Literary Criticism in the Postdigital Age: Spatial Narratives and Digital Storytelling

초록

This essay discusses the need to update narrative theories and literary criticism for emerging digital media like VR and AI. It emphasizes understanding space as a key element in storytelling within virtual environments. Traditional literary criticism has often prioritized time over space. However, recent developments acknowledge the significance of space, prompting a shift towards more nuanced explorations of spatial elements in stories. I suggest methods for analyzing what I call spatial storytelling and call for collaboration among scholars to modernize narrative theories. Drawing from my teaching of the Narrative and Digital Media course in 2022 and 2023, I propose prototypes of teaching tools for navigating stories in virtual spaces. Six general formulas for analyzing spatial elements in both predigitai and digital texts are presented as follows: (1) Actions, (2) Interactions, (3) Social Behaviors and Codes, (4) Familiar/Unfamiliar/ Defemiliarized, (5) Symbolic, and (6) Affective. These formulas conceptualize how narratives often manifest spatially through human experiences and responses to their surroundings, highlighting the interconnectedness of space, stories, and personal experiences. The proposed formulas also encourage students to read deeper into narrative spaces through metaphors, symbols, and affect. Our culture, marked by growing fetigue with digital media, challenges structures of reflection and critique. Amidst this, there is a call and opportunity for humanities education to reassert its relevance, fostering critical and empathetic engagement with others' stories. This essay offers one model and tries to imagine ways of making our literary criticism and education more relevant to new media environments and aesthetic experiences in the postdigital era. © 2024 ELLAK.

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