Laura Borràs Castanyer: Digital Literatur and Theoretical Approaches

Hermeneia

The texts to be found in this edition of Dichtung Digital derive from the papers presented at the International Conference Under construction: Literatures digitals i aproximacions teòriques (Under construction: Digital literatures and theoretical approaches), which was organised by the international research group Hermeneia and held at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) in Barcelona on 14-16 April 2004. Here we made a certain attempt to reopen the dialogue which had been started in previous workshops or seminars such as Cartografies de l’hipertext (Hypertext cartographies, 2002) i Textualitats electròniques: nous escenaris per a la literatura (Electronic textualities: new scénarios for literature, 2003). The results of the marriage of the new digital technologies and literature are constantly more evident, more interesting and more eloquent, and this conference was a further event from Hermeneia, which seeks to provide a meeting point for specialists and producers as well as for those who are merely interested in the field. At the same time, however, this new area throws up a whole range of questions which have no easy answers. On the opening day of the conference I read in a newspaper a striking assertion by Alberto Manguel, an author of, among other works, a history of reading.[1] According to him we are living through difficult times for intellectuals; it is a period when the best thing is to be an idiot and not ask questions. In our case, if we did not ask questions we would be without our raison d’être. The Open University of Catalonia, which this year is ten years old, is a completely virtual university that has developed quality e-learning systems. As pioneers who are committed to breaking new ground, we cannot stop asking questions because we know that it is less important to find answers than to do research, in the deepest sense of the word, since this is what is required in order to progresss.

The range of questions which are present in this area of research[2] as well as the provisional nature of the answers that may be put forward explain the title which was chosen for that event, since it reflects a reality which, although a certain ground has been covered, is still in the process of construction.

Image of the conference

It Image of the conference is a terrain under construction because it is young and still taking shape;[3] and it is like magma because of its fluidity and the dissemination of its manifestations through the internet. Nevertheless, to continue the geological metaphors, it is also a terrain full of faults, of fractures, of tectonic plates that collide and this is symbolised in the image of the conference triptych. They rebel, they are in conflict, they generate argument and, on occasion, they send out sparks, because the views that are generated are passionately held, and because they probably touch on what is most deeply felt in our book-centred nature. In a word, the terrain that is at the centre of our attention as a research group is fascinating.

Hermeneia investigates, then, the meeting point of the new technologies and the creation and study of literature, and we organise conferences or workshops like the one being considered here because we are convinced that this junction, far from being the danger that it is normally considered to be in traditional humanistic circles, is a field which has potentialities that are still to be discovered. The era of digital literature is now a reality and our research group sets out to reveal as many secrets as possible: this is the perfect pretext to promote a new interchange of experiences, perspectives and reflections.

Hermeneia's logo

Under construction

The three days of the conference at the Open University of Catalonia were taken up with lectures, talks and debates which, from different points of view, analysed the various literary and artistic manifestations that have arisen from the meeting of the new technologies and literature. The papers presented were grouped into different thematic blocks which dealt with educational, creative, sociological, didactic and critical aspects, and so on. Some of the topics dealt with the controversial management of the architecture of information; the critical analysis of digital works by authors in English, French, Italian, Catalan and Spanish; and the musical analysis of the most popular videogames or the presentation of a model to analyse videogames that seeks to combine ludology and narratology. At the same time there was room for a certain reflection concerning the role of code in digital literature, to introduce the subject of collective creation on the Internet and relate it to the precedents within traditional Western culture. This led to a consideration of readers’ habits and the preparation for them to understand this type of texts. There was also time for new personal literary forms on the web and weblogs as well as for a review of the history of hypertext within the traditions of contemporary literary theory, and also a look at digital poetry. On the more applied side, we dealt with the topic of hypertext as a tool for the critical editing of texts, and there were proposals for the use of the new technologies in the classroom. We also had an analysis of the massive implementation and dissemination of videogames in society – always emphasising the pedagogical possibilities contained in these multimedia systems – which is in part encouraged by the need to involve the player in the discourse to be found in hypertext. There were also practical demonstrations of software dedicated to authoring, (such as MIDIPoet, created by Eugenio Tisselli and used for the manipulation of texts and images through algorithms) and we even had a splendid analysis of Matrix. But we also offered an opportunity to sample a piece of digital creation entitled E-virgenes, by M. Angustias Bertomeus and Cristina Llorens, which was presented at the Hemispheric Institute of New York during the seminar Spectacles of Religiosity in 2003.

