The Routledge Companion to Literary Media [1 ed.] 9780367635695, 9780367635718, 9781003119739

Citation preview

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERARY MEDIA

The Routledge Companion to Literary Media examines the fast-moving present and future of a media ecosystem in which the literary continues to play a vital role. The term ‘literary media’ challenges the tendency to hold the two terms distinct and broadens accepted usage of the literary to include popular cultural forms, emerging technologies and taste cultures, genres, and platforms, as well as traditions and audiences all too often excluded from literary histories and canons. Featuring contributions from leading international scholars and practitioners, the Companion provides a comprehensive guide to existing terms and theories that address the alignment of literature and a variety of media forms. It situates the concept in relation to existing theories and histographies; considers emerging genres and forms such as locative narratives and autofiction; and expands discussion beyond the boundaries by which literary authorship is conventionally defined. Contributors also examine specific production and publishing contexts to provide in-depth analysis of the promotion of literary media materials. The volume further considers reading and other aspects of situated audience engagement, such as Indigenous and oral storytelling, prize and review cultures, book clubs, children, and young adults. This authoritative collection is an invaluable resource for scholars and students working at the intersection of literary and media studies. Astrid Ensslin is Professor of Digital Cultures and Communication at the University of Regensburg in Germany. She has published books on literary gaming, digital fiction, pre-web digital publishing, and language in the media, and is principal editor of the Bloomsbury Electronic Literature book series. Julia Round is Associate Professor of English and Comics Studies at Bournemouth University, UK. Her books include Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels (2014) and the award-winning Gothic for Girls (2019). She is one of the founders and editors of Studies in Comics journal and the Encapsulations book series. Bronwen Thomas is Emeritus Professor of English and New Media at Bournemouth University in the UK. She is the author of Literature and Social Media (2020) and has led several major projects on digital reading in the UK and Kenya.

ROUTLEDGE LITERATURE COMPANIONS Also available in this series:

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO NARRATIVE THEORY Edited by Paul Dawson and Maria Mäkelä THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE OF THE U.S. SOUTH Edited by Katharine A. Burnett, Todd Hagstette, and Monica Carol Miller THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERARY URBAN STUDIES Edited by Lieven Ameel THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO WORLD LITERATURE, SECOND EDITION Edited by Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO MEDIEVAL ENGLISH LITERATURE Edited by Raluca Radulescu and Sif Rikhardsdottir THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO ROMANTIC WOMEN WRITERS Edited by Ann R. Hawkins, Catherine S. Blackwell, and E. Leigh Bonds THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO GLOBAL LITERARY ADAPTATION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Edited by Brandon Chua and Elizabeth Ho THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO POLITICS AND LITERATURE IN ENGLISH Edited by Matthew Stratton THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERARY MEDIA Edited by Astrid Ensslin, Julia Round, and Bronwen Thomas For more information on this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-LiteratureCompanions/book-series/RC4444

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERARY MEDIA

Edited by Astrid Ensslin, Julia Round and Bronwen Thomas

Designed cover image: Jobalou, Getty First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Astrid Ensslin, Julia Round and Bronwen Thomas; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Astrid Ensslin, Julia Round and Bronwen Thomas to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ensslin, Astrid, editor. | Round, Julia, editor. | Thomas, Bronwen, editor. Title: The Routledge companion to literary media / [edited by] Astrid Ensslin, Julia Round, Bronwen Thomas. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge literature companions | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022061719 (print) | LCCN 2022061720 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367635695 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367635718 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003119739 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Mass media and literature. | Hypertext literature--History and criticism. | Literature and technology. | Intermediality. | Literature, Modern--21st century--Philosophy. | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC P96.L5 R68 2023 (print) | LCC P96.L5 (ebook) | DDC 800--dc23/eng/20230605 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022061719 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022061720 ISBN: 978-0-367-63569-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-63571-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-11973-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003119739 Typeset in Times New Roman by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

CONTENTS

Notes on the Contributors

x

Foreword xviii Jim Collins

Introduction: What is Literary Media? Astrid Ensslin, Julia Round and Bronwen Thomas

1

PART I

Literary Media in Context

15

1 Towards a New History of Literary Media Alexis Weedon

17

2 Intermediality as a Material Practice and Artistic Event Marina Grishakova

34

3 What is the Historiography of the Ebook? Simon Rowberry

49

PART II

Forms, Media, Materialities

61

4 Locative Narrative: Exploring Place-Based Storytelling Simone Murray

63

v

Contents

5 Ambient Literature Kate Pullinger and Jon Dovey

75

6 Autofiction in Words and Images: The Visual–Verbal Dialectic Hywel Dix

87

7 Important Artifacts and Literary Media in Archival Autofiction Elin Ivansson and Alison Gibbons

99

8 Counterfactuality and Disnarration in News Stories: Reimagining Real Events Marina Lambrou

111

9 The Evolution of Literary Journalism in the Digital Age Jaron Murphy

125

10 The Literary in Narrating Dramatic Life Experience Mari Hatavara, Matti Hyvärinen and Jarmila Mildorf

137

11 Poeticity and Parody: The Literary Interview on Radio and Podcast Jarmila Mildorf

148

12 Composing Narratives through Song Cycles: Stories of Shropshire Lads in Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge 159 Natalie Burton 13 Podcasts, Audiobooks and Podiobooks Matthew Rubery

174

PART III

Creators, Networks, Intermediaries

185

14 Virtual Darkness, Tangible Light: Crafting Expressionism through Algorithmic Poesis Martin P. Sheehan and William Wright

187

15 A Poetics of Misrepresentation: The Mimesis of Machine Learning in ReRites 197 Malthe Stavning Erslev 16 The Influence of Digital Platforms on Authors of Electronic Literature and Interactive Digital Narratives R. Lyle Skains vi

209

Contents

17 Collaborative Fiction Writing Off- and Online: Toward a Genealogy Isabell Klaiber

221

18 Italian Net Poetry: Caterina Davinio’s Creative Experimentation (1992–2009) 233 Emanuela Patti 19 Digital Editions: Rethinking How We Preserve Literary Correspondences 244 Lisa Gee 20 Literary Games, Walking Simulators and the New Wave of Digital Fiction 255 James O’Sullivan 21 Comics are a Medium, or, Learning from Hicksville 268 Stephanie Burt and Emmy Waldman PART IV

Markets, Economies, Industries

283

22 Producing Chinese Web-Based Literature: The ‘Qidian Model’ Yanjun Shao

285

23 Independent Publishing in a Post-Digital World: Creative Campaigns and Promotional Opportunities Anna Kiernan

299

24 Readers, Markets and a Packet of Literary Media, Please: Efferent Readers and Their Ordering of a New Economics Simon Frost

311

25 Merchants of Culture? The Value of UK Bookshops Samantha J. Rayner 26 Literary Pilgrimages for Play and Profit: Intersections of Reading, Space and Commodification in Contemporary Japan Andrew T. Kamei-Dyche

324

337

27 Contemporary Women’s Writing and the Media Ecologies of Neoliberal Britain 350 Megan Henesy

vii

Contents

28 Capturing the Imagination: Literary Expression, Participatory Culture and Digital Enclosure David M. Meurer

359

29 Many Gates with a Single Keeper: How Amazon Incentives Shape Novels in the Twenty-first Century Laura Dietz

371

30 Literary Festivals and the Media Alexandra Dane

385

PART V

Audiences, Engagement, Environments

397

31 Reading Digital Fiction and the Language of Immersion Alice Bell

399

32 Contemporary Critical Bibliotherapy and Its Uses in Creative, Digital-Born Body Image Interventions Karuna Nair, Astrid Ensslin, Carla Rice, Sarah Riley, Christine Wilks, Hannah Fowlie, Lauren Munro and Megan Perram 33 Literary Bundles: Bodies, Media and Redefining Indigenous Literatures Kateryna Barnes and Trudy Cardinal 34 Postcolonial Videogame Paratexts: Replaying the Minor and the Subaltern from the Fringes Souvik Mukherjee

412

427

439

35 Keep Reading and Carry On: Mediated Reading During COVID-19 Stevie Marsden

452

36 ‘Doing’ Literary Reading Online: The Case of BookTube Dorothee Birke

468

37 Sociality and Seriality in Digital Reading: Two Extra Memos for this Millennium 479 Federico Pianzola 38 Immersive Theatre and Live Cinema: An Aesthetic of the In-between Carina E. I. Westling

viii

490

Contents

39 Live Action Role Playing and Engagement with Literature Sara Bjärstorp and Petra Ragnerstam

502

40 Netflix Interactive Films and Gamebooks George Cox

513

41 The Dream of Interactivity in Children’s Literary Media María Goicoechea de Jorge

524

Afterword 538 Julie Rak

Index 547

ix

CONTRIBUTORS

Kateryna Barnes (Ukrainian-Haudenosaunee) is a graduate student in Digital Humanities at the University of Alberta. Alice Bell is Professor of English Language and Literature at Sheffield Hallam University (UK). Her main publications include Digital Fiction and the Unnatural (2021, co-authored with Ensslin), Analyzing Digital Fiction (2014, co-edited with Ensslin and Rustad), Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology (2019, co-edited with Ryan) and Style and Response (2021, co-edited with Browse, Gibbons, and Peplow). Dorothee Birke is Professor of Anglophone Literatures at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Her research interests include the history of novel reading as a cultural practice, narrative theory, and online reading culture. She has published in journals such as Poetics Today, Style, and Narrative, and her monographs include Writing the Reader: Configurations of a Cultural Practice in the English Novel (2016). Sara Bjärstorp is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Malmö University, Sweden. She has written on canon debates, the rise of modern horror and representations of the city. She is currently studying the embodiment of literature in contemporary cultural practices. Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard University. Her twelve books of poetry and literary criticism include After Callimachus (Princeton UP 2020) and Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How To Read Poems (Basic 2019), and her essays, articles and reviews about comics, poetry, science fiction, and LGBTQ+ identities have appeared in American Literary History, Boston Review, College Literature, Contemporary Literature, the London Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, and other journals in Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States. Natalie Burton is a PhD student at The Open University. Her research is interdisciplinary, focusing on the ways in which poetry and music inform issues of structure in English song cycles of the twentieth century.

