ABSTRACTOFDISSERTATION -CENTURY SPANISH LITERATURE In 2007, Nuria Azancot published an article in the magazine El Cultural in which she identified a burgeoning group of Spanish writers
iTexts: Techxtual Poetics and the Interneticized Novel in 21 st - Century
The book critic Christian Lorentzen recently published an online article 10 in which he muses about the nature of literature under recent presidents and suggests that the American novel under Obama will be discussed through the lens of authenticity, or more precisely about “problems of authenticity” (Lorentzen, par 3) According to
Lorentzen, this preoccupation with authenticity should not come as a surprise given that this was someone whose political charm took root in an air of authenticity that was repeatedly called into question by political adversaries bent on questioning his identity and origins 11 Now that he has left the office of the president, a new challenge is dealing with troubling questions of fake news and alternative facts whose very existence results from the 24-hour news cycle and the unprecedented reaches of the Internet and social
10 From the article “Considering the Novel in the Age of Obama” published online on the website Vulture: www.vulture.com/2017/01/considering-the-novel-in-the-age-of-obama.html
11 Lorentzen initiates his article from the perspective that for the better part of seventy years American novels have been interpreted through the lens of a “postmodern” vs “postwar” dichotomy that at least in the case of the latter term has perhaps lost some of its usefulness As an alternative, he wonders why it could not be just as useful and interesting to look at novels through the lens of presidencies He goes on to suggest that John Updike’s Rabbit Run could be matched with John F Kennedy; Jay McInerney’s Bright
Lights with Reagan; Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero to Bush I and finally David Foster Wallaces’s Infinite Jest to Clinton Under Bush II he highlights the popularity of 9/11 novels, superheroes and humanitarian lit the likes of which we can see in novels like Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude or Dave Egger’s What is the What For Lorentzen it was a political landscape defined by elaborate fictions When Obama arrives on the scene, against a backdrop of “birther” conspiracy theories and an identity imbued with the traumas of colonialism, Lorentzen suggests that the notion of authenticity became an important element precisely because that is what made Obama so appealing while at the same time his political adversaries sought to undermine him by questioning that authenticity Literarily speaking, if during the Bush years it was enough to present “knowingness” and artifice that called attention to itself, during the Obama years writers needed to go further’ they had to create “authentic characters” and artifice was supposed to be presented in such a way that it created an effect of authenticity, a narrative that made the real or true seem more real and more true
19 media Authority and authorship appear to be undergoing a fundamental shift in the digital age and the recent presidential election was perhaps no greater reflection of that change
But it was a more marginal element of the article that caught my attention when I read it Lorentzen points to the publication of a book by David Shields in 2010, Reality
Hunger: A Manifesto, as an important prophecy in American literature, and many of the issues that Shields addresses in that book and the way he composes it are very similar to the ones that appear around the same time in some of the experimental novels of the authors of the so-called Nocilla Generation in Spain Composed of snippits and vignettes, many of them borrowed (or is it, “appropriated” or “sampled”?) and altered, the manifesto directs its attention toward the wall that has been erected between nonfiction and fiction, and the notion that nonfiction presents something more pressing because it is based on fact It calls for “deliberate unartiness: ‘raw’ material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional … Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation” (Lorentzen, par 7) In the case of the Spanish novels, they too share many of these characteristics but what I propose is that this very nature, that of the fragmentary novel that borrows material and embraces randomness, is the direct result of a
“techxtually inspired” or “interneticized text.” That is to say, it is the principal point of departure for this project to show how some of the novels of the so-called Nocilla
Generation of Spanish writers are inspired and influenced by technology and in particular the products and practices of the Internet, which in turn raises serious questions related to authorship, reading and writing
Writing about technology and literature in the twenty-first century of course presents a host of challenges perhaps unparalleled in history Probably the most slippery component in this pair is the notion of technology precisely because of the pace with which it changes Rapid change is the hallmark of the modern era as it relates to technology The magnitude and velocity of change is exacerbated by the fact that the technology to which this project directs its attention is not what one might refer to as the traditional historically progressive modern advancements in the areas of transportation, medicine, energy or architecture, for example 12 On the contrary, the technology that will serve as the point of departure for the observations of this chapter is the one that revolves around the massive paradigm shift brought on by the computer, the Internet and the subsequent creation of the digital and virtual worlds
