E-lit in MLA 2015

Here's another interesting email I received yesterday. Read it, and if you are an artist (submit!): 

E-Lit@Vancouver

Start 2015 with Electronic Literature! The Electronic Literature Organization seeks proposals for the E-Lit@Vancouver reading,  to be held 8pm, Friday, January 9, at the Rickshaw Theatre (254 E Hastings St). The reading is organized by ELO President Dene Grigar and ELO co-Vice President Sandy Baldwin. The event is free and open to the public, and is scheduled to take place during the 2015 Modern Language Association (readers are not required to attend the conference or be members of MLA, though they are required to be physically present at the reading). 

Participations in the reading is open to any member of the ELO ( see http://eliterature.org​ for more information). We seek readings and performances that celebrate electronic literature in all its forms. To be considered, send a 300 word proposal, including technical requirements, and a brief biography to Sandy Baldwin at sbaldwin66@gmail.com. Deadline: November 28. All submissions will be read and peer reviewed. Decisions will be announced by December 5.

Could a Podcast Be Considered E-Lit?

My friend Nico asked me an interesting thing this morning that made my brain hurt:

On Nov 7, 2014, at 7:46 AM, Nicoletta -- <@gmail.com> wrote:

when the other day you explained what you consider digital literature, would you consider audiobooks a form of digital literature? if they have to be listened from digital media (especially now, that they don’t get published in tapes, but only as files or CDs, and people mostly use ipods or their computers to listen to them)?

----

So I replied:

Begin forwarded message:

From: Alex Saum-Pascual <@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: question
Date: November 7, 2014 at 8:05:10 AM PST
To: Nicoletta -- <@gmail.com>

Not generally, but it depends. If the work is a performance (something that was written to be read out loud like a play or a spoken word performance) I would consider them just that, a play or a performance in the traditional sense. Not electronic, but maybe literary. The fact that they are distributed or recorded as a digital file rather than magnetic tape is irrelevant, the product and the experience are the same. The question here is if you consider the listening to a reading of a book the same thing as the reading of a book—which I don’t since they imply different semiotic channels, skills, and means of constructing meaning.

Now then, if you think that listening is also a way of experiencing literature that builds upon a genre of “audio literature," and if there is something about that audio performance that points towards its digital conception (let’s say, a way of interacting with it via voice or movement or if the sound uses poetically some digital features that would not be possible other way) then maybe.

However (and this is why I would not generally think an audio book to be a form of electronic literature), the fact that a piece of literature is read out loud and then recorded affects the acts of reading, speaking and recording but not the piece of literature (the text) in itself, so I would not particularly consider that original piece electronic—unless, as I said, you define the work of literature as a larger system (beyond the text) that takes into consideration the act of reading as part of the literary  experience, and (in the case of e-lit) enhances the reading in some way beyond the text with the aid of digital technologies.

In this case, nonetheless, when considering a work of literature that encompasses the performative acts of reading and speaking as complimentary to the text but part of a larger experience, I think I would favor talking about digital performance, media art installation, or something like that, rather than literature.

I hope this helps! xoxo

---

And now I wonder then about the limits of reading as an experience, as all reading essentially happens in the combination of the visual interpretation of the sings and within the realm of sound (even if mental) but of the self, rather than listening to some other voice interpreting the symbols for you. But what if that interpreting mechanism is a machine? in the sense that all electronic text is interpreted by a graphical interface for us to see recognizable graphemes that we then read as letters and sound that lead to meaning. And what happens when we make our computers read to us? What happens to the text? where is the text? where is it? and what's up with the literariness of it all?

As I said, my morning brain hurts. This type of questions should wait to be posed till after 9am at least.

Sobre esas cosas que se escuchan en los congresos, o sobre la influencia literaria

Este fin de semana pasado volví a Riverside para presidir la sesión dedicada a la literatura peninsular española del congreso anual de PAMLA. Una mesa maravillosa donde discutimos sobre cuestiones relacionadas con la influencia literaria y su evolución a lo largo de los siglos XIX, XX y XI.

Según el programa (que claro, a mí me gusta porque lo elegí yo): 

Daniel Brown habló de los deseos y dificultades de los escritores españoles del XIX para definir su realismo sin recurrir a modelos franceses, algo que evidentemente a mí me resulta imposible de comprender. ¿Cómo pensar el naturalismo o el realismo español sin oponerlo a los modelos anteriores o coetáneos europeos? Imposible, de ahí que empezaran a negociarse las influencias. Si escapar del modelo es imposible porque su rechazo o admiración es la razón de ser del nuevo género, lo único que nos quedaría sería analizar la postura desde la que se hace el rechazo o el homenaje. Y, oye, esto me parece muy bien, porque analizar posturas no me parece poco.

Algo de rechazo y algo de homenaje tendría la versión novelada de la biografía de Teresa Mancha, la musa de Espronceda, que escribió Rosa Chacel a principios del siglo XX. Comisionada por Ortega y Gasset, esta biografía busca encontrar la pista de aquella mujer que todos recordamos por el canto que le hizo el poeta. Poco se sabe de ella, mas que tenía unos pies muy pequeñitos, nos dijo Nino Kebadze, y Chacel se encargó de construir una nueva versión de aquella mujer atrapada en la versión poética que la hizo célebre y desconocida para todos. ¿Cómo contar una biografía sin datos del biografiado? ¿Cómo contarla desde la memoria histórica cuando lo único que tenemos es la ficción poética? ¿Cómo pensar la responsabilidad literaria de la que ahora cuenta frente a aquello que fue contado? 

Finalmente, Jen Pretak, nos habló de la obra El hacedor (de Borges), Remake de Agustín Fernández Mallo, trayendo debates similares acerca de la influencia, la intertextualidad, y la responsabilidad al siglo XXI. Si bien me gustaría matizar que la obra de Fernández Mallo nunca fue acusada de plagio, es cierto que la técnica literaria que aplica--aquella de la obra que se deriva de otra tomándola como modelo sobre el que hacer variaciones--causó polémica suficiente como para retirarla del mercado. Jen nos habló de la legislación vigente en cuanto a los derechos de autor y sus herederos para explicar cómo esta estructura económica sirve para mantener y reforzar un cierto estado cultural y productivo basado en la perpetuación de una figura autoritaria (en tanto que "autorial") que tiene poco sentido hoy en día.

Y cierto es que tiene poco sentido hoy. Pero lo que quedó claro después de escuchar a estos tres panelistas es que tampoco lo ha tenido nunca. O eso creo yo, claro.

A