NEW RITUALS OF LITERARY READING

 ON THE SCREEN

Introduction

Part I

Transition from books to the screens

Theoretical perspectives

The New Literary Media Ecology

Part II

Experimental models

Tendencies in Digital Reading

Digital Reading Strategies

Part I: From Books to Screens

Hypertextual zapping

We have changed our concentrated and single-track reading over paper for the “restless, grazing behaviour of clicking and scrolling” (Sven Birkerts, The Gutemberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. London: Faber, 1996. XIV).

Cyborg illiteracy

“After all, who can resist committing adultery with multimedia after so many centuries of faithfulness to the written text? Who can resist the sensuous widening of the bandwidth that video games and mind-link tech provide? I call this new, secondary loss of the alphabet as a tool, “cyborg illiteracy”: we abandon reading for the hyper-MTV, wide-band pleasures of the text of the body inscribed and transcribed back out into the world and then back onto us” (Porush, 1998: 46).

Theoretical Perspectives

Ethnography of reading

Reception studies & Reader-Oriented Theories

Media Studies & Semiotics

Ethnography of Reading

“Nothing human is supposed to escape anthropology’s attention. Yet reading, an activity on which humans spend more time than on eating, having sex, or participating in rituals, has not been among the rubrics of standard ethnographic research and writing” (Fabian, 1993: 80).

“We will not get very far with a simple notion of ‘reading’ as a technology or practice independent of social context, since close examination of the nearest lexical equivalents of “reading” in other times and places reveals the very particular set of expectations our own modern European notion conjures up” (J. Boyarin, 1993: 6-7 ).

The Ethnography of Reading

Framework for the study of rituals: Gradation: Rituals>Ritualized behaviour> habit

Erasure of the dividing line between orality and textuality.

Frameworks to investigate reading in cross-cultural contexts.

Western model of reading: from the collective to the private, from oral to silent reading. And back?

Reading as cultural practice.

Reader-Oriented Theories & Questions

Literary Texts> Symbolic objects (Ingarden). Wolfgang Iser’s concept of the “implied reader” Hans Robert Jauss’ “horizon of expectations” Jonathan Culler’s emphasis on “interpretive conventions”

1. What type of readers have creators of digital literature in mind?The absence of narrator does not imply an absence of narratee.

2. In which ways are real readers affecting the creation of digital texts?

3. How are reader/writer pacts being reconfigured?

Types of Readers

The real/actual reader

The ideal reader (Wolfgang Iser)

The implied reader (Iser) is a system of textual structures which invite a type of response on the part of the reader, predisposing him to read in a determined way.

The narratee is the person to which the narrator addresses his discourse (Gerald Prince).

But we also need to add:

The cyborg reader (an ideal reader able to approach computer and literary codes)

Artifical Intelligence as readers.

Media Studies

Importance of Semiotics:

A totalizing science of human sign systems which includes all types of codes, apart from the linguistic-textual ones.

Cinema StudiesNet and computer artMusic studiesVideo art Cyberculture

McLuhan’s Tetrads applied to the print medium

Enhancement: What the medium amplifies or intensifies.

Obsolescence: What the medium drives out of prominence.

Retrieval: What the medium recovers which was previously lost.

Reversal: What the medium does when pushed to its limits.

The eye (McLuhan)Linear readingCommunal memory

Oral literature

Information transmission from one to many (Eisenstein)

Loss of individual memory?

The Digital Medium

Enhancement: Information The print medium Non-linear reading The role of the intellectual

as guide and filter of information (?)

Retrieval: The audiovisual man (or

pre-typographic) Orality in writing The community of readers Writing from many to

many

Obsolescence: Text as object Hand-written letters Libraries Telephone communication

Reversal: Information overload Memory loss increase Amputation of the faculty

of reflection (?)

Literary Communication Model for Print

1. Roman Jakobson’s model:

3. Beaugrande and Fletcher’s Model of Literary Reception:

2. Literary Model: context: community of readers signified: symbolic object

Author (meaning1) -------- Printed TEXT (signifier: material sign-vehicle) -------- Reader (meaning2) Sender of Message Producer of Interpretations

Interpretive effort Gained insight

Evolution in Literary Studies

Robert de Beaugrande, “Closing the gap between linguistics and literary study:Discourse analysis and literary theory”, Journal of Advanced Composition, 13/2, 1993, 423-448.

