Can Literary Theory be Participatory?

This cluster contemplates two core terms — contemporary literature and participatory culture — as they are influenced by web 2.0 platforms where they have flourished on a scale hitherto unseen among "old" technologies of moveable type or even digital text production.1 My remarks add a third term: literary theory. As it's practiced today, literary theory — what Mary Klage calls "explaining what literature is, what it does, and how we think about it"2 — fizzles before the flare of the contemporary and fumes at the blaze of anything participatory. Literary theory's most sustained engagement with web 2.0 usually involves using a search engine or an app to store or retrieve content rather than explaining literary content or its kinetic contemporary production.

My remarks, like many in this cluster, urge a more sustained critical engagement with content that is produced in, enabled by, and embedded in web 2.0, content that I urge is reshaping the very nature of "literary" and "literature."

So, what is web 2.0 and when did it emerge?

The term web 2.0 was coined in 1999 by Darcy DiNucci, a one-time English major turned information architect, and it went mainstream in 2004 at an O'Reilly Media conference in San Francisco. Web 2.0 has since come to be known as participatory or interactive web, something DiNucci predicted when she noted that "the Web will be understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens." 3 And in this ether, interactivity is key, offering opportunities for people to engage with content (such as videos and blogs), as well as with material typically thought of as "literature."

Web 2.0 is characterized by its ease of use, with dynamic apps, extensive user interactivity, and real time uploads. It is what the journalist Amanda Cooser names, "a people-oriented technology movement" (emphasis added). What's important in this movement, one of Cooser's informants tells her, is not the technology as such. Rather, "it's building simple things that people can use"4 (emphasis added). Cooser's report, and many others like it, focuses on businesses that embrace web 2.0 as a way to expand their reach. In this context, users ("people") determine what aspects of a site or app do or don't ease their engagement with a product. Developers integrate user input to modify the site or app; and both users and businesses thrive by the interaction. Today, the principle of people engagement applies widely beyond businesses. It's evident in gaming and in cultural products such as music, Twitter fiction, and Instagram poetry where interactivity is transforming the once static engagement between user and product.

Sites such as Wattpad (est. 2007), using interactive technologies associated with web 2.0, have become spaces where fiction writers produce content that is "fanned" and vetted by readers, where it thrives — or withers. Hailed as "the largest storytelling platform in nearly every market under the sun," Wattpad boasts 70 million users in over 50 languages. It's a site whose participatory platform promises to "connect Hollywood with proven ideas that have built-in audiences. By empowering diverse voices, we've opened up a whole world of stories just waiting to be turned into movies, TV shows, and audiobooks."5 In short, whether it delivers or not, Wattpad is part of a disruption of the modes by which publishing has prevailed for over three centuries.

With web 2.0, an entire archive of fiction is being produced and curated by readers, far from the attention of mainstream publishing, often with ambitions of leapfrogging over print and going straight from a web 2.0 platform to audio-visual media (for which "Hollywood" is shorthand).

What web 2.0 reveals are parallel tracks in which the thing called literature is produced. There is the world of print publishing with its circuits of author, publisher, reader. The book historian Robert Darnton's 1982 visualization of the communication circuit (Figure 1) reveals a network that remains largely unchanged from its origins following the arrival of the printing press into the digital era.6

In Darnton's model, the author produces text; the agent, editor, and publisher, with the help of compositors, binders, and printers, prepare the text for large scale circulation; and eventually, through shippers and purveyors of one sort or another, the text reaches the reader. Digital publishing on e-readers modifies numerous things (no printers are involved, nor binders nor shippers), but the general contours of the circuit prevail. Consumption concludes the circuit of production.

Web 2.0 rewires the communication circuit. Most fundamentally, it exposes how consumption is the engine of production: consumption (in this case, readers' contact with the text) inaugurates the circuit, rather than serving as its end point. I'll focus on one element so hard-wired into the web's interactive architecture that it names contemporary web experiences.

Web 2.0 is participatory.

As Cooser's "people-oriented technology," web 2.0 enables people to use it, to build on it, and to take it places far beyond those intended. In web 2.0, the author is the produser in Aarthi Vadde's keen phrase (with its play on product-user). Technological affordances aside, the web's ability to be the "ether through which connectivity happens" as DiNucci predicted deserves further explanation.