E-vírgenes

The installation consists of two complementary digital projections, which work on a reconstruction of the archetype of the different Eves. It’s a reflection on how women become subjects of a technology inherited through social transmission. And in order to recover the lost feminine areas the European Eves are shown secularized through their activity in the management of life and the old Indian women are shown as weaving encyclopedias of their people in their blankets. The artists have also wanted to show the contrast between spinning and dying, which are the codes of their history, the software; and looms and distaffs, the supports of the tradition, the hardware as well as bows and stitches, the alphabet of this feminine language, which are the pixels. Finally, religiousness is invoked in litanies and symbolizes the wetware.

Under construction brought together internationally renowned figures at the forefront of theoretical considerations and who, with respect to the topic that concerns us, represented approaches that were at variance and, on occasion, in opposition to each other. The selection of speakers was made with a view to promoting a fruitful exchange of experiences, views and reflections, which would benefit from a dialectical contrast of ideas. Scholars from many places – from the USA, Chile, France, Italy, Argentina, Great Britain, Germany, Finland and Denmark as well as various parts of Spain – came together at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona and shared their expertise with us. The conference had a multilingual atmosphere, with five official languages: Catalan, Spanish, English, French and Italian. Highlights included the presence and presentation of Professor Manuel Castells, the inaugural address by Gabriel Ferraté, Rector of the Open University of Catalonia, and the closing speech by Professor Isidor Marí, Head of Humanities and Language Studies. I would like to thank all those who responded to our call because we enjoyed three intense days of discussions and debates and it is the plenary talks from these that are published in this edition.

Laura Borràs and professor Manuel Castells during the opening words

Electronic Textualities

The previous conference, Electronic Textualities (2003),[4] closed with the affirmation that in the field of electronic literature we do not find ourselves either at the very beginning or at the celebration or expansion of ideas and projects. Rather we find ourselves at an impasse. From a literary point of view, we are living through a time characterised by disenchantment with the oldest form of the modern revolution: hypertext. This is probably due to the fact that its revolutionary possibilities were exaggerated, that it was asked to bear the weight of poststructuralist, deconstructionist, psychoanalytical and gender theories, and that it has become a generic term covering various types of text that allow links. There are those who feel disillusioned by practices that are perhaps not so innovative or postmodernist and which moreover are ambiguous since they include text-based adventure games, simple websites, data-based entries, or works of poetry or fiction. All in all, despite the widely broadcast announcement of its demise – which by the way was not a natural death but rather murder – hypertext continues to be an inescapable reference point in the field of electronic textualities. This is a field which, with ever greater frequency, has to share with cybertexts and other textual products that require a considerable effort on the part of the reader for the reading to progress. All these premises normally provoke rejection, fear and incomprehension because, while they are reading, readers perceive processes instead of static results. However, the much vaunted potentialities of hypertext – the non-linearity and the non-chronological narrative – are perhaps not where the emphasis should be laid, though this is what has happened so far. Many things have been done and said in relation to digital literature and especially hypertext, which has been the dominant paradigm. The initial enthusiasm has given way to more sceptical tendencies. The structural interest of hypertext certainly shows little that is dramatically different from what authors have been doing since remote times in the exploration and experimentation with language, with its content and with its materiality itself, with the games within the page when this made its appearance and thus with the will to explore the consequences of the technological changes that have shaken the history of culture.

Coffe break during the conference

Creation and experimentation: a reduced history of discontinuities and ruptures

To talk about poetry or literature is to talk about creation and experimentation. As part of its development, literature has established links with space and with form, with a physicality that goes beyond the written word and becomes image. We often feel that are we are immersed in the most overwhelming modernity. It seems that nothing had been invented and that the arrival of our epoch and our knowledge was essential in order to allow certain novelties to flourish. Professor Castells himself in his inaugural address pointed to the enormous conceptual error which can be clearly seen throughout the information society, lending information a distinctive value as if it had never previously had this decisive role. Regarding this point he did not mince his words: “There’s a conceptual misunderstanding: it is not now that we find ourselves in an information society, in a knowledge society, we’ve always been in one. Information and knowledge are central and crucial, but not specific to our present society.”

