Playful Detours for the Construction of a New Scriptural Memory. Analysis of Three Pieces of Latin American Electronic Literature

Abstract

This work addresses a corpus of Latin American artists whose pieces of electronic literature, artifacts produced and consumed on digital support, break, through play, with a type of linear and canonized writing in favor of recursion, deviations and micro-stories. In general, the playful aspect of electronic literature works is present since in many cases the interaction of the reader-users is required, while they have the particularity of being made with different languages -artistic or programming-. Certain rules of the game are imposed through instructions for use, at the same time that a space for chance and combinatorics is promoted, based on the depth of hypertext typical of digital support. In the specific case of the corpus that we propose here, the artists work under a new conception of scriptural memory enabled thanks to the intervening playful element: the hypertext autobiography in Memorias y caminos (2016) by Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez, the rebellious poems covering the urban weave in Textos guerreros (2017) by Pablo Somonte Ruano and the canonical literary tradition revisited in El Aleph a dieta (2015) by Milton Laüfer.