A grande dame of the high society is said to have asked for Frédéric Chopin’s opinion about her daughter’s musical talents. After watching the young lady dance and listening to her singing, the great musician replied:
“Congratulations, Madam, your daughter sings magnificently for a ballerina and dances divinely for a singer!”
Paraphrasing this joke, is the modern literature consumer in danger of becoming “a brilliant reader for a writer and a wonderful writer for a reader”?
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On September 24 I attended Teresa Dobson’s talk on "The Role of Multimedia Literature in Critical Literary Education", presented as part of the Humanities Computing Colloquium series.
The speaker opened her lecture by presenting a short history of the appearance and development of e-literature and then mentioned some criticism works in this new area. She continued by showing two examples of the 2nd generation e-literature, “Cruising” (Ankerson & Sapnar, 2001/2006) and “Girls' Day Out” (Lawrynovicz, 2004). These works, together with other pieces of e-literature, have been gathered in an electronic volume that can be found at http://collection.eliterature.org/1/. The speaker finished the first part of her talk by listing the main characteristics of e-literature: the collaboration of authors, the juxtaposition of layers, the bricolage appropriation, its iconoclastic nature and the implication of the reader in the form of embodied metaphor.
The last part of Teresa Dobson’s lecture, which actually prompted this blog entry, was dedicated to describing her research project on digital literacy. The first phase of the project is described in detail in the article “In search of a story: Reading and writing e-literature.” (Luce-Kapler, R. & Dobson, T.M., 2005). Dobson and her colleague introduced a group of undergraduate English education majors (ages 23 to 40) to several e-literature works, writing down their reactions to the unfamiliar form of the literary creations. They also held a workshop that endowed the participants with the skills necessary for creating similar hyperlink projects, and introduced them to Shelley Jackson’s “The Patchwork Girl”. What the authors of the study discovered was that the participants, who generally had a rejection reaction towards the electronic piece of literature at the beginning, became much more receptive in the end, after being themselves involved in the creation of a similar product. From this, the two project coordinators concluded that a rethinking of reading-writing relationship is necessary in the context of hypertextual literature.
The second phase of their project is described in the article “For the love of a good narrative: Digitality and textuality” (Dobson, T.M., 2006). Dobson prompted the participants of this phase of her project to write a narrative based on the first 5 paragraphs of Alice Munro’s “Love of a Good Woman”, a work they were unacquainted with. After that, Munro’s narrative was introduced to them, and the author of the study was able to conclude that the pre-reading exercise prepared them better for the complex structure of the work at hand, and that, per extrapolation, writing prepares the participant for reading e-literature.
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Teresa Dobson’s hypothesis is unarguably well developed and strongly supported by both theoretical arguments and well developed study cases. However, it raises the following dilemma:
The participants in both her studies were English majors or graduates, who assumably had extensive critical reading training and perhaps some creative writing training as well at the time of the studies. If we reasonably admit that hyperlink literature is not written for the sole purpose of being read by literature “professionals”, what kind of relevance do these studies have for “regular” readers (people with a high level of education in fields other than English who enjoy reading new fiction for the pleasure of intellectual stimulation)?
If we were to repeat the studies with participants selected from the above-mentioned category, would we get the same results?
In my opinion, “regular” readers would probably be more willing to accept unusual forms of literary creation, since their mind is less set on certain expectancy patterns than that of English students or graduates.
I also believe that the method of “learning to read through writing” is a two-edged sword for most of us who have little training in creative writing and who, in most cases, lack the skills or “the spark” for writing decent fiction.
Going back to our little joke at the beginning, bad writing is less obvious than bad music, and I speculate that what we would probably risk when scaling the method of familiarizing readers with e-literature through writing exercises is ending up with three types of results:
· Some participants would be discouraged by the results of their literary experiments and would presumably be pulled away from e-literature by the memory of their own failure.
· Some would become more accepting of e-literature, but only from an ill-conceived notion of solidarity (from one e-literature author to another)
· Very few participants would go through the process and come close to the same results described in Teresa Dobson’s lecture.
It is my opinion that e-literature and its pool of readers are going through an organic expansion and evolution, as was the case with other literary genres, like science-fiction. As long as e-literature writers continue to “boldly go where no author has gone before” the numbers of their readers, admirers and imitators will grow, with no particular need of external help in this matter.
References:
Luce-Kapler, R., & Dobson, T. (2005, May/June). In search of a story: Reading and writing e-literature. Reading Online, 8(6). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=luce-kapler/index.html
Dobson, T.M. (2006). For the love of a good narrative: Digitality and textuality. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 5(2), 56-68. Available:http://education.waikato.ac.nz/research/journal/index.php?id=1
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