There are considerations that are simply a sign of our arrogance or our ignorance. We know that Rimbaud gave colour to the vowels: “A noir, E blanc, I rouge, O bleu, U vert”, but the aesthetic practice of relating poetry to the spatial coordinates has a long and venerable history, although this has often been received with incomprehension. We have to go back to the first appearances of writing to find the earliest instances of tension between the word and artistic creation. From that time until our current hyperfiction or electronic poetry, and including avant-garde movements as well as figural, visual or phonetic poetry, we find that the whole history of poetry illustrates how human beings have sought new literary expressions in order to feed our imagination and our souls. A history of experiment and search given that – as the Brazilian poet Ledo Ivo puts it: “poetry has passed through many cultures and many movements in protest against its very nature.” One of these movements is the one that is concerned with the two dimensions – iconic and verbal – of the poem. This allows visual poetry to draw on the relationships between all types of language, including oral language and phonetics as well as the language of sounds, of music, of mathematics, etc. We can thus say that there are poets who write poetry without verses and this is why the poetic model is so interesting for a hermeneutics of electronic textuality.

In broad terms, and using the term poetry in its classical sense of literature, we may consider visual poetry, in its many and varied aspects, to be the practice of poetry and writing in which word and image become fused and lead to the construction of a complex and heightened significance. This is the case of a poem in the shape of a figure, poetry for the eyes, a poetic discourse where reading and looking form part of a single unique moment. A space where the word that seeks its own maze-like universe reflects internally the image of itself. A search for beauty, for dreams and for the infinite which underlies every word of poetry.

We date the first visual poems to around 1700 BC. The first known calligrams are the three (‘The hatchet’, ‘The wings’, ‘The egg’) of the Greek poet Simmias of Rhodes at about 300BC. We must remember that the word calligraphy comes from the Greek words kallos, meaning beauty, and graphos, meaning writing, so that a calligram is concerned with the visual art that emphasises the beauty of the written sign. However, in this summary review of the different types of poetic writing, we must also take account of the illustrated medieval codices. Here, this particular creative parable which we have detected since early times, in the dawn of the written word, can be seen in what we may define as the earliest specifically poetic avant-garde. From then until the most recent interactions between people, poetry and machines this creative impulse has driven so many authors down the centuries to seek to escape from the limits of the word, and this has obliged them to struggle with this synergic artistic tension which aims to fuse different artistic languages. Almost like a game that is set up between voice, word and image and all their multiple interrelations, from one body to another.

"The Hatchet" of Simias, copy from 1516, BNP

The power of the word, the religious word, to create worlds is well known given the importance that the word assumes in the monotheistic religions (Jewish, Islamic and Christian). A word that is a root, a principle, which brings order to chaos: creative principle by its very nature to the extent that God is —above all— word, voice, and by means of the word and the voice becomes manifest and brings about his work of creation. From this viewpoint, the resonance of the biblical text is not solely a literary issue but a theological one. Christians go further when they see the world as a book. Alain de Lille or Francis Bacon put forward the idea of the world as a book and talk of the alphabet of nature, while Galileo has a work entitled The Book of Nature. The letter takes on a sacred power in the founding books of the three great monotheistic religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Even for the uneducated mass, a drawn letter is an irrefutable, inaccessible reality, bearer of hopes, of prohibitions, of magical fear. This is why inscriptions, names and letters are engraved as talismans on armour, swords and the like.[5]

But words crystallise in books and it is there that they undergo a kind of fixation, of rigidity, of ‘death’. In Goethe’s Faust this is clearly illustrated when Faust starts to translate the gospel of Saint John and says: “the word dies under my calamus”. This is the eternal vacillation between the concepts of orality and writing. Let us remember the poem by Emily Dickinson:

“A word is dead
when it is said,
some say.
I say it just
begins to live
that day”

This conviction that poetic words take on life when written, here so nicely expressed by Dickinson, emphasises the performative, and not just the informative, force of the word, a fact which should be borne in mind in considerations of digital textuality. However, it is also in this cohabitation of image and word, in the capacity of the message to mean aesthetically, that we should seek reference points for the hypertextual narrative. In this regard, I will only refer very briefly to illustrated manuscripts which by their very nature are of great typological, physical and perceptive complexity. A very particular type of text that exists delicately balanced between its nature as an object of art and its use as a book, that is to say as an everyday object. It is an entity composed by several hands, at different times and with different means. It involves the time and skills of the author(s) or copyist(s), and the time and skills of the illustrator(s). Those responsible for the literature and the graphic design do not coincide but rather work in sequence, and so the indications that the copyist leaves for the illustrator often appear in the text itself. Even if they are covered over or erased, they still leave traces. We may speak of a division of labour which reflects the dual nature of the message expressed in one sole medium.