x

Contributors

Trudy Cardinal (Cree-Métis) is an Associate Professor of Elementary Education at the University of Alberta. Jim Collins is Professor of Film, Television, and Digital Critical Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2010). George Cox completed his PhD in American Studies at the University of Nottingham, funded by the Midlands3Cities Doctoral Training Partnership. His project, Platformalism: Finding the Forms of Platform Literature, uncovers the print predecessors of platform-based literary media, including Twitter fiction, Netflix interactive movies and YouTube performance poetry. His article ‘Archived Bards’, on YouTube poetry, was published in 2020 in C21. Alexandra Dane is a Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Melbourne and is the author of Gender and Prestige: Contemporary Australian Book Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Alexandra’s research focuses on contemporary literary culture and the relationship between formal and informal networks. Laura Dietz is an Associate Professor of Writing and Digital Publishing Studies in the Cambridge School of Creative Industries, Anglia Ruskin University, and editor of the Digital Literary Culture gathering of the Publishing and Book Culture series, Cambridge Elements (Cambridge University Press). Hywel Dix is Professor of English at Bournemouth University. He has published widely on authorial careers, critical theory and autofiction, notably in The Late-Career Novelist (2017), Autofiction in English (2018) and Career Construction Theory and Life Writing (2021). Jon Dovey is Professor of Screen Media at the University of the West of England, Bristol. His research into technology and cultural form has been published in new media, documentary and games studies. He was the founding Director of the Digital Cultures Research Centre at UWE Bristol. Astrid Ensslin is Professor of Digital Cultures and Communication at the University of Regensburg, Adjunct Professor of Digital Humanities and Game Studies at the University of Alberta, and a Research Associate of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen. Her most recent books include Pre-web Digital Publishing and the Lore of Electronic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and Digital Fiction and the Unnatural: Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis (with Alice Bell, Ohio State University Press, 2021). Malthe Stavning Erslev is a PhD fellow at the Department of Digital Design and Information Studies, Aarhus University. His current research concerns the mimesis of machine learning, and, in particular, the practice of bot-mimicry, that is, humans mimicking (ro)bots mimicking humans. Hannah Fowlie is a non-Indigenous woman who has worked side-by-side with her First Nations, Métis, and Inuit colleagues as the social worker at the Toronto District School Board’s Urban Indigenous Education Centre (UIEC). In 2012, she joined the inVISIBILITY: Indigenous in the city storytelling project with Dr. Susan Dion (Lenape/Pottawami), a Professor at York University, and Dr. Carla Rice, Research Chair and Founder of Revision xi

Contributors

Centre at Guelph University. More recently, she has been involved in several digital storytelling workshops with many different communities with the Revision Centre. Simon Frost is Principal Lecturer in English at Bournemouth University and Senior Editor for Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Literature. He was Director of Transnational Affairs and Executive Board member for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), 2009–2020. In addition to numerous articles on publishing, literature and reading studies, he has authored two monographs, including Reading, Wanting and Broken Economics (SUNY, 2021). Lisa Gee is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham for 50 per cent of her working life. She devotes the other 80 per cent [sic] to facilitating inclusive conversations online (video and text), editorial work, mentorship, and a range of speculative creative projects. Alison Gibbons is Reader in Contemporary Stylistics at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. She is the author of Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature (Routledge, 2012). She has published extensively on multimodal fiction and autofiction and is co-editor of numerous edited collections on stylistics and contemporary literature. María Goicoechea de Jorge is a Spanish researcher dedicated to exploring the changing role of the reader in digital culture. She currently teaches in the English Department at the University Complutense of Madrid. Her research interests include literary theory and ethnography. Marina Grishakova is Chair Professor of Literary Theory and Intermedial Studies at the University of Tartu, Estonia. Her most important publications include the monograph The Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov’s Fiction (2012) and co-edited volumes Intermediality and Storytelling (2010), Theoretical Schools and Circles in the 20th-century Humanities: Literary Theory, History, Philosophy (2015), Narrative Complexity: Cognition, Embodiment, Evolution (2019); The Gesamtkunstwerk as a Synergy of the Arts (2020). Mari Hatavara is Professor of Finnish Literature and director of Narrare. Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies at Tampere University, Finland. Her research interests include interdisciplinary narrative theory and analysis, fictionality studies, intermediality and the poetics of historical fiction and metafiction. Megan Henesy is a Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture and Communication at Bournemouth University. She completed a PhD in 2017 at Southampton University, with a thesis that explored neoliberal counternarratives in contemporary British women’s writing. Other areas of research include TV, film and music. Matti Hyvärinen is a sociologist and a Research Director at Tampere University. He has studied the conceptual history of narrative, narrative turns and counternarratives. He serves as an Editorial Board member in Narrative Inquiry and Narrative works. Elin Ivansson is a PhD Candidate in English Literature at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Her dissertation, ‘Archival Fiction: Archival Poetics in American Multimodal Literature’, xii

Contributors

explores the archival turn in multimodal literature through the lens of multimodal stylistics, cognitive stylistics, and narratology. Andrew T. Kamei-Dyche is an Associate Professor in the School of Global Studies and Collaboration at Aoyama Gakuin University. A scholar of Japanese book history and print culture, his publications include English and Japanese works on publishers, bookstores, and reading. Anna Kiernan is Programme Director of the MA Creativity at the University of Exeter and Publisher at The Literary Platform. Her practice-based research centres on writing culture and cultural value, contemporary book publishing and cultures of criticism and curation online. Isabell Klaiber is an Associate Professor of American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany. She is the author of a study on gender-based conceptualisations of the artist in 19th-century American narrative fiction (Gender und Genie: Künstlerkonzeptionen in der amerikanischen Erzählliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts, 2004) and the co-editor of essay collections on cultural iconicity and on short literary forms. She has also published on collaborative fiction writing and narrative co-construction off- and online and on real and implied multiple authorship. Her most recent project is ‘Shared Minds: Collaborative Fiction in the U.S. from the 19th Century to Online Writing Projects’. Marina Lambrou is Associate Professor in English Language and Linguistics at Kingston University, UK. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Literary Semantics and a former Chair of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA). She has published widely in literary and non-literary stylistics, personal and trauma narratives, disnarration and the counterfactual, and media discourses. She is the author of Disnarration and the Unmentioned in Fact and Fiction (Palgrave, 2019); editor of Narrative Retellings: Stylistic Approaches (Bloomsbury, 2021); co-author of Language and Media (with Alan Durant, Routledge, 2009); and co-editor of Contemporary Stylistics (with Peter Stockwell, Bloomsbury, 2007). Stevie Marsden is a Lecturer in Publishing at Edinburgh Napier University. Their first monograph, Prizing Scottish Literature: A Cultural History of the Saltire Society Literary Awards, was published in 2021. Their research interests include literary awards, celebrities and book culture, and the publishing industry in the UK. David M. Meurer conducts research into literary production practices and narrative cultural expression in the networked media ecology. Specific areas of focus include participatory digital narratives, electronic literature as a counter-strategy to data-driven platform business models, and digital archives. His work has appeared in Paradoxa, Dichtung Digital, and in several edited collections. He teaches courses in theoretical and applied approaches to digital and social media in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. Jarmila Mildorf is a Senior Lecturer for English Literature at Paderborn University. Her research interests are in socionarratology, audionarratology, radio drama, dialogue studies and literature and medicine. She has recently published Life Storying in Oral History: Fictional Contamination and Literary Complexity (2023) and is co-editor of the book series Narratives and Mental Health. xiii

Contributors

Souvik Mukherjee is Assistant Professor in Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta, India. His research examines the narrative and the literary through the emerging discourse of videogames as storytelling media and his interests include a broad spectrum of topics in Games Studies, ranging from postcolonialism, identity and temporality in videogames and boardgames to the videogame industry in South-East Asia. He is the author of three monographs, Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books (Palgrave Macmillan 2015), Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back (Springer UK 2017) and Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent: Development, Culture(s) and Representations (Bloomsbury India 2022) and is currently working on a book project on Indian board games and colonialism. Lauren Munro is a PhD candidate in the Community Psychology program at Wilfrid Laurier University. She is a limited-term faculty member in the School of Disability Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University and a fat activist, artist, and writer. She has been involved in a wide array of projects focused on the health and well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer communities, body diversity and weight stigma, disability justice in arts-based research, transformative approaches to mental health, sexual health service access for women with psychiatric disabilities, and issues related to sexual health and HIV vulnerability. Jaron Murphy is Principal Academic in Communication, Journalism and Literature at Bournemouth University. In 2018, he was named among the most respected journalists in the UK and Ireland following research by Cardiff University. He holds a DPhil in Literature from the University of Oxford. Simone Murray is Associate Professor in Literary Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. Her books include Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics (2004), The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation (2012), The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era (2018) and Introduction to Contemporary Print Culture: Books as Media (2021). Karuna Nair is a PhD candidate in the Clinical Psychology program at the Australian National University. Her previous research focused on emotion regulation and emotional awareness and she received the Australian Psychology Society Prize and Harry L. Fowler Prize for her thesis in 2021. Her current research examines the psychological impacts of the body positivity movement on social media, with a particular focus on what types of messages are most effective. Karuna received a scholarship to complete an international research internship at the University of Alberta in 2020 to work as part of the ‘Writing New Bodies’ project. James O’Sullivan lectures in the Department of Digital Humanities at University College Cork. He is the author of Towards a Digital Poetics (Palgrave Macmillan 2019) and has edited several collections, including The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities (Bloomsbury 2023) and Reading Modernism with Machines (Palgrave Macmillan 2016). He is the Irish Principal Investigator for the C21 Editions project, an international collaboration jointly funded by the Irish Research Council (IRC) and Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

