Books by Grzegorz Maziarczyk
This book is an inquiry into the elements that establish the physical presence of the novel as bo... more This book is an inquiry into the elements that establish the physical presence of the novel as book in the world and constitute a material vehicle for a verbal message. It develops a theoretical framework for a medium-specific analysis of printed narrative fiction by combining the concepts derived from narratology, multimodal discourse analysis, semiotics and literary-theoretical accounts of the signifying potential of the printed codex. It focuses on three basic levels of textual materiality – typeface, layout and book as physical object – as well as multimodal combinations of multiple semiotic resources and analyses their role in selected contemporary novels in English.
While the use of medium-focused devices is far from a completely new phenomenon in the history of narrative fiction, it is only at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries that engagement with textual materiality became a clear tendency, observable not only in the literary avant-garde but also in mainstream fiction. Juxtaposing the books published in the 1960s and 1970s by B. S. Johnson, Raymond Federman and William H. Gass with the latest examples of typographically innovative fiction by such authors as Mark Z. Danielewski, Steve Tomasula and Graham Rawle, this study seeks not only to outline the full range of the materiality-centred strategies in contemporary fiction but also to chart the changes in their forms and functions from the 1960s to the current Digital Age.
Papers by Grzegorz Maziarczyk
Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature
Revista Canaria De Estudios Ingleses, 2011
Roczniki Humanistyczne, 2002
Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature, 2014
This article discusses Mark Z. Danielewski’s creative employment of the codex format in his two n... more This article discusses Mark Z. Danielewski’s creative employment of the codex format in his two novels, House of Leaves and Only Revolutions, in response to the challenge of other media. Through the use of unconventional typography and interpenetration of text and paratext Danielewski subverts the widely assumed transparency of print and provokes the reader’s engagement with the material form of his novels. These typographic and paratextual manoeuvres have a primarily iconic function: the construction of the book is an inseparable element of the meaning it is supposed to merely contain. Even though Danielewski’s strategies cannot be analysed without taking into consideration electronic textuality and digital technology, they ultimately prove to be inextricably and intentionally bound up with the print medium, thus demonstrating the flexibility of the book form.
This contribution analyses a literally visible tendency in contemporary fiction, namely typograph... more This contribution analyses a literally visible tendency in contemporary fiction, namely typographic experimentation involving manipulation of fonts, deformation of page layout, incorporation of images and exploitation of the physical properties of the book as object. These departures from the conventional format of the printed codex subvert the widely assumed transparency of print and encourage the reader’s engagement with the material form of the novel. Typographic experimentation can thus be construed as an instance of ‘technological metareference’, i.e. metareference that elicits the recipient’s awareness of the technological form of a given medium. This turning to the materiality of print, related to its growing marginalisation in contemporary culture, seems to illustrate one of the cultural mechanisms responsible for the metareferential turn: in response to the challenge of other media, especially digital, many contemporary writers self-consciously exploit the potential of the printed novel in a manner allowing it to retain its unique identity in the media system.
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Books by Grzegorz Maziarczyk
While the use of medium-focused devices is far from a completely new phenomenon in the history of narrative fiction, it is only at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries that engagement with textual materiality became a clear tendency, observable not only in the literary avant-garde but also in mainstream fiction. Juxtaposing the books published in the 1960s and 1970s by B. S. Johnson, Raymond Federman and William H. Gass with the latest examples of typographically innovative fiction by such authors as Mark Z. Danielewski, Steve Tomasula and Graham Rawle, this study seeks not only to outline the full range of the materiality-centred strategies in contemporary fiction but also to chart the changes in their forms and functions from the 1960s to the current Digital Age.
Papers by Grzegorz Maziarczyk
While the use of medium-focused devices is far from a completely new phenomenon in the history of narrative fiction, it is only at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries that engagement with textual materiality became a clear tendency, observable not only in the literary avant-garde but also in mainstream fiction. Juxtaposing the books published in the 1960s and 1970s by B. S. Johnson, Raymond Federman and William H. Gass with the latest examples of typographically innovative fiction by such authors as Mark Z. Danielewski, Steve Tomasula and Graham Rawle, this study seeks not only to outline the full range of the materiality-centred strategies in contemporary fiction but also to chart the changes in their forms and functions from the 1960s to the current Digital Age.