Читать книгу Lit 21 - New Literary Genres in the Language Classroom - Группа авторов - Страница 9

Post-millennial literature, as heterogeneous as it may appear, can be characterized by the following features (Friesen 2011, Nünning et al. 2012):

 It has been written by contemporary authors and comprises new literary work created from 2001.

 It deals with current topics and issues, and frequently reflects today’s technological culture.

 It builds on traditional genres. For example, the new text-talk genres like email novels have their predecessor in the epistolary novel, the novel of letters like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela or Henry Fielding’s parody Shamela. So the ancient terms for this process of interaction with the literary past, i.e. imitatio (“imitation”) and aemulatio (“competition”), are still relevant; “imitation”, however, does not mean slavish copying, but creative adaptation of the tradition.

 It adapts classical texts. Adaptations, remixes and mash-ups are en vogue, so Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights becomes Wuthering Bytes (ostensibly a vampire story), Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is changed to Jane Eyre Laid Bare or Jane Slayre (with a blood-sucking twist), and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is extended to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

 It often breaks traditional writing rules. Rules are meant to be broken – which holds true for post-modernism or any other literary movement. Whether unconventional pieces really create something inspiring and original, or give novelty a bad name due to an overweening desire to achieve newness, is often a matter of dispute.

 It sees the emergence of new genres (Surkamp 2019). Various forms of electronic literature such as hypertext (interactive) fiction, animated poetry, or SMS (text-message) fiction, to a certain degree, reflect the much heralded “death of print”.

 It consists of numerous multi-modal texts. In teaching literature, “this multi-modal turn has shifted attention to the interplay of words and pictures in text-types such as picturebooks, comics and graphic novels” (Delanoy 2017: 14), and in language learning, “symbolic competence” (Kramsch 2006: 251) is the new goal.

 Its genre lines are blurred. Whether a certain piece of visual fiction must be classified as a graphic novel, an illustrated novel or doodle fiction, is often hard to decide. The boundaries of genres are fluid and are often breached for literary effect.

 It is immensely diverse in at least three dimensions: aesthetic quality, intended reader group, technical format.