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…ha perdut la veu: Some reflections on the composition of e-literature as a minor literature

This article is an extended version of a paper I gave at Kingston University as an invited speaker at the 'From Page to Screen to Augmented Reality' Conference in July 2010. The paper begins from a discussion of a digital text work of my own, entitled …ha perdut la veu. This is a bilingual text work in English and Catalan, and was first shown at the E-poetry conference at the University of Barcelona, May 2009. The text is drawn partly from the translation into Catalan of one of my early children’s novels, La Freda ha perdut la veu. (Alfreda Abbot's Lost Voice OUP), hence the title of the piece. The English text is taken from a translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Translation is being used here for its explanatory force in relation to both digital text and performance writing.

The paper has two objectives. The first is to give a clear example of the way in which practice and theory, or rather practice-as-research, can exist as a symbiotic relationship – each benefiting and illuminating the other. The second is to propose and map out an area of potential further research into the discursive positioning of electronic literature/digital writing within Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minorisation as articulated by Jean-Jacques Lecercle in his book, Deleuze and Style. The conference itself was organised by Dr Maria Mencia and the keynote was given by Jay David Bolter, Wesley Chair of New Media and a professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the author among other things of Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, a highly influential critical text of electronic literature.