Towards a carnivalesque interpretive community of Chinese internet literature

Since the 1990s, Chinese Internet Literature (CIL) has become a daily source of enjoyment for an increasing number of Chinese-speaking readers. Many popular CIL reading platforms, like Qidian, enable their readers to comment on every paragraph of CIL, fostering a communal interpretive phenomenon. This allows readers from diverse backgrounds to temporarily abandon their real identities and participate in an interpretive carnival, where conventional norms and thresholds for literary criticism are suspended. Through commenting, CIL readers construct both literary and social meanings. Examining this online communal interpretive phenomenon characterised by mass participation, this study integrates Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1984) carnival with Stanley Fish’s (1976) interpretive community to propose a carnivalesque interpretive community of CIL. It investigates how CIL readers perform their readership online through paragraph comments. Specific focus is placed on comments from five titles on Qidian, namely The Golden Eyes, Martial Universe, Nightfall, The Desolate Era and Way of Choices. By annotating 13,701 pieces of extracted comments using UAM CorpusTool (version 6), three key interpretive behaviours are identified: reflection, association and documentation. CIL readers reflect on the content of texts, authors and peer readers while associating CIL adaptations, personal life experiences and knowledge for interpretation. Additionally, CIL readers document their presence and hold ceremonies for finishing a book in the comments. By presenting these possibilities of meaning-making in the carnivalesque interpretive community, this study argues that CIL on the screen is spatialised into a carnival where CIL readers live their second life. Rather than interpreting CIL monologically, this study contends that CIL reading is a multifaceted social phenomenon with utopian orientations, tolerating and embracing equal and multifarious meaning-making from a reader-centric perspective.