Genre dissipativity of online entertaining literature as a result of direct author – reader communication

Vollständiger Abstract

Worum geht es in dieser Arbeit?

The networking of literature has led to the growth of the electronic book market and the emergence of many samizdat platforms. Digital technologies have created a zone of close contact between the writer and the reader and the ability to satisfy the needs of even very small audiences. In these conditions, the role of the expert literary community began to blur, the author becomes the publisher of his own books, and the reader – the dictator of narrow thematic preferences. The purpose of the article is to show that the orientation of non-expert network resources to satisfy the needs of small reader groups leads to an increase in genre representations, imparts dissipativity to the genre system of samizdat and ultimately leads to the mass reader unable to distinguish the genre characteristics of works. To achieve this goal, the analysis of the data from the most famous monetized samizdat platforms, the electronic sales portal “Litres”, including both samizdat and published literature, was performed. The results of the survey were compared with the practice of individual resources, where the influence of the expert literary community is strong. As a result, it turned out that the sources of the latest representation of genres on a number of platforms are themes and search tags popular among individual reader groups and literary definitions of other cultural practices and platforms. The principles of creating electronic cards of works enhance the dissipativity of the genre system and complicate the definition of the genre by the reader. Advertising and information cards are a kind of “contract forms” for satisfying reader expectations, where the genre, as the least meaningful element for the consumer, “drowns” in the list of themes, motives, properties of heroes and the description of the general mood of the text.