Digital Literatures Circulating in Spanish: The Emergence of a Field

Abstract

The launching of Google Books and of Google Earth in 2004 could be considered a symbolic landmark for building memories. In this context, we consider that digital literatures are a very useful workbench for exploring the consequences of global digital circulation as a factual process but also as an imaginary storytelling. Literatures born digital can show how rituals of reading, formulas of production, and narratives are being modified in the twenty-first century. This article traverses a very large and diverse domain: digital literatures circulating in Spanish all over the world, not just those created in Spanish-speaking countries. The starting point is Ciberia, a repository of digital literature in Spanish, but other digital collections such as LitElat, IloveE-Poetry, Hermeneia, ELMCIP, and ELO are also covered. The authors use a post-Bourdieu methodology to study circulating digital literatures in Spanish as an emerging and dynamic field. By doing so, they show how these literatures give birth to new communities of reader-writers, reading differently and perhaps announcing how readers from the new generation are going to read.