It is my position that the Internet in particular, along with all of its subsidiary components (computers, smart phones, social media, blogs, chatrooms, email, webpages) is what perhaps more than anything else in the modern era has dramatically and radically altered the social world and subsequent creative and literary landscapes One only needs to pause and think about the image of the contemporary individual, smartphone in hand at all times, a consummate reader and writer but in a vastly different way than at any other point in history It is into this dynamic landscape that I will insert this work with the hope
12 That is not to say that any one of those areas has not at some point in some way influenced or molded the way literature was read or written One need only look to the historic Spanish avant garde to see instances where the view out the window of a passenger train offered a new way of not only seeing the world but narrating that experience as something akin to the rapid succession of images that form that basis of the cinematographic experience Or how all of the new advancements in manufacturing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced sounds and noises previously unknown to the human ear which in turn gave rise to onomatopoeic neologisms But it is my position that the impact on the production of literature in general, albeit notable and influential by these technological advancements and especially film, did not represent a seismic threat or shift
21 of being able to overcome not only the necessary distance for critical analysis of someone enmeshed in this landscape but also some of the inherent challenges of trying to say something meaningful, relevant and interesting in an environment beset by rapid change where the new can become old in days or hours In other words, there is a lurking sense of “chasing meaning” in the sense that in the moment that one gains some understanding or reaches some insight into a specific element (be it a webpage, a blog, a social media platform, a new word or software or a new device) it could very well have already been displaced or replaced by something else
This project finds some encouragement and perspective for this endeavor in a different historically significant moment that took place over a century ago On Jan 25,
1896, the Lumière brothers screened their short film “L'Arrivée d'un Train en Gare de La Ciotat” (“Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station”) at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris While it was not the very first showing of a film it was one of the earliest and the effect it had on the audience is what gave rise to a longstanding urban legend According to the legend, the spectators shrieked with fear and even jumped and ran from their seats when they thought the oncoming train on the movie screen was literally going to break through the screen and crush them Film historian Martin Loipendinger was not able to find any firsthand accounts of any pandemonium but he along with other film historians like Ray Zone believe that the audience was at very least astonished by the image on the screen Loipendinger suggests that the purpose of the urban legend has been to accentuate just how far culture and society have come since the early days of film when it was most likely a shocking experience
What calls my attention about that occurrence is that while on the surface it reveals the incredible newness and unfamiliarity of film at that particular moment and how relatively unprepared the public was for all of the visual and spatial implications that film ushered in, if one looks deeper and more critically one could already in that moment identify and explain the inner workings of film and how those mechanisms were being experimented with outside of film in literature for example (the 1923 novel Cinelandia by Ramón Gómez de la Serna is a good example of this that will be looked at briefly later on) In other words, even if there was still some disconnect between the new technology and how it was playing out and interacting with the individual, the underlying tenets and mechanisms of film were already impacting and influencing what they were designed to do: significantly alter the visual experience and the way the individual perceives the human experience
Almost a century later, I argue that we are once again witnessing a significant transformation of the human experience and the way we see and perceive the world and our relationships because of the advances in technology Much of this, in my opinion, owes itself to computers and the Internet But in addition to an impact on the individual experience, it is at the same time having a particularly profound effect on the areas of reading and writing as well For George Landow, reading and writing in the digital age have given rise to “wreaders” (the portmanteau is the result of combining “readers” and
“writers”) He coined the word in reference to the way in which readers interact with hypertext fiction by suggesting that they were as much producers as consumers of the text Dolores Romero López takes up this idea and suggests that “playing with hyperlinks involves disorganized thinking, associative laxity and conceptual and linguistic