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- Beckman, Frida, 1976-
(författare)
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Reconfiguring Subjectivity : Experimental Narrative and Deleuzean Immanence
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis aims to re-think subjectivity in constructive rather than deconstructive terms of disintegration and dismantling. This shift is effected through a reading of Gilles Deleuze that brings together two concepts that are incompatible in his philosophy – immanence and subjectivity – and by my reading of three fictional texts that engage Deleuze in a generative dialogue. Kathy Acker’s novel Great Expectations, David Mack’s graphic novel series Kabuki, and David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive are all postmodern texts that have been read predominantly as portraying subjectivities as fragmented through strategies of intertextuality, metatextuality, and fragmentation. These texts, I argue, can be seen as positing alternative and more productive subjectivities if approached via the Deleuzean concepts of repetition, univocity, and the event. At the same time, these particular works “speak back” to Deleuze and create some tensions concerning how his concepts may be understood. In Chapter One, I show how Deleuze’s concept of repetition is applicable to but also rethought through Acker’s novel via the more forceful notion of pirating. Pirating, I suggest, can be seen as a textual strategy that employs and builds on repetition to help us re-envisage certain literary traditions of how subjectivity is presented. In Chapter Two I suggest that the concept of univocity makes it possible to envision how a violent inscription of subjectivity can be reconfigured through negotiations of visual and verbal signs. I investigate how Mack’s presentation of faces and masks questions Deleuze’s understanding of the face as a crucial component in the construction of a transcendent subjectivity. In Chapter Three, I discuss aural and visual reconfigurations of Hollywood clichés in Lynch’s film through Deleuze’s concept of the event.The event, as denoting a shift between virtual and actual, enables me to discuss the creative potential opened by the complex temporalities through which the main female characters are portrayed. In sum, alternative and more affirmative subjectivities emerge in the works of Acker, Mack, and Lynch once their textual tensions and slippages are put in a productive exchange with Deleuzean thought.
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- Blomberg Gudmundsson, Julie
(författare)
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Time of Turmoil : Reading and Media Combination in the American Young Adult Novels Cathy’s Book, Skeleton Creek, and Endgame
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In the beginning of the twenty-first century, Young Adult (YA) fiction experienced a renaissance, and YA novels began to appear on the best-seller lists in the US. Around the same time, many reports sounded alarms about rapidly declining rates of fiction reading among young adults. Often, such alarms identified an increased usage of the Internet in various forms as a possible culprit. In an attempt both to retain interest in YA fiction and to capitalize on the growing Internet usage among teens, many writers began to experiment with novel forms of storytelling that combined print fiction with other media. This study focuses on three such American YA novels to show a spectrum of experimental endeavors: Cathy’s Book: If Found Call (650) 266-8233 (2006), Skeleton Creek: Ryan’s Journal (2009), and Endgame: The Calling (2014). The novels are analyzed for their ways of combining media and forging specific “reading paths” through what I call nudges – the implicit and explicit instructions to the reader. In all three novels, reading is characterized by interruptions as the reader is asked to shift between media to access parts of the story and (re)construct the plot. This interrupted reading, I claim, has the function of drawing attention to the medium of storytelling. Therefore, media consciousness becomes a significant part of reading and this, I claim, supplements what Jonathan Culler has named “literary competence.” My study continues the revision of Culler’s understanding of literary competence that Maria Nikolajeva has undertaken for children’s literature. In particular, I draw on Nikolajeva’s set of interpretative codes and expand them for reading multimedia novels.In the introduction of the dissertation, I situate the three novels that I analyze within the context of YA fiction and teen reading and present the key frameworks for my analysis: media studies and theories of reading. In my first analytical chapter, focusing on Cathy’s Book, I explore how media combination promotes a reading based on ordering and detection. I further explore how media combination requires readers to critically assess each medium’s authenticity, concluding that source criticism and media consciousness are central competences promoted by the book. In the second analytical chapter, I explore how print and videos are “stitched” together in Skeleton Creek: Ryan’s Journal; this “stitching” of the media results in a “seamfull” reading process, the seams drawing attention to the semiotic significance of the medium of storytelling. Studying Endgame: The Calling in the last analytical chapter, I investigate what shape the reading process takes when the fictional work mimics games, and the print book itself contains a game. Endgame, I show, promotes “gamified reading” whose logic leads to the physical destruction of the print book. In the concluding chapter, I reflect on the significance of expanding Culler’s concept of literary competence in conjunction with how multimedia novels make use of metalepsis to raise concerns and queries about the distinction between ontological realms and the boundaries of the novel. Lastly, I consider some paths forward for research on reading and multimedia fiction.
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- Engberg, Maria
(författare)
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Born Digital : Writing Poetry in the Age of New Media
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study investigates Anglophone digital poems, created with and disseminated through digital computer media, for their visual, kinetic, and textual practices. I seek to articulate an analytic method grounded in close readings of selected poems. I have chosen to focus on poetic practices that raise questions about spatiality, temporality, kineticism, and word-and-image construction. My chief interest lies in how poetic form is orchestrated and what forms of engagement these digital constructions present the reader with. Underlying the main arguments of this study is an understanding of literary works in general as materially, culturally, and historically situated entities. Such “attention to material” is brought to bear on the digital poems that I analyze. Building upon N. Katherine Hayles’s notion of a “media-specific analysis,” I propose a materially specific analysis. In line with this proposition, I investigate particular properties of three clusters of poems. I propose terms such poemevents, cinematographic poems, and visual noise poems.A common feature of digital poems is the multisensory experience created through visual, auditive, tactile, kinetic, and textual artifice. The reader’s level of interaction is often of utmost importance. To articulate the different roles that the reader has to take on, I use two compound terms: reader/user and reader/viewer/listener. I argue that the active embodied engagement that is required of the reader/user in some digital poems and the denial of an active participation in others is part of the works’ materiality. Digital poetry as a field is expanding; it would not be too daring to claim that the exploration of the writing of poetry in the age of new media has only begun. I conclude the thesis by looking forward to what might lay ahead, how literary scholarship can be inspired by digital poetic work, and the questions about literary materiality that it poses.
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