I am super excited to be teaching a graduate seminar on Electronic Literature this Spring semester. My course: "Electronic Literature: Hispanic Influences and Digital Theories" will examine relevant theoretical paradigms, digital narratives and other manifestations of electronic literature in Spanish and English, both as a particular type of born-digital expression meant to live in a computer, as well as a larger field of inquiry that takes advantages of the capabilities offered by these electronic machines.
Throughout this course students will get familiarized with different genres of electronic literature (hypertextual and interactive fictions, kinetic poetry, locative narratives, generative text, codeworks, etc) while they learn how to analyze and explore electronic literature’s particular aesthetics, rhetoric and practical functioning.
Apart from analyzing the formal characteristics of born-digital pieces, this course is built around the idea that electronic literature should be seen as an expected outcome of literary experimentalism, grounded on some of the most revolutionary works of 20th Century Spain and Latin America. In order to establish this, students will read experimental literature by Borges and Cortázar, Spanish and Catalan visual poets, and the Brazilian Concrete poets, among others, hoping to establish a line of influences between Hispanic experimentalism and the digital realm—shameless plug alert: this is also in line with the E-Lit exhibit that the brilliant Élika Ortega and I are curating: Hispanic Legacies, March-August 2016, at UC Berkeley (read more: here and here).
Throughout the course we will be reading a selection of E-Lit pieces both in Spanish and English, including Santiago Ortiz's Diorama, Eugenio Tisselli's Synonymovie, Benjamín Moreno's Concretoons, and Belén Gache's famous Wordtoys, among many other digital pieces.
We'll also take a post digital detour, looking at my always favorite Crónica de viaje by Jordi Carrión (Carrión's work seems to be in all of my syllabi lately—one could say I am obsessed... but Crónica really is that good) and the absolute masterpiece Between Page and Screen by Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse.
Students will be posting their work on our class blog, as always, so I'll keep you posted!
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