The poetics of form in digimodernist prose
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.28925/2311-259x.2024.3.3Keywords:
digimodernism, digital technologies, prose, novel, text, contemporary Ukrainian literatureAbstract
Nowadays, in the era of rapid development of digital technologies, which the British researcher A. Kirby calls digimodernism, literature is undergoing significant changes, first of all, at the level of form. Traditional paper editions are being transformed, and completely new phenomena are emerging in the electronic space, the existence of which was impossible before the advent of computers, the Internet, social networks, etc.
In particular, in recent decades, new prose forms have emerged and developed significantly, and the need for a detailed analysis of these forms makes this study relevant. The purpose of the article is to identify and characterize the peculiarities of the poetics of the prose form in the era of digitalism, to determine what features of digital textuality are inherent in them. The subject of this study is ergodic, network (in particular, Facebook novel) and interactive literature, hypertext novel as an example of proto-digital prose, LitRPG, fanfiction, visual novel and generative prose. The study uses intermedial, comparative, and structuralist methods of analysis.
As a result of the study, it was found that in the era of digimodernism, traditional paper publications can be changed by adding textography (computer code and Internet correspondence) and QR codes, thus combining with the virtual space. Using examples from world and Ukrainian literature, we have examined the hypertext novel as an example of proto-digimodernist literature, and found that prose forms in the literature of the digital age are mostly interactive and multimedia, represent multilevel artistic phenomena and require the reader to interact with the text on a deeper level. The novelty of the study is that we have determined that prose forms of the digital age are characterized by such features of digital textuality as onwardness, haphazardness, evanescence, reformulation and intermediation of textual roles, anonymous, multiple and social authorship, the fluid-bounded text, and the nature of electronic-digitality.
Prospects for further research are related to the need to analyze and classify poetic forms of digimodernist literature.
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