In fact, the decoration of the medieval codices may be related to the text in two different ways: there may be a physical nexus that connects the two, or there may be a relation of sense and significance between them.

Page of an illuminated medieval manuscript

In the first case, the contribution of the illustrator is found as part of the written message, while in the second the text is given and is accompanied by illustration. We can easily understand the two options if we visualise them. The former is represented by illustrated initial letters, the incipits: those capital letters – or on occasions more extended textual sections – at the beginning of the text. In these cases the emphasis is normally aesthetic, given the richness of colour and artistic beauty, but the illustration forms a direct part of the text because it is integrated into the textual flow. What happens is that, from the receiver’s viewpoint, the perceptive emphasis is located in the individualised letter as being worthy of special attention. It is a decorative effect, whether we consider the material involved or the morphology represented. (Gradually, the initial vegetable and animal motifs gave way to a whole series of anthropomorphic and even monstrous creations.) It is an aesthetic resource which nevertheless maintains writing and image apart. However, in time this developed into an ‘iconic translation’ of the text, which allowed the reader to see as an image what the text related or narrated in words. This image was sometimes an extension of the illustration of the initial letter, and sometimes to be found in the margin of the manuscript or closely related to the text. In other words, these images served as elements lending hermeneutic support to the written text to the extent that they allowed a visualisation of what was expressed in the written language and tried to render it more clearly.

Collage of illuminated medieval manuscripts

At all events, in both cases we find an element which is not to be underestimated when the illustrated codex is read as a book. It is a question of a fundamental perceptive component: its sequential nature. The relationship between text and image has such a combined effect that it allows the setting up of hierarchies of values (above, below, inside, outside, centre, periphery, etc.) which precede or succeed sense units. This may prepare the reader better, may create expectations, clarify the sense of what has been read, etc. In sum, it offers different possibilities of aesthetic communication producing visual writing of a metapoetic nature to the extent that there is an interaction between two types of writing.

Page of an illuminated medieval manuscript. Book of Psalms, Quid gloriaris

The reading of any page of an illustrated manuscript allows different approaches to the object. On the one hand, the eye may follow – letter after letter, word after word, page after page – the flow of text along a route which, in our Western culture, obliges us to go from left to right and from top to bottom. On the other hand, the unforced eye can take in the whole of the page or the frame of the double page as if it was a painting. It can come to rest on any one element, and then through meticulous observation gradually reach the different levels of meaning. This panoramic view, which is the one we normally use when we look at these old texts, releases us from the linear route and allows us to accede to the meaning in new ways, ways that are doubtless complementary to that of the linear approach. When we do this we experience something of experimental poetry since the order of meaning is inverted, favouring direct perception and aesthetic appreciation above conceptualisation in the discovery of meaning.

Figure or image, words within the figure, and sequences of words are three distinct levels of content. This is without mentioning the latin carmina – creations that resulted from the bookish technology that replaced the papyrus roll with the codex[6] – or other types of visual poetry of the late antiquity. With names such as Optaziano or Venancio they figure as a fundamental crux in Western cultural history to the extent that, in spite of the Horatian maxim “a poem is like a painting,” the grammatical hierarchies ended more than once by betraying the conviction of the superiority of the written text. Their versus pictus and Carmen pictum anticipate our definition of ‘figurative poetry’. Even so, in his Confessions Saint Augustine introduces pedagogical notions which require the intelligibility of the word and the consequent demand that the other arts be conditional on the clarity of the text. Perhaps like our current situation, it was a question of ancestral fears. In that case, if in singing, the music threatened to drown the voice, or the modulations risked alterations in the pronunciation of the words, making them unrecognisable, in the same way figurative poetry was exposed to the same type of risk because of the complications that resulted from the technique of intertextual verses with their essential crosses. In this way the utility, which ought to be the true motivation for the artifice, is hindered by an excess of searching. Thus the music becomes a rumour that impedes the comprehension of the words, in the same way as the painting becomes patches of colour and shapes that cancel out the written text and, with it, the message. Figurative poetry in modern times is without doubt the beginning of a misunderstanding and a path that leads us to concealment. With Saint Augustine we are now very close to the modern complaint that contrived poetry is a type of poetry which, in its games in bad taste, its drawing that is useless, weak, superfluous, inert and senseless, as well as disorganised, is seen as a perversion, a poetry against nature, a sin against the word. Celebrated names such as Montaigne, Taine, De Sanctis, de Robertis, etc., join in the rejection of these minor forms that suffer perhaps from the difficulty to understand them. (At least this is what happens nowadays with certain sorts of digital literature which, because they are unknown, hermetical, impenetrable, are rejected out of hand).