A Literary Communication Model for Electronic Literature:

Rupture of the concept of genre

Loss of text as object>text as

process

Rupture of Narrativity/Linea

r Reading> Reader

Disorientation

Rupture of reading

conventions>Need to construct

new pacts between authors

and readers

The AI as author

Cyborg Readers/AI

Loss of meaning>

The medium (the code) is the message

The Literary Field: A New Media Ecology

Language as nation>

Rupture of the national border

Author as brandname

Change of intermediaries>

Author as publisher

Importance of reader communities

and information filters

Part II

Experimental models Tendencies in Digital ReadingDigital Reading Strategies

Part II: Literary Reading Rituals

Intensive Reading on the computer screen (close reading in academic contexts)

Extensive Reading on e-readers, tablet PCs and smartphones (long-duration reading, immersive reading)

Creative Reading & Writing (the archetypal wreaders, learning digital reading through creative digital writing)

Researching Digital Reading

What happens when the ideal reader, projected from the digital creation pole, meets the actual reader?

Experimental models and results of a research conducted

during the period 2009-2010/2010-2011 in the university domain with the purpose of studying the student’s degree of assimilation of literary reading on screen and their strategies for adapting to the digital media

A gradation of texts: We have designed several reading experiences using literary texts with different degrees of digital metamorphosis.

Objectives:

Is the horizon of expectations modified with respect to print literature? Does the manner in which readers approach the text or generate their reading hypotheses change?

What are the interpretative conventions used when meeting an electronic literary text? Which conventions from print literature are moved to the digital domain, and what type of adjustment do actual readers make?

Is the work of electronic literature still perceived as literature, or is the value attributed to the literary work altered in some way?

To sum up, what type of literacy does e-literature require?

Results:

The transition from print to screens is not abrupt but smooth. Literary reading is a ritual whose properties are moved onto the digital domain: good readers of traditional literature find it easier to adapt to the demands of the digital literature.

Readers expect an enhanced interactivity from the digital work of literature.

Digital reading standards are slowly forming: reading conventions and pacts between authors and readers are being created and communities of readers such as this are an integral part of the field of digital literature.

Tendencies of Digital Reading

Recuperation of the aural dimension: A New Textual Orality (Tisha B’Av)

Recuperation of the performative dimension (the reader-spectator-user as part of the piece). (The Transborder Immigrant Tool)

Exploiting Net Reading Habits (The Big Plot)Using tactile screen exploration (Shadows

Never Sleep)

The Transborder Immigrant Tool

Example of literary activism.The “reader” is the protagonist of a live

adventure

Exploiting Net Reading Habits

Shadows Never Sleep

Tendencies of Digital Reading

Hypertextual zapping (fragmented reading)Enhanced synaesthesiaThe Myth of InteractivityExternalized Intertextuality

The Myth of Interactivity

Interactivity

Interactivity of the medium

Interactivity as a property of

the work

Interactivity as a faculty of the

reader

Interactivity is a graded property: A telephone call is less interactive than a face-to-face conversation but more than a letter.

Closing the gap between Readers and Writers

On Lionel Kearns, by Robert Kendall (2004)

Intertextuality

Textual structure: Explicit intertextuality

The text’s past (Kristeva)The superconnectivity of hypertext priviledges a type of explicit intertextuality, univocous and without a past.

Reader strategy: Implicit intertextuality

The reader’s memory Information overload Less active reading?

Reading Strategies

Adjusting our intertextual reading strategies: Rupture of the concept

of genre> Reading Strategy: the synaesthetic approach.

Rupture of narrativity> Reading Strategy: Applying the Serendipity Principle.

Recycling our interactive reading strategies:

Loss of meaning> Reading Strategy: Dream-Reading.

Fear of solipsism> Reading Strategy: Building Context.

Conclusions:

The Medium is the Message, the interface is also the message. The performative dimension of literature acquires greater

importance, it is not the end product that is important but the process of composition and reading.

New modes of reading: Exploratory, Tactile, Enhanced Synaesthesia, Dream-reading, hypertextual zapping.

The shared interpretative conventions of a community of readers and writers become essential, as in primitive cultures. Without an initiation inside its modes of production and reception the reader might feel lost, without reference points to appreciate the piece.

The act of describing, reporting, interpreting, archiving, acquires a new relevance inside the field of digital literature, since many of its works are ephemeral experiences, depend on processes that leave no trace, thus recorded descriptions will be the only testimony of its existence.