I have finally got my act together to assemble some ideas for both my case study and my essay.
For my case study, I will be looking at Poetry Slams, a type of poetry competition where (usually) anyone can take to the stage to perform a piece of their own poetry and compete against other poets. The poems are marked by a pannel of judges chosen from the audience, and are judged based on their performance and the audience’s reaction to them, as well as the quality of the writing. The main poetry slam website is here, and there are a lot of resources available both on and off line regarding them.
If anyone wants to kill some time, you can find videos of the good, the bad and the ugly sides of poetry slams at YouTube. I’m thinking of putting together a list of maybe eight videos and holding my own little poetry slam, asking for people to vote on which they like best, so if you have any nominees for the shortlist then let me know!
As for the more extended case study to hand in, I plan on exploring the links between modern day poetry slams and historical forms of poetic performance, something which stretches back before the written word itself – indeed, much of literature finds its foundations in Homer who was (or were, there may have been several people who came to be known collectively as Homer) primarily a performance poet.
For my essay, I’m going to be looking at the internet and fiction, which is a topic I have a much longer personal connection with. My aim is to explore how the internet has made fiction more accessible and has aided the proliferation of certain kinds of fiction that appeal to an audience who have little connection to traditional novels or short stories.
Collaborative fiction, text-based roleplaying games, fanfiction and serial fiction all share the internet as their widest distribution network, and if you expand the definition of fiction to include mixed media projects such as webcomics and films then fiction accounts for a vast proportion of the internet’s total content. Indeed, many of these aspects of fiction on the internet have created whole subcultures of their own, with one quite remarkable example of hundreds of people travelling to a set of GPS coordinates at a specific time without any prior organisation, because of a single panel in a webcomic.
A lot of the research for this project will take place online, but Sherry Turkle’s book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet contains some useful insights into certain aspects of the online fiction community that I hope to take advantage of in my work.
So, that’s me finally set for the term. If anyone has any advice or tie-ins, I would be more than happy to hear them!
Joanna
