literary competence

This paper is a comparative reading of two works of generative literature: Scott Rettberg's Frequency Poetry Generator and J.R. Carpenter's Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR from a structuralist perspective.
Viktor Shklovsky described the effect of literature in his 1988 article "Art as Technique", in which he describes the difference between practical and poetic language. The essence of poetic text, according to Shklovsky, is its process of "defamiliarization": The reader will see his/her familiar world in a different light due to poetic rather that practical descriptions. In generative poetry, however, the defamiliarizing effect does not stop there. Not only does one see the world differently, but the way one sees poetry itself is defamiliarized. This defamiliarizing effect does not mean that there are no rules. The formal elements of the text guide the reader, as Culler describes in his article "Literary Competence".
The aim of my paper is dual. First of all, I use Shklovky's author- and text-focused approach combined with Culler's reader-focused approach to gain insight into how generative texts build upon the readers' 'literary competence', their familiarity with 'conventional' literature, in order to understand the defamiliarizing effect of generative literature. Second, I argue that my specific analysis of generative poetry in turn gives insight in what readers expect from a text, thus helping to define the often implicit literary competence readers possess.
The output of Frequency Poetry Generator shows poems that are explicitly recognizable as poetry, thus guiding the readers' interpretation. Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR on the other hand, situates the full text as a chronicle, implying the passing of time, and the individual texts as "excerpts", implying there might be more to the story that is not included in these excerpts, making the text into a serial narrative.
I analyze both code as well as output of these works in my analysis, utilizing Marino's framework of Critical Code Studies. The analysis of code is an integral part of the understanding of the work as it positions how the work is portrayed building on different conventional genres as well as the knowledge that one is reading a generative work of literature. Even if the reader chooses not to look at the source code, it is the potential of all possible texts that defines how the text is read as a work within the genre of generative literature. The code shows this structure, all sentences together make the potential of all different texts explicit.
A significant characteristic of generative literature is the fact that it will be a different text each reading. As I cannot analyze every single output, I invite readers of my paper, which is originally written in Scalar, to submit a reader experience of the output based on the structuralist method that I outline. This way, I offer a new type of criticism, which uses the affordances of the born digital paper to crowd source reading experiences that can be combined to specify the theory of "literary competence" further.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

«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

from the publisher: Description This innovative monograph focuses on a contemporary form of computer-based literature called 'literary hypertext', a digital, interactive, communicative form of new media writing. Canonizing Hypertext combines theoretical and hermeneutic investigations with empirical research into the motivational and pedagogic possibilities of this form of literature. It focuses on key questions for literary scholars and teachers: How can literature be taught in such a way as to make it relevant for an increasingly hypermedia-oriented readership? How can the rapidly evolving new media be integrated into curricula that still seek to transmit ‘traditional’ literary competence? How can the notion of literary competence be broadened to take into account these current trends? This study, which argues for hypertext’s integration in the literary canon, offers a critical overview of developments in hypertext theory, an exemplary hypertext canon and an evaluation of possible classroom applications.Table of ContentsIntroduction1. Hypertextual Ontologies2. Hypertext and the Question of Canonicity3. A Hypertext Canon4. Literary Competence - Conceptual Adaptations5. Hypertext in the Literature ClassroomConclusionBibliographyIndex