Content area
Abstract
The present study focuses on Escritos para desocupados (Writings for the Unoccupied), a 2013 work by Mexican author Vivian Abenshushan, as a multifaceted book that poses challenges for literary studies, book studies, and the reader in general. From a textual perspective, Escritos para desocupados is a shape-shifter. That is, depending on how the reader accesses its content, it can be a blog-book, a web-book, a printed book or a digital PDF-book. Using a term coined by the author, the "augmented book," I seek to encompass a phenomenon that is no longer unusual, the publication of a text in different media. Using Roger Chartier’s Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances and Audiences from Codex to Computer (1995), and N. Katherine Hayles’s Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008), the present study reworks and builds upon Abenshushan’s term "augmented book" to reflect the transformation suffered by the text, and expands upon this new perspective to offer three basic modes of augmentation: through content, through formats, and through reading. Drawing on these forms of augmentation, and adding a more literary perspective, after reviewing the characteristics of two Avant-garde and post-Avant-garde literary movements in Mexico, as well as their primary characteristics, the findings suggest that Escritos para desocupados could be considered the manifesto to a new post-Avant-garde literary movement in Mexico, under the proposed name of movimiento desocupado (Unoccupied Movement).
Note to the reader: This thesis is currently available only in Spanish.