François Rabelais, Le cinquiesme et dernier libres des faicts et dicts heroïques du bon Pantagruel, 1565.

Montaigne, in his Essays (I, 54) states: “There exist frivolous and vain ploys by means of which men at times seek to achieve esteem. I refer to those poets who compose works with verses that begin with the same letter, that offer us eggs, spheres, wings, etc., stretching them and shrinking them so that they represent this or that figure.” Up to this point he is deprecatory but in an ironic tone. From now on Montaigne becomes implacable. “It is an extraordinary proof of the weakness of our judgement that we attempt to appreciate things because of their strangeness or novelty, even for their difficulty, when we do not find in them anything good or useful.” It is obvious that the subtleties of these poetical conceits run contrary to the principles of utility and goodness, so they smack of evil.

As for Taine, who considers acrostic squares to be “bits and clips of tapestry”, he goes further and makes this definitive judgement: “Strange literary endeavours that transform poets into artisans.” We see also here one of the habitual reproaches: the assignment of it to art rather than to literature.[7] It is an approach that sets visual poetry in a frontier terrain in which the linguistic message is autonomous – although at the same time integrated – and it is not superimposed on or juxtaposed to an iconic message. It might be the case that a verbal message, in the form of writing, produces at the same time and place an iconic message, and vice versa, that a figure replaces the writing to express a verbal, not conceptual, message.

"Il grande drago rosso", c. 15v: Gioachino da Fiore, Liber figurarum, ms. s. XIII, Reggio Emilia, Biblioteca del Seminario Vescovile, ms. RE

We have now started on the way that leads to diagrammatic writing, whose function is not illustrative, but ideographic, almost like a hypertext that mounts and dismounts and transcends the transparency of the discourse, at the same time etching unpronounceable instances of meaning within a normal figurative presentation. We are entering alchemical hypertextuality, that is to say the visual clustering of words and figures into logograms and cosmograms. These have constituted the specific practice through which hermetic, magical and alchemical writing has given rise to a desire for a language more complex than that of literary, philosophical and even religious communication.

Rabano Mauro, De Laudibus Sanctae crucis, 1503

Historically, the poetry of Mallarmé establishes a new reality. It does not represent beyond the text; it represents itself, and ipso facto the act of producing the text becomes an act of infinite self-reflection. There are no concessions of any sort made to communication. In Un coup de dés, Mallarmé carries out his particular revolution of poetic language. This work, originally published in 1897 in the review Cosmópolis, has a typographical layout with variations in the written characters and with the interposition of blanks between written segments and between one word and another. This confers a rhythm on the text which is not determined by the accents on the words or the accentuation of the verses, but by the position of the words on the page. It thus constitutes a new spatial art. Space takes the place of time. If in traditional verse, including free verse, it is the temporal, linear sequence of the words that is rhythmically ordered, here the scansion is spatial. It is more a text for the eyes than for the ears. The blanks or spaces do not function as indicators of rhythm, as silent pauses within the text. As the signs are inscribed on the blank surface of the page, it is not the silent pauses that surround the words, but the words that lose themselves in space, giving rise to abstract configurations: words that resound against the background silence.

