L’œuvre hybride de Jorge Carrión : la page face à l’écran dans Crónica de viaje

• Main Author: Roxana Ilasca
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université du Sud Toulon-Var 2016-01-01
• Series: Babel : Littératures Plurielles
• Subjects: Spanish literature (XXIst century); mutant generation; emigration; e-migration; Google; paratext
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/babel/4447

At the beginning of the 21st century, in Spanish literature a new generation of writers, called the mutants, begin to focus on the relationship between literature and the contemporary world. Considered as part of this mutant literary movement, Jorge Carrión creates Crónica de viaje, a nonfiction work in which he makes use of the Google search engine in order to tell the story of his paternal grand-father. More than just a medium, the technological device is a paratext which turns into a narrative tool. As a result of the interaction between the story of his grand-parent’s emigration and the author’s own e-migration (i.e. electronic migration), a new poetics arises: that of the scree-page, where the frontier separating the text from the outer world becomes blurred. Nevertheless, this is not just an experimental endeavour, but a hybrid work within the field of crisis art; that is, it strives to adopt a critical view towards both the flaws of the electronic medium and the literary creation which refuses to update its modes of artistic expression.