Mediating Literature (original) (raw)
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Dichtung Digital, 2012
Bouchardon, S. (2012). « Digital Literature in France », Dichtung Digital. N°41, ISSN 1617-6901. ---------- In this paper, I first retrace the filiations and the history of digital literature in France, emphasizing the various literary and aesthetic tendencies and the corresponding structures (groups, reviews). Then I focus on French digital literature communities. I notably give an account of a study that I did in 2004-2007 for the Centre Pompidou in Paris: I analyzed a socio-technical device (discussion list and website) called ecritures, dedicated to digital literature, with the hypothesis of the co-construction of a socio-technical device, a field and a community. I conclude on the possible characteristics of digital literature in France.
Contributing to extant academic discourse on the emerging trend of digital humanities and electronic literature, this study explores the evolving landscape of French electronic literature (French E-Lit), focusing on the pivotal role played by digital platforms in its dissemination and reception. The aim is to gain valuable insights into how digital platforms have impacted the accessibility, visibility, and reception of French E-Lit, and assess the contribution of these platforms to the existing body of knowledge in contemporary literature, while offering an outlook on potential future developments within the field. The study is grounded in a multidisciplinary theoretical framework that combines elements from literary studies, media studies, and digital humanities. A mixed-methods approach is adopted in this study, combining both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods. The research reveals that digital platforms have significantly democratized the dissemination of French E-Lit. These platforms have allowed authors to reach wider audiences, experiment with new forms of storytelling, and engage with interactive elements, fostering an innovative literary environment. This study's gain lies on fact that it enriches our understanding of the evolving literary landscape in the digital age.
Can We (Still) Speak of a ‘French’ Digital Literature?
Matlit Revista do Programa de Doutoramento em Materialidades da Literatura
This article explores the conditions of emergence of digital and computer-assisted literatures in the French context. Noting the importance of exhibitions in particular in contributing to the development of digital works and aesthetics, the article explores what offerings and concessions are there in considering the emergence and elaboration of such literatures through an approximate national frame.
This article draws on Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of the relationship between contemporary developments in print-capitalism -such as the vertical integration of means of production and distribution -and the literary avant-garde, and takes it in two directions. The first questions the extent to which these developments have, or have not, weakened the hold of Parisian publishers -and the dominance of French literature -on literatures in French published outside France. The second, related angle of enquiry questions the decline of the avant-garde at the expense of a thematics of the "real" that takes a number of forms, one of which is the postcolonial. The thrust of the argument is that this contemporary transitional moment sees French literature in a state of flux within broader, transnational configurations.
The Translator, 2019
Bourdieu defined the French publishing field after conducting a study of 61 publishers in 1999. His study identified key features that can help us define the position of a publisher in the field. How has the field changed since then? Are these features useful in defining other publishers? Are there any features specific to digital publishers? This article revisits Bourdieu's study and tests his observations about the polarised publishing field through a case study of a Barcelona-based publishing initiative that issues literary translations in e-book format. The data collection for this study followed an ethnography-inspired approach, involving participant observation, field notes, reflective diaries, semi-structured interviews, and the collection of translation drafts, correspondence and paratexts. Book reviews and blog posts were also collected to study the dissemination of the translations. The results showed that many of Bourdieu's observations remain relevant, and the characteristics he defined are useful for understanding many of the changes that have taken place in the last two decades. New categories were created to describe specific features of our case study and to show how digital advances have created possibilities for new forms of publishing.
The Literary as a Cultural Industry
The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries, eds. Kate Oakley and Justin O'Connor
Book publishing is often absent from or treated cursorily in cultural industries research. The little research that does consider publishing does not discuss what characterizes and informs the production, circulation and reception of particularly literary titles. At first glance we might explain this lacuna as a matter of disciplines. Cultural industries researchers are mainly working in sociology and in cultural and media studies, whereas those concerned with the specificity of literature work in English faculties. Our chapter questions this divide.
