Rapidly changing digital media creates a new paradigm crossing the border of genre through inter-media convergence and consilience. What is the foundation that the literature can survive in this multi-media and multi-culture situation which changes the paradigm rapidly. How can the literature progress in the society of competition in which the principle of survival of fittest rules? This study deals with how the literature obtains the ability to stand and renew on its own in this harsh social environment much different from the past in the point of the literature's position and what is the foundation of it.
The study analyzes Korean novels written mainly after 2000 in order to find out how the inter-medial nature which makes the literature merge into,interchange with other media and transform can function in the production and communication of the literature and which meaning it has culturally. It gets out of the existing study frame focused on the written form of literature and actively adopts and positively understands the Post-Gutenberg Galaxy thought.
Inter-mediality generally means the media bridge. It acts as a connection among literature, music, dance, art and language. The concept of inter-mediality began with new type of cultural phenomenon in the digital era which is characterized by the mutual-intervention, supplementation and merge.
Since this, many researchers have denied to classify according to media or academic areas and paid attention to the combination and fusion using the concept of inter-mediality. The ultimate aim of this study is to critically review the nature and function of media and to promote the 'media ability'capable of dealing with it positively and creatively.
te literature's dominance apart from the area of the formal education.
Instead, 'lower quality literature' in the view of the existing literary world such as internet novels, cyber novels, chit-lit novels, factions and fantasy novels obtains much more public readers. These new types of popular novels can be called as 21th century new novels sharing desires and dreams of people and having flexible attitude to continuously react and search for the new recognizing sense. The literature, specially novels have found the solution and practiced whenever it has faced the limit of existing method.
That is, novels have developed creativity for open communication with other media rather than sticking to the historically fixed frames.
Things changes after 2000 as internet using population counts over 10million and at the same time, thanks to the development of digital media,the network becomes the most important element. Through the digitalized and networked media, humans now have infinite capability of not only reflecting, recreating and transforming the existing things in the real world but also creating the non-existing things. Humans have opportunities to contact an artificial reality as well as to unlimitedly get the information on any culture they want such as movie, music, art, books through various digital media.
In such a situation of audio-visual contents overflowing, the reading-oriented formal novels are no more actively read and now left as the legacy of the old days. As the method of relations between the consumer's recognizing sense and the media becomes an interactive type, the time comes to spend the literature as one of media contents which can make multi-sense and omni-directional communication possible, beyond the spatial sense.
Particularly, in the atmosphere to prefer using the OSMU (One Source Multi Use), the literature has tried to expand its identity by inducing other media or transforming itself rather than protecting itself from others.
'Trans-literacy' also means an ability to read, write and communicate crossing the border of each medium in order for intermediation and mutual connection of the media. If one is capable of adopting such a trans-literacy,he has to be able to obtain the flexible identity and to transform himself into the producer of media contents by choosing, appropriating and re-assembling the existing contents rather than being left as a consumer of the media contents.
The third oral culture era of trans-literacy is characterized by all digital content media's mutual influence and requires the open attitude in mutual text borrowing, mutual media introduction and integration, mutual intervention between the producer and the consumer. If so, various media made by the digital technology can have the mutual-media character beyond the simple co-existing multi-media concept. On the basis of it, humans will be able to go forward to the regain of the lost human ideal as well as to help people understand multilaterally the existence of human by expanding all borders suppressing human existence such as the border of reality and fiction, spirit and body, time and space, genre and genre, art and technology.