The Rise of the Fragmentary Essay-Novel: Towards a Poetics and Contextualization of an Emerging Hybrid Genre in the Digital Age (original) (raw)
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Paratextual Interferences: Patterns and Reconfigurations for Literary Narrative in the Digital Age.
Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology (AJCN), 2016
To acknowledge that the beginning of the twenty-first century has witnessed the rise of literary narratives that make extensive use of visual or graphic elements such as photographs, typographical experimentations, unusual page layouts, drawings, illustrations, etc., is not a novelty per se. Neither is it, in recent years, to explore digital narratives and their affordances. Rather, these explorations have received much attention in narrative theory and in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Since the digital turn, new studies have approached both subjects. However, while most of these studies are either inquiries into new digital devices and digital narratives (e.g., digital narratology) or focus on experimentations with the materiality of the book (e.g., multimodal narrative), this article will consider the two issues as part of the same phenomenon. On the one hand, literary experimentations with the materiality of the book have been especially flourishing since the emergence of new digital technologies. On the other hand, contemporary fictional writers, who are becoming more and more aware of the affordances offered by digital media, have started exploiting the properties of these new technologies to supplement their print narratives. These new but recurrent practices are thus both historically grounded in the socio-cultural context of the twenty-first century and consistent with a knowledge-sharing mode embedded in web 2.0 technologies. As I will show, the correlation between (a) the materiality of the book and (b) the digital supplementary material to be found on writers’ personal websites and blogs and in social media finds its origins in Gérard Genette’s concept of paratext and, in particular, in his subdivision into (a) peritext, i.e. the paratextual elements situated in proximity of the text, and (b) epitext, i.e. the paratextual elements “not materially appended to the text within the same volume, but circulating [...] in a virtually limitless physical and social space” (Genette [1987] 1997: 344). In the first section of this article, I highlight how the concept of paratext, despite some lacks and ambivalences, is still able to offer a valuable perspective on contemporary practices. I will introduce recent investigations on issues of media, mode, and materiality in order to contextualize my study in a wider cultural and theoretical discourse. The second section analyzes how paratextual elements are employed in a contemporary novel, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010). This analysis sheds new light on the way visual and digital elements may be used in a literary narrative. Drawing on this paradigmatic case, the third section puts forth my proposal of “paratext 2.0.” Formed by the categories of material peritext and digital epitext, the conceptualization of paratexts 2.0 allows for the identification of several functions. Far from containing a definitive reconfiguration of paratext for literary narrative in the digital age, this article provides new a vocabulary and, more significantly, new insights to answer some of the urgent questions twenty-first century literary practices are posing to narrative theory.
The Novel and Media: Three Essays
Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, 2019
These three short papers were initially formulated as contributions to a roundtable discussion on The Novel and Media held at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center in May 2018. Their brief was to contribute to the recent project of methodological reflection set in train by a resurgence of formalist analysis in literary criticism by thinking about the intersection of the novel form, novel theory, and media studies; at the most general level our challenge was to reflect upon the relation between the medium and the form of the literary text, and beyond that about the relation between the print medium in which the novel originated and the other media which form its environment and on which it frequently reflects. We start, then, with a reading of one of the most influential recent attempts to rethink formalist analysis, Caroline Levine’s Forms; John Frow contrasts her project with Jonathan Grossman’s Kittlerian reading of The Pickwick Papers in terms of the relation between two media of communication (coaching and the postal service) and the two novelistic forms that ‘correspond’ to them, in order to open up some questions about the limits and the appropriate focus of an analysis of novelistic forms. Melissa Hardie then moves to a consideration of the novelistic medium at its most material, taking the ‘queer materiality’ of Alvin Lustig’s 1948 jacket design for Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood as an index both of the ‘pulp’ presentation by which modernist texts acquired a wider readership and of the ‘queer ekphrasis’ of the novel itself. And Kelly Rich reads Zadie Smith’s NW as offering a robust account of the encounter between the novel as a narrative genre and various forms of digital media. In Alan Liu’s words, the novel is engaged in and works to illuminate the ‘thick, unpredictable zone of contact … where (mis)understandings of new media are negotiated along twisting, partial, and contradictory vectors’.
