Transmedia strategies in school literary education: deconstructing kitsch and the semiotics of readerly creativity

Abstract We consider the substitution of living classical texts with their simulacra, kitschy interpretations, to be one of the most important issues in literary education in schools. Traditional teaching methods and textbooks reproduce a set of pedagogical clichés. This leads to a loss of the skill of reading. As a result, the student gains a set of simple narratives about canonical texts, not the knowledge of them. The goal of our study is to give impetus to developing the classics. We think that this development is possible if teachers work with the text, starting with deconstruction of the narrative and clichés surrounding it, applying methods of analysis that are typical for the humanities, in particular semiotic analysis, formal analysis, and narrative analysis. Dominants and metaphors may become a starting point for transmedia extensions, which is extremely important for students’ subsequent independent creative work. We propose an approach to working with literary texts in a manner which stimulates the reader’s personal creativity in the process of becoming acquainted with classics. We have used the example of famous film adaptations and theatrical stagings of the novel War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, as well as multimedia projects by trainees from grades 7–11.