Just what is participatory culture? And what does it have to do with contemporary literature?

Across several decades, inaugurated by early work on fan studies, the media scholar Henry Jenkins defined participatory culture as "a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby experienced participants pass along knowledge to novices."7 Even when media are owned by corporate groups, as many games are, participatory culture thrives, according to Jenkins. It creates opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, and — this is key — it challenges attitudes toward intellectual property by creating what Jenkins calls "spreadable media," which occurs when ordinary users remix content that then shapes the collective pool.8

Users are produsers in web 2.0.

Fans of contemporary fiction remix it and purvey it in all sorts of ways on web 2.0 platforms. Stephenie Meyer's vampire romance, Twilight (2005), invited enthusiastic readers to thriving fan sites where they incubated their own successful forms of the novel. One text initially "published" to acclaim on a Twilight fan fiction site was E. L. James's erotic romance, Fifty Shades of Grey (2011), which migrated as a print-on-demand title by an Australian outfit before being noticed and picked up by the mainstream imprint Vintage where it sold over 125 million copies by 2015, the year that the first of the Fifty Shades trilogy appeared as a film adaptation. As in this instance, if not always on this scale, readers become authors in a literal sense, exploiting web 2.0 technologies to also become agents, compositors, publishers, and retailers of their own novels as E. L. James and others have.

Half a century before web 2.0 was imagined, one literary theorist had boldly postulated the user as producer around extant technologies of print reproduction. In a provocative essay from 1967, Roland Barthes theorized something he named the writerly text produced by readers who defy the commodification of the text around the altar of the Author. "A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author," Barthes wrote in "The Death of the Author."9 For Barthes, as adherents of participatory culture echoed decades later, the reader is the figure who absorbs the "multiple writings," the one who remixes the many textual inscriptions to make them anew. The reader is the author. The texts that enable the reader to remix and fabricate spreadable content were what Barthes named writerly texts.

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Half a century after Barthes's essay, the writerly text has migrated from print to pixel. The reader as author is no longer a theoretical Left Bank fabulation: it's a living figure found among the millions who read, comment, share, produce, and upload writing on web 2.0 platforms.

In addition to reconceiving "production," the digital public sphere has also rewired how the novel circulates as a commodity. Passionate readers vet emerging forms of the novel on social writing platforms where some prove massively lucrative before a timorous Big Five publisher wakes to their potential, as St. Martin's eventually did with Amanda Hocking, the bestselling author of zombie romances incubated on Wattpad. As the media scholar Melanie Ramdarshan Bold notes, "traditional publishers are no longer the sole gatekeepers of [literary] culture."10 Participatory platforms gesture to a marketplace characterized by exchange where readers collaboratively germinate emerging forms of the novel and render them into thriving economic commodities. Aarthi Vadde names this widespread contemporary phenomenon "amateur creativity" and shows how it has come to "exert transformative pressure on august institutions of literature, from the publishing house to professional authorship to reviewing culture."11

Contemporary literary theory has balked at seriously engaging this world. Barthes's manifesto on writerly texts comes as close as literary theory has to addressing a robust world of production on web 2.0 platforms that are reconceiving concepts such as author, producer, reader, and even the literary.

Novel theory, for instance, that subsection of literary theory where web 2.0 fiction might be addressed, focuses instead on a universe preserved in aspic. All of the novels on which its dominant theories are based have been European, and virtually all were written in the eighteenth- or nineteenth-centuries. Thus, the novels of Fielding, Richardson, and Defoe were 200 years old when Ian Watt retrieved them for his history (1957); Balzac's and Tolstoy's novels would have been collecting social security when Lukács wrote on them in Theory of the Novel (1916/1920)); and Bakhtin's "early novels" were almost a millennium old in the account he provides in "Epic and the Novel" (1930s). Even as Bakhtin championed the novel's movement from what he called "the deaf, semi-patriarchal society and its entrance into international languages and contacts," literary theory has seemed to prefer the deaf, semi-patriarchal society, not the world of "international languages and contacts."12 And where Bakhtin understood the novel's vitality to rise from what he called "the zone of maximal contact with the present (with contemporary reality) in all its open-endedness," the theories that address the novel have recoiled from addressing the form's messy contact with contemporary reality.

