Public Defence: Anette Hagen

Anette Hagen will defend her thesis Aesthetic potential in multimodal narrative apps for the degree of philosophiae doctor (PhD) in the programme in pedagogical resources and learning processes (PEDRES).

Title of trial lecture: Make a comparative analysis of how aesthetic potential is realized multimodally in the literary apps The Fantastic Flying Books of Miss Morris Lessmore (from article 2) and Pry by Samantha Gorman (2014), including both a new reading of the former and critical reflections on your own framework.

Participate digitally on Zoom

Download the thesis (openarchive.usn.no)

Abstract

In this doctoral thesis, I examine a type of multimodal text that is often called a narrative app. The goal of this project is to derive new knowledge about the aesthetic aspects of these texts, and the main research questions of the thesis examine the aesthetic experiences that narrative apps can offer and the potential for interpretation that lies within them. The project’s theoretical framework is a combination of Wolfgang Iser’s theory of aesthetic response and multimodal social semiotics.

The project addresses various aspects of narrative apps through four articles.

The first article aims to raise awareness of the aesthetic aspects of narrative apps by exploring their aesthetic and didactic potential.

The second, which is a close reading of a specific app, also addresses aesthetic potential; the aim of the article is to contribute to a broader understanding of the aesthetic aspects of narrative apps, particularly by looking at the apps’ media-specific interactive features and the aesthetic potential of the multimodal narrative.

The third article, «Rhythm in Literary Apps», which was co-written by Professor Kathy A. Mills, thematises a previously little-described aspect of narrative apps: the function of rhythm. The article proposes a new way of analysing rhythm in narrative apps by introducing two categories of rhythm: narrative rhythm and reading rhythm.

The final article was written in collaboration with Professor Elise Seip Tønnessen and is called «Worlds and Readers: Augmented Reality in Modern Polaxis». In this article, we look at how augmented reality (AR) can affect reading experiences and enrich narrative worlds.

Each article has a dual purpose: to analyse one or more specific apps and to explore a theoretical perspective.

This thesis shows that narrative apps can offer multifaceted aesthetic experiences, which are influenced by the use of touch and the materiality of the medium. A complex whole is potentially created through images, touch, music, other sounds and written and oral verbal language, and this may lead to new aesthetic experiences. The analyses also show how the interplay between modes can both open and close interpretative spaces for the reader.