From the Novel to Digital Storytelling: Dialogue, Identity, and the Fictionalization of Reality (original) (raw)

Paperless Text: Digital Storytelling in Latin America and Spain (1976-2016)

In this special issue of Letras Hispanas we bring together a collection of interventions that illustrate a variety of ways of approaching digital storytelling, from multidisciplinary perspectives, by a new generation of scholars working on this field. While the contributions to this special issue vary considerably in terms of the primary materials they analyze and the critical approaches they employ, there are several identifiable tendencies that allow us to divide these interventions into three major trajectories. A first set of articles deals with the evolving relationship between electronic narrative and print media, analyzing examples of crossover between the two spheres. A second trajectory among the contributions to this volume examines specific digital media technologies and the new genres and modes of expression they have engendered. The third and final set of contributions focuses on the ways digital communities and social networks have impacted literary practice and creative expression in the Spanish-speaking world.

Introduction: Digital Storytelling in Latin America and Spain (1976-2016)

Introduction to a special section of Letras Hispanas that brings together a collection of interventions that illustrate a variety of ways of approaching digital storytelling, from multidisciplinary perspectives, by a new generation of scholars working on this field. While the contributions to this special section vary considerably in terms of the primary materials they analyze and the critical approaches they employ, there are several identifiable tendencies that allow us to divide these interventions into three major trajectories. A first set of articles deals with the evolving relationship between electronic narrative and print media, analyzing examples of crossover between the two spheres. A second trajectory among the contributions to this volume examines specific digital media technologies and the new genres and modes of expression they have engendered. The third and final set of contributions focuses on the ways digital communities and social networks have impacted literary practice and creative expression in the Spanish-speaking world.

The “Narrative Turn” in Literature. Observations on Digital Works

2020

The transformation of literary models was born out of a process initiated by the avant-garde and is still present nowadays in the form of the post avant-garde, understood as the cre­ation of many new manifestations of literary expressions, including digital literature. The aim of the article is to analyse the forms, changes and structures of digital literature in comparison to the procedures of so-called “traditional literature”. The methodology is based on comparative literature. The topic is viewed from the perspective of Ibero-American literature exemplified with proto-hypertexts, hypertexts and literary hypermedia from Latin America. As a summary, we can say that digital literature is not going to change literature, but it is going to introduce new literary aesthetics which, in turn, will provide literature with new, different, and experimental narrative structures.

Hybrid Storyspaces: Redefining the Critical Enterprise in Twenty-First Century Hispanic Literature