Routledge, 2020
My essay investigates the influences of the transmodern paradigm on Tom McCarthy’s latest novel, Satin Island (2015), which features U., a corporate anthropologist working on the questions of contemporaneity. In particular, I examine how the tangled web of data proliferation and the saturation of ideas affect U.’s ontological status, revealing a crisis of agency in the age of the Anthropocene. Then, by drawing on the theoretical framework of the novel of ideas, I analyse how the novel engages with the metafictional paradox of “finding shape,” showing that U.’s anthropological inquiries inhabit a buffer-zone, a temporal frame that interweaves stasis and acceleration, past and future. I finally argue that McCarthy’s linguistic and formal solutions situate Satin Island at the crossroads of transmodernity: while stretching the fictional representation to the limit, the narrative succumbs neither to detailed observation nor centrifugal alienation. By invoking a problematic relation between human and post-human, through a transmodern critique of our present age, the novel thus hints at a vision of humankind that resists the aesthetics of an evacuated subjectivity.
Mediums in Literary Settings: The Leverage of Technology in the Modern Novel
2015
Literary theorists have always been in search of new ways of expression and new experiments, so much so with reference to the modern novel like, for instance James Joyce 's Ulysses , Dubliners , or Portrait of the Artist . Generally, modern writers made use of theoretical notes or marginal ia in order to approve or disapprove of certain terms and ideologies, and to set forth their distinct aesthetic philosophy well into the 20th century. The fact that modern writers such as Joyce were in a constant process of changing perspectives and denouncing Realism 's infatua- tion with objectivity can be traced back to their common habit of leaving behind works unfin- ished just to have a glance into the newly launched technologies on the market, and to put to the test the functionality of subjectivism through the stimuli mediated by scientific discoveries such as waves communication, atonality or techniques similar to the stored-program architec- ture. The question remains for us, and...
Postmodernity and Critical Editions of Literary Texts: Towards the Virtual Presence of the Past
Literatures in the Digital Era: Theory and Praxis. Ed. Amelia Sanz and Dolores Romero. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. 201-20., 2007
The article raises the question of how the materiality of media products, such as literary manuscripts or books, influences the production and comprehension of textual significance. Far from being a subsidiary discipline, textology is vitally intertwined with the theory, interpretation, and history of literature. It transfers literary texts from the domain of art to the discourses of scholarship and education, strengthens their social relevance, and influences their canonization. Thanks to the textual critic, the literary text, restored and purged of all subsequent interference and error, should speak beyond the confines of its historical frame. The “old” historicism attempted to reconstruct an image of the text closest to the original, but in fact produced an additional textual version, marked with normative finality. Modern, text-centered trends in literary studies, striving to ensure aesthetic pleasure, would, in the process of editing, also filter and retouch the text’s historicity. The postmodern humanities have deconstructed history, presenting it as an interplay of interpretation and narration; however, they have striven for a return of the historical presence, but within a structure of the present: the past should reveal itself in its contingency, polyphony of detail, openness, and becoming. Within these horizons, a different understanding of texts has been formed: they are seen as an open process of writing and reading. Such views have touched the theory and practice of textology as well. The role of the two subjects, the author and editor, becomes looser, as does the notion of the literary work as a finished product. The literary work, observed in the processes of genesis, distribution, and post-production, is presented as a “fuzzy” set of drafts, versions, corrections, and rewriting. Postmodern textology does not reduce the text to its verbal structure, but also pays attention to the circumstances of publication, as well as to the medium; these factors are crucial for the meaning of the work and its cultural position. The postmodern tendencies to restore the historical presence and mutability of literary texts are—paradoxically—answered by the potentialities of virtual cyberspace, which is “in the service of postmodern detailism and the micro-contexts of knowledge” (Sutherland). Moreover, the electronic medium and the hypertext have led to recognition of the semantic role played by older media, the book in particular. E-text is thus not only a rival to a classical book-text, but also a useful tool that represents and interprets its historical specificity.
