POETICS TODAYPub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-8883178
Dorothee Birke
{"title":"Social Reading? On the Rise of a “Bookish” Reading Culture Online","authors":"Dorothee Birke","doi":"10.1215/03335372-8883178","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-8883178","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 While the internet is often seen as having destroyed book culture, this article is interested in those areas in our contemporary media environment where book and internet culture actually converge. Focusing on the example of BookTube, the author examines how book culture is “done” on the internet and analyzes the values attached to the media practices involved. In particular, in millennial book culture, social aspects of reading are often emphasized. This trend is usually associated with the new affordances of social media and either assessed positively (e.g., by proponents of the internet as a democratizing force) or negatively (e.g., by detractors of the internet as fostering superficiality). The author argues that such a simplistic binary view can be transcended if one takes a historical perspective, reflecting on how sociality and self-fashioning have been integral aspects of book culture for centuries. At the same time, she shows the extent to which BookTube provides new opportunities to socialize around reading.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"42 1","pages":"149-172"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48764601","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
POETICS TODAYPub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-8883262
B. S. Pedersen, M. Engberg, Iben Have, A. Q. Henkel, S. Mygind, H. Svendsen
{"title":"To Move, to Touch, to Listen: Multisensory Aspects of the Digital Reading Condition","authors":"B. S. Pedersen, M. Engberg, Iben Have, A. Q. Henkel, S. Mygind, H. Svendsen","doi":"10.1215/03335372-8883262","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-8883262","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The article discusses modes of reading that emerge from reading situations that involve literary digital interfaces and digital audiobooks. Building on analyses of sensorial characteristics of the act of reading a digital audiobook and a literary digital app, respectively, the article presents and defines the concept of multisensory reading. This concept emphasizes the literary work's material and performative features, as well as the experienced reading situation. The authors explore how the digital literary interface changes reading situations and argue that new reading habits create a need to renegotiate what it means to read in a digital age. In particular, sensory aspects can be understood as integrally involved in what they term the digital reading condition.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"42 1","pages":"281-300"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45633343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
POETICS TODAYPub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-8883192
Karin Kukkonen
{"title":"Reading, Fast and Slow","authors":"Karin Kukkonen","doi":"10.1215/03335372-8883192","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-8883192","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Reading literature is often contrasted to the use of digital media in terms of speed. While readers engage slowly with a book, they rush through digital environments at an ever faster pace. This article argues against a simple binary between slow/literary and fast/digital. This binary is in fact not native to the public debate about literature in the digital age but can be traced back from the digital revolution to modernist attitudes on literature, as they emerge in Viktor Shklovsky and Walter Benjamin. Drawing on results about reading speed in reading science and on current narrative theory, this article devises an alternative argument for literary reading as a process that unfolds over multiple time scales linked to different layers of meaning making. Reading literature, from this perspective, is not exclusively slow but, rather, works through a combination of both fast and slow processes. The article develops its argument through the example of Alexander Pushkin's classic novella “The Queen of Spades” and then applies this new theoretical account of multispeed literary reading to two novels engaging explicitly with the digital revolution.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"42 1","pages":"173-191"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44717110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
POETICS TODAYPub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-8883220
Anne Line Dalsgård
{"title":"Reading Times: Temporalities and Time Work in Current Everyday Reading Practices","authors":"Anne Line Dalsgård","doi":"10.1215/03335372-8883220","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-8883220","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's observation that practice is not in time but makes time and Michael Flaherty's concept of time work, this article explores temporal aspects of the use of literature in contemporary Denmark and describes how reading allows readers to manipulate their experience of time. The main part of the article focuses on cultural norms and readers’ expectations in relation to reading time, while the last, shorter part discusses the structuring temporal effects of a literary text, such as presence, narrative, and endings. The article concludes that time is not just a practical issue to consider (when and where to read), or just something to work on through reading (e.g., changing a boring time into flow time). Texts also affect the readers’ sense of time; that is, agency lies in the literature read as well as the reader. The empirical data are drawn from extensive ethnographic fieldwork (mainly qualitative interviews) in different social and geographical contexts in Denmark from 2014 to 2019. The article contributes to empirical reading studies by exploring everyday reading as a practice in and of time.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"42 1","pages":"207-227"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48122020","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
POETICS TODAYPub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-8883276
A. Spencer
{"title":"Reading Ambient Literature: Immersion, Distraction, and the Situated Reading Experience","authors":"A. Spencer","doi":"10.1215/03335372-8883276","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-8883276","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article considers the experience and process of reading works of ambient literature, a form of situated literary experience delivered by pervasive computing platforms, responding to the presence of a physically situated reader to deliver a story. This form of situated digital work does not need to be bound by a material form, such as a printed book. Without such a framing device, and its position embedded in the physical world, this narrative form has boundaries that are often in flux. It can shift and respond to the presence of the situated reader, and its beginning and ending can become blurred. This article addresses the specifics of this fluid literary form, open to distraction and unpredictability for the reader, and examines the potential of a reading experience informed by pervasive and ubiquitous computing practices. In doing so, it draws on Ulrich Schmidt's notions of distraction and immersion in relation to the position of the reader. In particular, it addresses the idea that attention can dissolve in two opposite directions, toward a lack of concentration or toward an absorbed trance, a time of focused concentration and immersion, and explores how in ambient literature these become literary devices that lead and shape the reader's experience.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"42 1","pages":"301-315"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45851114","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
