iTEXTS: TECHXTUAL POETICS, AUTHORSHIP AND RE-WREADERS IN 21\u3csup\u3eST\u3c/sup\u3e-CENTURY SPANISH LITERATURE

In 2007, Nuria Azancot published an article in the magazine El Cultural in which she identified a burgeoning group of Spanish writers that she referred to as the “Nocilla Generation.” The catalyst behind the article was a literary reunion that took place weeks before in Seville and brought together authors from all parts of Spain to talk about the status and future of writing. She described them as “transgressors” and “bloggers” who hybridized literary genres and held a revolutionary approach to the literary that was clearly marked by the Internet. Numerous articles and dissertations have since highlighted the impact that technology has had on the literature of this generation and how the Internet has allowed these authors a very active presence on social media. Few of these critical examinations have engaged in close textual analyses of the works of this so-called “Nocilla Generation” of writers. This dissertation engages with these issues for the purpose of exploring three main points. First, it seeks to identify and examine the role of the Internet on the literary production of Agustín Fernández Mallo, Alberto Olmos and Vicente Luis Mora. Second, it looks at the way that the internetization of literature implicitly undermines the traditional understanding of authorship. Third, the project suggests that the concept of an author as the source of an original creation should be replaced with a “re-wreader” (a blend of reader and writer infused with the repetitive nature of the prefix “re.”). The main thesis of this dissertation is that the interneticized text gives rise to a new understanding of authorship that is best captured in the figure of a re-wreader writing re-wreaderly texts that echo the ideas of the readerly and writerly from Barthes. The result: a textual space at once strange yet familiar in which a search for meaning, textual stability or origins gives itself over to the pleasure of the search, a search for something or nothing, a search for the search, a search in which all the material of the world (printed and digital) is there to be used and repackaged into a new literary creation