Reconfiguring the twenty first-century reader : an analysis of interpretation and performance

Abstract

This article discusses how contemporary technological trends and new media have reconfigured the reader into a multiplicity of roles, suggesting that a number of dualisms formerly associated with the act of reading are no longer valid. Notions of writing and reading, creation and interpretation have been adapted to new convergence models of textual production and reception, and whilst 'story' remains translatable across media, in the process of multiplatforming, various narrative techniques are used to create different levels of engagement with the text at each stage. The promise of the reader's much-celebrated creative authority at the turn of the century is problematised here through a discussion of distributed aesthetics and tele-theories of representation. Taking the fantasy genre as a case study, the contemporary influence of cultish trends, together with the effect of cybernetic communication dynamics on traditional genre stylistics and the fulfilment of narrative meaning, will be analysed as essential considerations in establishing which aspects of the traditional reader are translatable to a future that seems increasingly dependent on connectivity, interactivity and speed. The article will argue that, in a number of instances, the contemporary cultural scenario suggests that fulfilment of meaning is often successfully executed through strategies previously associated with the performative rather than the literary text, and will conclude that specific technological developments are responsible for this adaptation.