(World) Literature as Ars Vivendi through Collaborative Authorship

Abstract

During the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, 46 Portuguese authors collaborated on a serialized hypertext novel: Bode Inspiratório, translated into English as Escape Goat. It draws attention to escapism in literature and calls to the mind a 21st-century retelling of the Decameron, which belongs to the rich sets of texts emanating from The Thousand and One Nights we define in literature as ars moriendi. By transferring the act of collective storytelling to a digital platform, Escape Goat transgresses the monologism of authorial isolation by bringing together the heteroglossic structure of the novel with the polyphony of collaborative authorship. This study holds up Escape Goat as a proto example of collaborative Covid-novels and aims to demonstrate how this “novel” form of collaborative authorship extends the boundaries of world literature through a transformation of the escapist, mortuary and agonistic aspect of literature as ars moriendi, into the collaborative, ludic and solidarist aspect of literature as ars vivendi.