hispanicissues.umn.edu

Without a reader, literature does not exist. At the heart of the most primitive of fictions, according to Antonio Muñoz Molina, is someone telling a story and someone listening to it (20). Literature, therefore, is a communicational act with an emitter (the writer), a receptor (the reader and the reading public), and a message that is the work itself. From a legal point of view, the work and the author exist even without a recipient; the mere expression of an original idea fixed in a tangible medium generates intellectual property. 1 However, literary texts are generally directed at a reader upon whom the author depends financially (Senabre 16). I refer here not only to the reader who purchases a book in a shop or online-whom we could call the end consumer-but to the reader upon whom the author depends until publication: the editor. The Internet has changed this structure. Among the many changes the Internet has produced in the editorial field, there are two that are especially significant: first, the possibility that the author may become his or her own editor. With the help of print-ondemand services, the author-editor can constantly adjust the number of copies to cover actual demand for the book. The second change is the ease with which the author and reader can communicate. The creation of blogs has facilitated a more fluent communication among authors and their readers that goes beyond the role of the Web as an alternative and increasingly powerful marketing channel for publishing houses. In the present essay I will focus on this second change. I will explore how the Internet is challenging the traditional model of production, communication and reception of literary works. More and more, the fruitful interaction of authors and readers leads to the print publication of books in the Spanish language based on materials originating on the Internet. In some limited and interesting cases, the author has offered readers the opportunity HIOL ♦ Hispanic Issues On Line ♦ Spring 2012 NAVARRO ♦ 124 to complete or add pieces to the puzzle that constitutes the original work, to act as collaborators, as producers and coauthors of his or her work. As a starting point, I will examine the figure of the author, who constitutes readership, and how their relationship and collaborative process has evolved up until the advent of the digital era. Following that analysis, I will explore the changes that have ocurred in their relationship and why the so-called hybrid economy, an economy based on the combination of commercial and community interests, represents an old but also new and necessary counterpoint to the unidirectional, author-reader relationship fostered by multinational publishing and media conglomerates. My study of the transition from blog to book format will demonstrate how blogs have ultimately gone to waste, and how, conversely, wikis seem to be building a bridge capable of spanning the profound breach between the analogic and the digital publishing worlds. It also will expose a certain lack of interest on the part of big publishing houses in the new culture of collaboration; socalled literary blogs seem to exist as a means by which media conglomerates pursue certain business ends. As in the Gospel according to John, the beginning is the word. Literature originates in oral tradition, where tales are transmitted from one generation to the next throughout the spoken word. Oral cultures preserve certain information by means of participatory and communal practices. Compared to spoken texts, writing, according to Walter Ong, "separates the knower from the known and thus sets up conditions for 'objectivity,' in the sense of personal disengagement or distancing" (45). The spoken word has the peculiarity of allowing the different transmitter to modify the narrative, introducing small variations to the text. This explains the existence of diverse versions, one or more of which will subsequently be put down in writing. In truth, the first authors we can attest to are transcribers, compilers and commentators of oral narrative, writers that. according to Michael North, did not aspire to anything more than a "derivative authority" (1380). This is the realm of Benedictine monks such as Gonzalo de Berceo, on one hand, and minstrels on the other, brought together despite their differences by the letter and the word, versification and theme. In essence, the material on which both feed has a common root: oral tradition. Both ends of the communicative act can eventually exchange roles. The emitter can become the receptor, and vice versa. The relationship is more dynamic than in written cultures. Going back to Muñoz Molina's comment, one relates and the other listens, but one also repeats, and in that reproduction of the message, the narrative is modified. The receptor becomes the emitter, but also something else: because of the additions to the text, the receptor also becomes an author, another link in the chain of authorauditors that comprise oral tradition. Modern concepts of authorship arise in tandem with the advent of Gutenberg's printing press, though author and editor are often confused up

Transmedia Critical| Don Quixote of La Mancha : Transmedia Storytelling in the Grey Zone

International Journal of Communication, 2014

Transmedia storytelling is one of the most interesting phenomena emerging from the contemporary media ecology. In this article, the focus moves from contemporary transmedia productions to a literary classic: The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, written by Miguel de Cervante from 1605-1615). Inspired by the conceptions of Henry Jenkins and Jesús Martín-Barbero, this article first reflects on the relationships between participatory culture, the media industry, and popular cultures; second, the article analyses from a narratological perspective a corpus of productions published between the 19th and 20th centuries in Spain that expanded the narrative universe of Cervantes' masterpiece. The research specifically focuses on the auques, a series of peripheral graphic productions situated in a grey zone between Cervantes' official narrative (the canon) and user-generated content (the fandom).

The Virtual Canon: Don Quixote in the Spanish Cyberland

Revista Texto Digital

We are at a historic moment in which it seems that everything is changing from paper to computer, from analogue to digital. The canonical texts, once digitized, acquire, thanks to the Web, a global dimension. We must think about the model followed in this transfer of knowledge and its historical and literary consequences. In this article we, firstly, select a canonical and universal text, Don Quixote and, secondly, we search and analyze how the text has been transferred to digital format online. Finally, we will try to see what specific features offer the digitization of canonical books.

