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Novice Interpreters, Transmedia Fictions and the Afferent Stance

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Title: Novice Interpreters, Transmedia Fictions and the Afferent Stance
Language: English
Authors: Margaret Mackey
Source: Literacy. 2025 59(2):177-184.
Availability: Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us
Peer Reviewed: Y
Page Count: 8
Publication Date: 2025
Document Type: Journal Articles
Reports - Evaluative
Descriptors: Reading Processes, Reading Comprehension, Reader Text Relationship, Story Reading, Interpretive Skills, Story Telling
DOI: 10.1111/lit.12381
ISSN: 1741-4350
1741-4369
Abstract: Louise Rosenblatt's well-known concept of stance distinguishes between efferent reading (reading to take something away from the text) and aesthetic reading (reading for the experience of dwelling in the text). This article proposes a refinement to this binary, adding the concept of afferent reading. Afference, in biology, means a bringing-to, and afferent reading includes what interpreters bring "to" a text. This article particularly considers how afference works in a world of transmedia iterations of a story. What do young readers bring "to" their interpretation of a version of a story from other versions of the same story or the same story world? How does the concept of afference improve the ability of teachers and other adult observers to consider different renditions of the same story as a potential asset to young interpreters rather than simply a form of repetition?
Abstractor: As Provided
Entry Date: 2025
Accession Number: EJ1470530
Database: ERIC
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  Value: <anid>AN0185030878;0lo01may.25;2025May12.02:21;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0185030878-1">Novice interpreters, transmedia fictions and the afferent stance </title> <p>Louise Rosenblatt's well‐known concept of stance distinguishes between efferent reading (reading to take something away from the text) and aesthetic reading (reading for the experience of dwelling in the text). This article proposes a refinement to this binary, adding the concept of afferent reading. Afference, in biology, means a bringing‐to, and afferent reading includes what interpreters bring to a text. This article particularly considers how afference works in a world of transmedia iterations of a story. What do young readers bring to their interpretation of a version of a story from other versions of the same story or the same story world? How does the concept of afference improve the ability of teachers and other adult observers to consider different renditions of the same story as a potential asset to young interpreters rather than simply a form of repetition?</p> <p>Keywords: afferent stance; transmedia fiction; learning; media education; multimodality; reader response</p> <hd id="AN0185030878-2">Introduction</hd> <p>Today's children grow into full literacy in a transmedia environment; their stories are regularly told and retold, shaped and reshaped, across a range of different media platforms. Their earliest contacts with fictional characters are frequently mediated through screens, pages and many forms of three‐dimensional (3‐D) artefacts. Children learn how stories are designed to attract their attention, and they learn skills for addressing the worlds of such stories, worlds expressed through "rich content systems that [can] be encountered and engaged with on a variety of different platforms" (Tosca & Klastrup, [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref1">14</reflink>], p. 1). They learn to interpret stories via "narratives that refuse to leave the stage, returning repeatedly for another round of applause and for another pot of gold" (Ryan & Thon, [<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref2">11</reflink>], p. 1). Although Worden ([<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref3">15</reflink>]) is considering the nature of adult interactions with a transmedia world, he describes the reality of many children's encounters with contemporary texts: "the platform streams content at the user's whim and on any number of the user's networked devices. The platform wraps itself around everyday life" (p. 72).</p> <p>Freeman and Gambarato ([<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref4">4</reflink>]) say, "To understand what transmediality really means, we have to talk about navigation, and in particular the ways in which people move across physical and virtual spheres—and what motivates that process of moving" (p. 9). How do children learn to navigate and manage their attention and engagement across a variety of incarnations of their favoured stories that repeat core characters and events on diverse media platforms? Blanariu and Papa ([<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref5">2</reflink>]) raise the question of the '<emph>performative</emph> dimension' of transmedia storytelling. How do transmedia audiences <emph>perform</emph> the collection, curation and comprehension of different versions that contribute to a larger narrative whole? How do children acquire the capacity to participate in this complex process, and what ideas about interpretive activities do they internalise from these repetitive exposures? Teachers, librarians, parents and researchers can all benefit from a subtler toolkit of observational strategies as they monitor novice interpreters at work.</p> <p>Rosenblatt's concept of stance, first suggested in 1938, provides one way of analysing how children manage their attention as they engage with texts. Rosenblatt hypothesises that a reader's encounter with a text is not entirely led by the nature of the content and organisation of the words on the page but rather involves a transaction between reader and text, in which the reader's purpose is one dynamic element. She distinguishes between two interpretive stances: <emph>aesthetic</emph> and <emph>efferent</emph>. She specifies that an aesthetic stance involves dwelling in the experience of the text, while an efferent stance entails taking something away from the reading activity, frequently information.