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The Pitman, Claire
Taylor (Ed.)
Latin American Cyberculture and
Cyberliterature
256 S., Paperback, £ 50
Liverpool University Press 2007
ISBN 978-184631-061-4
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This
collection of critical essays investigates
an emergent and increasingly important
field of cultural production in Latin
America: cyberliterature and cyberculture
in their varying manifestations, including
blogs and hypertext narratives, collective
novels and e-mags, digital art and short
Net-films. Highly innovative in its
conception, this book provides the first
sustained academic focus on this area of
cultural production, and investigates the
ways in which cyberliterature and
cyberculture in the broadest sense are
providing new configurations of subjects,
narrative voices, and even political
agency, for Latin Americans.
The
volume is divided into two main sections.
The first comprises eight chapters on the
broad area of cyberculture and identity
formation/preservation including the
development of different types of
cybercommunities in Latin America. While
many of the chapters applaud the creative
potential of these new virtual
communities, identities and cultural
products to create networks across
boundaries and offer new contestatory
strategies, they also consider whether
such phenomena may risk reinforcing
existing social inequalities or perpetuate
conservatism. The second section comprises
six chapters and an afterword that deal
with the nature of cyberliterature in all
its many forms, from the (cyber)cultural
legacies of writers such as Julio
Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges, to
traditional print literature from the
region that reflects on the subject of new
technology, to weblogs and hypertext and
hypermedia fiction proper.
'I
know of few books that offer so much
geographical and generic coverage on Latin
America
it will become required
reading for many courses on film,
literature, and culture.'
Eva-Lynn Jagoe, University of
Toronto
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