Mutatis Mutandi: Spanish Literature of the New 21st Century

Mutatis mutandi: literatura española del nuevo siglo XXI, focuses on how the new hybrid prose and poetry created by the so called “Generación Mutante”—or Generación Nocilla—is able to question the purpose and nature of art in the current context of information technology. Chapter 1 deals with the writing of Vicente Luis Mora. I argue here that his written representation of other media within the general tradition of the “book” brings to the fore the technological mediation present in today's artistic creation. Grammatical and orthographical subversions in Mora's poetry projects aim to alter our habitual reading practices and force the reader to take an active role as interpreter and constructor of meaning. Chapter 2 elaborates on the idea of technological representation and its subversion in the marketplace through the experimental literary work of Agustín Fernández Mallo. I claim that his poesía postpoética challenges established uses of everyday objects and questions their artistic essence. My final chapter explores the use of new hybrid narrative methods in the work of Jorge Carrión. Carrión's use of Google as a narratological structure in charge of organizing information, reflects on new reading practices intrinsic to the current way of online reading, updating traditional genres like the récit de voyage. These authors' mash-up techniques and their juxtaposition of alien materials accessible through the Web call our attention to new ways of production where art is based on the manipulation of products understood as creation. The possibility of talking about this group of writers as a new Spanish generation is challenged by their relation with this network of universal collaboration. I argue that, although, these writers all benefit from the changes in access, manipulation and generation of information within a global system, a shared historical and social background, together with a change in their operational systems within the conventional literary panorama, allows us to establish them as a representative sample of a new wave of Spanish writers whose production will grant us an understanding of today's tensions between the Spanish individual —writer— and an all encompassing network of information technologies