empirical study of literature

«Like Reading a Movie»: Students' Reading of Electronic Literature This thesis is an empirical investigation of students' reading of electronic literature. The main goal has been to study the skills required to get the most out of this kind of literature. Theoretical approaches include reader-oriented theories, where Jonathan Cullen and his concept of literary competence creates an overall basis, and media-specific theories, particularly parts of the multimodal theory derived from a social semiotic perspective. The theoretical framework also includes perspectives from researchers who have written about e- literary competence. The empirical evidence has been collected through qualitative research interviews with five 17-year-old students attending the branch of general studies performed after lessons. The students read episode 1 and 3 of Inanimate Alice by Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph, and part 1 and 2 of Nightingale's Playground by Andy Campbell and Judi Alston. The theme of the interviews focused on how the respondents perceived these texts, and to what extent they benefited from them. The fact that the survey is carried out in a school context, is emphasized in the thesis. The study shows that these respondents do not find electronic literature as difficult to perceive as much previous research shows. They showed good control of both the navigation and the plot. One reason for this is that the texts these students read, do not have a typical hypertextual structure. About the interplay between the various modalities they showed good understanding. The field, in which the informants have the most room for improvement, is in the thesis described as the area of general literary competence. This applies especially when reflecting on the contents of the texts. Thus, one can see the e-literary competence more in the context of traditional literary skills than as something entirely new. Electronic literature in school can act as a link between leisure culture and school culture and thus help strengthen students' literary skills that can be useful in terms of both electronic and printed literature.

Source: Author's Abstract

German net literature had an early and very public start through competitions organized in 1996-8 by the major newspaper Die Zeit and IBM, but was declared dead or stillborn immediately afterwards. Consequently, net literature became a subject of controversy between artists, theorists, and literary critics from which not only a strong community evolved but also a literary system. In this system, competitions served as public, peer-reviewed mediators for net literature and became an important feature of “post-processing.” Since the end of the 90s however, German net literature became slowly invisible. The lack of public awareness of net literature is common to many countries. Post-processing is a key for public visibility and according to Siegfried J. Schmidt et al. an important component in a literary system. In search of reasons for the state of invisibility of German net literature, I analyze mechanisms of post-processing in our community, which I regard as a literary system. This descriptive synopsis is the first paper in an upcoming series that opens up questions towards the role of peer-review, public reception, and artists' community-building.