Cibertextual Specificity in Digital Poetry. A close reading of Rui Torres’ Amor de Clarice

Taking for granted the emergence of an extended literature in cyberculture (a term borrowed from Weibel and Export´s notion of “extended cinema” in the 60´s), this article claims for a specific set of theoretical and critical categories in order to answer properly to what makes electronic or digital literature “different”. This challenge takes the form of a close reading of a work of digital poetry entitled Amor de Clarice, by the Portuguese artist and academic Rui Torres. This work is an adaptation or rewriting of Clarice Lispector´s tale “Amor” (1960) whose poetic rich ambiguity is played and empowered by this cyberpoetry, from a structural and feminist perspective, mixing the plagiotropic and avant-gardist traditions of lusobrazilian poetry, including the Shlovskian principle of estrangement, with the potential of combinatory and generative poetry implemented on computing algorithms and hypermedia programming. The analysis also emerges from a 6 level layered concept of complexity (material or technological; authorship; genre; reception & participation; semiotic and intermedia/transmedial; institutional). This complexity is part of the answer for the specificity of this literary practices.