Video Poetry: Performative Space for Negotiating Interpretations
Submitted by:
Heidi Höglund
Abstract:
There is a growing scholarly and educational interest in the potentials of multimodal and digital approaches to literature education. Researchers have begun to understand youths’ multimodal composing in various media settings, including digital video and filmmaking. However, there is not much research on students’ multimodal designing in response to literature.
In the presentation, I discuss findings and implications from my PhD study on students’ multimodal designing in response to literature, in which I explore how a process of digital video making in response to literature influences the negotiations of a piece of poetry among a group of students in lower secondary education. Data is produced at a Swedish-speaking school in Finland and consists of (a) video recordings of a collective video making process among a group of four students in 8th grade and (b) the digital video they produced.
Grounded in a performative approach to literary interpretation, referring to interpretation as something one do and actively negotiate, the research design builds on an analytical framework based in social semiotic theory of multimodality (Burn & Parker, 2003; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). Analytically focus is on how the students make use of semiotic resources in representing their interpretation of the text during a multimodal designing process, focusing on both the process of the students’ collective work and the digital video that they produce.
The findings indicate that the semiotic resources available and in use can be a key factor in students’ interpretative work of literary texts; what to represent is closely and continuously connected to how. Based on the findings, the students’ process of transmediating poetry to digital video was a multilayered process that continuously requested, encouraged, and urged negotiation, not always a straightforward walk facilitated by a multiplicity of available modes and semiotic resources. However, the resistances and potentials are what offer and accommodate spaces for negotiation. Thus, this study argues that negotiations of the literary text are interrelated with the negotiations of semiotic resources in representational practices, suggesting a performative approach to literary interpretation as spaces for negotiations.
If literary interpretation is promoted through the ability of negotiation, then the process of creating spaces for negotiation, and extending the means through which students represent their understanding, should be among the main concerns of educators – and researchers.
References:
Burn, A. & Parker, D (2003). Tiger’s Big Plan: Multimodality and the moving image. In Jewitt, C. & Kress, G. (Eds.). Multimodal literacy (pp. 56–72). New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.
Keywords: literature education; performative approach to interpretation; negotiations of interpretations; multimodality