As an alternative to print media, digital media make us newly aware of the materiality of experimental poetic texts and require us to account for their media-specific differences. Although already several theoretical models have been put forward to define these differences, so far few poems have been analyzed in terms of their media-specific textual materiality. This thesis seeks to fill this gap in the applied media-specific analysis of experimental poetry. It combines traditional close reading with a media-specific approach in order to investigate the relationship between the physical characteristics and signifying strategies of four experimental poetic texts in various digital and non-digital media. It critically interrogates the specific use of the given medium in each poem, and illustrates that their respective textual materiality cannot be specified in advance based on general assumptions concerning the medium in question. A digital poem is not inherently more innovative than a non-digital poem. Rather, a poem is perceived as innovative if it resists conventional reading strategies by establishing a particularly complex, dynamic, and effectively anomalous sense of textual materiality, which necessarily only emerges from the direct interplay among text, object, and reader.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/243048 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Muller, Sandra, n/a |
| Publisher | University of Otago. Department of English |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://policy01.otago.ac.nz/policies/FMPro?-db=policies.fm&-format=viewpolicy.html&-lay=viewpolicy&-sortfield=Title&Type=Academic&-recid=33025&-find), Copyright Sandra Muller |
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