READING
in the Age of Media, Computers, and Internet

CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS
====================

Michail Nedelchev

THE OLD-FASHIONED READER IN THE NET

The understanding of this report is that the old-fashioned reader is a professional man of letters, analyzer of belles lettres, maybe of lyric works of art. Moreover, like the philosopher who develops and elaborates different aspects of the powerful ideas born in the years of his youth, the man of letters reads the same works of art again and again and tries to find new meanings in them. Similar or rather contrasting in verse and subject matter literary works are attracted and re-grouped – an original semiosphere – around these texts that hold forever his attention, there mature his own and others’ readings, then the configuration disintegrates and thus leaves the important texts again solitary but presumably enriched in meaning.

In other time, in other periods, with all his wandering within other worlds of art, with his temporary passions, fallings in love, enchantments, the old-fashioned reader regards the significant works as constituting his vague, looming dream. Sometimes they remain so distant that they seem to be lost forever – as attainability of meaning and emotion. Until they stand with their whole power again in the focus of the penetrating, sensitive understanding (he gets again comprehensively inside them).

Does the birth and development of the net present a mighty problematic situation before this old-fashioned reader? This is the question whose answer the report is trying to provide.