xiv

Contributors

Emanuela Patti is a Lecturer in Italian at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Opera aperta: Italian Electronic Literature from the 1960s to the Present (Peter Lang, 2022), as well as edited volumes on experimental narratives and digital storytelling. Megan Perram (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. Her research centres on the experiences of women and nonbinary individuals with hyperandrogenism by exploring innovative digital tools for writing illness narratives. Megan is a 2021 SSHRC Doctoral Fellow and recipient of the President’s Doctoral Prize of Distinction. She has twice won the Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship, and was also awarded the Joan Shore Memorial Scholarship in Graduate Studies. She received the Government of Alberta’s Persons Case Scholarship in both 2017 and 2020. Federico Pianzola is Assistant Professor in Computational Humanities at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. He uses qualitative and quantitative methods to study reader response and assess the influence of digital media on the evolution of fiction. Kate Pullinger’s works include the Governor General’s Award-winning novel The Mistress of Nothing (2009), Forest Green (2020), and the smartphone fiction, Breathe (2018). She is Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media at Bath Spa University, UK. Petra Ragnerstam is a Senior Lecturer at Malmö University, Sweden. She has previously written on literary, feminist modernism and on voice in 20th-century American drama. She is currently studying the embodiment of literature in contemporary cultural practices. Julie Rak is Professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Her books include False Summit: Gender in Mountaineering Nonfiction (2021), Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market (2013) and Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse (2004). She is the editor of the Identities volume of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory (2021) and the collection Autobiography in Canada (2005). Her latest book is The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography (2022), co-written with Sonja Boon, Laurie McNeill and Candida Rifkind. Samantha J. Rayner is Professor of Publishing and Book Cultures in the Department of Information Studies, and Vice Dean Wellbeing in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at University College, London. She is also the General Editor for the Cambridge University Press Elements series on Publishing and Book Culture, and a co-Director of the Bookselling Research Network. Carla Rice is Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Guelph. She is the founder of the ReVision Centre for Art and Social Justice, a research creation centre with a mandate to use arts-informed methods to foster inclusive communities, well-being, equity, and justice within Canada and beyond. Her current research investigates the power of story to creatively re-imagine the human, including through decolonising education, speaking back to ableism, weightism, sexism, and cisheteronormativity in healthcare and other systems,

xv

Contributors

experimenting with/enacting accessible practices in material and virtual spaces, and cultivating non-normative arts in Canada. Sarah Riley is a Professor in Critical Health Psychology at Massey University, New Zealand, where she leads a Masters in Health Psychology programme. Her work includes the co-authored books Critical Bodies (Palgrave, 2008), Technologies of Sexiness (Oxford University Press, USA, 2014), Postfeminism and Health (Routledge, 2018) and Postfeminism & Body Image (Routledge, 2022). With Adrienne Evans, she is currently writing Digital Feeling (Palgrave). Twitter @sarahrileybrown. Simon Rowberry is Lecturer in Publishing at University College London. He researches the history of digital publishing. MIT Press published his first book, Four Shades of Gray: The Amazon Kindle Platform in Spring 2022. Matthew Rubery is Professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book (2016) and editor of Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies (2011). Yanjun Shao is a Professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Peking University. She researches Internet literature, and is the author of “The Slant Literature Field – on the Marketization of Contemporary Literature Production Mechanism” (2003), “Literature Transfer in the Era of Internet” (2015), “’New Grammar in Internet Literature” (2021). Martin P. Sheehan is Professor of German at Tennessee Tech University, where he researches visual culture, social network analysis, and disability in German drama. R. Lyle Skains researches interactive digital narratives for health and science communication, conducting practice-based research into writing, reading/playing, and publishing digital and transmedia narratives. She is currently a Principal Academic in Health and Science Communication at Bournemouth University. Emmy Waldman is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Tech. Having earned her PhD from Harvard in 2020, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard and a Lecturer in English at Bournemouth University. Her research and writing has appeared in New Literary History, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis, COVID-19 and Creative Resilience, and Keywords and Keyimages in Graphic Medicine, among others. Alexis Weedon is Professor of Publishing Studies at the University of Bedfordshire and UNESCO chairholder in new media forms of the book. She is author of The Origins of Transmedia Storytelling in Early Twentieth Century Adaptation (2021) and co-founder of the new media journal Convergence. Carina E. I. Westling is a Senior Lecturer in Cross-Platform Media at Bournemouth University. She researches digital media and cultures, specialising in the tensions and opportunities formed between the technical, social and discursive aspects of multimedia environments and design for immersive, AR/VR and blended applications. Her monograph Immersion

xvi

Contributors

and Participation in Punchdrunk’s Theatrical Worlds (2020) introduces a theoretical framework for interrogating the materiality of audience agency in virtual and physical designed spaces. Christine Wilks is a digital writer, artist, developer of interactive narratives and playable media, and practice-based researcher. She has a PhD in digital writing from Bath Spa University and is the digital fiction writer-designer-developer for the SSHRC-funded ‘Writing New Bodies’ project. Her digital fiction, Underbelly, won the New Media Writing Prize 2010 and the MaMSIE Digital Media Competition 2011. Her creative work is published in online journals, exhibitions and anthologies, including the ‘Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2’ and the ‘ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature’, and has been presented internationally at festivals, exhibitions and conferences. William Wright teaches creative writing in Reinhardt University’s MFA program and has authored or edited over twenty volumes of poetry, most recently Grass Chapels: New & Selected Poems.

xvii

FOREWORD Jim Collins

What I hope to accomplish in the Foreword is to set the table for this Companion. Since I plan on teaching it as soon as it becomes available, I thought it might be useful to provide a sense of context the way I would for my students, explaining what the term ‘literary media’ refers to and why this collection is so essential for understanding the writing, circulation and reading of literary texts in contemporary cultures. As the title suggests, it does indeed mean that literary texts which were once thought of as radically apart from mass media are now part of media culture. But the term involves more than focusing on new technologies and delivery systems. Taking the measure of literary media involves a far broader exploration of the entire architecture of participation in literary cultures, a line of inquiry that poses fundamental questions about the interplay between media industries, the materiality of the book, and the networks that connect readers to books, readers to readers, and readers to authors in unprecedented ways. The Introduction will cover in more depth the topic areas included in this Companion by detailing the various historical and theoretical contexts for the emergence of literary media. This volume will move the discussion beyond the realm of the Anglo-American/Eurocentric to be more inclusive of the work of non-Western, Indigenous and minoritised scholars and to be more representative of a broad range of cultures and languages. The editors of this Companion are far too modest to give themselves the credit they deserve for assembling a paradigm-shifting collection of essays. My main goal in this Foreword is to explain why this book is such a landmark contribution to the field. To accomplish that goal, I need to situate literary media studies, in very bold strokes, within the broader shifts that have occurred in cultural studies and digital studies over the past two decades. File this under the heading of first things before the first. Literary media studies, to a great extent, grew out of cultural studies but it also represented a significant recalibration of its theoretical agenda. What was initially referred to as ‘British Cultural Studies’ began to have a massive impact on film and television studies in the 1980s because it introduced critical paradigms that rejected so many of the presuppositions of both conservative and Marxian theories of ‘mass culture’ (Strinati 2000; Storey 2003). Critics from both ends of the political spectrum had demonised popular culture as inauthentic entertainment manufactured by the culture industries for mindless audiences duped into xviii

Foreword

false consciousness. But within this new framework, popular culture was reframed: no longer a shoddy replacement for the ‘folk cultures’ that preceded the advent of the industrial revolution – while it could be highly mediated, it also allowed for high degree of agency of the part of audience members who brought their own social experience to bear as texts were given meaning and values in reference to those experiences. The seminal work of media scholars such as Stuart Hall (1980), Dick Hebdige (1979), Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott (1987) redefined how popular phenomena worked by not only considering the ways in which texts were encoded by the culture industries but, just as importantly, how they were decoded by readers in reference to gender, class, nationality, sexual identity and other categories of identity formation. Yet while that body of work made popular culture worthy of study, the broader terrain of cultural production was still being mapped according to a cartography that left traditional taste hierarchies largely intact. The neglect of literary texts and literary culture was understandable since the initial theoretical agenda of cultural studies was to legitimise the study of cultural phenomena over and against elite cultural pleasures, and that agenda reaffirmed a fundamental bifurcation in which there was popular culture, and then there was literary culture which was somewhere off-screen, literally and metaphorically, tended to by scholars and critics charged with the care and maintenance of the legitimate arts. In the first phase of my teaching career, I was as guilty of relying on that map as much as anyone else. When I was teaching courses on contemporary Hollywood or the rise of quality serial television, I used cultural studies paradigms, focusing on the ways in which texts were given meaning and value as texts to be read, to use Tony Bennett’s (1987) phrase, in very particular ways depending on how they were circulated. By contrast, when I taught graduate seminars on postmodern narrative for the English department, I focused on the craft of literary authors such as Jeanette Winterson, Julian Barnes, Michael Ondaatje or Salman Rushdie or how those novels exemplified aspects of postmodern theory. We would talk at length about postmodern textuality but there was no serious consideration of how that textuality was shaped by the ways literary fiction was now being circulated – and profoundly revalued – within the heart of media culture which everyone knew was there, but which was somehow inadmissible as far as serious literary study was concerned. Those changes were getting increasingly harder to ignore. Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club was making titles such as Anna Karenina into global bestsellers and the publishing industry was turning literary bestsellers into a kind of category fiction, as carefully marketed for target audiences as any Hollywood film by Amazon and chain store booksellers. And Hollywood, or at least Miramax, appeared to be besotted with all things literary and created their own patented brand of cine-literary culture (Collins 2010). There is no better example of this convergence than Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992). In 2018, the novel was awarded the Golden Man Booker, a special one-off prize in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Booker Prize (all of the previous 51 winning titles since the Booker’s inception in 1969 were eligible). Ondaatje’s novel being awarded that prize signified, if one wanted to make such an argument, that it was the best literary novel published in English in the past fifty years. Was that recognition attributable to Ondaatje’s craft, or the fact that the film adaptation had become an Academy Award and BAFTA juggernaut in 1996? While examples like this are significant as reference points, making sense of the ways in which literary culture had become media culture required a far more expansive approach if the pink elephant in the room was finally going to be confronted (Collins 2010). Taking the measure of this new form of literary culture involved more than identifying changes in the publishing industry or new technologies and delivery systems for literary reading – it also xix

