Abstract :
[en] This presentation aims to retrace the development of my current research project, going back to my doctoral thesis in 2012-2018, which constitutes its first stage. The topic of my doctoral research was the depiction of digital media in contemporary German literature from 1990 to 2018. One of the key findings of this study is that the topical integration of this kind of media in printed literary texts almost always goes hand in hand with a political statement about digital culture, its effect on the world we inhabit and its relationship to the so-called book culture. The second stage began where the first one ended: Indeed, the idea of obsolescence is central to the literary works that stage this kind of media, particularly to the type of texts I call "gamer novels". On the one hand, they deal with the issue of printed literature possibly becoming obsolescent in a context of perceived concurrence with digital products such as video games. On the other hand, they largely describe digital culture as being itself essentially obsolescent because of the rapid superseding of always new hardware and software. Thus, the study of the cultural concept of obsolescence in both printed as well as electronic literature seems to be a gateway to understanding the production context of cultural artifacts in the 21th century. As I started investigating that concept within the framework of my postdoctoral project, I was struck by the existence of a particular kind of contemporary literary works, namely gamer poetry, i.e. poems taking the act of gaming as their main topic. Their analysis constitutes the third and current stage of my research, led by numerous and still unanswered questions. For instance, given the fact that these works almost exclusively consist of a recollection of past time experiences to which gaming and the remembrance of gaming moments seem to be the only access, is this genre only an exacerbation of the tenets of the gamer novel or something conceptually new? The future is always presented as non-existent in these works, or only in the form of future-in-the-past, but does it mean that they merely constitute a dead end of gamer literature as a whole, or rather a new movement towards the fulfilling of a literature of obsolescence? This talk leaves this questioning open for further research, which should thus try to locate gamer poetry within, outside of beyond the concept of cultural obsolescence.
