E-Literary Text and New Media Paratexts

Abstract

This chapter aims to explore the role of the hybrid reader-viewer-listener as the user of electronic literary projects that demand more complex interactions, including sophisticated ways to navigate. Rather than taking into account just the reader's role in decoding meaning and linguistic comprehension, the new-media-shaped literary text stimulates even more sophisticated reader response, addressing both software recognition and bodily activity. For such an approach, the use of new-media-shaped paratexts as the devices and practices that enable and facilitate one's orientation and navigation within new media contents is also essential. Interfaces, instructions, menus, statements, reviews, blog posts, and documentation belong to the new generation of paratexts, which broaden Genette's original concept relating to print-based literature.