Foreword

required an expansive analysis of how the mediation of literary experiences changed both pleasures and players involved in literary cultures. Or to frame it in terms of Lisa Gitelman’s (2008) definition of a medium – literary media culture involved new delivery systems but also new protocols that defined how literary experiences were supposed to be enjoyed – most exuberantly – by mass audiences. That depended, at the most fundamental level, on recognising the multiplication of literary experiences, that the joys of literary reading were not restricted to the print-based private communion between author and reader in some sort of domestic inner sanctum. Taking stock of those changes required the construction of a kind of media ecology that could trace the interconnections between literary bestsellers, high-concept film adaptations, television book clubs, bookstore chains, library initiatives, and Amazon.com. That media ecology needed to address the ways in which reading experiences were now as social as they were solitary, as public as private, and as screen-based as they were print-based. And it also had to come to terms with another seismic change – that as the audiences for these literary pleasures were expanding, passionate reading had acquired its own legitimacy and no longer had to be thought of as less rewarding than close reading, an interpretive protocol that required a skillset provided only by the academy. Enjoying literary pleasures on your own terms became something everyone could most definitely try at home and getting the expertise needed to maximise those pleasures was merely a matter of knowing where to look for it. It also required the careful delineation of the disparate factors that animated this new literary culture. What was attributable to the culture industries’ determination to expand markets by mobilising algorithms and introducing new forms of literary media to diversify the product? What was attributable to more philanthropic factors such as adult literacy initiatives and the exuberance of fan communities that had no profit expectations? How did ‘the joy of reading’ become an ever more sophisticated advertising pitch yet simultaneously a declaration of genuine cultural pleasure made by an ever-larger population who now thought of themselves as readers? The ubiquity of digital media has only accelerated those changes over the course of the past decade but defining the impact of the digital on the literary requires another set of fine distinctions because not all literary media are necessarily digital, or at least not digital in the way that term was conceived in the 1990s by the academy. The Introduction and individual chapters in this Companion will trace the evolution of eliterature and ereading in greater detail so only a brief overview needs to be included here. The first wave of digital theory seemed to offer little that could be applied broadly to the study of contemporary literary cultures because it was restricted to either digital-born phenomena (e.g. hypertexts) or data-mining, the latter of which sadly became coterminous with ‘Digital Humanities’. Public discourse on digital culture, on the other hand, was not just of limited use – it was downright stultifying. The advent of the ebook led to the worst sort of either/or, that was then/this is now sort of oversimplifications. Far too much of the public discourse devoted to the impact of digital media on literary reading remained fixated on two themes: dire predictions about the future of the book, and endless debate about the ‘feel’ of the ereader in the hand of the reader. These predictions came in two stages: 1) ebooks are conquering the world – the traditional book is dead, followed by 2) the traditional book has survived the digital onslaught – the ebook is dead. Neither of these sweeping accounts was especially prescient, since wood pulp books were never in danger of obsolescence, and ebook sales exploded, then declined, but then rebounded during the ‘digital acceleration’ that occurred during the COVID pandemic. This acceleration also included very significant growth in audiobooks, a publishing phenomenon for the past decade which made smartphones – not ereaders – the preferred xx

Foreword

format for millions of readers. The materiality of the book should indeed be a central issue in literary media studies but the public discourse on that materiality stalled out on the ‘gestalt’ of the reading experience, i.e. whether an ebook in the hand could ever feel or even smell like a real book. That very limited way of framing the question of materiality failed to consider what else came in the box. The hand that holds that ebook also holds an ereader which, given its archive function, makes the ebook always already a library, and given its portal function, that hand also has the ability to access an endless variety of reading communities, as well as collaborative writing communities (see, for example, Ramdarshan Bold 2018; Masschelein and de Geest 2020). How textuality is impacted by materiality is then never simply a matter of new reading technologies because those technologies are embedded in intensely mediated reading cultures The edges of the book become elastic, as do the contours of literary culture, as the relationships between writers, readers and a host of intermediaries feed into the ways books are circulated and valued. The impact of the work of Henry Jenkins can hardly be overestimated in terms of how it demonstrated that digital culture involved more than hypertexts and data-mining – it was crucial for understanding how audiences made popular texts their own. In her seminal book The Digital Literary Sphere (2018) Simone Murray provided an invaluable new cartography for understanding that sphere, demonstrating how scholars might connect the dots between individual phenomena in order to develop a more intensive and extensive understanding of the interplay between digital technologies, the publishing industry, and reading practices. In Reading Beyond the Book (2013), Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo provide an expansive investigation of how reading depends on an ever-wider array of social practices by focusing on one central question – when the internet allows people to share the minutiae of their day to day life online, why do so many readers choose to share the details of their reading pleasure? What was ultimately most limiting about the traditional book vs ebook conversations, however, was that the binary oppositions that were insisted upon so fiercely failed to recognise the hybridisation of those reading cultures. The predictions concerning the obsolescence of the traditional book took for granted that writing, publishing and reading would all become subsumed into the digital, but the wood pulp codex has remained the format of choice for millions of readers. The readers who may insist on the sensory pleasures of wood pulp while reading now order their books online, get the ‘book talk’ online, stream adaptations of those books online, and find other like-minded readers online, as well as in the flesh in the endlessly sanctified small independent bookstores where the physicality of the site, the books and the communities who gather at those stores are anything but digital. Book Tok videos are a perfect example of that hybridity. They offer heartfelt, urgent recommendations about what to read and the vast majority feature the recommender holding that book out to the camera as if it were a sacred relic of their personal history, but that message is delivered digitally to smartphones in the hands of a global audience of readers with whom they have another kind of private conversation, the same hands that might eventually hold the book featured on-screen as a life-changing experience. Social and solitary pleasures of reading, and non-digital and digital delivery systems that enable those pleasures are fused together as screen culture and the long-promised benefits of reading become entirely interdependent. Bronwen Thomas, in her vitally important book, Literature and Social Media (2020), addresses exactly this kind of hybridity in her subtle analysis of the ways that different social platforms generate a variety of reading pleasures, contending that, the fascination with the materiality of the book, for example, can be understood as a response to the dematerialisation of reading on digital devices. xxi

Foreword

How and when something becomes literary media as opposed to a traditional book involves categorical and temporal questions. Comics and videogames are not always included in discussions of literary media in the way they will be in this volume. The Introduction will elaborate on why this inclusion is so essential. For example, when does Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel, Watchmen (1987) become a form of literary media? Julia Round’s groundbreaking essay on graphic fiction, ‘“Is it a Book?”: DC Vertigo and the Redefinition of Comics in the 1990s’ (2010) is especially relevant in this regard because she considers how graphic novels became books, specifically in the case of titles by Moore and Neil Gaiman which have been given the kind of critical scrutiny normally reserved for the most literary books. That same kind of categorical question has been framed in reference to quality serial television programs such as The Sopranos, The Wire, or Mad Men, which have been hailed as the most significant literary fiction of the 21st century, yet none of which are based on literary texts. The HBO adaptation of Watchmen (2021) complicates traditional categories still further because as a television sequel to a graphic novel that reflects on the history of racial prejudice in America in reference to the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921, it went on to win Emmy, Peabody, and Writers Guild awards as it became a fixture of ‘Black Lives Matter’ lists. What constitutes literariness in this case? The complexity of a text’s narrative universe and the interpretive work it requires? The sophisticated combination of racial history, science fiction, and quality TV? Or the copious amounts of critical prestige it has acquired? The vast majority of Alan Moore fans apparently continue to insist on reading the graphic novel in its original wood pulp format, but its ‘HBO-ification’ takes place on post-digital television and the conversation about the series’ racial politics is also largely online. At what point did it become literary media, or was it always literary media? The same kind of categorical redefinition of the literary has been investigated by Tamer Thabet and Tim Lanzendörfer (2020) and by Astrid Ensslin in her benchmark study, Literary Gaming (2014). How changes in the publishing industry have been impacted by digital technologies has generated a vast bibliography unto itself, headed by the meticulous studies undertaken by John Thompson (2012), Ann Steiner (2018) and Claire Squires (2020). Here too the hybridisation of the digital and traditional bookselling strategies become ever more apparent in the way that Amazon tries to mobilise both models. The impact of data analytics on online bookselling in what has come to be called algorithm culture has been detailed by Jonathan Cohn (2018) and Ted Striphas (2015). Amazon has tried to harness the power of that digital data as well as ‘word of mouth’ recommendations. I refer here not just to the recent introduction of ‘brick and mortar’ stores but their attempt to harness both digital and ‘real life’ word of mouth recommendations from readers, a point made most vividly by their acquisition of Goodreads in 2013. That acquisition caused an uproar at the time, leading thousands of members to withdraw their membership of Goodreads but the website statement made by founder Otis Chandler describes another kind of hybridisation at work when he assures visitors to the site that they can rely on their recommendations because they come from community members and a ‘recommendation engine that analyses 20 billion data points to give suggestions tailored to your literary tastes’. Amazon’s cultivation of fan-generated fiction in the form of Kindle Worlds also epitomises this attempt to incorporate the discourse of grassroots, online collaborative participation in literary cultures, thereby adopting a simultaneous top-down and bottom-up phenomenon that Jenkins (2007) insists is the hallmark of convergence cultures. Publishing industry studies will need to account for the ways in which Amazon has become a ‘one-stop shop’ for all literary pleasures, from book sales, to Kindle ereaders, to fan-fics, to reading communities, etc. xxii

Foreword

Investigating how literary media works in a digital context necessary means coming to terms with that messy hybridity and how the diversification of its endlessly mutating forms impacts how people write, read, sell, listen to, play, and evaluate literary experiences – which is exactly what the essays in this Companion investigate so compellingly. Literary experiences began to multiply in the 1990s and the contributors to this Companion demonstrate that passionate readers now take their pleasure in ever-wider networks spread across a range of media formats. To paraphrase Steven Dinehardt’s often-quoted formulation, the reader who has been the object of so much critical attention since the rise of cultural studies and reader-response theory now needs to be thought of as a reader-viewer-listener-player-curator, particularly when equipped with a digital device that enables the change from one role to the other to be virtually instantaneous. What sort of transmediation is operative in this context demands closer scrutiny. That term is normally used to describe the way media conglomerates coordinate the release and cross-merchandising of the texts in a given franchise, but how do individuals transmediate their own literary experiences? (Collins 2017). The most productive way to conceive of literary media culture, then, is to conceive of it not as a cluster of distinct media phenomena but in terms of arcs which might involve disparate forms of participation from reading, to watching, to collaborating on network texts, to touristic travel adventures, to list-making, to role-playing, to self-publishing, to competitive annotation, etc. That sort of transmediation is predicated on a kind of curatorial agency in which literary pleasures depend on selection and arrangement as individuals move across media platforms and configure their own passionate literary experiences accordingly. Divergent notions of curation have been investigated by Collins (2020), Thomas in regard to social media (2020), Thomas and Round (2017), Bloyd-Pesjskin and Whitaker in regard to how 20th-century magazines created reading communities (2021), Muntenau in reference to Tumblr (2018) and Murray in her analysis of literary festivals (2018). What remains to be explored is how readers curate the curation, how they assemble, to borrow a term from museum studies, their own hangs in which they arrange and configure their own literary pleasures according to a variety of different itineraries. When I started writing this piece, I decided to google ‘what is a Foreword?’ and I headed to MasterClass.com, which I figured the contributors would approve of since it seemed so commensurate with the goals of this Companion. In search of literary expertise online, there, among the celebrity literary authors, (all offering instruction about how to write for a not so modest fee) I learned that a Foreword ‘lends credibility to the book’ by praising the author or the work. I thought this definition was remarkably apropos because what I find most praiseworthy about this collection is the way that the contributors give credibility to the forms of literary media they explore by demonstrating how those forms insist on their own value in literary cultures where the solitary reading of print-based texts in search of private conversation with authors is no longer the only way to participate in those cultures. In aggregate, these case studies provide an amazing composite tableau of the ever-wider variety of forms of participation that are now being enjoyed so exuberantly, the ways they are being marketed so successfully, and the delights of curating a range of literary experiences in pursuit of both the most traditional and the most contemporary forms of literary pleasure.

