Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Comparative Literature

Advisor

Giancarlo Lombardi

Committee Members

Bettina Lerner

Matthew K. Gold

Subject Categories

Comparative Literature | Digital Humanities | Italian Literature | Liberal Studies | Modern Literature

Keywords

Digital Social Reading, Digital Humanities, Italian Literature, Italian Contemporary Literature, Cesare Pavese, Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Natalia Ginzburg, Twitter, Betwyll

Abstract

This dissertation explores Digital Social Reading (DSR) as a novel mode of literary engagement, focusing on the Italian project Twitteratura, a series of social reading experiments conducted on Twitter (2012–2016) and later on the Betwyll app. The research situates Twitteratura within the intersection of Reader-Response Theory, Digital Humanities, Reception Studies, and Sociology of Literature, demonstrating how digital environments reshape the act of reading and interpretation. Through detailed analyses of four DSR projects centered on major twentieth-century Italian authors—Cesare Pavese, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino, and Natalia Ginzburg—this dissertation argues that Twitteratura provides a concrete, data-rich demonstration of Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory in action, reconfiguring the relationship between author, text, and reader in the digital age. The study begins by positioning Twitteratura within the broader history of literary theory and digital culture by drawing on Wolfgang Iser’s conception of reading as an active process that completes the aesthetic object, and on Hans Robert Jauss’s notion of reception as a historical, collective event. From these theoretical foundations, the study examines how digital platforms have expanded the field of literary participation, producing new forms of social hermeneutics that merge interpretation, creativity, and community-building. This framework is further informed by Digital Humanities scholarship emphasizing collaboration, openness, and the democratization of knowledge, as well as by Media and Platform Studies addressing Twitter’s transformation from a microblogging platform into a participatory social medium. The dissertation addresses three main research questions: (1) How can Twitteratura’s practices of digital social reading exemplify and expand reader-response theory? (2) What interpretive strategies do readers employ in DSR environments, and how do these relate to genre, medium, and authorial presence? (3) How can computational and qualitative methods combine to analyze literary reception in digital networks? To answer these questions, the adopted approach combined close reading, digital text analysis, and reception study. Each DSR project is analyzed through a corpus of tweets or twlls, categorized according to five interpretive strategies: quotation, summary, comment, identification, and remake. These categories are then compared across the four case studies to assess how readers’ engagement shifts with text type, platform affordances, and community dynamics. The four case studies—#LunaFalò, #Corsari, #Invisibili, and #CaroMichele—trace the evolution of Twitteratura from its inception to its later development on Betwyll. Each represents a different mode of literary engagement. #LunaFalò (2012) tested the viability of DSR as a collective interpretive method, while #Corsari (2013) foregrounded critical discourse around Pasolini’s civic and political ideas. #Invisibili (2013) demonstrated creative intertextuality through collective rewriting inspired by Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Finally, #CaroMichele (2016), hosted on Betwyll, emphasized educational and pedagogical applications of DSR, showing how classroom participation reshapes traditional reading practices. The comparative analysis of these projects yields several key findings. First, DSR practices reveal that reader-response theory not only survives but thrives in the digital age, as readers publicly perform the interpretive acts Iser theorized as internal and private. The microtextual format of Twitter and Betwyll externalizes the cognitive and emotional dimensions of reading, making them visible, archivable, and analyzable. Second, the genre and medium of the original text strongly shape readers’ engagement strategies. Narrative texts encourage empathetic identification, while argumentative or poetic texts promote commentary and creative reappropriation. The shift from Twitter to Betwyll further reveals how platform design—character limits, threading, visibility—affects interpretive expression. Third, Twitteratura demonstrates that digital environments can democratize literary culture, turning reading into a collective and creative act that blurs the boundary between scholarship and popular participation. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that Digital Social Reading is not a technological curiosity but a humanistic phenomenon—one that reaffirms the centrality of the reader in the literary experience. It bridges the gap between solitary and communal reading, between aesthetic reflection and social interaction, and between traditional literary criticism and digital humanities methodologies. By analyzing how Italian readers have collectively reimagined their literary heritage through Twitter and Betwyll, this work illuminates broader transformations in global literary culture: from passive consumption to participatory creation, from national canons to transnational communities of interpretation.

Download

Share

COinS