POETICS TODAYPub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-8883290
T. V. Gemert
{"title":"Big Books in Times of Big Data","authors":"T. V. Gemert","doi":"10.1215/03335372-8883290","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-8883290","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"42 1","pages":"317-320"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49145249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
POETICS TODAYPub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-8883234
M. Steenberg, C. Christiansen, Anne Line Dalsgård, Anne Maria Stagis, Liv Moeslund Ahlgren, Tine Lykkegaard Nielsen, N. Ladegaard
{"title":"Facilitating Reading Engagement in Shared Reading","authors":"M. Steenberg, C. Christiansen, Anne Line Dalsgård, Anne Maria Stagis, Liv Moeslund Ahlgren, Tine Lykkegaard Nielsen, N. Ladegaard","doi":"10.1215/03335372-8883234","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-8883234","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article responds to this special issue's overarching interest in the relation between modes of reading and the experiences of actual readers by analyzing how the specific practice of shared reading facilitates readers’ engagement in literary reading. The article responds both to an under-investigated dimension of the practice of shared reading, that of the role of facilitation, and to a pressing articulated and educational need to develop additional and better methodologies for fostering literary reading engagement, as existing results from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) have demonstrated the importance of reading engagement for both academic achievement and social mobility. By linking the notion of engagement within the PISA framework with phenomenologically oriented empirical research on expressive reading and the notion of emergent thinking in existing shared reading research, the article argues for the role of the reader leader in facilitating literary engagement. These connections may inspire literary scholars to consider the link between literary analysis and the didactics of literary reading.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"42 1","pages":"229-251"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42103699","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
POETICS TODAYPub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-8883248
Naomi S. Baron, Anne Mangen
{"title":"Doing the Reading: The Decline of Long Long-Form Reading in Higher Education","authors":"Naomi S. Baron, Anne Mangen","doi":"10.1215/03335372-8883248","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-8883248","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Long-form reading of literary and non-literary texts is historically an essential component of education. However, in many schooling contexts, the amount of long-form reading is diminishing. Are digital technologies augmenting this trend? And are these technologies affecting assignments and student reading patterns in other ways? This article begins by arguing for the relevance of long-form reading and then reviews prior research on how much assigned reading students in higher education report completing. With these findings as background, university faculty in the United States and Norway were surveyed to gauge contemporary reading assignments and student reading practices in humanities and social sciences disciplines, which traditionally are reading intensive. Several of the questions focused on the potential impact of technology on reading assignments, including their length and complexity. This exploratory research suggests that digital technologies are contributing to reduced long-form reading in higher education.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"42 1","pages":"253-279"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46259154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
POETICS TODAYPub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-8883206
L. Koepnick
{"title":"Reading in the Age of Compression","authors":"L. Koepnick","doi":"10.1215/03335372-8883206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-8883206","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Compression is often considered a royal road to process data in ever-shorter time and to cater to our desire to outspeed the accelerating transmission of information in the digital age. This article explores how different techniques of accelerated text dissemination and reading, such as consonant writing, speed-reading apps, and the PDF file format, borrow from the language of compression yet, precisely in so doing, obscure the constitutive multilayered temporality of reading and the embodied role of the reader. While discussing different methods aspiring to compress textual objects and processes of reading, the author illuminates hidden assumptions that accompany the rhetoric of text compression and compressed reading.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"42 1","pages":"193-206"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41396258","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
POETICS TODAYPub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-8752615
Adam R. Rosenthal
{"title":"The Seminar in Deconstruction","authors":"Adam R. Rosenthal","doi":"10.1215/03335372-8752615","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-8752615","url":null,"abstract":"In this article the author explores how the problem of the seminar enters into the work of Jacques Derrida. He shows how it emerges not only within the context of the teaching institution but also as a conceptual thematic with a history far in excess of the educational institutions of France. As early as 1968 and as late as 2003, the word, concept, figure, and institution of “the seminar” was one that Derrida worked to define and problematize. The author thus asks how Derrida’s autobiographical relationship with the institution of the seminar both influenced and was influenced by what one might call the philosophical problem of the seminar. As Derrida points out on a number of occasions, the seminar is not a neutral space. Indeed, it is a particularly ambivalent one, as early discussions of it in “Plato’s Pharmacy” and Clang show. In appropriating the form, not only for his teaching but also as a problematic of the seminars that he gave, the author argues that Derrida precisely embraced the ambivalence of a space at once caught up in the politics of reproduction, hegemony, and tradition and, to that very extent, the site of a potential “event.”","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48395803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}