</p> <p>Today's children live with an abundance of multimodal and interactive texts. I believe we may refine the subtlety of our understanding of how readers meet texts by adding a third concept to Rosenblatt's pair. I label this position the <emph>afferent</emph> stance and propose that it modulates the concept of efference and possibly augments the details of an aesthetic response. In biology, 'efferent' means taking away, whereas 'afferent' means bringing towards. I argue that young children not only take information out of their books and media to help them understand the world; they also bring information <emph>to</emph> their books and media to help them understand the material being presented. Such information may be imported into a reading experience from the raw data of the real world, but it is frequently drawn from other texts, and in the transmedia culture that children inhabit today, those other texts are often telling the same story in different ways. This back‐and‐forth between versions helps novice interpreters assemble meaning in a world of representations and may add depth and richness to an aesthetic engagement with a text. Including the afferent stance permits a more nuanced analysis of how young interpreters navigate a multimedia world. Intertextuality addresses ways in which <emph>texts</emph> borrow from each other; the concept of stance focuses on <emph>readers'</emph> decisions and priorities, and I believe adding afference to the package of possible stances is a useful refinement, for classroom purposes and elsewhere.</p> <p>Although readers afferently bring specific perceptions and general background knowledge to any interpretive act, in this article, I investigate the specific performative value of afference in the comprehension of a transmedia world, asking two questions:</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> What may interpreters take from one instantiation of a story world <emph>to</emph> an engagement with a different version?</item> <p></p> <item> How do such afferent transfers affect learning interpreters in particular?</item> </ulist> <p>I explore these questions through an analysis of the extensive text universe of the Australian animated series, <emph>Bluey</emph>, which is made available to children through a range of different media portals. The study of alternative routes into Bluey's world comprises the main focus of this article. But children transfer what they learn about interpretation from one kind of media experience to another. To expand our awareness of children's interpretive agency (and to emphasise the importance of the active approaches implied in the concept of stance), I also briefly consider an example that contrasts with the transmedia <emph>Bluey</emph> world. Nicholas Blechman's ([<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref6">16</reflink>]) <emph>Night Light</emph> is a singular, analogue, stand‐alone book. A contemporary 5‐year‐old creates a home‐assembled transmedia playset for the world of <emph>Night Light</emph> and afferently brings her expanded awareness to the book. I include this example to highlight the significance of how children draw on their transmedia expertise to enrich their interpretation of more traditional materials.</p> <p>Though I describe my analysis in terms of the nouns of the texts (<emph>Bluey</emph> and <emph>Night Light</emph>), I am interested less in the intertextual relationships between different instantiations and more in using these manifestations of story worlds as vehicles for considering the tacit processes and actions of child interpreters. My real interest lies in the verbs of interpreting what readers, viewers and players <emph>do</emph> as they move between and among different recountings of the same story world.</p> <p>The kinds of actions entailed by the broad concept of afference are hardly new; they are implicit in Rosenblatt's ([<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref7">10</reflink>]) account of transactional reading in terms of what any reader brings to a text:</p> <p>Every reading act is an event, or a transaction involving a particular reader and a particular pattern of signs, a text, and occurring at a particular time in a particular context. Instead of two fixed entities acting on each other, the reader and the text are two aspects of a total dynamic situation. The meaning does not reside ready‐made 'in' the text or 'in' the reader but happens or comes into being during the transaction between reader and text (p. 7).</p> <p>Cathy Burnett and Guy Merchant ([<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref8">3</reflink>]) point out that these transactions between readers and texts now occur in multiple forms and call for</p> <p>an expanded view of literacies which simultaneously acknowledges the centrality of lettered representation and the importance of other semiotic systems in meaning making. Engagement with new media is seen here as part of a more widespread and proliferating set of communicative practices which are increasingly important to full participation in social life. This set of practices is what we mean by the <emph>communication repertoire</emph>(p. 2).</p> <p>Much of what contemporary children assemble in their communication repertoire is gleaned via transmedial materials, from their encounters with dispersed story networks in which character, plot and setting are manifested in numerous incarnations. Early on, they start to acquire the characteristics of a distributed reader, a concept that Anderson and Iversen ([<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref9">1</reflink>]) describe as follows in relation to print reading:</p> <p>The reader is distributed across the realms of world, book, and storyworld, with different aspects of the self sometimes becoming more grounded or directed (consciously or non‐consciously) toward one or the other in complex, nuanced, and potentially creative fusions and fissions (p. 591).</p> <p>Children today move between texts in many media, not just books, but otherwise this description is helpful. The concept of afference permits a more careful investigation of the impact of such a distributed awareness on how children learn to interpret stories. It provides us with another tool for discussing the relationship between very young interpreters, their texts and their expanding sense of the world.</p> <p>It is probably fair to observe that young children new to books and media frequently engage in what we might call involuntary efference. They may be aesthetically absorbed in a text, yet they may be learning many things that they did not know before and that they subsequently take into the world. Such worldly learning is one benefit of exposure to texts. At the same time, however, these novices take ideas from their books and other media, test them in their local environment and in other texts and then bring new or newly refreshed concepts back <emph>to</emph> the original text in a virtuous cycle that may (or may not) involve many forms of transmediation. With text worlds that manifest on multiple sites, children pick up details from one setting of a particular story to bring to bear on another. They can rapidly gain a degree of expertise and confidence when an afferent stance permits them to supplement the version currently being presented with extra information from a previous encounter with that world.