Lecture, Art, Innovation, Recherche, Écriture (LAIRE) and theorist of programmed literature. It comments on the relationship between digital computer code and literature, addressing the materiality of the display and poetics. Other topics explored include programming poetry, patterns of specific writing processes, and automatic text generation. Through analysis of computer-assisted multimodal and retroactive forms, this essay discusses the role played by code and motion in digital works. It also stresses the function of language as cultural form in electronic literature.

(Source: Author's abstract)