Throughout the ages, literature has been a cultural element related to textuality and its technological devices in a slowly, but deep, way. All the devices turned media (voice, papyr, bulky bindings, paperbacks, electronic books or tablets) changed not only how one reads but mainly one's relationship with knowledge and the world.
(Source: Short and free translation from the original abstract)
A literatura é um elemento de cultura que, ao longo dos tempos, se relacionou com a textualidade e os seus aparatos tecnológicos de forma lenta, mas profunda. Cada dispositivo que lhe deu abrigo (vozes, papiros, volumosas encadernações, livros de bolso, livros electrónicos ou tablets) alterou não só a forma de leitura mas, principalmente, a nossa própria relação com o conhecimento e com o mundo. No momento em que os hábitos de leitura se modificam de forma drástica, a utilização das novas tecnologias audiovisuais e multimédia no texto traduz inovações estéticas que tornam a leitura uma experiência complexa, não linear e cada vez mais sensível. Destacam-se dessa experiência sensível uma nova forma de comunicar com os meios tecnológicos e a necessidade de uma recontextualização do leitor nos novos percursos da literacia/transliteracia. Desde que o texto electrónico se tornou um espaço híbrido, onde se fabricam sentidos na exigência e volubilidade do mundo físico e virtual, o encontro com a literatura electrónica materializa na tessitura da escrita uma experiência interpretativa profundamente individualizada a cada instante de leitura online.
(Source: Author's Abstract)
The aim of this doctoral thesis is to analyse how the contents and the structures of the Anglo-American novel have been influenced by the emergence of digital and telematic media during the last two decades. One of the primary targets is to identify the common strategies adopted by electronic and printed novels to analyze the complexity and to try, at the same time, to escape from the “trap” of language. In my introduction I argue about the increasing relevance of the pattern/randomness dialectic into the narrative field. In the first chapter, while analysing the two novels Galatea 2.2 (1995) by Richard Powers and Exegesis (1997) by Astro Teller, I try to show how computational practices are affecting the literary fruition and authorship along with the role that the novel might play as an instrument of knowledge and cultural interaction. In the subsequent chapters I bring together literary analysis and network culture, focusing on different notions such as the database as a symbolic form, the properties of connectionist networks, the idea of transliteracy and the concepts of autopoiesis and exopoiesis. For this very reason, I examined five different works: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996), William Gibson's Pattern Recognition (2003), Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions (2006), Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph's Flight Paths (2007) and The Unknown (1998), developed by Scott Rettberg, William Gillespie, Dirk Stratton and Frank Marquardt. These literary texts propose different strategies to assimilate the structures and the dynamics proper to the networks in order to create new cognitive paradigms. It would seem that, through specific narrative structures and topics, some of the novelists of the last fifteen years are abandoning the self-reflexivity typical of the previous postmodern tradition in order to suggest an idea of fiction as an instrument to connect individual and contingency, reader and text, text and media ecology.
Source: author's abstract
My contention that e-literature has been gradually sidelined by the rise of the internet as a mass medium proves controversial. A straw poll of some of the movers and shakers on the digital writing scene indicates that a huge majority believes e-lit has a higher profile today than it did 10 years ago.
Since its inception, e-lit has been struggling to free itself from its generic limitations and now seems to be on the verge of doing so
Technology - the very stuff e-lit is made of - has also turned out to be its Achilles heel.
author-submitted abstract:
What effect are the current profound changes in global communications, transport and demographics having on language and its readers and writers, those defined through their engagement with and as a function of language? What happens to our identity, as linguistic beings, when the means of communication and associated demographics shift profoundly? What is driving this? Is it the technology, the migration of people or a mixture of these factors?
Language is motile, polymorphic and hybrid. Illuminated manuscripts, graphic novels, the televisual and the web are similar phenomena. The idea that the ‘pure’ word is the ultimate source of knowledge/power (a hermeneutic) was never the case. Don Ihde’s ‘expanded hermeneutics’ (1999), proposes, through an expanded significatory system, that what appear to be novel representations of phenomena and knowledge are, whilst not new, now apparent to us.
Fernando Ortiz (1947) proposed the concept of ‘transculturation’, which may offer possible insights in relation to these questions.
“I am of the opinion that the word transculturation better expresses the different phases of the process of transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture, which is what the English word acculturation really implies, but the process also necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could be defined as a deculturation. In addition it carries the idea of the consequent creation of new cultural phenomena, which could be called neoculturation.”
The suggestion here is that in a communications saturated world of highly mobile people’s we are all engaged in a complex interplay of cultural interactions and appropriations. Language, a technology fundamental to the human condition, is the primary means by which this process occurs. The demographic implications here give rise to the question; are we creating a ‘neo-pidgin’ or are our cultures fragmenting further into linguistic ghettoes?
People define themselves through language and create their own sub-cultural linguistic fields, their own ‘tribal’ codes, in order to establish their identity and be identified by other members of their ‘tribe’. This can be done through the clothes they wear, the language they employ and the means through which they transmit their messages. This is an iterative process where people evolve new dialects that in turn define self. Transculturation functions not only within the established context of the colonial but also the post-colonial, where human migration has proceeded, for multiple reasons, in multiple directions.
Does creative work with language, that employs digital media and exposes necessarily the dynamic processes of signification, lend itself to reflecting upon the technological, social and linguistic changes enveloping us?
References:
Ihde, D (1999); Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science; Northwestern University Press, USA.
Ortiz, F (1947), Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar; Re-published 1995, Duke University Press, USA.