</p> <hd id="AN0185030878-3">Bluey</hd> <p>I explore afference in relation to many manifestations of an episode of <emph>Bluey</emph>, the Australian animated series for young children. <emph>Bluey</emph> started life as a series of short, animated cartoons that rapidly spread to incarnations in many other media. Bluey is one of two children in an Australian family of anthropomorphised Blue Heeler dogs. She, her little sister Bingo and their parents, Bandit and Chilli, feature in a total of 153 animated cartoons, mostly about 7 min in length, with a small number of longer features. Potter ([<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref10">8</reflink>]) offers a valuable institutional history of <emph>Bluey</emph>, its Australian origins as the brainchild of Joe Brumm, who still oversees its production at Ludo Studio in Brisbane, and its international circulation and commodification through financial commitments from the BBC and online distribution by Disney+.</p> <p>Bluey's world is also accessible in an assortment of book formats, on websites, as toys, clothing and other merchandise, through unboxing videos on YouTube and in many other forms. Each episode soundtrack features a made‐to‐order composition, so audio materials include both voice and musical highlights; the producers currently also offer a soundscape of a creek environment related to a recent episode ('Soundscape', [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref11">20</reflink>].). The digital expanse of the <emph>Bluey</emph> world is enormous and fluid. The material universe of <emph>Bluey</emph> objects is also vast; in April 2024, Amazon.ca listed more than 3000 items connected to this fiction.</p> <p> <emph>Bluey</emph>, therefore, provides many openings for afferent behaviour. At the most basic level, viewers of the cartoons may find that any reading of the books activates an involuntary memory of the characters' distinctive voices and accents. For some young listeners, that accent will be an inviolable element of the textual experience. Other children who struggle to interpret the Australian cadences in the animation may find that a book reading provides a slower pace, a more familiar voice and rhythm as the book is read aloud, and the chance to ask questions; thus, it provides new insight to bring back to the next viewing. Beginning with the book before moving on to the animation may give some children a head start in comprehending these energetic and fast‐moving little stories. Either way, sampling the story in multiple incarnations permits a child interpreter to build up a distributed expertise that enriches their attachment to the story.</p> <p>In April 2024, Google registered more than 137 million hits for a simple search entry of 'Bluey'. The official website (Bluey, [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref12">27</reflink>].) offers information about characters, suggestions for things to make, little video games and advertisements for a variety of live and mediated events and interactive sites. The list I encountered in April 2024 includes a live theatre show featuring puppets, an interactive experience inside a facsimile of Bluey and Bingo's house in selected stores in the United States, a chance to meet the characters at CBeebies Land in Alton Towers Resort in Britain and an announcement of the upcoming 'Bluey's World' interactive site in Brisbane, Australia, described as 'a life‐sized immersive experience'. The treats in store at Bluey's World ([<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref13">29</reflink>].) include "Bringing the Heeler home to life using authentic sets and captivating storytelling. Explore the renowned cul‐de‐sac, wander through Bluey and Bingo's bedroom, dive into the living room and playroom, and venture beyond to the backyard under the poinciana tree" (Bluey's World).</p> <p>On the official site, merchandise for sale is located under the heading 'Grown‐ups', but it is hard to imagine children would not swiftly find their way to the listing of toys and collectibles, some of which I also found featured on YouTube's popular 'unboxing' videos. I took particular note of the Bluey Family Home Playset as it connects to my sample story and will return to it below.</p> <p>To dig deeper, I randomly selected a single story: 'Fruit Bat', Season 1, Episode 8 ([<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref14">19</reflink>].) of the animated series. In the initial screen rendition of this story, Bluey watches fruit bats head out for their nocturnal adventures. She then goes to bed under severe protest. When she can't sleep and goes back downstairs, she sees her father napping, acting out a dream of playing his beloved football. Her mother says he doesn't get much chance to play anymore because he is too busy working and caring for his children. When Bluey eventually sleeps herself, she dreams she is a fruit bat soaring over town and watching her dad play in a football game. Next morning, in an acknowledgement of his sacrifices, she thanks him for looking after her.</p> <p>The print version (<emph>Bluey: Good Night, Fruit Bat</emph>, [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref15">18</reflink>]) takes images from the animation and fixes them on the page, along with words presenting the story events and dialogue. I looked at a paperback edition of this single title and an entry in a hardback collection called <emph>Bluey: For Real Life</emph> ([<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref16">17</reflink>]). The words and images are identical in the two tellings, but the books, of course, are different objects. The stability of each print presentation provides one of the key affordances of a paper text: stillness. As de Kerckhove ([<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref17">5</reflink>]) says, a printed book is a "resting place for words" (p. 107). But the permanence of the printed text is only part of the story. Young readers learn early to attend to the interaction between words and pictures, using each to expand and illuminate the other in what might be called a mini‐afferent effect. The page is constant, but the interpreter's mind is in motion. The paper version is very much reduced from the larger story conveyed, even in a short animation. A child can afferently bring extra information from one version of the story to another. My compendium of four stories also includes an appendix that provides an introduction to 22 characters, potentially enhancing the awareness that readers bring to other examples of this world.