The Significance of Media in Literary Theory: Shaping the Future of Literary Criticism of Electronic Literature

Abstract

Media plays an important role in literary studies. Nevertheless, the media has been neglected since the emergence of literary theories and criticism. Today, the development of digital media, which has influenced the world, has greatly influenced the development of literature. This development has created a research gap for further research on the effect of media on literature. The emergence of electronic literature has become the fundamental drive to look into the importance of the media in literary studies specifically the need of literary theory and criticism that adopt the role of media. The aim of this paper is to show how important literary theory and criticism to incorporate the elements of media that will give a better understanding of reading, writing, authorship and meaning of literature in the different context of media usage. In this paper, a theory of literary digital media, which focuses on three aspects, the creation, presentation and reception of literary work are discussed, but only the aspect of the representation will be explored in detail and apply to the text studied. Using the video content analysis, a study has been done to analyse the audio, text and image that reflect a set of semantic meaningful representations of a video poetry entitled “Aku”. This video poetry by Barlycine from Indonesia is an adaptation of a written poetry by Khairil Anwar, an Indonesian poet with the same title. This paper shows that theory of literary digital media, which become the basic aspect of the literary criticism of the video poetry is able to analyse semantic meaningful representations of the video poetry. This paper has also revealed the conventional of assumptions about reading, writing and meaning have challenged. A comparative study between the written text and the video poetry gives a better perspective of the effect of media on literature, specifically video poetry of electronic literature.

Save as a Favourite

Author Information
Sohaimi Abdul Aziz, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia
Mohammad Fitry Ariff Ahmad Zulkefley, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia

• Category: Assessment Theories & Methodologies

Posted by James Alexander Gordon

All Posts