Writing Digital Culture into Contemporary Realist Young Adult Literature: a novel and exegesis
2020
I am indebted to many people for the completion of this thesis. My first supervisor, Professor Eugene Giddens 'got it' from the start, stayed clear-sighted throughout, and despite not being a creative writer himself, provided the work with much creative insight as well as his customary forensic scholarly attention. I am deeply indebted to you for steering me to the right course. To my first second supervisor Dr Mick Gowar, who supported my research even through his retirement, by inviting me to co-edit the scholarly journal on books and technology, Book 2.0. My second supervisor, Dr Helen Marshall also 'got it' and was instrumental in discussions that led me to the adapted form of screenplay deployed here and whose advice with regards to editing contributed substantially finishing it off to a standard worthy reaching the longlist of The Times Chicken House Children's Fiction Competition. To Dr Tiffani Angus, my final second supervisor. To the collegiate early support of author-researchers Liz Flanagan, Joanna Nadin, Louise Ells. To my colleague Tanya Horeck for her last-push-to-submission cheerleading. To old friends Rebekah Polding and Vicky Barker the earliest of readers. For Lotus who kick-started my YA reading with a gift book and who has been a constant and muchneeded morale booster and all-around ray of light. To Louisa Douglas, for friendship, understanding, and childcare support when I most needed it. Ali Smith for her generous comments on a very early manuscript when ambition far outweighed skill, including the invention of a new word 'panacheful' to describe my scribblings. Sally Cline mentored this very early draft through the new writers mentoring scheme Gold Dust, supported by a grant from The National Lottery Award. Ben Illis of BIA Literary Agency was an early champion of this novel and whose conversations gave me a taste of what it feels like to be a professional author. Which of course means published, which we didn't quite do, but still hold hope to achieve. My children, both born during writing the novel, Morley 2011 and Orin 2014. Morley's birth predates the start of Ph.D. but coincided with a very early [and different] draft. They took me away from research but returned me too-with fresh eyes and new conviction. Shaped this time of becoming-mother alongside becoming-writer which has made me better on both counts. My mother, who endured a long illness, before dying on February 3 rd , 2017, at her home, four days before my birthday, loved to read, and even though some way off the demographic for this novel I know she would have enjoyed it and shared in my satisfaction at having completed this work. To some extent, the constancy of this work ameliorated a long period of grief. My father, who I still have to remind what it is that I do, and in so doing inadvertently provides a sobering perspective on the wider importance of this time-consuming work. Finally, I thank Adam. My heart, my husband. Who brings me back to the world even when, sometimes, I don't want to be. The adventure continues.
Electronic Fictions: Television, the Internet, and the Future of Digital Fiction
forthcoming chapter in Paula E. Geyh (ed) (2016) The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern American Fiction. Cambridge: CUP. This chapter focuses on a contemporary literary art form that emerged in the 1970s and 80s in the wake of postmodernism and particularly poststructuralism, and has been developing alongside evolving electronic and digital media up to the present day. To begin with, I shall outline some important theoretical, literary and media developments that preceded and heralded digital fiction in its manifold forms. This discussion will involve the role of television vis-à-vis specific developments in postmodern fiction writing, as well as pre-digital forms of nonlinear writing such as proto-hypertext novels. I will then zoom in on diverse movements and forms of digital fiction over time, starting from interactive and hypertext fiction in the 1980s and the ways in which hypertext was theorized as the ‘embodiment’ of poststructuralist critical theory. I will then look at the arrival of digital multimedia (hypermedia) in the 1990s, which gave rise to new forms of digital literary multimodality. Similarly, the growth of the games industry around the same time inspired various forms of literary-creative experimentation with the power of the program code vis-à-vis the reader as player or indeed the object of textual play. Finally, I shall examine how the rise of (micro)blogging and social media in the early 21st century has generated new forms of participatory fiction writing online. Section 6 will follow with a discussion of new platforms for creative literary expression, such as tabloids and smartphones, and how they have given rise to augmented, or medially enhanced ebooks. Digital fiction is one of the most recent and fastest developing phenomena in postmodern literature generating new, experimental forms with almost every new artefact produced and incorporating newly evolving technologies as they emerge. Therefore it is worth dedicating part of this essay to some speculations about where the future of digital fiction and literary ‘reading’ more generally may lie. This discussion will form the final section of this essay and involve some deliberations about multimodal embodiment, ludoliterary artefacts, as well as the creative implications of digital and metamodernism.
Narrative
This essay compares two novel forms that are separated by more than 250 years: Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, published in 1742, and Philippa Burne's hypertext fiction "24 Hours with Someone You Know," copyrighted in 1996. Using narratological, pragmatic, and cognitive tools and theories, the confrontation of the two distant texts aims to highlight that while "the ethics of the telling" is congruent with the "ethics of the told" in both stories (Phelan, Rhetoric), the texts differ in the pragmatic positioning of their audiences and the freedom that they seem to grant readers, thereby emphasizing the evolution of the authorreader relationship across centuries and media. The article shows to what extent digital fiction can be said to invite the active participation of the reader via the computer mouse/cursor. Meanwhile it exposes a paradox: although Joseph Andrews is a highly author-controlled narrative, guiding the reader's ethical interpretation of what is told, it seems to leave more "space" for the actual reader, while Burne's participatory framework, conveyed through a second-person pronoun that blurs the line between implied and actual audience, requires some "forced participation" (Walker) via the "virtual performatives" that hyperlinks represent. Finally the specificity of "you" digital fiction as opposed to its print counterpart is theorized in two contrasted models of audience.