</p> <p>YouTube videos (Bluey YouTube, [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref18">28</reflink>].) show different read‐aloud versions of <emph>Good Night, Fruit Bat</emph> (see "Selected read‐alouds"). At a minimum, the action of a turning page is added to the mix, and some versions provide a bit of layering of print and pictures over a blank page. I was surprised at the absence of Australian accents in several of the versions I investigated; the rhythm of the sentences is significantly altered when a British or an American voice narrates, and it is interesting that the official <emph>Bluey</emph> site has recently added some Australian readers‐aloud to their offerings. Some performances are definitely livelier than others, which changes the dynamics of listener commitment as well.</p> <p>The spoken cadences of the animations are augmented by music, which is an important feature of the series. A soundtrack is specifically composed for each episode. Shachat ([<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref19">12</reflink>]) says, "[T]he music by composer Joff Bush and a coterie of talented collaborators has fueled two albums and untold instances of 'Dance Mode' .... Music has always anchored the wordless sequences where <emph>Bluey</emph> reaches its most poignant heights" (n.p.). She observes, "The music on <emph>Bluey</emph> never clashes with the primary emotion of a scene, but it often is a lot more psychologically grounded in the experience of that scene's key characters" (Shachat, [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref20">12</reflink>], n.p.). On different occasions, listeners may afferently attach specific story details to the experience of particular music; they may develop an ineffable affective response to a particular soundtrack and bring this awareness to all future versions of its related story; they may engage their whole bodies in Bluey‐sponsored dancing; and/or they may simply register a familiar <emph>Bluey</emph> ambiance.</p> <p>The hundreds of <emph>Bluey</emph> materials featured on the Amazon site have in common the fact that they are all tangible items that can be wrapped up and mailed to the purchaser: DVDs of the original animations, books, plush versions of the characters, plastic toys, games, puzzles, playsets, clothing, china, room décor, backpacks and more. Each item may, for some children, be their first introduction to the world of <emph>Bluey</emph>, providing them with a sense of initial connection that they bring to their next encounter with this world.</p> <hd id="AN0185030878-4">The Fruit Bat experience</hd> <p>Some children will efferently acquire knowledge about real fruit bats from my selected episode. In some parts of the world, a more knowledgeable companion may point out real fruit bats in the sky, and that new experience will afferently vivify the idea of fruit bats when these children return to the episode in any format.</p> <p>Beyond this kind of real‐life exchange (common to many ways that children move between words and worlds), the scope of digital and analogue options multiplies the potential for afference to a startling degree. Many children will come to a book version of a <emph>Bluey</emph> story already equipped with knowledge about the related cartoon episode or about Bluey as a character in more general terms. Their aesthetic experience of the printed story, read in the context of a different kind of telling in the animation, may incorporate the observation that the affordances of writing differ from those of the moving image. The energy of print is implicit rather than expressed in motion (though a lively voice, as we saw above, can alter that relationship between stasis and action to a certain degree). A child who has just napped with a stuffed incarnation of Bluey or Bingo (Bluey 18″, [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref21">30</reflink>].) will relate to the images on the page with an afferent quotient of emotional investment. A child who owns the home playset can enact <emph>Bluey</emph> stories in a relatively accurate plastic setting of the rooms that feature in <emph>Good Night, Fruit Bat</emph>, and bring a sense of imaginative agency to bear on the print or animated versions of that setting. A child who has access to the musical themes of Season 1, Episode 8, may endow the printed book with a memory of background instrumentals.</p> <p>Such intertextual encounters are not definitive; Marsh ([<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref22">7</reflink>]) describes the "amorphous structure" of a fictional network like <emph>Bluey</emph> and says, "the relationship of each element within this network may change according to context" (p. 370). She observes that "brandscapes may have a core and a periphery" (Marsh, [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref23">7</reflink>], p. 371); it seems likely that children's shifting focus means that the priority of one element or another is mutable and can readily be described in Anderson and Iversen's ([<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref24">1</reflink>]) terms of "complex, nuanced, and potentially creative fusions and fissions" (p. 591).</p> <p>The <emph>Bluey</emph> world is also manifested in plastic; the many 3‐D instantiations of character and accessory in a variety of scales provide multiple examples of detailed facsimile. We know very little about the degree to which children come to rely on accuracy as part of creating a transmediated version of fiction. The story of <emph>Fruit Bat</emph>, for example, ranges all over Bluey's home, with scenes in the living room, the bathroom, the bedroom and the kitchen. These rooms are all represented in substantially faithful ways in the home playset. But many moments in the animated story take place on the staircase, which is missing from the playset version that I investigated (Bluey Family Home Playset, [<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref25">31</reflink>].). A child who wanted to re‐enact <emph>Fruit Bat</emph> within this plastic house would probably substitute swooshing the toy characters through the air to represent the scenes that occur on the stairs. Would such a necessary stopgap action subvert the delights of verisimilitude in this tangible rendition of Bluey's home? If the stairs are not needed for successful play, if imagination always has an override power, how significant is accuracy in the recreation of those parts of the house that are included? Does the fidelity of representation subsume any deficiencies? Each variation of child, game, intertextual repertoire, time of play, history of previous play, experience of companions and more may contribute to a broad diversity of responses to these questions.