Sonka Hinders
Kontakt
Sonka Hinders
Promotionsprojekt
The Retrospective Future of Reading in Contemporary Literature (Arbeitstitel)
Abstract
My dissertation aims to investigate how retrospective representations of reading in contemporary literature conceptualise the future of reading in the face of digitalisation. The rise of digital technologies throughout the last decades has led to the prominent Western discourse that there is a decline in reading, often connected to a loss of humanist values. A second influential discourse claims that Western culture is exceptionally engaged with the past as a refuge from the fast-paced digital world. My dissertation investigates how contemporary literature connects these two discourses. In line with academic examinations of retrospection in contemporary Western culture, I view retrospection – serving as an umbrella term for concepts such as memory, nostalgia, retro, trauma, hauntology and the archive – as a potentially constructive phenomenon in which humans access the past to imagine the future. My dissertation studies how retrospection, occurring on textual, medial and commercial levels in a selection of contemporary literary works, creates new understandings of reading which are simultaneously inspired by the past and digital developments. I aim to provide a framework of characteristics which describe emerging reading practices, based on interactions and overlaps of retrospection and reading.