References Bennett, T. and Woollacott, J. (1987) Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero, New York: Routledge.

xxiii

Foreword Bloyd-Pesjskin, S. and Whitaker, C. (2021) Curating Culture: How Twentieth-Century Magazines Influenced America, New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Cohn, J. (2018) The Burden of Choice: Recommendations, Subversion, and Algorithmic Culture, New York: Rutgers University Press. Collins, J. (2010) Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture, Durham: Duke University Press. Collins, J. (2017) “Transmediaphilia, World Building, and the Pleasures of the Personal Digital Archive” in World Building. Transmedia, Fans, Industries, eds. Marta Boni and Matt Hills, Amsterdam University Press. pp. 362–376. Collins, J. (2020) “Locating the Goods in Contemporary Literary Culture: Between the Book and The Archive” in The Novel as Network: Form, Ideas, Commodities, ed. Tim Lanzendörfer and Corinna Norrick-Ruhl, New York: Palgrave Press, New Direction in Book History. pp. 211–227. Ensslin, A. (2014) Literary Gaming, Cambridge: The MIT Press. Fuller, D. and Rehberg Sedo, D. (2013) Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture, New York: Routledge. Gitelman, L. (2008) Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hall, S. (1980) “Encoding and Decoding” in Culture, Media, Language, ed. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Tillis, London: Hutchinson, pp. 128–138. Hebdige, D. (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style, New York: Routledge. Jenkins, H. (2007) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University Press Masschelein, A. and de Geest, D. (2020) Writing Manuals for the Masses: The Rise of the Literary Advice Industry from Quill to Keyboard, ed. New York: Palgrave Press, New Directions in Book History. Moore, A. and Gibbons, D. (1987) Watchmen, New York: DC Comics. Munteanu, D. G. (2018) “Improbable Curators: Analyzing Nostalgia, Authorship and Audience on Tumblr Microblogs” in Collaborative Production in the Creative Industries, eds. James Graham and Alessandro Gandini, London: University of Westminster Press, pp. 126–157. Murray, S. (2018) The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ramdarshan Bold, M. (2018) “The Return of the Social Author: Negotiating Authority and Influence on Wattpad” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media, Vol. 24(2) pp. 117–135. Round, J. (2010) “‘Is this a Book?’ DC Vertigo and the Redefinition of Comics in the 1990s” in The Rise of the American Comics Artist, eds. Paul Williams and James Lyons, Jacksonville: University of Mississippi Press, pp. 14–30. Squires, C. (2020) “Sensing the Novel/Seeing the Book/selling the Goods” in The Novel as Network by Tim Lanzendörfer and Corrina Norrick-Ruhl, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 251–270. Steiner, A. (2018) “The Global Book: Micropublsihing, Conglomerate Production, and Digital” Market Structures Publishing Research Quarterly Vol. 34(1), pp. 118–132. Striphas, T. (2015) “Algorithmic Culture” European Cultural Studies, Vol. 18(4–5). Strinati, D. (2000) An Introduction to Studying Popular Culture, New York: Routledge. Storey, J. (2003) Inventing Popular Culture, New York: Blackwell. Thabet, T. and Lanzendörfer, T. (2020) “The Video Game Novel: StoryWorld and Narratives. Novelization, and The Contemporary Novel-Network” in The Novel as Network by Tim Lanzendörfer and Corrina Norrick-Ruhl, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 181–201. Thomas, B. (2020) Literature and Social Media, New York: Routledge. Thomas, B. and Round, J. (2017) “Moderating readers and reading online” Language and Literature Vol. 25(3), pp. 239–253. Thompson, J. (2012) Merchants of Culture, London: Plume.

xxiv

INTRODUCTION What is Literary Media? Astrid Ensslin, Julia Round and Bronwen Thomas

It has been over a decade since, in her groundbreaking book Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008), N. Katherine Hayles challenged the rigid, exclusive and somewhat obsolete institutional and ideological connotations of the term ‘literature’ in a fast-transforming media landscape. She called for a ‘broader category that encompasses the kind of creative … artworks that interrogate the histories, contexts and productions of literature, including as well the verbal art of literature proper’ (45). This proposed category, called ‘the literary’, reflects the seismic impact of contemporary digitalisation and the increasing cross-pollination of literary studies with such diverse disciplines and movements as media and cultural studies, social, environmental and computational sciences, pop, fan and participatory cultures. This volume situates its exploration of ‘literary media’ against this backdrop, asking what happens when we expand the horizons of what can be considered literary still further. Whereas Hayles’ concept still posits the literary as a distinct category, and confines itself to works that define themselves as creative/artistic, our definition of ‘literary media’ includes popular cultural forms and media and cultural texts that do not necessarily overtly align themselves to the literary. This may also include paratextual materials, and an approach and method that includes discussion of specific aspects of the socio-political, industry and commercial contexts, as well as analysis of specific texts or works. Fundamentally, instead of keeping the literary and the media as separate categories, we focus on an interdependence of the literary and its diverse forms of mediation that is increasingly apparent in this era of global late capitalism. The term ‘literary media’ for us therefore far exceeds notions and connotations of ‘art’ and unsettles the continuing privileging of ‘literature proper’. Our formulation derives from and has particular resonance for scholars working at the intersection of literary and media studies and reflects wider shifts in both institutional structures and the long established boundaries or silos of traditional academic disciplines. A number of recent works (Barekat et al. 2017; Murray 2018) examine how electronic and digital cultures, especially, have transformed literature both in terms of the kinds of texts produced but also more broadly with regards to how those texts are accessed, circulated and evaluated. As Murray has argued, digitalisation and, in particular, debates about the ‘future of the book’ have also shown the need for sociological approaches alongside the text-based, 1 DOI: 10.4324/9781003119739-1

Astrid Ensslin et al.

close reading of traditional literary criticism. Rather than a focus on texts in isolation, literary media instead examines media ecosystems or ecologies that are shaped by a ‘convergence of literary, visual, and material cultures’ (Collins 2010: 8). As a consequence, networks, infrastructures and platforms themselves become the focus of attention as much as the works or texts produced on and by them. The interdependence of the literary and its media is both brought to the fore by digital culture, and retrospectively thrown into relief as an historical phenomenon, understudied outside of book history and historically-informed sociologies of literature. In practical terms, this can mean revisiting ‘old media’ and specific cultural texts through the lens of the literary, and explicitly addressing how our concept of the literary often elides or marginalises mediation and materiality in the attempt to lay claim to the kinds of universalising that result in maintaining the literary as a separate, elite category. It also highlights hitherto under-­ acknowledged tensions between literature and popular culture, as adaptations and transmedia franchises redraw boundaries between media forms and platforms, and problematise the privileging of the literary. For many theorists (e.g. Collins 2010), such a development is to be celebrated as a means of reconnecting literature with broader-based audiences and enabling renewed forms of participation from those previously marginalised or excluded. It means that the intimate relationship between literature and media being reconfigured by online digital technologies needs to be examined for both continuities and radical breaks with the past. Most studies relevant to literary media look beyond traditional literary criticism to media and cultural studies, cultural sociology, and book history to better understand how the transformation is taking place with respect to cultural and creative industries, shifts in cultural authority, and empowerment of readers and audiences. Typically, they look beyond the close analysis of text to explore literature as a social as much as a private activity, and to consider the role of paratextual and extratextual materials in shaping what we understand by the literary. To some extent, this results from the very ways in which ‘media’ are understood by these disciplines – for example, as both something that can be defined in terms of formal and material characteristics, but also in terms of what they ‘do’ (Rippl 2015), or their economic and social functions (Bolter and Grusin 2000). According to these views of ‘media’ they must always be conceived relationally: as ‘old media’ respond to the new, and ‘new media’ position themselves against the ‘old’, with the cultural work of recognising what counts as media seen as ongoing and subject to change. This is especially important as we increasingly recognise and challenge the ways in which media of expression for some groups and individuals may be excluded or marginalised. This volume of essays sets out new ways of approaching and analysing literary media across a range of genres, styles and materialities, including and transcending conventional notions of fiction, poetry, performance, graphic arts, creative nonfiction, paratextual and extratextual material. Moreover, whereas many studies and cognate terms (as discussed further below) focus their attention on avant garde or experimental works, this volume and our concept of literary media is intended to recognise its presence all around us: encompassing and bridging popular cultural as well as classical and canonical literary forms and practices. Our authors include writers and practitioners with experience of working in the cultural industries and engaging with readers and audiences from a range of cultural backgrounds. Their work explores what literary media is; who participates in it; where we might encounter it; how it can work; and why we might want to study it. Inclusive in its approach, this Companion includes contributions that extend these discussions in terms of both geography and history and which engage with a wide range of theoretical perspectives and methods. 2

Introduction

Aims of This Book At this time there is no single volume that explores the concept of literary media, so this Companion will be a unique resource and, it is hoped, a landmark text that will define this emergent field. Each of the chapters has been specially commissioned for this volume: providing fresh and original insights into the wide range of literary media practices represented. This Companion is aimed at scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including literature, media and cultural studies, library and information science, new media studies and book history. Discussions around the intersections between literature and media are increasingly informing both teaching and research in these areas, and literature is increasingly multi and transmedial – so much so that its long-lasting alignment with print is fast dissolving. In addition to challenging the print and narrative dominated discussions of many existing studies even of emerging electronic and digital literatures, we set out to include diverse examples of performance, live events, graphic arts, games, creative nonfiction and poetry. The term literary media is new, and this volume will help to disseminate and establish it through the examination of specific examples of literary media to define, redefine and interrogate existing and emerging understandings of what the term may mean for theorists, educators and practitioners.

