CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
Refine
Year of publication
- 2005 (3) (remove)
Document Type
- Article (1)
- Part of a Book (1)
- Conference Proceeding (1)
Language
- English (3) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (3)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (3) (remove)
Keywords
- Intermedialität (1)
- Kanon (1)
- Literaturwissenschaft (1)
- Narrativität (1)
- Netzliteratur (1)
In his paper, "The Canonization of German-language Digital Literature," Florian Hartling discusses "Net Literature," a relatively young phenomenon, that has its roots in experimental visual and concrete poetry and hypertext. With the use of new media technology, this new genre of literature has acquired much interest and is now considered to be one of the most important influences in contemporary art. Not only does Net Literature connect sound, video, and animation with interactivity and allows new forms of artistic expression, it also impacts significantly on the traditional functions of the literary system. Hartling suggests that, in relation to Net Literature, the notion of the "death of the author" gives birth to the "writing reader." Hartling presents the results of his study where he applies the concept of "canon" to German-language Net Literature and where he attempts to find out whether, in this new form of literature, a "canon" has already been formed. Based on Karl Erik Rosengren's framework of "mention technique," a sample of Germanlanguage reviews of Net Literature was analyzed. The study intends to test the applicability of Rosengren's method to the analysis of Net Literature, that is, whether it is valid to use a method that was originally developed for the empirical study of the traditional literary canon for the study of an emergent Net Literature.
A glance at the current situation in literary criticism shows that narratology, pronounced dead twenty years ago, is remarkably alive and well. This fact has been noted repeatedly and with understandable self-satisfaction in the recent literature on research into narrative theory. Just how astonishing this rebirth is, however, becomes apparent only when we step back from literary criticism and the humanities to take a wider historical view of the developments in academic and theoretical circles that preceded it. The deeply symbolic year of 1968 marked the fall of the academic ancient régime. Partly in anticipation of this and partly in response to it, a number of new leading disciplines were raised to power in western Europe as sources of hope for the future. However much they may have differed from one another in political purpose (in theoretical circles or beyond), linguistics, political economy, psychoanalysis, and structuralist semiology—to name but a few of the superdisciplines of the time—clearly belonged to one and the same paradigm in terms of how they conceived of themselves: throughout, they sought to reveal universal, ahistorical regularities in human thought and action in their respective fields.