Umberto Eco's Opera Aperta and the Birth of Italian Electronic Literature

Emanuela Patti
2021 Modern Languages Open  
the convergence of electronic media and literary forms during the digital revolution has produced a variety of hybrid genres which in the present day are often labelled as "electronic literature". As Massimo riva points out in Il futuro della letteratura. L'opera d'arte nell'epoca della sua riproducibilità digitale (2011), electronic literature encompasses not just reading and writing practices, but all of the senses and artistic media, such as poetic and narrative movement, full bodily
more » ... ion with a written text, dance, painting, sculpture, design, which are all integrated into something that we still label "literary" (27). More specifically, he notes how, when it is remediated by a computer, the text of a story or a poem turns into a complex layered palimpsest made of "natural" and algorithmic language, words and alphanumeric codes, which both machines and human beings can read in a new form of collaboration between artificial and human intelligence. in order to represent the inherent resistance of these practices to the "law of genre" (derrida 56), the actual definition provided by the electronic Literature organisation in 2004 accommodates such flexibility: "electronic literature" refers to "works with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer". in keeping with todorov's definition of "a new genre"-that is, "the transformation of one or several old genres: by inversion, by displacement, by combination" (cited in swales 46)-and rick Altman's theory that new genres are born of the marriage between a pre-existing form and a new technology, "electronic literature" is inevitably marked by hybridity and, perhaps, by monstrosity, as suggested by Katherine n. hayles (4). in italy, electronic literature has a rich history. it was born in the cultural milieu of the Neoavanguardia in the early 1960s and, since then, it has produced a significant number of experimental works and practices which can be generally grouped as follows: 1 'combinatory literature', 'kinetic and interactive poetry', 'hypertext fiction', and 'network writing'. under these umbrella categories, a number of genres have emerged, including nanni Balestrini's computer poetry, gianni toti's video poetry, Luigi Longo, Luisa Lux and Fabrizio Venerandi's kinetic poetry, Caterina davinio's net-poetry, enrico Colombini's interactive fiction, and the various forms of network writing by Wu Ming (distributed narratives), Kai Zen (hypertext novel), Michela Murgia and Francesco pecoraro (blooks), tommaso pincio (social network novel), and scrittura industriale Collettiva (wiki novel), to mention just a few. these hybrid genres tend to be multimodal and mostly employ, as well as question, technological processes such as coding, networking, hypertextuality, interactivity, virtuality, and simulation. in spite of the richness and international significance of italian electronic literature, a systematic reconstruction of its historical phases, along with its milestones, protagonists, key genres, and the critical issues they raised, has not yet been undertaken globally. 2 similarly, the social, political, ideological, moral, linguistic, and educational functions of electronic literature have barely received any attention.
doi:10.3828/mlo.v0i0.381 fatcat:l54strvwnvfxljyy2jiqzzk42m