This graduate seminar will examine theories, narratives, and manifestations of electronic literature in Spanish, both as a particular type of born-digital expression meant to live on 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 (hypertext and interactive fictions, kinetic poetry, locative narratives, generative text, code work, 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 will explore the relations between digital experimentalism and some of the most revolutionary works of twentieth-century Spain and Latin America. In order to establish this, students will read experimental literature by Borges and Cortázar, the Spanish Futurists and Catalan visual poets, and the Brazilian Concrete poets, among others from the English speaking world, hoping to establish a line of influences between avant-garde and post-digital experimentalism, and electronic writing. Participants will present on seminar topics, and complete a final research paper.