Imersão e Interactividade na Ficção Digital

This doctoral thesis is dedicated to a form of storytelling which was added to the literary horizon almost three decades ago. Digital fiction began by defining itself against the printed book. The transgression of linearity, a feature which is often related to print or, more precisely, to the novel, and the attempts to reduce authorial presence in the text, were soon turned into defining characteristics of this literary form. These works were first described as fragmented objects comprised of “text chunks” interconnected by hyperlinks, which offered the reader freedom of choice and a participative role in the construction of the text. This text was read by selecting several links and by assembling its lexias. However, the expansion of the World Wide Web and the emergence of new software and new devices, suggested new reading and writing experiences. Technology offered new ways to tell a story, and with it, additional paradigms. Hyperlinks were replaced with new navigation tools and lexias gave way to new kinds of textual organization. The computer became a multimedia environment where several forms of representation could thrive and prosper. As digital fiction became multimodal, words began to share the screen with image, video, music or icons. Sound was also included as part of digital fiction. In electronic literature, the emergence of new software is often followed by the creation of new types of texts. Virtual reality or augmented reality are presently being used to produce new textual responses. These demand an analysis of the relation between interactivity and immersion. While interactivity is often described as a set of physical activities that can interfere with attention, immersion is frequently seen as an uncritical and passive response to the text. Interactivity was used to offer freedom of choice to the reader and to give the reader the opportunity of co-authoring the text. Immersion was, by contrast, considered as the result of a reading experience constrained by authorial intention. In so doing, interactivity was mostly viewed as an antidote of reader’s immersion in the text. However, in this thesis, I will focus on a cooperation rather than a conflict between both. By describing electronic literature as part of a long self-generating process known as literature, I will demonstrate that immersion and interactivity cannot survive separately. In fact, they represent intrinsic characteristics which can be identified in any kind of literary text. In order to better understand the relation between immersion and interactivity, the alleged transparency of the medium and its apparent immateriality will be discussed in this thesis. The hybridity and interactivity of digital fiction will be considered as aesthetic features that must be covered by literary analysis. This thesis aims to address the relationship between immersion and interactivity by taking into account the text’s multimodality and transiency, as well as the ergodic and cognitive work done by the reader.