Growing up Digital: The Emergence of E-Lit Communities in Spain. The Case of Catalonia “And the Rest is Literature”

Starting with the famous last words of Hamlet “and the rest is silence”, I would like to introduce Catalan e-lit communities and their experience of digital literature. The Hermeneia Research Group has been one of the pioneers in the field in Spain and has been developing many different activities for the last ten years. Lately it has been promoting a public debate in Literary Societies on Digital Literature (Premis Octubre in Valencia (2009), Catalan and Castillian Association of Writers (AELC/ACEC), Spanish Society of Comparative Literature, Alacant (2010) etc.). Certainly, the celebration of the e‐poetry festival 2009 in Barcelona was one of the big events that supported this open debate on that matter. In this paper there is a special space for one of these activities, which – for the last five years – we have been trying to encourage: creativity. The establishment of the international Ciutat de Vinaròs awards is one of these activities. These awards accept creations in languages that already have a tradition of electronic or digital literature, such as English, French or Portuguese, but they also serve to stimulate creative works in languages like Spanish, Italian or Catalan. These works are subsequently studied by the Hermeneia research group and at the same time in undergraduate and postgraduate courses, thus promoting an interchange between the areas of creation, teaching, and research.

(Source: Author's abstract)