Prof. Élika Ortega Speaks in ELL on March 9

Professor Élika Ortega from the Department of Cultures Societies and Global Studies at Northeastern University will be giving a talk on Friday, March 9, 2018, in the Electronic Literature Lab (VMMC 211A) Washington State University, Vancouver, 1-2 p.m. The title of her talk is “Binding Media: Print-Digital Literatures from Latin America.”

Here is the abstract of her talk:

“There is no shortage of ways in which the print and the digital intersect within the literary realm. Though still a recurrent trope, the print and digital binary has proven as unproductive as that of “the old” and “the new” when discussing contemporary literature and media. Indeed, the instances in which print and digital move around each other at all stages in the lifespan of a literary work, from its writing to its reviewing, are so intricately woven together that attempting to talk about print without the digital seems nearly impossible. More than providing confirmation of the “death of the book” or the decline of literary reading, the present moment offers a wealth of evidence that reveals an unstable landscape where extremely creative endeavors have been flourishing around the world. In this presentation, I will discuss a handful of Latin American works that “bind” print and digital media and exploit creatively the tensions and harmonies, the rhetorics and expressiveness, and the aesthetic effects emerging at their intersection.”

Professor Ortega will be working in the lab from March 7-16, researching the manuals that accompany works of early electronic literature.

Bio (from Northeastern U’s website)
“Élika Ortega is a literary and media scholar and a digital humanist. Her work focuses on the intersection of literature, print-digital culture, and global exchanges in the 21st Century. She writes about digital literature, media, materiality, reading practices, global networks, digital humanities, and multilingualism.

Her projects include “A Handbook of E-Lit Reading”, an archive of instructions to read electronic literature works; “No Legacy || Literatura electrónica” (2016) an exhibition of electronic and print literature in Spanish, Portuguese, and English; and Textual Environments, her monograph investigating print-digital works of literature.

Élika serves on several professional organizations. She is chair of Global Outlook::Digital Humanities, executive council officer of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, and part of the communications team of the Electronic Literature Organization.

Élika keeps close ties with scholars all over the world and often writes for Red de Humanidades Digitales and _laboratorio de literaturas extendidas y otras materialidades_.”

Selected Publications