HACIA LA CONSTRUCCIÓN DEL SUJETO Y SUS PROCESOS DE LECTURA EN LA HIPERTEXTUALIDAD LATINOAMERICANA

Abstract

ABSTRACT Eduardo Acuna-Zumbado, Ph.D. Department of Spanish and Portuguese University of Kansas This study contends that hypertextual writing puts forward, by its multilinear structure and its decentered process of reading, subjects that have abandoned essentializing unity in space and time. The virtual reading subjects configure themselves through their transitions in the reading process. These hypertextual reading subjects are consciousness consisting of multiple identities defined by the spaces that they traverse and functioning in an interconnected network that cannot be interpreted as unitary subjectivity in the virtual space. They have to be understood as a locus of multiple connections that interpret and decode a text. In the first chapter I interpret Jorge Luis Borges's "La Biblioteca de Babel" (1941), "El libro de arena" (1975), "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan" (1941), and Brazilian Concrete Poetry (i.e., the poems: "Life" y "Terra" (1956) by Decio Pignatari, "Verde Erva" by Ferreira Gullar (1958), and "A Ave" (1956) and "Solida" (1956) by Wlademir Dias-Pino) as precursors to hypertextual writing or proto-hypertexts. These two modes of textual production implement techniques that attempt to break with the traditional linearity associated with the written text and propose different reading approaches for their readers. Building upon this idea of multilinearity, in chapter two I explore the holopoetry of the Brazilian Eduardo Kac as a textual practice that subverts the traditional bidimensional and static medium of visual/verbal representation to favor a tridimensional medium of production. Chapter three focuses on Condiciones Extremas (1998, 2000, 2005), a Colombian hypernovel with three versions written by Juan B. Gutiérrez in the tradition of science fiction. This text uses Literatronic, an adaptive narrative system, which attempts to avoid the possible dispersions of the reading subject in the virtual space. Finally, I turn to the Spaniard Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez's gabriella infinita (1995, 1998-9, 200?), and analyze three versions of this multiform and metaphoric fiction whose labyrinthine structure presents many narrative "realities" that force the reader to navigate through multiple spatial-temporal points simultaneously.