</p> <p>Regardless of the need to supplement the details of the house with remedial ingenuity, some children are likely to return from a game with the dollhouse to the cartoon or the book, experiencing a strong, if inchoate, feeling of <emph>I've been there</emph>. Their capacity to recreate the canonical stories, alter them or ignore them completely in favour of new adventures may give them a sense of agency in Bluey's setting that they then bring back <emph>to</emph> their viewing and reading.</p> <hd id="AN0185030878-5">Degrees of separation</hd> <p>One particular form of remediation of toys lies in the unbiquitous 'unboxing' videos on YouTube (short films of children or adults unwrapping the packaging of commercial items). I looked at examples featuring the home playset (see "Selected unboxing videos"). These little shows may serve as instruction manuals for 'what to want'. Alternatively, they may provide a kind of substitute for actual ownership; the initial unboxing of these appealing plastic miniatures certainly represents a major moment of satisfaction in such owning, and a facsimile of that experience is freely available in the films. Maybe involvement at one remove suffices to account for the massive appeal of the videos. But it seems worth continuing the thought experiment to ask what a child viewer of these highly popular texts might bring from them <emph>to</emph> an experience of <emph>Bluey</emph> in a different format.</p> <p>Even children who own <emph>Bluey</emph> toys will not own an infinite number of them. The number of cartoon episodes is limited; the domestic toybox eventually reaches capacity. But the plethora of unboxing videos suggests that representations of <emph>Bluey</emph>'s world extend indefinitely. Does a feeling of such plenitude affect children's viewing or reading experiences? Marsh ([<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref26">7</reflink>]), in her study of 4‐year‐old Gareth watching a LEGO unboxing video, suggests other possibilities:</p> <p>One argument ... is that these videos reflect an imagined life back to the child, which is not dissimilar to her/his own .... Other children can identify with the child producer and celebrate the vindication the video offers their own lives and interests .... There may also be a vicarious pleasure ... [or] a form of vicarious consumption (p. 375).</p> <p>Marsh ([<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref27">7</reflink>]) also suggests that these videos enable children to participate in a particular affinity space, a virtual group brought together by a shared interest (p. 376).</p> <p>There is much more to be said about unboxing videos, but my concern here is to consider what a child viewer might take away from the experience to bring <emph>to</emph> other <emph>Bluey</emph> texts. A sense of validation as a member of a global community of <emph>Bluey</emph> connoisseurs can create an affective commitment to every new or repeated version of a story from this world. Once a child experiences the authority of playing with one <emph>Bluey</emph> toy, they can bring tactile knowledge and a sense of imaginative agency <emph>to</emph> their encounters with other toys and <emph>to</emph> video representations of such toys, even when such engagements are purely vicarious.</p> <hd id="AN0185030878-6">The afferent toolkit</hd> <p>Tosca and Klastrup ([<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref28">13</reflink>]) describe transmedia worlds as "acts of the imagination, that is, as mental images gradually built from diverse encounters with fictions that share the same universe, and which become into existence in acts of aesthetic reception" (p. 392). With much experience of this nature, many contemporary children are likely to take it for granted that they bring awareness of other versions to any textual encounter. This approach becomes part of a general interpretive strategy, and I briefly report on the actions of 5‐year‐old Laura, who spontaneously created transmedia conditions for afferent transfer to a singular, stand‐alone and strikingly analogue book.</p> <p> <emph>Night Light</emph> by Nicholas Blechman ([<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref29">16</reflink>]) is a hardback counting book with die‐cut holes in some of its pages; when the holes appear on the right‐hand page, they highlight an increasing number of round, oval or square shapes in red, orange, white and yellow. When the page is turned, the new right page shows that these holes have been framing the lights of a particular vehicle; meanwhile, the holes, now on the left page, are converted into part of the setting for the relevant car, truck or heavy machine from the right half of the opening. Each time, a child is driving the vehicle. Nicholas Blechman ([<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref30">26</reflink>].) supplies samples of the design on his website (Blechman).</p> <p>The openings move up to 10 lights and then revert to one: a night light in a bedroom, where all the vehicles previously revealed are now shown as toys, and the child driver from the earlier pages sits in bed, reading <emph>Night Light</emph>. The book presents a constant requirement to re‐frame: A single light reveals itself on the front of a train, while the hole converts into the opening of the tunnel from which the train is emerging; later, the book raises questions of whether the train is real, or a toy or a train simply—but metafictionally—being read about in this very book.</p> <p>The contents of this book can thus fairly be described as fluid and open to more than one interpretation. The book itself, however, is a singularity. It is produced as an analogue object, and it invites analogue and tangible reading; the holes in the page welcome touching or holding to the eye for looking through. The final opening entices readers to look back on the earlier pages for ontological evidence: Are these real vehicles or figments of the child's imagination? But the stand‐alone hardback represents the full extent of this universe. The title has never even been re‐issued as a paperback, as far as I can ascertain, and it is now difficult to obtain. I located only two online videos of readings of <emph>Night Light</emph>; neither of them does justice to how the significance of the holes changes as the page turns, instead focusing only on the vehicles. Their impact is thus reductive rather than transformative.