Random Borges | Infinite E Lit: A Look from Hispanic Legacies

Abstract

Part of the inter-institutional collaborative project Hispanic Legacies in Electronic Literature, in this presentation Élika Ortega proposes a juxtaposition between Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges’ imagined figures of infinity such as The Library of Babel, The Aleph, and The Book of Sand and contemporary examples of Electronic Literature (E-Lit) that analogously and literally enact endlessness in reading and writing. Media figures of infinity (as Ortega terms the conceptual and structural strategies used by writers to create infinites) underscore the tensions between the life span of artworks, the machines and code that materialize them, and the people reading them. Furthermore, the spatial-temporal dimensions of infinite E-Lit works put into question the role of readers and archivists dealing with literary works whose end will not be seen but are likely to stop working or become obsolete and inaccessible.