Transliteracy: expanded materialities of contemporary literature in the context of technoculture

Abstract

After much was said about the apocalypse of the book and of literature as paradigms of culture at the edge of 2000, we have confirmed that printed literature did not die or completely move to the digital world, but rather has received feedback from it and from its dynamics and has renewed its modes of production based on the tension between the dematerialization imposed by virtuality and a return to materiality, expanded into innumerable possibilities and with a constant impetus for renewal. Thus, in the context of technoculture, literature has renewed and diversified its modes of production in contact with other media spheres, it has received feedback from technology and has expanded its processes, on the one hand, to carve out a place in the digital context and, on the other, to enhance and expand the materiality behind the experience of digitality, which we see crystallized in the rise of independent publishers, the constant production of artist's books and intermedial works, the incorporation of topics and processes from contemporary art and the consolidation of a “network literature” that draws from the digital universe. I am interested in dwelling on how the concept of literacy has been modified in light of this and how, in contemporary literature, the practices of writing and reading from one medium are transferred to another, generating a condition of transliteracy, in which I will dwell through some examples.