"Un coup de dés", Mallarmé (1897)

This last work by Mallarmé, which, according to the young Valéry, deserved to be considered as ‘an act of dementia’, is simply the logical consequence of a poetics that was never discursive, and which now approaches a non-alphabetic reading, with the possibility of playing with the page and the pagination. The text opens with “Un coup de dés” (A throw of the dice) and closes with “Toute pensée émet un coup de dés” (All thought emits a throw of the dice), a perfectly chiasmatic structure. We are keenly aware of the sentence: “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance), a sentence which can be read from left to right and from top to bottom throughout the passage. It is placed according to a principle of dissemination and dispersion which breaks it up, but it retains its integrity from the typographical coherence. Mallarmé develops a logic of words and the spaces between words; it is thus a logic of spatial distribution, a typographical aesthetics of the page. The linearity is interrupted and we have to resort to reading at a distance. It is almost analogous to theme music: an architecture and a music of words. A new writing for the eyes and for the mind, a truly visual score.

With Marinetti and the avant-garde, especially Futurism, there is a break with Symbolism because the latter is somewhat obsolete, because it is ‘words of an absence’, because of its view of art and the artist, which diverges enormously from that of Futurism. Futurism is the latest thing and takes art and aesthetics by storm. The Futurists are intent on practising a poetics that is utterly of the present. Its achievements will be asyntacticism, the struggle against syntax as a constraining force, simultaneity, the typographical revolution, words in freedom and le tavole parolibere. The parole in libertà rattle the order of Gutenberg’s page and represent a loosening of the syntax, but not yet of the word, which continues to predominate over the letter. The typographical effects are here meant to indicate gestures during the recital. They underline and emphasise a sequence that is still completely verbal. The movement of the writing continues to be progressive, that is to say temporal.

F. T. Marinetti. Les mots en liberté futuristes. Milan, Edizioni Futurise di "Poesia", 1919

But the greatest ambition of the Futurists – and perhaps of the avant-garde in general – is not to renew literature but to break through its boundaries. They aspire to create a new language which is capable of crossing the boundaries between the arts, the verbal arts and the visual arts. A language which is not now considered as a neutral, transparent means that allows us to transcribe ideas and meanings that are outside language. Language and the world are two separate entities but they establish an essential affinity. The world does not exist without language and language does not exist without the world. It was therefore necessary to develop a modern language which would derive from the sounds of modernity, from the new world that surrounds us. A language that incorporates the sounds of a modern city. Here, the logico-verbal and the figurative codes are not integrated, they become disintegrated. In this way, sense expands, disseminates, explodes, opening objects to the plurality of their meanings.

"Poesia pentagramada", de F. Cangiaullo

The case of Apollinaire is different. His beginnings are Symbolist since he also opens up to a new poetics in which poetry fully accepts the present, and with it the techniques of simultaneity, of dissonance and of surprise. Apollinaire defines himself in his book Calligrammes; he defines his position within and with respect to Futurism. In it he reveals himself as a poet of order and also as a poet of adventure. On the one hand we find calligrams such as “Il pleut” (1916), which fits perfectly into the ancient tradition of technopaegnia and of the carmina figurata. It has perfectly linear verses which are arranged from top to bottom on lines that are slightly inclined in order to contribute to the effect of rain; here the iconism has the function of amusement. At the same time we find the “Lettre-Océan” (1914), which is a good example of the management of space on the page. Here we have a calligram, or rather a lyrical ideogram, which takes on a particular meaning because it is in the line of Marinetti’s tavole parolelibere and of the Futurists, while at the same time indicating a new path to follow. The technique is Futurist: centrifugation of the meaning, and the dialectic between the linguistic and visual codes. But there is an element that is ironic, playful, fanciful, which tells us of the pleasure of convulsing the established orders, the wish to split the single linear code, stripping it of its traditional prerogatives and privileges. The violence of the separation between literal and figural relativises both media. The text reveals itself under the signs of duplicity and ambiguity, with the addition of a symbolic valence (the signs of the sun or the eye), and with the counterpoint characteristic of the Futurist philosophy to introduce fragments of anonymous conversations collected in the street.

"Il pleut", Apollinaire (1916)

The linguistic component is here presented dissected and decontextualised, producing a mish-mash, an association of heterogeneous elements, a dissonance. It is a sort of lyrical short-circuit. We must not forget that orphism is the key word in their poetics. This work takes a step in a magical, fanciful direction. This moment ushers in the second phase of the avant-garde; we must talk of surrealism and continue with the various poetics of modernity: post-avant-garde, concrete poetry and other verbo-voco-visual texts (in line with the materiality of the word and its plastic and phonetic values), where we find the integration of the verbal and the non-verbal, between word and image. We will leave it here because our purpose in this brief sketch of experimentation was to show that the path towards electronic textuality is clearly drawn, consisting of reference points which indicate that the supposed novelties of electronic literature are perhaps not so new. We are dealing with a developmental path which leads us to a writing that lives at the edges, straddling borders. What is more distinctive is that it was born out of digital media that seek to expand the expressive possibilities of literature and provide it with new platforms and structures.

