heuristics

This dissertation addresses the need for a strategy that will help readers new to new media texts interpret such texts. While scholars in multimodal and new media theory posit rubrics that offer ways to understand how designers use the materialities and media found in overtly designed, new media texts (see, e.g,, Wysocki, 2004a), these strategies do not account for how readers have to make meaning from those texts. In this dissertation, I discuss how these theories, such as Lev Manovich’s (2001) five principles for determining the new media potential of texts and Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s (2001) four strata of designing multimodal texts, are inadequate to the job of helping readers understand new media from a rhetorical perspective. I also explore how literary theory, specifically Wolfgang Iser’s (1978) description of acts of interpretation, can help audiences understand why readers are often unable to interpret the multiple, unexpected modes of communication used in new media texts. Rhetorical theory, explored in a discussion of Sonja Foss’s (2004) units of analysis, is helpful in bringing the reader into a situated context with a new media text, although these units of analysis, like Iser’s process, suggests that a reader has some prior experience interpreting a text-as-artifact. Because of this assumption of knowledge put forth by all of the theories explored within, I argue that none alone is useful to help readers engage with and interpret new media texts. However, I argue that a heuristic which combines elements from each of these theories, as well as additional ones, is more useful for readers who are new to interpreting the multiple modes of communication that are often used in unconventional ways in new media texts. I describe that heuristic in the final chapter and discuss how it can be useful to a range of texts besides those labelled new media.

What makes electronic literature interesting for researchers?Maybe not its artistic and literary value, but rather its heuristic value.Indeed electronic literature not only permits previous media to be reexamined (paper for instance), but it also allows several well-established notions to be questioned (cf. figure above) such as:- narrative in narratology;- text in linguistics and semiotics;- figure in rhetorics;- materiality in aesthetics;- grasp in anthropology;- memory in archivistics;- literariness in literary studies…

Exploiting the heuristic value of electronic literature has two consequences:- an evolution of some notions in certain scientific disciplines, and maybe of the disciplines themselves;- a revealing effect regarding both digital technology and interactive and multimedia writing.

Where does electronic literature derive this capacity of interrogation from? From its sometimes hybrid status (paper vs digital) and its internal tensions (static vs dynamic text). Yet we should consider that this heuristic value is also due to the Digital and its properties: the need to be explicit - regarding formats for example - and the tendancy to objectivize the processes. This need to explicit formats and media is obvious for example in the HTML language : the metatags allow information to be given on the file itself, on the way it is to be interpreted and indexed. The media and its various formats are thus verbalized. The Digital entails a form of explicitation, and thus reflexivity, on its own formats and frames of production. It is this explicitation of format which invites us to revisit previous media, or at least to further interrogate what wrongly seemed inherent to the printed media.

Just as the Digital supposes a need for explicitation, the works of electronic literature objectivize certain properties of the literary. In this sense, they play a revealing role. One can even wonder to what extent digital writing may end up using conceptual tools made explicit by literature theoreticians. Let’s take the examples of the categories used by Gérard Genette to characterize the narrative speed : pause, scene, summary and ellipse. In a digital work, we could consider integrating these concepts into a DTD (Document Type Definition). It is indeed in a DTD that the poetics (from the Greek poiesis, meaning “making”) appears. DTDs specific to digital literary works could thus be elaborated, which would unveil their poetics. We would have here the principles of an objectivization of their stylistic devices.

However, electronic literature remains, from an anthropological point of view, “an experience that goes beyond us”, as Bruno Latour would say (« une expérience qui nous dépasse » ). Besides its heuristic value, electronic literature provides an experience of limits.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)