interactivity

This paper explores what I define as a “masqueraded complexity”, a term that refers to the way
children’s electronic literature disguises its multiple features to a formative reader (the child/young adult) in order to maintain/assert the whole range of semiotic and narratological creative approaches allowed in this new literary scenario. The paper paper also examines the lights and shadows of children's digital literature's inherent properties from an educational perspective. To support this exploration, I combine theoretical approaches to digital literature (Ryan, Murray, Hayles, Landow, etc.), the exploration of the digital literature landscape for youngsters and recent studies on children's literary education (Chambers, Colomer, Tauveron etc.). Some of my own research group ongoing case studies with real young digital readers will also be used to illustrate the outcomes.
Despite its obvious heterogeneity, electronic literature presents a series of common complexities
intrinsically connected to the constructive properties that define it, such as multimodal expression, non-trivial engagement, and narratological disruption. Children's literature could also be understood as a polymorphic set of texts; however, the formative reader (the child) becomes an anchor during the creative act that assembles this set of texts. The awareness of this reader’s existence and her role forces authors to find ways to express their art within certain required limits in the complexity. In combination with the particular contexts where this group of texts are received, the resulting poetics denote a closeness between the electronic literature's properties and those of children's literature (e.g. interactivity and immersion as ways to maximize readers emotional engagement and the seduction of reading). This provocative and stimulating scenario is increasing scholars' interest towards children's e-lit in a very hopeful way but the rawness in the formative and definitional process of this new corpus is still quite obvious, far removed from mainstream electronic literature's solid evolutive paths (e.g. avant-garde expressions of e-poetry, the different hyperfiction generations and so forth).
Nevertheless, children’s e-literature is already managing to find a way to deal with this required
dialogue between these new literary features and the fact that its users are still not fully developed as readers/spectators. This status quo urges to reflect on children and young adult's electronic literature’s future as well as become aware that a new approach to our literary education is necessary. This new approach should account for the electronic literature's formative potential for a contemporary reader. (Source: authors abstract)

Blueberries (2009) by Susan Gibb, published in the ELO (Electronic Literature Organization), invites the reader to travel inside the protagonist’s mind to discover real and imaginary experiences examining notions of gender, sex, body and identity of a traumatised woman. This article explores the verbal and visual modes in this digital short fiction following semiotic patterns as well as interpreting the psychological states that are expressed through poetical and technological components. A comparative study of the consequences of trauma in the protagonist will be developed including psychoanalytic theories by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and the feminist psychoanalysts: Melanie Klein and Bracha Ettinger. The reactions of the protagonist will be studied: loss of reality, hallucinations and Electra Complex, as well as the rise of defence mechanisms and her use of the artistic creativity as a healing therapy. The interactivity of the hypermedia, multiple paths and endings will be analyzed as a literary strategy that increases the reader’s capacity of empathizing with the speaker.

With the rise of smartphones and tablet pcs, children’s book apps have emerged as a new type of children’s media. While some of them are based on popular children’s books such as Mo Willems’ Pigeon books or Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, others were specifically designed as apps. This paper focuses on examining book apps under the aspects of implied user strategies and narrative structure. Using a narratological framework that also takes into account the unique characteristics of the medium, a terminology for the analysis of book apps will be sketched out. Furthermore, an exemplary analysis of iOS book apps for pre- and grade school children comes to the conclusion that, far from offering the child users room for individual creativity, a large number of apps rather train their users in following prescribed paths of reading.

(Contains references to more creative works than currently registered:

Animal Snapp Farm by Axel Scheffler. Version 1.0.1. # 2012. Nosy Crow Ltd.
Don’t Let the Pigeon Run this App by Mo Willems. Version: 1.0 Seller: Disney Publishing Worldwide Applica- tions # 2011. Disney Enterprises Inc.
Flip Flap Farm by Axel Scheffler. Version 1.0.1 # 2013. Nosy Crow Ltd.
Lil’ Red. Concept by Bart Bloemen & Brian Main, tech: Tom Skidmore, audio: Lukas Hasitschka, grafix: Brian Main www.lilredapp.com Version: 1.03 # Brian Main.
Magic Story Factory by Kathy Rypp, illustrations: Gretchen Wheeler. Version: 1.0 Seller: Christian Larsen # 2011.
The Gift: An interactive storybook. Written by Jos Carlyle, illustrated by Dan Mynard. Version: 1.5. Seller: Persian Cat Press Ltd # 2012. Persian Cat Press.
The Land of Me: Story Time. Version: 0.0.4 Developer: Made in Me Ltd. # Made in Me.
The Original Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter. Version: 1.0 Seller: Pearson PLC # 2011 by Penguin Group (USA).
Your Adventure by Rianne van Duin (RumDeeDum). Version: 1.1 # ImproVive.)

