Electronic Literature in Latin America: From Text to Hypertext by Claire Taylor (review)

In the digital era, the methods of production and consumption of literary works continue to undergo modifications that affect concepts of literary form. Claire Taylor's Electronic Literature in Latin America: From Text to Hypertext examines a series of hypertextualized works to interrogate the processes of digitalization in Latin American literature and what those procedures can tell us about the evolution of contemporary literature. The sum of these studies is an informative and engaging reflection upon literature and literacy in an online world.

The introductory chapter, "From Text to Hypertext: Electronic Literature in Latin America," lays out the theoretical framework of the study by first examining standing debates on electronic literature, as well as cultural studies as a field of practice—first in England and later in global and Latin American contexts. Through these reflections, Taylor discusses the negotiations of aesthetics within digital technologies, including a theoretical examination of how those same technologies imbricate both producers and consumers in a corporatized post-statist economy. Taylor suggests that the works she analyzes throughout her study are aware of the precarity of their very creation and that they resist, in differing ways, a simple acquiescence to a dominant digital modality that would neutralize the social commentary they voice. Through dialogue with earlier modes of writing (epistolary, journalistic) and literary movements (High Modernism, the avant-garde), Taylor argues that digital literature is part of a literary tradition that consciously considers its positionality and radical potential while maintaining awareness of its institutional limitations. In this, Taylor intimates her three-part approach to digital cultural studies, examining "aesthetics, technologics, and ethics" as part of an interwoven process that shapes Latin American electronic literature (13).

The second chapter examines Carlos Labbé's Pentagonal: Incluidos tú y yo (2001). Taylor's analysis here is two-fold: first, by contrasting the collage techniques of an historical avant-garde with the "cut and paste" processes of digitally manufactured text; and second, by comparing the conventions of the epistolary novel with the nuances of the email-based novel. Taylor argues that Labbé's novel problematizes both the concepts of digital collage and epistolary fiction, and that the text thus demonstrates consciousness of its entanglements within a techno-capitalist regime. As such, the collage technique, via cut and paste, may lose its radical avant-garde potential, and the email format cannot but divulge its corporatist framework.

In the next chapter, Taylor analyzes Marina Zerbarini's Evaline, fragmentos de una respuesta (2004). Here Taylor examines how Zerbarini's textual installation engages visual and auditory cues, complicating basic conventions of narrative structure. Taylor observes that, through digital processes of deliberate narratological obstruction, Zerbarini's work, in dialogue with James Joyce's source text, retakes questions of textual closure and coherence, as well as stream of consciousness techniques, all of which do not align precisely with the branching structure of internet technology. Taylor's analysis demonstrates how, through dialogue with high modernist aesthetics, the potentialities and limits of Zerbarini's fragmentary internet narrative are put on display.

In chapter four, Taylor turns to Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez's Golpe de gracia (2006) to examine the ludic elements of this electronic narrative and their dialogue with both detective fiction and surrealism, specifically in the form of the exquisite corpse. Here Taylor suggests that, through the text's malleable protagonist and the shifting role of the reader via identification with protagonist and later the detective charged with the story's investigation, a broader understanding of violence as a social ill can be achieved. Though Taylor's analysis does not entirely elucidate the transition between interactive textual processes and macro-level social issues, the proposal of such socio-aesthetic dynamics is intriguing.

The fifth chapter examines Belén Gache's Góngora Word Toys (2011) and Radikal Karaoke (2011). In her analysis of the first of these two texts, Taylor details the ways in which, through the construction of labyrinthine links and pop-up windows, Gache's rereading/rewriting of Góngora...