Literary theory help?

Cafe Society
1

I’m working on a project involving the construction of a theoretical framework for the aesthetics of videogames and I could use a bit of guidance from someone who’s more up on contemporary literary theory than I am.

Specifically I’m interested in reader-response theory and how readers construct meaning from texts. I know that a fair amount of work has been done on ambiguity and the multiplicity of ways that a text can be interpreted, but has anybody written about the progressive collapse of ambiguity that occurs as the reader moves forward through the text and new information cuts off different potential readings?

So far all the sources I’ve found seem to approach ambiguity as a product of the totality of the text and not as an ongoing fluctuation as the reading unfolds in time.

2

Can’t say that I’ve had any classes in the topic or studied it any, but going from the Wikipedia page it would seem to me like doing so would be antithetical to the goal of the study.

Again, assuming my understanding is correct, their goal is in finding the sorts of things a person can create for himself out of the ambiguities in a text. Removing ambiguities so as to reach a particular conclusion is the work of interpretation of a book which interpretation, correct or not, is still trying to determine what the intention of the author is. This is antithetical to their purpose.

While one could say that, in reader-response think, the author slays particular creations of the reader’s as the story unfolds, you could just as well say that he opens up more items to use as a jump-off point as the story progresses. So ultimately, its a synergistic process not a reductive one as you would have it. Which again strikes me as being more chronicling a reader’s method of interpretation rather than creation.

3

It seems to me that this is exactly where videogames are revolutionary, and where original theory will have to be attempted.

4

The process is both reductive and constructive. As some potential readings are closed off, others open up in an ongoing unfolding.

After poking around a bit online I suspect that I need to read Wolfgang Iser’s The Art of Reading.

5

Heh, yes, well that is the idea. However if possible I’m interested in grounding what I’m doing in existing literary criticism to 1.) better understand some of the phenomonological issues I’m grappling with and 2.) prevent myself from coming across as a total loon.

Specifically I’m interested in resolving the debate between narratology and ludology by extending ludic analysis to traditional narrative. Reader-response theory seems like its probably the necessary bridge I need to explore the idea of “play” in non-interactive art forms.

6

But isn’t that about as subjective as you could possibly get? How could you draw theory from that?

7

Well, not that subjectivity and theory are mutually exclusive ideas; not at all. Only, your OP seems to be searching for universals. It seems to me that the subjectivity of game-v-narrative is the key here. No?

8

The fundamental divide between game and narrative is interactivity. Games allow players a freedom to explore that’s missing from traditional approaches to narrative. But if you approach narrative from a reader-response perspective the reader is freely choosing his reading from a multiplicity of possible readings, introducing an element of interactivity into the process and bridging the gap between ludology and narratology. Each individual reading may be subjective, but that fits nicely into a ludic framework that assumes that each player is taking his own unique path through the state space of the game.