In short, in an unfolding moment when digital platforms enable open-source participatory opportunities for remixing and redeploying "culture" (see Sarah Wasserman's multiplayer stories, or the Instagram poets detailed by Seth Perlow in this cluster), literary theory has remained obstinately analog. Literary theory has remained unable — unwilling — to engage with current practices of production and consumption.

The transition from print to pixel might also be regarded as a transition from prestige to popular, however vexed these terms are. In what literary theory chooses to theorize, it has a demonstrable preference for print, and a taste for prestige forms that owe their consecration to history. It has defended two cherished blind spots: the fetish for the past, and the fetish for what it terms "literary." And by defending the "literary," theory has set up high barriers to entry, little support for new creations, and an attitude toward intellectual production that focuses on the producer or author, rather than the consumer or reader. As some elements of the contemporary novel have become more open access, the theory to understand them remains shrouded behind a high disciplinary paywall.

Participatory culture changes all that: it obliges literary theorists to look at the contemporary, and at the produser. Given the global reach of writing platforms and the languages where web 2.0 flourishes, the dominance of the Euro-US axis as the empirical basis of literary theory's postulations will need to recede. Theorists attentive to web 2.0 can expose and enable the end of the Global North's control over what Pascale Casanova named "the bourse of literary value."13

With the shift from author to reader, from North to South, comes another major move: from the literary to something that I name the anti-literary, but which some might call the popular. The variety of forms emerging in web 2.0's participatory platforms are often unanticipated by literary theory and remote from the familiar taxonomies of genre fiction. If Fifty Shades's erotic romance seems an inevitable if unbound version of the romance novel, then Amanda Hocking's best-selling zombie romances seem harder to have predicted, even if each component (zombie and romance) has a half-life in the history of the novel reaching back to Bram Stoker and Charlotte Brontë.

These web 2.0 forms, and the processes that bring them about, call for a literary theory that asks not what novels do but what readers do with novels. I call for a theory that acknowledges, foregrounds, and actively studies the participatory processes visible in plain sight of markets, movements, and institutions where readers encounter and manage their reading of the novel. In short, I call for a book history of the novel, not (just) a literary history. Absorbing book history's attention to process — to inquiring how a text got the way it did, who the human and technological actors have been, and how it circulates — are ways of renovating literary theory for a new millennium, and for the millennials who live there.

And if this means we theorize a print culture without print, or a print culture in which print plays just a small part, so be it. As Simone Murray advises, "once texts are digital-born, literary studies' relatively settled, long-cozy triad of author-text-reader is thrown into the air."14 If that's the case, it's time to have a theory that is airborne. Born digital "authors" are readers foremost; they are the masses, removed from elite producers consecrated by the economy of prestige.15 With its low barrier for access, web 2.0's novels are brokered by readers and "uploaded" rather than printed. They are beta tested and come with frequent updates. They release patches to accommodate user commentary (not unlike Samuel Richardson did, incidentally, with Pamela [1740]). Their compositional model is less the MFA workshop than the gamer's couch. And in time, some of the novels recede and die down; others migrate to different platforms such as codex, audio, or moving image.

A literary theory of the contemporary global novel needs to engage this narrative more fully. It needs to accept that the novel is more than a literary concoction, featuring only certain forms whose persistence in history endows it with prestige.

Released from the tyranny of the author could release theory from the tyranny of nomenclature that has confined its attention to "literary." "It would be better from now on to say writing," urged Barthes (147). It's a call worth heeding in order to surmount the disciplinary and institutional hierarchies that have kept literary theory blind to its present, curating a body of texts from the past whose resources seem less and less resonant with contemporary reality.

If writing can be participatory, perhaps one day writing theory can as well. And if it takes a Fortnite to get there, so be it.

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Priya Joshi is Professor of English at Temple University. She is writing a book about good bad books that rethinks the theory of the novel using anti-literary forms produced outside the metropolis. She is the author of In Another Country:  Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (Columbia University Press, 2002; winner of the MLA First Book Prize, the Sonya Rudikoff Prize, among others) and Bollywood's India: A Public Fantasy (Columbia University Press, 2015).

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Keywords: novel theory, readers and reading, literary theory, participatory culture, digital public sphere

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