

Simone
Wilcock
Biography
Simone Wilcock is a Doctoral Candidate in the English Department at the University of Johannesburg. Her research interests include contemporary literary studies, digital narrativity, genre systems in literature, translation and applied linguistics.
Pedagogical Reflections on Digital Narrativity
The Digital Humanities brought the technological revolution into the literary fold by creating an awareness of the production of texts in the digital age. In addition, the ubiquity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is compelling critics and educators to reconceptualise concepts like human authorship and agency, textuality, and narrativity to explore and question how we think (Manghani, 2024). Consequently, methods of reading and analysis have changed, and pedagogical strategies need to be adapted to meet this cultural shift. According to Georgopoulou et al. (2025), there is a notable lack of academic reflection on educational practices in the Digital Humanities, however, our proposed Honours module, “Digital Narrativity,” addresses this gap by exploring how digital tools interact with traditional methods of reading and writing. This module will be informed by Barnett and Coate’s (2005: 49) schema of the engaging and engaged higher education curriculum, comprising three interlocking domains of action. These are Knowing, Doing and Being. Our scholarship aims to reflect on how this curriculum engages with all of these domains by facilitating active, critical and analytical engagement with digital texts, informed by the methods and theories of literary criticism; the students’ own creative and analytical work, including their reflection on their own intellectual, creative and personal growth through writing; and the encouragement of their personal critical, creative and experimental faculties.