</p> <p>Some of the vehicles in <emph>Night Light</emph> are familiar to children in real life: taxis and school buses. Some are exotic: tugboats and tankers. Laura created a do‐it‐yourself version of different instantiations of the <emph>Night Light</emph> world. Like the children spotting fruit bats in the wild, she took note of relevant vehicles as she met them in the world and was particularly struck one day to see a snow plough also featuring some street‐cleaning equipment: two for the price of one. For a few days, she ran a tally of taxis in her neighbourhood. She also raided the family toybox to lay out a set of 10 vehicles that either matched the list in the book or provided a reasonable substitute (without a toy taxi, e.g., she made use of a car with both a front seat and a back seat since part of the schema of a taxi includes riding in the back). With her two sets of samples, one acquired from real life and one entailing a set of miniature facsimiles, she returned <emph>to</emph> the book, bringing to its pages a more profound grasp of its ontological complexity. Her general sense of what it means to read includes an unspoken concept of transfer from other versions, so she simply mediated her awareness of <emph>Night Light</emph> through other home‐curated renditions of the <emph>Night Light</emph> world and then brought her toy collection and her reports of street sightings back <emph>to</emph> subsequent readings of the book—afferent behaviours serving the cause of analogue reading.</p> <p>Today's children may tacitly assume that all text worlds are plural; the entirely singular edition is likely to be an exception for many young people. Laura's homemade approach to creating transmedia options for a stand‐alone text manifests an interpretive resourcefulness that permits her to engage afferently with <emph>Night Light</emph>, and her pleasure in the back‐and‐forth movement she thus enables is very evident.</p> <hd id="AN0185030878-7">Afference and a transmedia aesthetic</hd> <p>In many examples of a transmedia text world, no single version from a network of related stories features as the invariant centre of attention, the singular fixed focal point towards which all information is directed. The concept of afference works variably and flexibly. Much information is gathered and carried to a new encounter in completely tacit ways; the expertise of a child viewer/reader/player may never be articulated beyond an abstract feeling of being knowledgeable.</p> <p>Leon ([<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref31">6</reflink>]) argues for the importance of rereading stories to young children: "oftentimes, children firstly need time to absorb and digest the narrative before they are ready to talk about it in depth" (p. 128). Moving across different versions of a story is not the same as rereading, but meeting a story in different incarnations may offer some of the same qualities of deepening and extending the understanding a child brings <emph>to</emph> the next interaction.</p> <p>In general terms, all interpretive events include what the interpreter brings to bear on the process. In Rosenblatt's ([<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref32">9</reflink>]) terms, "the personal contribution of the reader is an essential element in any vital reading of literature" (p. 108). No reader, let alone any outside observer, will ever be aware of all the explicit and tacit awareness being brought to an act of interpretation. What we might call afference at large is impossible to break down into specific checklists. But being aware of the afferent affordances of a particular transmedia network offers a different kind of advantage. It provides one way to observe and analyse how interpreters move from one version to another within a familiar text world, and it offers a way to think of that familiarity as an asset.</p> <p>There are many questions that may help guide observations by teachers and other invested adults. I draw my examples from the texts already described in this paper, but it is easy to adapt them to the materials available to a given set of children.</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> What does the cartoon offer young interpreters to bring <emph>to</emph> a book version of the same story—and vice versa?</item> <p></p> <item> What does the act of engaging with the home playset give children to bring <emph>to</emph> their next encounter with words and still pictures, or moving images and music, featuring the same setting?</item> <p></p> <item> How does a tangible rendition of a world (that playset, for example) interact with an intangible one (that unboxing video)?</item> <p></p> <item> What are the implications for the imagination of physically stepping inside a life‐size specimen of Bluey's world, and how might that experience affect how a reader or viewer next approaches a version of a <emph>Bluey</emph> story?</item> <p></p> <item> What are the implications of a specific musical soundtrack being associated with a story?</item> </ulist> <p>Some of these questions can be adapted for children themselves to discuss; they are experts, after all, on the tacit knowledge that fuels their own afferent stances. But anyone—teacher, librarian, parent, researcher and more—can consider such questions in more subtle ways if we add the idea of afference to our conceptual framework.</p> <hd id="AN0185030878-8">Conclusion</hd> <p>There are many questions demanding further exploration; this outline of the possibilities inherent in the concept of afference is preliminary in nature. It is, however, worth returning briefly to my initial questions.</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> What can interpreters take from one instantiation of a story world <emph>to</emph> an engagement with a different version?</item> </ulist> <p>As with rereading the same story more than once, moving between versions of a story world may allow an interpreter to develop expertise—in grasping the details of the story world itself, in coming to terms with the varying forms of agency enabled by different formats and also in developing a greater understanding of the potential and affordances of transmedia storytelling. An interpreter crossing between different tellings of a story develops local expertise and confidence. The experience often provides a specialised example of indwelling, a kind of single‐within‐multiple form of narrative engagement that we would do well to understand better.