Players and Readers:

master's thesis

• Title: Players and Readers: : Exploring The Role of the Reader in Cybertext Literature
• Author: Izabela Šegedin
• Mentor: Sven Cvek (komentor)
• Mentor: Luka Bekavac (komentor)
• Committee member: Maša Grdešić (predsjednik povjerenstva)
• Granter: University of Zagreb; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences; (Department of English language and literature); Zagreb
• Granter: University of Zagreb; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences; (Department of Comparative literature); Zagreb
• Defense date and country: 2022-09-16, Croatia
• Scientific / art field, discipline and subdiscipline: HUMANISTIC SCIENCES; Art Sciences; Art Science

Abstract

This thesis examines the role of the reader within the framework of cybertext literature. Emerging in the late 1980s, cybertext literature has reshaped narrative storytelling with the arrival of the technology of links and nodes which opened the way towards video games with a focus on reading and narrative. This shift has blurred the lines between traditional printed literature and digital literature, complicating and revising the way we categorize literary texts. Through the analysis of different types of printed and digital cybertext literary works - namely Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars, Austin Jorgensen’s Lisa, ZA/UM’s Disco Elysium, Ice-Pick Lodge’s Pathologic, Obsidian Entertainment’s Fallout: New Vegas, 11 Bit Studios’ This War of Mine and Electronic Arts’ The Sims - this thesis aims to provide insight into the dynamic relationship between cybertexts and their readers and into the way narrative meaning is conveyed through the way the reader is conditioned to traverse the text. Relying on the work of narratologists and cybertext theorists, this paper uses taxonomies of multimodal fiction to illustrate connections between printed and digital works and the distinctions in the way different types of readers and players can be constructed within a participatory narrative framework. Analysis of both printed and digital cybertext literature in this thesis provides insight into the three types of focalising perspectives or three types of cybertext readers - the doubly-deictic reader, the reader-as-protagonist and the omniscient multimodal perspective. As the analysis shows, two of the three focalising perspectives occur both in printed and in digital iterations of cybertext literature, with the third occurring only in digital literature. The final aim of this work is thus to demonstrate ways in which these focalising perspectives function in cybertext literature, as well as to convey the need for further analysis of cybertext readers in order to better understand the overlapping and intersecting categories of reader and player.

• Keywords: postmodernist fiction; cybertext; hypertext; video games; ludology; ergodic literature
• Language: english
• URN:NBN: urn:nbn:hr:131:368166
• Study programme: Title: English Language and Literature (double major); specializations in: Linguistics, Literature and Culture, Translation, TEFL; Course: Literature and Culture; Study programme type: university; Study level: graduate; Academic / professional title: magistar/magistra engleskog jezika i književnosti (magistar/magistra engleskog jezika i književnosti)
• Study programme: Title: Comparative Literature (double major); Study programme type: university; Study level: graduate; Academic / professional title: magistar/magistra komparativne književnosti (magistar/magistra komparativne književnosti)
• Type of resource: Text
• File origin: Born digital
• Access conditions: Open access
• Created on: 2022-09-17 05:15:14