“New technologies” and “old values”: The function of various text and media forms in literary studies

In a society where multimodal stories (movies, TV series, and computer games) have a big influence on young people, reports show that young people demonstrate a decrease in reading habits, reading comprehension, and reading abilities. This article analyses to what extent and in what way(s) various text and media forms are used in literary studies at upper secondary level in Sweden through interviews with five teachers, who offer their experiences, ideas, and thoughts on working with various fictional texts. The results show that novels are used most frequently, that the teachers struggle with the decrease in reading habits among their students, that the students prefer and show great knowledge about films, that there is an absence of multimodal fictional texts in literary studies, and that the teachers see that neither text form nor media form has an impact on student performance