Social/Cultural Context Studies of literature that engage with contemporary media and the digital revolution often tend to focus on technological change and new affordances, and to treat literature and ‘other’ media as distinct or even conflicting. Two notable exceptions to this are Collins’s Bring on the Books For Everybody (2010) and Murray’s The Adaptation Industry (2012). Both treat literature and media as co-existent and mutually influential, and both also engage in depth with trends and wider shifts in the cultural industries. Both studies also embrace popular cultural forms within their analysis of the literary and are unafraid to discuss how literary texts are bought, sold and promoted in the cultural marketplace. Both writers are a major influence on how we understand and define ‘literary media’ and contribute to ongoing discussion with a foreword (Collins) and chapter (Murray) for this volume. Another key influence of these studies is the increased focus on reception, again not rigidly distinguishing between readers, audiences and (to a lesser extent) users, but demonstrating how in the contemporary cultural marketplace engagement with cultural texts crosses media as well as notions of taste, modes of reception and socio-economic backgrounds. Murray’s book also concerns itself with what she calls the ‘feedback effect’ – how film adaptations but also associated promotions and merchandising such as book covers may enhance sales of the adapted work of literature, and how fans of the book and/or the adaptation may go on to produce their own unauthorised adaptations in the form of fanfiction, fan art etc. Similarly, Gray has argued persuasively that contemporary theorists of cultural texts need to engage with and take seriously paratextual materials that have previously been too easily dismissed as only of significance to marketers or brand managers. Instead, he demonstrates through his analysis of specific case studies ‘the significant primary power that these supposedly secondary intertexts hold over consumption’ (2008: 33), expanding what comes under the remit of the cultural experience to include discussion of trailers, posters, author and cast interviews and the like. Connecting these groundbreaking studies is a desire to challenge accepted wisdom and orthodoxies about prevailing taste cultures. In the case of Murray, this is made with direct 3

Astrid Ensslin et al.

reference to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, whereas for Collins it is primarily the phenomenon of postmodernism that has reconnected literature with a broad-based audience, resulting in a situation whereby ‘who reads it, how it is read, where it is read, and even what is read under the heading of literary fiction have all changed in fundamental ways’ (2010: 4). The essays in this volume all adopt this more sociological approach to the literary, reflecting the impact of new technologies and the shift towards what Collins calls ‘image-based’ content, and an understanding of literary culture as ‘an exuberantly social activity’ (2010: 4). As many theorists have demonstrated, this new sociality and, for some, democratisation of literary cultures have been accelerated by the affordances of the digital and online cultures, and the emergence of ‘migratory’ media audiences willing to ‘go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experience they want’ (Jenkins 2006: 2). For book and cultural historians the paradigm shift away from traditional literary criticism’s focus on reading as an intensely private experience is more a necessary historical check to the relatively recent dominance of this notion set against the short span of print cultures in human history. Thus while social media and Internet forums may have massively magnified the scale and speed of feedback, audience participation and interaction, there are plenty of historical antecedents for many of these activities (see Weedon, this volume). But alongside the greater sense of empowerment that activity on this scale brings, digital technologies and online cultures have also brought greater opportunities for creative expression, often arising out of what may begin as readerly engagement. In turn, this has led to debates and discussions about the fragility of divisions between production and consumption (as in the prosumer), writing and reading (the wreader) and concern that the very notion of ‘the audience’ as a predictable mass of beings no longer has any validity. Alongside discussion of whether we are now ‘post-audience’, questions have also been raised about the continued relevance of notions such as spectatorship (implying a certain passivity) and even the whole notion of the ‘screen’ as something which materially divides or separates people rather than bringing them together in shared activities in shared spaces (see Fizek 2022). Thus in her discussion of the ‘post-transmedia, post-platform specific and platform-agnostic age’, Atkinson (2014: 6) rightly suggested – almost ten years ago – that the mono-media forms and media-specific boundaries of book, film, and game are things of the past. The rise of fan studies as a discipline has led to fresh reconceptualisations of the literary, and consideration of the ways in which traditional and evolving reading practices may be labelled as ‘fannish’ (Thomas 2011). Creative engagement and play with literary sources has exploded with the advent of online forums and platforms. This engagement may take the form of written stories of varying lengths, but also encompasses fan art and fan videos (vids), while the sources drawn upon also cross media and modalities as fans draw on materials from books, films, video games etc. (see Shao, this volume). As with the debates surrounding contemporary adaptations of literary texts, fan engagement often brings into question notions of ‘before’ and ‘after’, ‘old’ and ‘new’ media challenging as they do chronologies and hierarchies. Moreover, in fan cultures the literary must be understood as part of a ‘multimedia stew’ (Gardner 2008) both from the point of view of the pre-existing texts that fans choose to draw inspiration from, and also from the point of view of the means by which they choose to express themselves (Thomas 2010). The chapters in this volume are wide-ranging, drawing on approaches and concepts from book history and its focus on modes of production, reception and material cultures, on media and cultural studies’ use of quantitative and ethnographic methods, and on literary linguistics’ reliance on empirical data. But there are many other movements and influences shaping 4

Introduction

our emerging understanding of what literary media can and might mean. For example, ­chapters on autofiction (Dix, Ivansson and Gibbons) and real-world narratives (Hatavara et al.) draw on life writing and investigate its challenges to artificial boundaries between the real and the fictional (or between daily, lived experience and the literary), while contemporary narratology and new materialism constantly question what counts as ‘experience’ and who or what can record or relay that experience to others. In turn, this connects with important work emerging to decolonise existing disciplines and modes of practice, drawing on non-Western and Indigenous worldviews and mythologies (Barnes and Cardinal, Mukherjee, Burt and Waldman), queering heteronormativity, or reflecting critically on how we speak of or to disability, animals and the non-human. Computational approaches to literature and the digital humanities have also had a profound impact on the study of literature. The practice of ‘distant reading’ employs the latest computational tools to mine information from literary texts and corpora in ways that would be impossible for individual or even teams of readers. In some cases, the methods have already established antecedents for example in corpus linguistics or information studies but, as some of the chapters in this volume demonstrate (Pianzola; Gee), the applications and implications of some of these new methods are only now starting to be realised. Likewise, with the emergence of electronic literature (Erslev; Patti), digital-born fictions (Cox; Bell; Goicoechea; Nair et al.; Skains), locative media (Murray; Pullinger and Dovey), games (Bjärstorp and Ragnerstam; Mukherjee; O’Sullivan) and immersive theatre (Westling), definitions of the literary are continually being redefined. Expanding production contexts (streaming content; on demand cultures) and seemingly infinite possibilities for engaging with new literary material make it more and more difficult to generalise about reader/audience experiences. While it is important to acknowledge the increased dominance of large global corporations on cultural production as they crowd out independent producers or simply just swallow them up (see Thompson 2021; also Dietz this volume), new models of patronage, personalisation and customisation are also springing up, for example authors auctioning off the names of their fictional characters or offering the readers the opportunity to purchase bespoke or personalised content relating to their works. With the debates around fan labour and ‘playbor’ and controversies about works of art or graphic narratives being sold as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) or produced by Artificial Intelligence (AI), it is becoming increasingly impossible to consider works of literature in isolation from the markets, platforms, and production contexts that so define and shape them. As definitions of the literary change and become permeable, the processes and qualities of creativity also come into question. New technologies and publishing models can increase equalities and creator rights (for example, by making royalty splits and payments swift and direct, offering direct communication with readers, and giving independent creators open access tools or the opportunity to crowdfund projects), but can also create new hierarchies and exploit and undermine existing creative roles. What happens when art is (co-)produced by machines, and digital copies and currency exclude those who cannot (or will not) engage with suitable technologies? For example, many comics readers feel strongly that AI art takes work away from artists, and that NFTs encourage profiteering, exploitation and speculation far beyond that already present in the creative industries. Or are NFT books with unique AI art not so different from a limited edition hardback run with a creator signature or artist sketch? Moral ideologies and emotional responses come into play here alongside stereotypes and archetypes. For those working in the visual arts, literary media may be a welcome concept that supports and opens up new research possibilities. For example, comics scholarship has often 5

Astrid Ensslin et al.

foregrounded the storytelling and narrative properties of the medium, leaving visual impact or material presence underexplored. Approaching comics from a literary media perspective can shift the emphasis from exceptionality onto interconnectedness and invite exploration of the visual, the corporate, or other networked relationships. Similarly, viewing games as literary media allows new research into possible forms, anthropological underpinnings and aesthetic affordances of play. Medium-specific, procedural multimodality becomes the modus operandi for ludonarrative and ludopoetic experiences (Hawreliak 2019), and it allows literary scholarship to join forces with other aesthetic, social and computational disciplines. The impacts of new publishing materialities also become apparent when we consider literary media. Materiality shapes definitions of the text – in the case of comics, for instance, it often directly informs accepted terminology, which is culturally specific. So in Britain and America the term ‘comics’ foregrounds content and genre, while ‘comic books’ brings in a further reference to the print format, but in other countries different aspects such as history, narratology (e.g. sequentiality) or aesthetic are emphasised. In France comics are ‘bande dessinées’ (drawn strips), but in Italian they are ‘fumetti’ (puffs of smoke – referencing speech balloons), in Spain they are ‘tebeo’ (from the magazine title T.B.O.) or ‘monitos’ (little sketches), in Chinese ‘liánhuánhuà’ (linked images), and so on (Groensteen 2012). These definitions affect what is considered to be a comic – often excluding experimental or avant garde works – and so new technologies and materialities push at existing boundaries. When digital comics began to appear Scott McCloud named the medium ‘the infinite canvas’, urging creators to treat the screen as a window rather than a page (McCloud 2009). But further possibilities such as adding sound and movement quickly led to the development of ‘motion comics’ – challenging traditional perceptions of the medium and blurring the lines between comics and animation. More recently, the development of smartphone technology has provoked further evolutions of storytelling, for example by adding 3D effects. Smartphones and other portable devices also provide new points of access to reading and playing literary media. They may increase accessibility, for example by allowing the page order and reading direction of Western and Asian comics to be ‘flipped’ to suit the reader’s preferences, or by making narrative games playable and savable beyond the living room and other static environments. But the platforms and programmes used may also affect the ways that creators make stories and how readers experience visual storytelling. Apps such as comiXology and Google PlayBook offer different ways of increasing readability on small screens and these initiatives impact on how creators design their content (Skains), with the aesthetics of overall page layout arguably becoming less significant, as readers can ‘zoom in’ on individual panels. Digital platforms also affect the reader regarding issues of property and ownership, as texts across media (movies, music, comics) may not be available for download and subscription services replace more traditional models of ownership.

