Production / Authorship

The computer has redefined literary media ecology. This is also true of literature which as book literature, holds quite different beliefs than such developments or even explicitly occupies an opposing standpoint. Digitalisation concerns fundamental practices and terminology of that which we call literature. The term authorship is increasingly challenged in network-like communications. The classic distinction between production and reception is set against the terminology of a collaborative writing practice with a simultaneity of roles, such as with the concept of 'produsers' or 'pronsumers' in which producers and users are melded into one instance, or in the term 'wreader' which refers to both a writing reader and a reading writer. Even if many of the enthusiastic expectations of such a model of authorship, or something similar have not been fulfilled in the time after the end of the 1990s, new media developments and the debates of culture criticism which accompany them unsettle established descriptions of literary trade. At least three areas which can be relatable for dissertation projects are named here.

1. Digital literature should be further examined, its manifestations and aesthetic, the possibilities of its analysis, meaning and value, not least its canonisation. Work to transform authorship concepts are of interest, and studies of digital self-staging of individual actors or communities also in interaction with the traditional literary market place or studies on the development of new direct marketing channels as has long become established in the music scene.

2. Investigations are worthwhile as to digitally adapted Genres, such as concerning the new form of the mobile phone novel and the structural difficulty of writing in short chapters, relevant to the email novel and twitter poetry. Further research areas which have only been briefly dealt with so far are blogs and the question how this format differentiates itself from the pre-digital forms of diary self-staging as well as the new self-historicising of books in experimental and bibliophile formats which explore the possibilities of storytelling in printed books.

3. Digitalisation has among other things changed the production of books in a lasting manner. It is to be clarified which economic and aesthetic consequences arise for literature. If for example publishing houses increase their concentration on fewer 'bestsellers,' this could lead to 'high literature' which is harder to sell coming under further pressure and increasingly being transferred to marketing instruments such as self-publishing. Decreased print runs could force demanding literary texts out of the catalogues of larger publishing houses, whereby then on the other hand smaller, less corporate publishers could profit, for whom smaller print-runs are also economically viable. The trend of 'world bestsellers' is to be researched, which is a consequence of the concentration on the international book market and encourages the levelling of aesthetic cultural units. Further important topics for possible projects are e-books, open access and the transition of the job of editor into product manager.