Post-Digitalism and Contemporary Spanish Fiction

Hispanic Issues, 2012

The purpose of this essay is to contextualize the work of several contemporary Spanish fiction writers who have faced the challenge of the mediatization and digitalization of culture by locating their creative and critical practice “at the edge of chaos.” They have done so by creating new metaphors, possibilities for narrative innovation, interdisciplinary border crossings, hybrid networks and capacities for establishing new connections, absorbing and processing information from traditional and electronic media, market dynamics, science and technology, philosophy, metacreation, and the avangardist tradition of modernist, postmodernist and avant-pop literature. My hypothesis here is that some of the common features of these writers derive from their active engagement in the socio-cultural, mediatic and artistic postdigital environment.

Digital Prompts and Narrative Cues: Storytelling in the 1450s and in the 2020s

Forum for Modern Language Studies

The Cent Nouvelles nouvelles present challenges to student learners of French linguistically, culturally and in terms of the content of the stories. Investigations designed to interrogate how the stories might have been collected in the second half of the fifteenth century end up demonstrating how the storytelling environment shapes the stories that are told and the way that they are understood. The experience of storytelling online during a period of pandemic learning is very different from the same experience in a pre- or post-pandemic classroom. Methodologies, such as critical pedagogy and inquiry stance pedagogy, which had limited resonance in the pre-pandemic environment, became much more central to the learner’s experience in the online, pandemic environment. This confirms the practices of ‘Flux pedagogy’, as advocated by Sharon M. Ravitch. Similarly, reactions to a story featuring the transmission of plague can be shaped by a framing that includes or excludes direct referen...

Paratextual Interferences: Patterns and Reconfigurations for Literary Narrative in the Digital Age.

Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology (AJCN), 2016

To acknowledge that the beginning of the twenty-first century has witnessed the rise of literary narratives that make extensive use of visual or graphic elements such as photographs, typographical experimentations, unusual page layouts, drawings, illustrations, etc., is not a novelty per se. Neither is it, in recent years, to explore digital narratives and their affordances. Rather, these explorations have received much attention in narrative theory and in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Since the digital turn, new studies have approached both subjects. However, while most of these studies are either inquiries into new digital devices and digital narratives (e.g., digital narratology) or focus on experimentations with the materiality of the book (e.g., multimodal narrative), this article will consider the two issues as part of the same phenomenon. On the one hand, literary experimentations with the materiality of the book have been especially flourishing since the emergence of new digital technologies. On the other hand, contemporary fictional writers, who are becoming more and more aware of the affordances offered by digital media, have started exploiting the properties of these new technologies to supplement their print narratives. These new but recurrent practices are thus both historically grounded in the socio-cultural context of the twenty-first century and consistent with a knowledge-sharing mode embedded in web 2.0 technologies. As I will show, the correlation between (a) the materiality of the book and (b) the digital supplementary material to be found on writers’ personal websites and blogs and in social media finds its origins in Gérard Genette’s concept of paratext and, in particular, in his subdivision into (a) peritext, i.e. the paratextual elements situated in proximity of the text, and (b) epitext, i.e. the paratextual elements “not materially appended to the text within the same volume, but circulating [...] in a virtually limitless physical and social space” (Genette [1987] 1997: 344). In the first section of this article, I highlight how the concept of paratext, despite some lacks and ambivalences, is still able to offer a valuable perspective on contemporary practices. I will introduce recent investigations on issues of media, mode, and materiality in order to contextualize my study in a wider cultural and theoretical discourse. The second section analyzes how paratextual elements are employed in a contemporary novel, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010). This analysis sheds new light on the way visual and digital elements may be used in a literary narrative. Drawing on this paradigmatic case, the third section puts forth my proposal of “paratext 2.0.” Formed by the categories of material peritext and digital epitext, the conceptualization of paratexts 2.0 allows for the identification of several functions. Far from containing a definitive reconfiguration of paratext for literary narrative in the digital age, this article provides new a vocabulary and, more significantly, new insights to answer some of the urgent questions twenty-first century literary practices are posing to narrative theory.