Towards a tension-based definition of Digital Literature
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Why a paper on digital (or electronic) literature? Writers who are recognized as print writers, such as the French novelist François Bon,1 have been experimenting new literary forms on the Internet. In some respects, the Internet appears as an artistic laboratory or as a vast creative workshop.2 However, literary creation with and for the computer was not born with the Internet; it has been around for several decades. “Digital literature”, “electronic literature”, or even “cyberliterature”: the terminology is not fixed.3 Its authors aim at conceiving and realizing works which are specific to the computer and the digital medium by trying to exploit their characteristics: hypertext technology, multimedia dimension, interactivity... The productions of digital literature were of course not born ex nihilo. Genealogy lines can be traced which are acknowledged by the authors themselves: combinatorial writing and constrained writing, fragmentary writing, sound and visual writing.
Going digital: Changing the game of Danish publishing
This article aims to analyse current transformations in the Danish book publishing industry in light of the convergence between the book and the broader media culture. We focus on changing relationships between actors (publishing houses, bookstores, etc.) in the trade book's circuit of production, distribution and consumption. The development of the e-book challenges established routines of publishers, which must cope with new groups of actors in both the production and distribution of their products as well as new ways for readers to access and consume books. Methodologically, the study is based on qualitative interviews with key organizational actors in the Danish publishing industry and document studies of available industry information and statistics. On a theoretical level, the project combines organizational theory and institutional perspectives of mediatization in order to address the question of how the introduction of new media reconfigures old media industries. In particular, we focus on the interplay between book business actors' perceptions of digital technology, the changing market conditions, and the possibilities this entails for them. The convergence between the book and other media is enabled by 'institutional entrepreneurs', who import perceptions and practices from other media industries into book publishing. These changes at the organizational level also affect the balance between 'market' and 'cathedral' in the book publishing industry as a whole. The distinction between 'brownfield' and 'greenfield' development allows us to understand why existing players in the book market generally try to adapt to digital technologies in ways that do not put their existing businesses at risk, while newcomers may face fewer barriers to pursuing new technological opportunities.
A conservative revolution in French publishing
One translators' preface The French original of this text was first published in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 126-127 (March 1999), pp. 3-28, under the title " Une revolution conservatrice dans l'édition ". Our translation into English has been carried out to address the needs of graduate students and researchers working in the field of Translation Studies, who are increasingly aware of the need to integrate sociological perspectives into their work. To suit the needs of this particular readership, the syntax in the translation is considerably simpler than that of the original. We have cut many sentences into two, three or sometimes four; we have remove most clefts; we have replaced many dummy conditionals (" If it is true that… ") with straight affirmations; in short, we have removed many of the features that make the French text remarkably abstruse, even within the corpus of Bourdieu's writings (according to one reviewer, this particular text is " scarcely comprehensible and decidedly unpleasant "). So if you think the English is hard, try the French. In so doing, we have removed a set of formal features that were perhaps not entirely gratuitous in their original context. When launching this assault on the literary institutions of his day, Bourdieu took care to show that he too knew how to write. He was no merely descriptive sociologist; his work had every right to enter high humanist culture, indeed the Olympus of literary universals that he opposes to the merely commercial concern of the larger publishers. In sacrificing much of the style (syntax, but not terminology), we rob the text of part of its defensive arsenal. We have thus obscured the extent to which Bourdieu's text is part of its own object. With some irony, the sociologist excludes " publishers of social sciences " from his field of investigation, even though his own publisher, the traditionally Catholic Le Seuil, is still very much included. Similar irony might be found in the way Bourdieu's text moves from the apparatus of apparently solid sociology, statistics and all, to final overt backing of the most naïvely idealist notion of literature possible, allied with that of all the innocent small publishers whom he occasionally appears to consider pathetically lost. Bourdieu positions himself aloof from the world of bestsellers , ridiculed as being Americanized, as not revealing anything about social relations, and as being for women. Yet women return in a second role, as the semi-heroic owners of the small publishing houses closest to the sociologist's own ideals. This would seem a very French defense of literature as an exception culturelle, an area not subject to the normal rules of commerce and certainly not open to free international trade. Almost despite the sociology, Bourdieu takes root within the literary field he seeks to analyze. We have chosen this text because it is one of the very few sociological studies of the literary field that explicitly analyzes the role of translations. We would not, however, suggest that the study meets all the standards of solid sociology. First, on the empirical level, the survey was carried out in 1996 on only 61 publishers (56 in the graphs), without any serious attempt being made to justify the selection of this