Impact of the 2020 Global Pandemic This volume was first conceived just before the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is undoubtedly the case that many of its key concerns and reflections have been thrown into sharp relief by the experiences of ‘lockdowns’ that many of our contributors underwent, as well as the rapid rise of new technologies facilitating telepresence at a time when face to face contact was so problematic. While many literary related activities moved online during this period (as documented by Dane and Marsden in this volume), hybrid digital and physical events and activities also became commonplace, fundamentally challenging once again both the delivery and 6

Introduction

the reception of the literary across multiple media modes and modalities. In at least some cases, this has been seen to have a lasting positive impact on access to the literary, notably for underserved communities so long excluded due to physical, economic or ideological barriers of various kinds.

Literary Media Tales As this volume’s ethos is to consider texts as inseparable from their contexts of production and reception, we pause here to reflect on our own lived experiences of ‘literary media’. We by no means wish to suggest that the experiences of three white women from affluent societies is by any means representative, but offer these experiences as illustrations of the interpenetration of media across our life journeys accompanied by some theoretical reflection; setting the scene for the discussions that follow.

Literary TV – Bronwen I grew up in a house with few books. What books we did have (an eclectic mix including nonfictional works and hymn books) were kept in a small cupboard. The local library was therefore my main source of reading materials, but even there I experienced frustrations as a reader, being turned away one day for trying to return a book I had only taken out that morning. We also never went to the cinema as a family. TV was our thing, and while we started out with a set that could be contained behind closed doors, by the time I was in my early teens the TV was on all of the time for most of the day, every day. Around this time, I became enamoured of literary adaptations generally broadcast on the BBC on Sunday afternoons or evenings. An added attraction was that I might be allowed to miss an evening service at chapel to watch the latest episode of Jane Eyre or Nicholas Nickleby, and, even more blissfully, I could do so alone. It is almost impossible for me to separate this love of these adaptations from my love of reading or love of literature. The faux-leather set of Dickens novels that my parents owned suddenly became more attractive, and after watching Alan Rickman as Mr Slope in the TV adaptation of the Barchester Chronicles, I sought out any Trollope I could lay my hands on. If I am honest, I often did not go further than coveting and acquiring these books, but it did instill in me a fascination with the ‘classics’ and with the myriad ways in which they could be interpreted and brought to life. This shaped what was to become my future vocation. It undoubtedly influenced my fascination with fictional dialogue and informed my approach to teaching, especially when I got my first full time academic post teaching literature as a part of a Communication degree at Bournemouth University. The first chapter I published after arriving at Bournemouth (Thomas 2000) examined the film adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and the ‘accelerated ageing process’ (Sheen 2000: 9) by which the novel, its paratexts and its afterlives blur and merge so as to challenge and erode ‘literary fetishism’ (10) and the idea of the ‘classic’. Teaching a unit on ‘narrative structures’ I discovered a body of work theorising why serial narratives, including the much-derided soap opera, are so compelling. Often drawing on literary-based theories, including German reception theory (Allen 1992) or the carnivalesque (Fiske 1987) and arguing for more critical evaluation and close textual criticism of television ‘texts’ (Cardwell 2006), these theories allowed me to engage with students who were often reluctant readers and even more reluctant readers of theory, as well as opening up new avenues of research into adaptation and media and new media narrative forms. They also provided a welcome corrective to 7

Astrid Ensslin et al.

the notion that the hours I spent watching TV were somehow wasted. Later, with growing interest in novelistic and ‘complex’ television (Mittell 2015), and new viewing/reading modes and practices such as the ‘collective intelligence’ (Jenkins 2006: 27) displayed by online forum users or the ‘second screening’ facilitated by social media platforms such as Twitter, shows such as The Wire, Mad Men or Breaking Bad could readily be drawn on as rich illustrative examples and case studies. Meanwhile, TV continues to provide an important platform for the literary, for example broadcasting live the annual Booker Prize event, or providing literary programming from the author interview to television book clubs (see further Mildorf and Marsden this volume). I continue to draw on key texts theorising television narratives, production contexts and reception in my work on literature and social media, fan cultures and online readers. Rarely any longer are these discussions confined to one medium. So new subscription models, phenomena such as ‘binge watching’ and season finales provide opportunities to explore parallels with historical and emerging literary practices, as illustrated by the concept of ‘must-read TV’ directly examining ‘how your Netflix habit is changing contemporary fiction’ (Manshel et al. 2021).

Literary comics – Julia I was a childhood bookworm and (I now accept) bibliophile. My bedroom was a jumble of paperbacks covering mystery, fantasy, school stories and more; but my strongest memories are of the books I read at my Nanny and Grandpa’s house: my aunt’s hardback first editions of Blyton’s Famous Five series with colour dust covers, and the small gold-bound hardbacks of Alexandre Dumas and H. Rider Haggard that my Dad had won in the Boys’ Brigade and Sunday school. The packaging and the visuals of these books impressed me and when I reread my childhood favourites today on Kindle I’m amazed how easily I can recall all their cover images and even internal illustrations. For me, then, reading was always a visual and tactile experience. So it probably wasn’t surprising that as well as prose, I enjoyed reading comics, mostly found at jumble sales or picked up at doctor and dentist surgeries or in youth clubs. There were slapstick comedy titles like the Beano and the Dandy; school stories and Cinderella tales in girls’ comics like Tammy and Bunty; and even mystery and horror comics like Misty. I bought big stacks of these at church jumble sales until I was 9 years old or so, when a story in one scared me so much that I retreated for some years back into the safer space of Marvel UK’s weekly Care Bears comics, alongside a subscription to a title called Big! that reprinted old Fleetway comedy strips. My interest in comics picked up again as a teenage goth in the late 1980s, thanks to my brother and to DC Comics’ launch of their Vertigo imprint with titles such as Sandman and Preacher. Vertigo was heavily promoted as having a writerly focus, with the majority of its launch titles coming from high-profile British creators. I combined my comics fandom with an undergrad fascination with Romantic and Gothic literature into a PhD study on the redefinition of comics as literature and the use of literary models like Gothic to help us understand their storytelling. My work was initially formalist – I wanted to understand what narrative methods these comics used to create their most impactful and memorable moments – but, more recently, my long-forgotten memories of British girls’ horror comics have led me away from this type of ‘lit crit’ close reading. Girls’ titles dominated the British comics industry between the 1950s and 1980s but are all but forgotten today, and as I dug into their lost history I found myself increasingly engaging with the concept of literary 8

Introduction

media, which has expanded and redirected my research towards investigative projects to discover the unnamed creators, publishing practices and international influences behind these comics (Round 2019). Leading scholars such as the late Martin Barker have used comics to draw attention to the hidden stakeholders behind publishers (1984), and the active work of audiences in interpreting and responding to content (1989). Both the British and American comics industries have famously exploited their producers and consumers in multiple ways: for example, by requiring creators to sign away all rights as part of cashing in payments, removing artists’ signatures from work and keeping all originals, and axing popular characters or titles without warning to sustain high profit margins. Researching the collaborative, international, and corporate processes behind British comics and their treatment of their readership has been a quest with real moments of joy, such as reinstating artist names on new collections of their work or showing creators pages of their work they had not seen for decades (and sometimes not at all). It has contributed to my teaching on Bournemouth University’s English and Literary Media MA, and led me to reconsider what I thought I knew about global comics industries. This has been informed by scholars such as Christopher Murray (2017), Isabelle LicariGuillaume (2022) and Kelly Kanayama (forthcoming), who have written insightfully about British–American transatlantic exchange. The forces that have shaped the production and reception of global comics are further illuminated by Casey Brienza’s (2016) work on the Americanisation of Japanese manga and books by John Lent (2015) and Paul Gravett (2017) that uncover the breadth of Asian comics. Finally, acknowledging literary media has also made me more aware of the publishing processes and practices that have shaped all of my favourite stories – from my beloved Care Bears (a franchise developed from American greeting card illustrations, although the comics were worked on by many of the top British girls’ comics writers and artists) to many paperback series such as Nancy Drew or The Hardy Boys (which were entirely the product of ghostwriters). Seeing my childhood texts in this new light no longer feels like an elegy for the myth of Romantic authorship, but rather a celebration of the collaborative, creative and corporate networks that analysing literary media reveals.

Literary transmedia and play – Astrid I remember my youth in 1980s’ and early 1990s’ Southern Germany as saturated with pre-­ digital multi- and transmedia. My family has been ‘reading’ across platforms ever since I can remember – from the daily broadsheets that I consumed second-hand after my Dad had abandoned them after breakfast to political radio talk shows that were constantly playing in the kitchen, and the TV with its ever-looping CNN broadcasts next to the ironing board in the basement. And while this side of my early mediated life tended to be preoccupied with what I admired and somehow feared as ‘serious’, adult media culture, I sought creative relief in what was then perceived as the German/European canon of young person’s fiction – from Ottfried Preußler to Astrid Lindgren and Michael Ende. But I also sought relief in diverse forms of play – and more consciously so as I grew older. With a pianist as a grandfather, my legacy as part-time musician was predestined, and early on I discovered the restorative, self-expressive and creativity-inspiring powers of musical performance. Of course, playing Vivaldi, Mozart and Bruch on my beloved violin wasn’t exactly the same as the storified delight I garnered from Enid Blyton and Robert Arthur cassette audiobooks or the dreadfully gendered Connie comics and neoliberalist glossy girl magazines my peer group 9

Astrid Ensslin et al.

