| Summaries in English
Maribeth Back and Rich Gold
"XFR" Experiments in the Future of Reading" is a museum exhibition featuring eleven interactive experiences designed to explore the relationship between technology and reading. The six-month exhibit, designed by researchers in the RED group at Xerox PARC, was installed at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. More than 350,000 visitors came through the exhibit between March and September 2000. The reading experiences they saw included, among other things, a book one can drive through, a book that one plays like an instrument; a working book artist's studio complete with live artists, a life sized walk-through comic book, and a robotic dog that reads aloud. Keywords: Interactive museum exhibits, audio books, electronic
books, reading, affect, interactive design, interactive books, new genres,
new media.
Anne Mangen
This article presents a close reading of some aspects of point-and-click adventure games, exemplified by Myst, focussing on ways computer games provide new spaces for experiencing fiction, as well as aesthetic pleasures and intellectual challenges. The aspects of remediation, metafiction and syn-aesthetics are foregrounded, the aim being to shed light on some media-specific characteristics of computer games that underscore why this medium deserve attention by both librarians and media scholars. Arne Apelseth
Reading, book collecting and text based interaction among commoners, in Norway as well as in most of the northern and western parts of Europe, characterizes a cultural practice that goes back to the 16th century. This practice should be viewed as procedural deposits of a growing protestant mass literature related with church controlled reading campaigns, changes in communicative interaction and the status of merchandise goods that books and prints earned in early modern capitalistic economy. It is also a matter of literary life that only partly was developed within the cultural control that the danish-norwegian state effectuated. Today this combination of normative refinement and literary underground is as unfamiliar to us as are the books that circulated. Aase K. Tveit
Why do people enjoy reading biographies? This is the main issue in this article, which also attempts to define the biographic genre, and presents the status of biographies today. In recent years, biographies have improved their reputation in the academic world. Both historians and literary critics show a growing interest in this genre, and biographies written with academic and professional skills are published every year. This development may be seen as part of what the sociologist Richard Sennett describes as "The Intimate Society"; the modern world, where the distinctions between the public and the intimate field are broken down. An examination of biographies published in Norway 1997-1999 shows a great variety in both style and subject. Among the categories of people most frequently chosen as biographical subjects, are artists, authors, religious persons, politicians and persons subjected to social injustice. Most Norwegian biographies are written by male authors about male subjects, but biographies seem to appeal as much to women as to men. To the public libraries, biographies have for a long time played an important role, being among the readers' favourites. The article describes three readers' experiences with reading biographies. Their different attitudes underline the fact that biographies can be read for different reasons; to obtain knowledge, to develop your inner self, or - just for fun. Ingeborg Westerheim
In support of Norwegian literature, the Norwegian Cultural Council every year buys and distributes copies of new Norwegian novels to all country public libraries. In 1999 a total of 117 novels were accepted for distribution. At Oslo University College we used this set of novels to identifying current literary trends in themes, settings and plots. The investigation was organised as a project involving about 120 first year students, who read and analysed one novel each. The results were compared with a similar study of the novels published in 1979. The typical author is a middle aged male, living in Oslo. The main protagonist tends to be a younger version of the author. Existential themes dominate. The novels of 1999 novels most often deal with sexual conflicts and marriage troubles. Only a quarter focused on political themes. The form is generally traditional and realistic. Compared with the novels twenty years ago, the current set often reveals a more "post modernist" approach to life. Reality is viewed from a distance, often with an ironic attitude. Nora Simonhjell
Jon Fosse is perhaps most known as dramatist, and is regarded as one of the greatest as such since Ibsen. His authorship though includes many different genres, for both children and adults. In this article Simonhjell reflects upon a part of Fosse’s authorship that not often receives the same attention, namely the short prose. Focusing on Fosse’s work To forteljingar, Prosa frå ein oppvekst (Two stories, Prose from an adolescence) and some pieces from Eldre kortare prosa (Older shorter prose) the author tries to create a wordily perspective about this "something" in Fosse’s literature, which almost refuse explanation and language, and which makes his literature so absorbing and hypnotising. The works of Fosse considered are regarded as echoing the deconstuctionist view of writing as absence. In the sense that there exists "something" about which one cannot speak, without, at best, distorting it. At worst the sublime insight one may have of this "something", as it remains unspoken, may even be forgotten, not to say overwritten, in the very act of naming it. To speak about this "something" therefore involves something somewhat unutterable, a wordily distance and negativity that is, simultaneously, keeping it both within and out of reach of language. Toril Berle Hanssen
Valuation of literature is problematic. What is considered as good literature varies with time and place and depends on who makes the valuation, the target audience and the purpose of the assessment. Children’s literature is in a special position. It is adults who pass on the literature and they evaluate, not for themselves but on behalf of someone else, the children. To what extend do these factors affect the notion of quality in children’s literature? Is this literature so different that it has to be treated in a special way, based on other premises and criteria? The Norwegian Council for Cultural Affairs has become a very important actor in defining what literary quality means, as well as the publishers and the critics. Unity, complexity and intensity are the traditional criteria that the literary text has been judged by. Usually, the council doesn’t state the reason why they choose to disqualify books, but when they do, it is these three criteria they use. The last 25 years the research on children’s literature has been dominated by a tug of war between the "childpeople", who concentrate on the reader, and the "bookpeople", whose main interest is the text. What approach one chooses will have consequences for what one considers as the ideal book for children. The educational approach to children’s literature is probably still an issue, but most modern scientists claim that literary methods can and should be used on this literature. The differences between the two literary types are not so important, and one tends to play down the uniqueness in texts for children. But still, there is a major difference between literature for adults and literature meant for children. If we ignore these differences we also miss the fundamental and essential in these texts. A book meant for children has to speak to two sets of readers, the adults and the children, who are the primary reader. Zohar Shavit claims that there are two ways for an author to solve this problem. He can totally ignore the adult reader, and concentrate on the primary reader. In this way, the book will never be canonized, because of the limitations in this literary system. Another way to solve this problem is to write an ambivalent text, a text that belongs to more than one system. Then you can use effects from the child literary system as well as the adult literary system, thus appealing two both sets of readers, and succeeding in both systems. The author can use text models opposed to the child literary system, but also text models opposed to the ones in the adult literary system. Shavit asserts that the ambivalent text actually addresses the adult, and that the author merely uses the child as an alibi to succeed in the literary system for adults. It seems like Shavit’s observations are right. Books with two levels that both address the child and the adult, are potential canonical books in the literary institution. However, I don’t think that the child is just an alibi. The adult reader knows that this is a book for children and reads it as such, and so will the critics. The multiple levels give the child something to reach for. These kinds of books take children seriously, they challenge the reader and they stimulate their fantasy, qualities that are not exclusively reserved for the adult literary system.
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