Delight, Intertextuality, and Challenges to Normative Interpretations Through the Digital Serialization of Dracula

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: (Re)Considering the Critical and Affective Potentials of Playful Literacies (Table 11)

Abstract

Our study explores the implications of a recent case in spring 2022 where the novel Dracula went “viral” as tens of thousands of Tumblr users participated in a serialized re-reading and discussion of the text through the hashtags #dracula and #dracula daily. We use a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design approach to examine how users described their own practices as well as top posts in the first month of the collective reading of the novel. Determining specific affective, intertextual, and serialized aspects of textual play that were made possible by this format of textual discussion, we provide suggestions for teachers working to embrace interpretive play in formal learning spaces through intertextual connections and multimodal memes. We invite participants to think with us about how this kind of play blurs boundaries around more traditional disciplinary readings of Dracula. Additionally, we will discuss this work in light of our emergent "player response" framework, which works to understand play and collaborative meaning-making building on ideas of reader-response. We will invite other working group roundtable participants to think alongside us about ways that play disrupts misconceptions about reading in the ways that it is emergent, ontologically nested, affective, and ludic.

Authors

• Karis Michelle Jones, Baylor University

• Scott Storm, University at Albany - SUNY

• Alex Corbitt, Syracuse University