This dissertation aims at comprehending interactivity in the digital work of art, through the perspective of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. For such, I combine a general
objective – that of mapping mechanisms and strategies of interactivity in digital poetry – and
a specific objective – that of reading Rui Torres’ work Amor de Clarice – with the intention of better understanding both through their constant dialogue, on how they intercross, as to finally comprehend the process of interaction in digital work of art. For this purpose I return to
poems from the Iberian and Brazilian Baroque, Portuguese Experimentalism and French OuLiPo; being these, printed creations in which material construction and medium (physical support) are held as signifying elements of the work, as parts of the construction of meaning, which proposes to the reader a program to be understood for and in the act of reading, in which the procedural aspect of writing and reading become evident. To show how this occurs I utilized texts from writer-critics such as Ana Hatherly, Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, and Raymond Queneau, in whose works one may perceive this procedural aspect. In the final stage, I return to the digital medium and its techniques to examine, through phenomenology, the proximity between creation and interaction as expressive acts in the world, as the encountering of horizons, as acts that solicit us to inhabit the medium, allowing us to bring objects to our bodies and allowing them to participate in our being in the world.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

There are baroque features in contemporary digital poetry. Baroquism is apparent in the mode of operation of digital works and in the way they relate to authors and users. The mode of existence of digital works is similar to baroque works in three respects: in treating materiality as producer of meaning, in their multimediality, and in interactions between work and user. This article offers a description of these baroque features of digital literature.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

Type enough questions, Lisa Swanstrom suggests, and "Galatea" answers Socrates' ancient call for a poetry that talks back. Using Emily Short's interactive fiction as a model, Swanstrom argues that the khora - the strange Platonic intermediary between form and copy - might serve as a guide for understanding the peculiar nature of literary interactivity itself.

Electronic Literature and Digital Art share many processes, themes, creative and theoretical guidelines. In this sense, I developed a critical framework that could resist to a hyperdisciplinary analysis and include one of the characteristics of this sharing pattern: the transfer and transformation processes. In order to recognize these processes I have done an approach of the transduction concept that could perform a theoretical migration on these aspects: the transducer function. Thus, the transducer function appears in the critical analysis of the works by Mark Z. Danielewski, Stuart Moulthrop, R. Luke DuBois and André Sier. The selected works are representative of the following genres: novel, hyperfiction, net.art and digital installation, drawing on phenomena and concerns resulting from the creative production within the digital culture. In this research I have enhanced mechanisms, patterns, languages and common grounds: authorship, user, cybertext, surface, hypertext, infoduct, interactivity, pixel, algorithm, code, programming, network, software and data. (Source: Author's abstract)

The expression interactive literary narrative applies to a variety of works. In its diversity, theinteractive literary narrative raises questions on narratives, interactive architecture, multimedia aswell as on literature. It is because the interactive literary narrative is wrought by tensions that it hasthis questioning and maybe even revealing capacity. This tension is first and foremost that which lies between narrativity and interactivity and which investigates other connections or tensions :- with regards to the narrative, the tension between adherence and distance can be characterized by a play on fictionalization and reflexivity;- with regards to the interactive architecture, the tension between assistance and control roles canmanifest itself by a play on loss of grasp,- with regards to the multimedia, the tension between a text-based narrative and a multimedianarrative can be reached by work on text as a dynamic and polysemiotic object, and also thetheatralization of interactive objects endowed with behaviour,- with regards to its recognition as a literary work, the tension between horizon of expectations and aesthetic distance manifests itself by the aesthetics of the materiality of the text, the interface and the medium. Thus, the interactive literary narrative corresponds more to an experimental field than to a well defined autonomous genre.

Source: author's abstract