This graduate seminar studies digital literature from the Spanish and Portuguese speaking world that, while inhabiting the virtual web, engages, in one way or another, its grounding in the material world. Although it may sound counterintuitive, the destruction of natural resources and human life is directly related to the modern evolution of digital technologies that project a perverse sense of immaterial existence. Rethinking digital materiality calls for a double framework of interpretation: a questioning of historical periodization that puts the global contemporary moment in relation to ecology (the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene, etc), and a loose posthumanist approach where new relationships of knowledge emerge multi-directionally from epistemic accountability and transversal ethics. This porous framework may establish conversations with: book materiality, digital temporality, media archeologies vs. historiography, cybernetics, Anthropocene criticism, queer of color critique, and feminist new materialisms. In this seminar we will think through this networked approach to (digital) literary criticism as we experience and discuss art and literature born from and for digital environments and machines. We will focus on the creative work by Latin American and Spanish digital artists such as Eugenio Tisselli, Belén Gache, Joana Moll, Micha Cárdenas, Milton Läufer, Giselle Beiguelman, Yto Aranda, and Mario Santamaría, among others.

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