View source for Reading Digital Literature: A Subject Between Media and Methods

Simanowksi's overview essay describes the agenda of part one, "Reading Digital Liteature" of the''Reading Moving Letters'' collection: to gather semiotic readings of digital literature that provide future readers of these varied aesthetic forms with sophisticated theoretical and methodological tools for intepretation. While doing so, it provides short glosses of key concerns addressed in the essays from this section. One overarching concern is how to strike the correct critical balance when reading literary works in which natural language is often subsumed by other semiotic flows: how can the critical reader address medial specificity without sacrificing an interest in a work's linguistic properties, which, traditionally, have been at the forefront of literary study? Like much of Simanowksi's critical writing on digital literature, the essay aims to enable scholars and critics to produce meaningful, analytic interpretations of works of digital literature, rather than simply empirical descriptions of their functional interactions.