English Teaching: Practice and Critique

Creative fragments: The subjunctive spaces of e-literature

Volume 5 Number 2 September 2006

Rebecca Luce-Kapler (Queen’s University, Canada)

This paper considers some of the benefits of reading and writing e-literature, including its influences on prints texts, challenges to the imagination, and attention to metafictive devices and processes. The less cohesive, more fragmented quality of e-literature creates a subjunctive space for creation where writers can consider interesting pathways and diversions since the digital form supports multidirectional structures. Using data from a digital literacy study with an eleventh grade English class as well as her own writing of fiction and poetry, the author suggests that the fragmented nature of e-literature offers benefits for learning in school that complement rather than replace more traditional forms of literature.  

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