THEME RATIONALE

Forms of fiction and literature underwent a process of disembodiment and cross-fertilization during the revolution from the Gutenberg Galaxy — printed paper, mass distribution — to the McLuhan Galaxy — new media, hypertext, collaborative writing — (Castells, 2003). The dimension of literacy has moved from a semiotically-measured geometry (De Saussure, 1916; Hjelmslev, 1969) to a dislocation and a deconstruction of contents and channels that give expression to new products (Derrida, 1974; Landow, 1994; Bolter & Grusin, 1999). The impact of social media on narratology has redefined the meaning of readership and authorship. The author not only loses his/her traditional role, but becomes an icon of himself/herself, a collective-minded producer that is self-perceived through the extro-flexed eye of the amniotic network in which he/she defines his/her narrative experience (De Kerckhove, 2003).
This conference seeks to shed light on digital literature according to the epistemological crisis of authorship and the new dimension of participation and relationship offered by both the Web and new media. The conference will offer keynote speeches and talks to examine specific case studies. Moving from the state of the art, the aim is to investigate the interdisciplinary relations in the field of electronic literature, in order to favour a pattern recognition about theories, technologies, and social dimensions of the phenomena to offer
a critical toolkit to understand and map out the emerging knowledge and practices created by this field and the multifaceted dimension of education.

We invite artists, researchers, scholars, PhD candidates, experts and practitioners to submit works, papers, case studies, and media artefacts for presentation at the festival and in the different venues of the Conference.