"Lettre-Océan", Apollinaire (1914)

This era of modernity is a time of discontinuities and ruptures. Writing is becoming more and more a spatial art, and painting takes on a literary value. We are faced with the need to renew our means of expression. Not only to redefine the field of art but to maintain it in a permanent state of redefinition. Artists become experimenters of what is possible. Digital literature can be seen as an archipelago of text samples that have recently appeared in the geography of our literary maps. In certain academic circles they have still not made an appearance in spite of the fact that they link up with this historical thread of experimentation with space, with media, in short with technique. And I understand an archipelago to be a group of islands joined together precisely by what separates them. Islands that might be hypertexts, cybertexts, isotexts, holotexts, or whatever we want to call them, and which maintain their idiosyncrasies while forming part of something shared. This is their value. And what we must do is continue advancing, developing new forms of electronic discourse, which might be perceived as violations of genres and styles but which, after all, make people think, even those who are remote from these positions.

"La Belle", Philippe Bootz (1989)

A cartography of Under construction

This is what we proposed for our conference Under construction, and now, with the conference behind us, I can say that the result is very positive: a volume containing the papers and sessions in the Romance languages that will be published by our university publishers in the collection e-cultures, and this number of Dichtung Digital with the papers by invited speakers. These papers attempt to delineate a geography specific to the broad map of the different textualities, including concrete poetry in digital media, and to establish the frontiers between digital literature and net art. To this end, “Concrete poetry in Digital Media. Its Predecessors, its Presence and its Future”, is a text in which, to use the Faustian metaphor of the two souls (the meaning-driven soul and the spectacle-driven soul) Roberto Simanowski introduces the division between the reader who focuses on content and the reader who focuses on form; while Joan Campàs for his part seeks to establish the weakness of these factual frontiers by analysing more than twenty online digital works and proposing various distinct categories.

However, we also tended to reflect on the assessment of quality in the hypermedia, as well as a cretive analysis of the evolution from pen to computer or from book to screen. In “Is this hypertext any good? Or, how do we evaluate quality in hypermedia?” we find a series of questions that have to do with hypertext and quality and an accurate analysis of informational, educational, fictional and poetic hypertexts by George Landow, one of the pioneers of hypertext theory. The author also discusses the characteristics that we should take into account to evaluate not only quality in hypertexts, but also their success and effectiveness. In “Littérature numérique, contraintes et ouvertures de l’écran. (Du stylo à l’ordinateur ou du livre à l’écran)" Jean Pierre Balpe sets out the concept of “engrammation” which deals with the process of text mediatization. He presents some practical examples, such as different algorithmic programming, in order to illustrate the mediatization processes.

[1] Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (London: HarperCollins, 1997)
[2] Questions such as: What is this new digital literature? Is it literature? Why is it embarrassing? Or is it perhaps frightening? Do we need new tools to read this literature? New approaches to explore it? New ways of viewing the literary tradition? Etc.
[3] Youthfulness is always relative, of course, because some of the texts that are considered canonical in this area of knowledge are already old. However, as a discipline within the academic world, it certainly can be considered to be incipient and relatively young, especially if we remember the reticence on the part of university institutions to welcome this reality and to incorporate new tendencies into the study of literature.
[4] Laura Borràs Castanyer (ed.), Textualidades electrónicas (Barcelona: Ediuoc, 2004).
[5] In old French, for example, escrire means "to draw" or "to paint", like drawing or painting characters.
[6] The arrival of the page also implied – at least in theory – the autonomy of a space with certain dimensions which could be contemplated as a whole or alternatively as an object similar to a painting. We also find something of this in digital or electronic writing, where each web page, each screen is a blend of roll and page-painting.
[7] Nowadays it is perhaps in this reproach that we see one of the reasons restricting creativity in the field of electronic textuality, since it is often difficult to find an author who has the multiple skills in the areas of programming, design and literary writing.