Three weeks into the semester already! I guess time flies when you are having fun! And it has been fun! This Fall I am teaching two courses, variations on courses I have taught before–which makes things even funner somehow! (I don’t know why I hadn’t thought about doing this until now. Honestly, I have created about 11 new courses since I joined UC Berkeley! I must be mad).
Transmedia Narratives: a writing intensive course for Spanish majors, around the topic of literature written across different media and platforms. We started reading a selection of Javier Fernández’s VR dystopia Cero Absoluto, we received the visit of Loss Pequeño Glazier, who read from his classic e-work White-Faced Bromeliads in 20 Hectares, and will shortly being reading Belén Gache’s blog project Kublai Moon, Vicente Mora’s magazine-novel Alba Cromm and Agustín Fernández Mallo’s transmedial Proyecto Nocilla. Like the previous cohort, this new group of students will be sharing some of their writing on the course blog: Poéticas de la tecnocultura.
Experimental Literature and Digital Machines: a graduate seminar examining theories, narratives, poetry and other manifestations of electronic literature in Spanish (and English, and Portuguese), both as a particular type of born-digital expression meant to live on a computer, as well as a larger field of inquiry that takes advantages of the capabilities offered by these electronic machines. Throughout this course students get familiarized with different genres of e-lit while they learn how to analyze and explore its particular aesthetics, rhetoric and practical functioning. Apart from analyzing the formal characteristics of born-digital pieces, this course explores the relations between digital experimentalism and some of the most revolutionary works of 20th and 21st Century Spain and Latin America. In order to establish this, students read experimental literature by Borges and Cortázar, the Spanish Futurists and Catalan visual poets, the Brazilian Concrete poets, and contemporary post digital Spanish writers, among others from the English-speaking world (the complete reading list is too long to share here, but do email me if you’d like to see it!). Grad students are also sharing their first reading impressions on the course blog: Electrolite.
Want to learn about digital literature in Spanish? Come to UC Berkeley, friends.
