Turning to dictionaries, agency is described as “action or intervention producing a particular effect; a thing or person that acts to produce a particular result: action or intervention producing a particular effect”36 and is described with synonyms as action, activity, effect, influence, force, and power. Following the theoretical framework of social semiotic theory, social agency refers to the connection between meaning-making and the social interest of the individual (Kress &
Jewitt, 2003; Jewitt, 2009b). Agency could be defined as a “willingness to act”, as individuals recognise, resist, or change the values, ideologies, or discourses they are a part of and in accordance to their own interest and semiotic resources available. According to the dictionary, agency derives from agent and “doing”, emphasising the active role of individuals, coinciding with a performative approach to meaning-making.
It should be noted that a performative approach does not automatically mean that “anything goes” when it comes to interpreting literary texts. Many educators and scholars hold it problematic to attend the matter of interpretation too openly in an educational context. In this study, attention is focused on how multimodal designing influences and allows for negotiating interpretations. It follows the understanding of literary interpretation as something one does and actively negotiates, emphasising the use of semiotic resources and how this influences, challenges, and supports the interpretive work. This emphasises a culture of recognition (Kress
& Selander, 2012) of literary interpretation not as a final stage or level to achieve, but as means for describing what principles that contribute to the interpretive work of students37. As Kress and Selander (2012, p. 268) point out, this recognition is “at the same time a culture of valuation – a valuing of the agency of all learners.”
In an article on the subject and importance of “bildung” (bildning, in Swedish) Dencik (2016) emphasises the significance of “bildung” as an ability to nuance, reflect on, and act to changes around you. In contemporary society, people are continuously facing ambiguity, complexity, and divergence in relation to previous understandings.
Although Dencik does not argue primarily for “bildung” in relation to literary reading, I find these thought aligning with a performative approach to literary interpretation. The ability to negotiating different stances, perspectives, positions, and views is crucial in order to live with ambivalent situations and perspectives. The ability to negotiate one’s interpretations, views, and understandings, is essential to be able to make space for conflicting perspectives in contrasting one’s own. However, in order to develop such abilities there need to be such spaces for negotiating, resembling Faust’s (2000) metaphor of the reconstructed marketplace. In such understanding, literary reading activities would not strive for arriving at consensus.
Instead, students would be encouraged to reflect on differences, contrasting understandings, and develop awareness of multiple views.
37 See Kress and Selander (2012) for a discussion on cultures of recognition regarding learning and meaning-making.
With support in the findings of this study, such spaces can be offered in the literature classroom. However, ideas and values presented in the literary text do not necessarily need to be “good”, and the values that need to be fought or resisted are outside the text, whereas the literary text provides “suitable” contrasting pictures and is per se
“good” (see Persson, 2012, p. 20). Such an insight further substantiates the importance of an ability to negotiate the text and one’s interpretations critically.
With reference to Bakhtin, Smidt (2007, p. 224) argues that there is a close connection between response and responsibility; by positioning yourself in the world, responding to the world and voices around you and making your own voice heard you are taking a responsibility for your own utterances. Students’ multimodal responses to the poetic text, their interpretive work during their transmediation process, is a demonstration of how they are positioning themselves with their interpretation of the poem. They are responding to both the text as well as the surrounding world making their voices heard and also taking responsibility for their own standpoints. In this respect, their process of transmediation was reflective and dialogic, with the students discussing possible ways of representing the poem, negotiating their different views and constructing a collective representation to represent their interpretation of the poem; by negotiating the poem they were also negotiating the voice of their own. Hence, with a performative approach to literary interpretation and with support from the results of the analyses, the multimodal designing process in response to literature explored in this study can be viewed as a way of negotiating the text, the self, and the world.
The findings of the study reveal that the semiotic resources available and in use can be a key factor in students’ interpretive work of literary texts. The study illuminates how the negotiations of the poetic text are connected to the negotiations of semiotic resources.
The students’ process of transmediating poetry to digital video was not always a straightforward walk facilitated by a multiplicity of available semiotic resources. Neither was it a wholly rational, controlled process; rather it indeed involved accidental and unexpected discoveries. However, the analyses demonstrate that the
resistances and potentials are what offer and accommodate spaces for negotiation. Thus, this study argues that negotiations of the poetic text are interrelated with the negotiations of semiotic resources in representational practices, suggesting a performative approach to literary interpretation as spaces for negotiations. With reference to the findings of this study, negotiating interpretation encompasses ways of combining, juxtaposing, and emphasising different interpretations. If literary reading and 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.