</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> How do such afferent transfers affect learning interpreters in particular?</item> </ulist> <p>Acknowledging the local knowledge that a young interpreter may transfer afferently between different versions of a particular story world allows adults to treat this specialised expertise as an asset rather than writing it off as mere (tiresome) repetition. Secondary teachers who enable their Shakespeare students to see a performance of the play being studied know the value of enhancing students' sense of the overarching shape of the production. Young <emph>Bluey</emph> experts bring to any particular <emph>Bluey</emph> text a kind of junior equivalent of such knowledge, supplying an awareness of the larger contours of the narrative world under inspection. A cluster of related texts permits a diverse group of children to explore concepts of difference from the safe perspective of shared but distinctive expertise. It can also enable metacognitive thinking about how a story changes when told differently.</p> <p>Child interpreters are intent on making the best sense possible out of their surroundings. We should give them credit for the unacknowledged and invisible work of afference that leads them to revisit a narrative universe and transfer new information that enriches the aesthetic encounter. We should acknowledge the network of afferent connections that helps them navigate a distributed text world that, to many adult eyes, simply looks like more and more and more of the same. Respect for the work of afference can help adults notice and value the interpretive labours of children, enabling us to bring this greater appreciation and esteem <emph>to</emph> our engagement with young interpreters and their texts.</p> <hd id="AN0185030878-9">Conflict of interest statement</hd> <p>The author declares no conflicts of interest.</p> <ref id="AN0185030878-10"> <title> References </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref9" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Anderson, M. and Iversen, S. (2018) Immersion and defamiliarization: experiencing literature and world. Poetics Today, 39. 3, pp. 569 – 595. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372‐7032760.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" idref="ref5" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> Blanariu, N. P. and Papa, D. (2018) ' A mythological approach to transmedia storytelling ', in M. Freeman, R. R. Gambarato (Eds.) The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies. New York : Routledge, pp. 447 – 454.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib3" idref="ref8" type="bt">3</bibl> <bibtext> Burnett, C. and Merchant, G. (2018) New Media in the Classroom: Rethinking Primary Literacy. London : Sage.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib4" idref="ref4" type="bt">4</bibl> <bibtext> Freeman, M. and Gambarato, R. R. (2018) ' Introduction: transmedia studies—where now? ' in M. Freeman, R. R. Gambarato (Eds.) The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies. New York : Routledge, pp. 1 – 12.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib5" idref="ref17" type="bt">5</bibl> <bibtext> de Kerckhove, D. (1997) Connected Intelligence: The Arrival of the Web Society. Toronto : Somerville House/Patrick Crean.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib6" idref="ref31" type="bt">6</bibl> <bibtext> Leon, L. R. (2023) ' Reflections on the rights of the reader ', in T. Cremin, H. Hendry, L. R. Leon, N. Kucirkova (Eds.) Reading Teachers: Nurturing Reading for Pleasure. London : Routledge, pp. 127 – 130.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib7" idref="ref22" type="bt">7</bibl> <bibtext> Marsh, J. (2016) 'Unboxing' videos: co‐construction of the child as cyberflâneur. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37. 3, pp. 369 – 380. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2015.1041457.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib8" idref="ref10" type="bt">8</bibl> <bibtext> Potter, A. (2021) Globalising the local in children's television for the post‐network era: how Disney+ and BBC studios helped Bluey the Australian cattle dog jump the national fence. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 24. 2, pp. 216 – 232. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877920941869.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib9" idref="ref32" type="bt">9</bibl> <bibtext> Rosenblatt, L. M. (1976 /1938) Literature as Exploration, 4th edn. New York : Modern Languages Association of America.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Rosenblatt, L. (2005 /1994) ' The transactional theory of reading and writing ', in Making Meaning With Texts: Selected Essays. Portsmouth, NH : Heinemann, pp. 1 – 37.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ryan, M.‐L. and Thon, J.‐N. (2014) ' Storyworlds across media: introduction ', in M.‐L. Ryan, J.‐N. Thon (Eds.) Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media‐Conscious Narratology. Lincoln, NB : University of Nebraska Press, pp. 1 – 21.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Shachat, S. (2024, April 16) An Ode to the Music of 'Bluey'. IndieWire. https://<ulink href="http://www.indiewire.com/features/craft/bluey‐the‐sign‐music‐joff‐bush‐meg‐washington‐1234973578/">www.indiewire.com/features/craft/bluey‐the‐sign‐music‐joff‐bush‐meg‐washington‐1234973578/</ulink>.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Tosca, S. and Klastrup, L. (2018) ' An experience approach to transmedia fictions ', in M. Freeman, R. R. Gambarato (Eds.) The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies. New York : Routledge, pp. 392 – 400.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Tosca, S. and Klastrup, L. (2019) Transmedial Worlds in Everyday Life: Networked Reception, Social Media, and Fictional Worlds. New York : Routledge.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Worden, D. (2023) The work of art in the age of transmedia production (with regards to Walter Benjamin). Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 28. 5, pp. 56 – 77. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2023.2243159.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Blechman, N. (2013) Night Light. New York : Orchard Books.