Multimodal literature

This article, published in issue 48 (Summer/Fall 2019) of Notre Dame Review, considers the relationship between literary collage and crisis, on the level of both form and content. Following an overview of the most recent American collage works (including This Is Not a Novel by David Markson), the article examines Steve Tomasula's VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2002) and Lance Olsen's Head in Flames (2009) as collage works responding to the crises of their time.

Introduction to the special issue of Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature titled Formal Intersections between Narrative Fiction and Other Media. The entire volume is available here: https://journals.umcs.pl/lsmll/issue/view/604/showToc

This monograph considers the phenomenon of the continued relevance of collage, a form established over a hundred years ago, to contemporary literature. It argues that collage is a perfect artistic vehicle to represent the crisis-ridden reality of the twenty-first-century. Being a mixture of fragmentary incompatible voices, collage embodies the chaos of the media-dominated world. Examining the artistic, sociopolitical and personal crises addressed in contemporary collage literature, the book argues that the 21st Century has brought a revival of collage-like novels and essays.

Using J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S (2013) as its case study, this article explores multimodal fiction and transmedia storyworlds. Conceptualizations of transmedia storytelling have sought to emphasize not only the creation and distribution of narrative worlds across media but also the imaginative construction of these worlds by recipients. Nevertheless, this latter characteristic has been somewhat neglected in terms of empirical research. This article seeks to redress that neglect in relation to printed multimodal fiction, by using real reader data to gain insight into how readers engage with such transmedia, transfictional storyworlds. The analysis at the heart of the article progresses outwards from an exploration of the central multimodal text, S, to consider its wider transmedia network and the narrative experience it offers readers. Ultimately, the article makes two original contributions to the study of transmedia narratives and the multimodal novel. Firstly, it considers how various media texts within a transmedia network (with a multimodal printed novel at its center) together create a transfictional storyworld; secondly, it explores how real readers experience such storyworlds.

Desde chicos aprendimos que los libros con dibujos y letras coloridas y vistosas eran “para niños”, y que los libros sin imágenes de ningún tipo, con tipografía uniforme negra sobre papel blanco, eran “serios,” “para grandes.” Sin embargo, ¿es esto realmente así? Siempre ha habido novelistas que sin tener necesariamente a un lector infantil en mente, se toman la cuestión gráfica de sus textos muy en serio.

In Remediation: Understanding New Media, Bolter and Grusin contend that the composition of contemporary media texts is influenced both by the history of textual production and by newer technological developments. Specifically, Bolter and Grusin claim: “Older electronic and print media are seeking to reaffirm their status within our culture as digital media challenge that status” (1999, 5). Pressman makes a comparable observation explicitly in relation to the printed book, arguing that there exists a trend in contemporary literature which she coins “the aesthetic of bookishness” (2009). Amidst anxiety over the future of the printed book in the digital age, such an aesthetic is a “literary strategy” whereby “novels exploit the power of the printed page in ways that draw attention to the book as a multimedia format, one informed by and connected to digital technologies” (2009, 465). This chapter investigates the bookish strategies of remediation employed by Mark Z. Danielewski in the new, reimagined edition of his novella The Fifty Year Sword (2012 [2005]).
After introducing the concept of remediation, the chapter’s exploration is contextualized in relation to Mark Z. Danielewski’s oeuvre, which he conceives as a remediation project. Through close stylistic analysis, the chapter demonstrates that The Fifty Year Sword simultaneously remediates oral storytelling whilst foregrounding the unique textual properties of the printed book through four central strategies: (1) the use of embedded stories, told by multiple characters; (2) the distribution of sentences across character’s speech turns; (3) the creation of deviant words; (4) phonological word play (particularly, onomatopoeia and homophonic puns). The chapter ultimately provides three valuable insights for the literary study of remediation and bookishness. Firstly, building on existing literary investigations of remediation (cf. Hayles 2002a, 2002b), the analysis demonstrates that literary remediation occurs through multimodal means (linguistic as well as visual). Secondly, it shows that remediation in the novel is a process that can represent both older and newer text-types. Finally, it demonstrates that whilst an aesthetic of bookishness is evident in twenty-first century literature, such an aesthetic uses remediation not only in response to the threat of digital communication. In remediating an old media form, the oral narrative, The Fifty Year Sword also foregrounds the diachronic ubiquity of storytelling.

This paper examines the shift from single to multiple semiotic modes in poetry during the age of digital media.  While one can argue that in the history of poetry the text has always represented “sight, sound and intellection,” the propagation of digital media and the devolution of popular culture into a predominantly graphical regime have made an irrevocable impression on poetry-on-the-page.  The production of multimodal poetry in print literature presents the hybridization of text and image, or typography and the visual arts.  Modernist experiments in poetry largely confined themselves to the single semiotic mode of alphabetic typography.  By century’s end, however, digital page composition enabled the use of index, icon and symbol in increasingly complex relations.  In the multimodal poetry of Emily McVarish, Steve McCaffery and Geof Huth, the reader encounters two or more semiotic modes simultaneously.  The relation between text and image is not one of dependency (illustration; annotation) or autonomy (catalog; artist book) but rather a bilateral interactivity that requires and stimulates a cognitive poetics.  Such print works demand that readers pursue a multiplicity of reading paths and develop the interpretive skills required by multimodal metaphor in which signs are drawn from more than one mode.

This paper aims at investigating the expressive forms of contemporary fiction, characterized by a ceaseless intermedial dialogue that increasingly affects the production, distribution and reception of literary works. Through an interdisciplinary perspective that combines literary criticism with the mediological and performative approaches, this work provides an examination of the distinctive methods, strategies and tools involved in the multimedial texture of The Fifty Year Sword by Mark Z. Danielewski, where a strong relationship between the acoustic-sound medium and the visual-textual one can be observed.
Keywords : textuality, multimedia, sound, visual, performance.

Desde chicos aprendimos que los libros con dibujos y letras coloridas y vistosas eran “para niños”, y que los libros sin imágenes de ningún tipo, con tipografía uniforme negra sobre papel blanco, eran “serios,” “para grandes.” Sin embargo, ¿es esto realmente así? Siempre ha habido novelistas que sin tener necesariamente a un lector infantil en mente, se toman la cuestión gráfica de sus textos muy en serio.