Digital literary trajectories: (dis)encounters between experimentalism and mass culture flows

Abstract

In light of the fact that contemporary glocal digital culture has touched many people’s everyday life deeply–even in regards to their habits of writing and reading–, the paper wonders why this type of literature remains more or less invisible to most of the same population. The main hypothesis explored is that this situation has to do with the strong experimental impetus that digital literature has entailed since its first appearances in mid- 20^th century, an impetus kept to the present. This experimentalism, not without some problems, such as the possible reproduction of the “great divide” between high and lowbrow culture, already contested since the sixties, also opens great potentialities to build disruptive ways of cognitive and perceptual experience within hegemonic digital culture, understand as an “algorithmic culture”. To test the hypothesis, the paper examines some encounters and (dis) encounters between two different practices within online digital culture that turn to appropriationism as an artistic device. On one hand, digital literature associated to conceptual and un-creative writing and, on the other hand, literary fancfiction which, even if could only be digitized literature –not strictly digital– it owns its exponential growth to virtual communities and social networks since the development of the Web 2.0.