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> (2021) Bluey: For Real Life, A Story Collection. New York : Penguin Young Readers.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> (2019) Bluey: Good Night, Fruit Bat. Australia : Penguin Young Readers.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Bluey: Fruit Bat. Season 1, Episode 8. Bluey Official Channel. (n.d.). https://<ulink href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R%5fGMwkf2UM4">www.youtube.com/watch?v=R%5fGMwkf2UM4</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Soundscape of a creek scene. (n.d.). https://<ulink href="http://www.bluey.tv/watch/bluey‐book‐reads/the‐creek‐2/">www.bluey.tv/watch/bluey‐book‐reads/the‐creek‐2/</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> BBC Children's Book Read Aloud. https://<ulink href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRHsrF‐x808">www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRHsrF‐x808</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Daily Read Aloud. https://<ulink href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sPiTsK%5fzTA">www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sPiTsK%5fzTA</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Kip TV. https://<ulink href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTXwHpbziM4">www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTXwHpbziM4</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> The Sunny Star Show. https://<ulink href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5xBi1luoC0">www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5xBi1luoC0</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Transportation Children's Centre. https://<ulink href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AbA6XWtQ5g">www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AbA6XWtQ5g</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Blechman, N. (n.d.). https://<ulink href="http://www.nicholasblechman.com/nightlight">www.nicholasblechman.com/nightlight</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Bluey, official website. (n.d.). https://<ulink href="http://www.bluey.tv">www.bluey.tv</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Bluey YouTube channel. (n.d.). https://<ulink href="http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVzLLZkDuFGAE2BGdBuBNBg">www.youtube.com/channel/UCVzLLZkDuFGAE2BGdBuBNBg</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Bluey's World. (n.d.). https://<ulink href="http://www.bluey.tv/blueys‐world/">www.bluey.tv/blueys‐world/</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Bluey 18″ stuffed animal. (n.d.). https://<ulink href="http://www.walmart.com/ip/Bluey‐Jumbo‐Plush‐Single‐Pack‐18‐Tall‐Bluey‐Toys‐for‐Kids‐Preschool‐Ages‐3/802632131">www.walmart.com/ip/Bluey‐Jumbo‐Plush‐Single‐Pack‐18‐Tall‐Bluey‐Toys‐for‐Kids‐Preschool‐Ages‐3/802632131</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Bluey Family Home Playset. (n.d.). https://<ulink href="http://www.bluey.tv/products/bluey‐family‐home‐playset‐4/">www.bluey.tv/products/bluey‐family‐home‐playset‐4/</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> https://<ulink href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QnsCiVQAJ0">www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QnsCiVQAJ0</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> https://<ulink href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHxUTWRyHQM">www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHxUTWRyHQM</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> https://<ulink href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYhVxKivk3w">www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYhVxKivk3w</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> https://<ulink href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsXB4DUswTw">www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsXB4DUswTw</ulink></bibtext> </blist> </ref> <aug> <p>By Margaret Mackey</p> <p>Reported by Author</p> </aug> <nolink nlid="nl1" bibid="bib14" firstref="ref1"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl2" bibid="bib11" firstref="ref2"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl3" bibid="bib15" firstref="ref3"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl4" bibid="bib16" firstref="ref6"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl5" bibid="bib10" firstref="ref7"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl6" bibid="bib20" firstref="ref11"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl7" bibid="bib27" firstref="ref12"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl8" bibid="bib29" firstref="ref13"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl9" bibid="bib19" firstref="ref14"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl10" bibid="bib18" firstref="ref15"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl11" bibid="bib17" firstref="ref16"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl12" bibid="bib28" firstref="ref18"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl13" bibid="bib12" firstref="ref19"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl14" bibid="bib30" firstref="ref21"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl15" bibid="bib31" firstref="ref25"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl16" bibid="bib13" firstref="ref28"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl17" bibid="bib26" firstref="ref30"></nolink>
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  Data: Novice Interpreters, Transmedia Fictions and the Afferent Stance
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  Data: Louise Rosenblatt's well-known concept of stance distinguishes between efferent reading (reading to take something away from the text) and aesthetic reading (reading for the experience of dwelling in the text). This article proposes a refinement to this binary, adding the concept of afferent reading. Afference, in biology, means a bringing-to, and afferent reading includes what interpreters bring "to" a text. This article particularly considers how afference works in a world of transmedia iterations of a story. What do young readers bring "to" their interpretation of a version of a story from other versions of the same story or the same story world? How does the concept of afference improve the ability of teachers and other adult observers to consider different renditions of the same story as a potential asset to young interpreters rather than simply a form of repetition?
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