considered cool at the time. However, when I think about music as a form of self-expression, I suppose the ‘flow’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) of self-forgotten play instilled a sense of biographical awareness in me that helped me build a reflective stance on my own early life as a story in episodes, interspersed with intervals of recreational play. With my early musical excursions came a keen awareness of performativity inherent in mediated play, and that I soon found paralleled in a love for theatre, opera, ballet and – with different peer groups – film and cinema. I remember adoring the productions of the Stuttgart Theater der Altstadt, the Altes Schauspielhaus and the Stuttgart Ballet. As an undergraduate at the Stuttgart Academy of Music and Performing Arts, I regularly obtained last-minute, 10DM ticket deals for the Großes Haus to enjoy Humperdinck, Puccini and Berg operas from the first row and to admire the singers’ talent in bringing to life a host of fascinating fictional characters right at my fingertips. I also found pleasure in playing narrative music (see Burton, this volume), with staged and instrumental performances of Beethoven’s Fidelio, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, and Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to name a few. I indulged in the characters, events and settings evoked by the motifs, rhythms and harmonies, and in the vibes of communality that made these performances happen. But play has never been just music for me. My maternal grandmother was a passionate player of card and board games, and in her characteristic, streetwise fashion she never failed to give my brother, cousins and me a sense of winnability at the likes of Sorry, Mikado and Memory while ultimately always keeping the upper hand over who was going to win and when, including herself – big style. The key paradigm shift happened around 1983, when my early adopter Uncle V. purchased a Commodore 64 for ‘work’. Inevitably, we were hooked, and each visit to my cousins’ house turned into a frenzy of turn-taking proto-couch-coop. I don’t know whether it was my index finger or the space key that suffered more from the tireless hacking away at Winter Games speed skating, and I lost count of the endless fights we had over who was going to be next to not make it across the floating logs on Frogger. I also remember the shared bliss as being relatively short-lived during each visit because the games of that era were predominantly games of emergence (Juul 2005), with hardly any story arc to speak of and predominantly abstract characters. It wasn’t until I entered graduate school that I was able to combine my love for performative storytelling, games and play with digital media. Hypertext had entered the stage of literary scholarship, and reading first-generation theorists like Landow, Bolter, Ryan and Hayles opened my eyes to the vast opportunities lying ahead of literary studies in the new millennium. At the time, literary hypertext was already past its ‘golden age’ (Coover 1999), and while the German e-literary scene showed hopeful signs of a new era in Flash and other web formats (Simanowski 2002), what is now known as digital fiction was only beginning to grow in new, post-Storyspace directions. So whilst I completed my PhD engaging critically with notions of canonicity in post-canonical literary media (Ensslin 2007), my academic career developed at the intersections between electronic literature and the institutionally more palatable game and transmedia studies. The early years of my scholarship were, like Julia’s and Bronwen’s, more formalist in nature and shaped by a desire to come to terms with the materialities and narrative affordances of diverse platforms of digital storytelling and literary gaming (Bell et al. 2014; Ensslin 2014). More recently, this sense-making quest has transformed into the need to proactively shape the literary media landscape, and to explore the therapeutic qualities of digital fiction on mobile devices that commonly serve to promote idealised bodies, Instagram-style. My team’s work in this area is reflected by Nair et al.’s chapter in this book, and it is my hope that literary play 10

Introduction

and performativity can generate more inclusive environments of self-expression and self-­ compassion in the years to come.

Structure of This Book The volume is bookended by reflections on the place and value of the literary in the contemporary age from two leading thinkers: Jim Collins, whose work has already been mentioned here as a major influence, and Julie Rak, who continues to push at the boundaries of how we define the literary and to challenge the ways in which some existing practices and assumptions continue to exclude and alienate many individuals and groupings. Both raise important questions about the development and impact of literary media which the essays in the volume return to time and again, and which also concern us all as educators and writers engaged with exploring the many new and unpredictable ways in which literary media emerge and evolve. The first section of the book (‘Literary Media in Context’) then features new essays by Alexis Weedon and Marina Grishakova, both of whom have worked closely with field-­ defining terms (transmediality and intermediality) that inform our concept of ‘literary media’. Both provide fascinating historical insights into both avant garde experiments and everyday practices whereby the materiality and mediated nature of the literary come to the fore. In both cases, the chapters resist the temptation to shoehorn diverse practices into neat boxes or linear trajectories. Simon Rowberry’s chapter on the historiography of the ebook explores but also contests the dominant narrative of the emergence of this new format providing a more nuanced media archaeological analysis which addresses head on the particular challenges of describing and mapping formats that have long become obsolete. In the sections that follow our authors continue to draw on but also critique prevailing assumptions and accepted narratives in their explorations of established, new and emerging instances of ‘literary media’. We asked all of our authors to explicitly engage with the concept of literary media both as it relates to their key case studies, and how it might reinflect their understanding and usage of theoretical terms and models from within their own more established intellectual disciplines. Part II (‘Forms, Media, Materialities’) addresses specific emerging genres and forms of literary media such as locative narratives or autofiction. This section also includes explicit reference and analysis of media and materials not always discussed in the context of the literary, including journalism, music, real-life experiences and podcasts. It explores how material presence and location impacts on our experience of storytelling: for example, in Murray’s opening analysis of locative narrative (which investigates the multimodal qualities of such texts and questions the extent to which they are emancipatory or perpetuate existing hierarchies) and Pullinger and Dovey’s discussion of ambient literature (which considers the ways in which stories are both situated and situating). It develops existing discussions of forms such as autofiction: which Dix extends beyond prose by analysing its visual-verbal dialectic across multiple media, and Ivansson and Gibbons consider in the context of the archive, combining cultural studies, multimodal analysis, cognitive stylistics and narratology. The following chapters in this section explore the types of storytelling we might find in journalism, focusing on concepts such as disnarration (Lambrou) and the intersections between print and online literary journalism, interrogating ideas of bias and prestige (Murphy). Literature as a verbal and oral art is also explored via the poetic and rhetorical qualities of oral histories (Hatavara; Hyvärinen and Mildorf) and the literary interview (Mildorf). Burton’s subsequent analysis of song cycles also engages with an understudied form of literary media, revealing 11

Astrid Ensslin et al.

the ways in which these adaptations resist conventions and traditions such as linearity. Finally, Rubery examines podcasting’s impact on contemporary literary culture, by focusing on the emerging genre of the ‘podcast novel’. Part III (‘Creators, Networks, Intermediaries’) features contributions by scholars and creative practitioners expanding the discussion beyond the boundaries by which literary authorship is conventionally defined. Research reflected here includes how bots might remediate literary expressionism (Sheehan and Wright), how machine learning leads to new forms of mimesis-as-misrepresentation (Erslev), and how networked and collaborative writing give rise to medium-specific forms of digital-born writing (Patti; O’Sullivan), to culture-specific visual storytelling (Burt and Waldman), and to multilayered plot development across ontological spheres (Klaiber). Chapters in this section further centre the materiality of digital platforms as seminal parameters in the creative process (Skains), and examine the opportunities and challenges they entail for literary editions, curatorship and preservation (Gee). Thus, at the heart of this section lie considerations surrounding the networks and mediating platforms that arise around different literary media forms, and discussions about how we may preserve and present literary media for future generations. Part IV (‘Markets, Economies, Industries’) examines specific production and publishing contexts (China, Japan, Australia), and provides in-depth analysis of the marketing and promotion of literary media materials (Kiernan; Dane) and the selling of books in both bricks and mortar and online retail environments (Frost; Rayner; Kamei-Dyche; Dietz). Individual chapters engage with contemporary economics (Frost) and discussions of neoliberalism (Henesy), but also provide fine-grained analysis of a range of consumer preferences and practices from fan production (Shao) and ritualistic readerly pilgrimages (Kamei-Dyche) to algorithmically stimulated forms of participation generated and controlled by social media platforms (Meurer). As well as providing insights into emerging and established cultural markets and industries, therefore, this section also demonstrates how the roles of authors, readers and cultural intermediaries are all impacted. Part V (‘Audiences, Engagement, Environments’) considers reading and other aspects of situated audience engagement. Its contributions engage with the evasive phenomena of immersion and interactivity in digital fiction (Bell; Goicoechea) and film/TV (Cox), with concepts of sociality, seriality and performativity (Bjärstorp and Ragnerstam; Pianzola; Westling), and with the increasingly central role of social media as spaces of literary engagement (Birke). It foregrounds the socio-political, cultural and epistemological environments that both shape and are shaped by literary media, including Indigenous ways of knowing (Barnes and Cardinal), postcolonial paratexts (Mukherjee), and post-pandemic entanglements (Marsden). Chapters in this section provide a detailed exploration of how readers and audiences engage with new platforms (Netflix, Wattpad, YouTube) as well as how new technologies provide innovative ways of providing audiences with experiences that reimagine and reinvent the thrills and spills that we associate with the ‘live’.

Limitations of Scope/Future Development This volume represents current work relevant to the emerging concept of ‘literary media’, but we recognise that this is a fast-moving field and technological, cultural and social change will inevitably result in some of what we discuss here becoming passé or even obsolete. We also recognise that there are some gaps in terms of representation, both geographically and in terms of underserved groups. But we hope to have demonstrated that the term ‘literary media’ 12

Introduction

is intended to be responsive to change and inclusive. The editors are grateful to our contributors for challenging and refining our initial attempts at defining and using this new term, and for their patience and perseverance in bringing this volume to publication in the context of a global pandemic. Special thanks goes to our research assistant, Simone Blessing, who crowdsourced and compiled an index that can be considered a terminological foundation of the field.

References Allen, R.C. (1992) Audience-Oriented Criticism and Television. In Channels of Discourse Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism. London: Routledge, 101–137. Atkinson, S. (2014) Beyond the Screen: Emerging Cinema and Engaging Audiences. London: Bloomsbury. Barekat, H., Barry, R., and Winters, D. (2017) The Digital Critic: Literary Culture Online. New York and London: OR Books. Barker, M. (1984) A Haunt of Fears. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Barker, M. (1989) Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bell, Alice, Ensslin, Astrid, and Rustad, Hans (eds) (2014) Analysing Digital Fiction. New York: Routledge. Bolter, J.D., and Grusin, R. (2000) Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Brienza, C. (2016) Manga in America: Transnational Book Publishing and the Domestication of Japanese Comics. London: Bloomsbury. Cardwell, S. (2006) Television Aesthetics. Critical Studies in Television 1(1), 72–80. Collins, J. (2010) Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Coover, R. (1999) Literary Hypertext: The Passing of the Golden Age. Atlanta, Georgia: Keynote Address, Digital Arts and Culture. https://nickm.com/vox/golden_age.html Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York and London: Harper and Row. Ensslin, A. (2007) Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions. London: Continuum. Ensslin, A. (2014) Literary Gaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fiske, J. (1987) Television Culture. London: Routledge. Fizek, S. (2022) Playing at a Distance: Borderlands of Video Game Aesthetic. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gardner, J. (2008) “PN Second Debate - ‘The Sopranos’ vs. ‘Lost.’: Debating the Highs and Lows of the Serial Narrative Arts”. Accessed 5 April 2023 at https://projectnarrative.wordpress.com/2008/06/10/ pn-second-debate-the-sopranos-v-lost-debating-the-highs-and-lows-of-serial-narrative/ Gravett, P. (2017) Mangasia. London: Thames and Hudson. Gray, J. (2008) Television Pre-views and the Meaning of Hype. International Journal of Cultural Studies 11(1), 33–49. Groensteen, T. (2012) Definitions. In The French Comics Theory Reader, eds. Ann Miller, and Bart Beaty. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 93–114. Hawreliak, Jason. 2019. Multimodal Semiotics and Rhetoric in Videogames. New York: Routledge. Hayles, N. Katherine (2008) Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Indiana: Notre Dame. Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Juul, Jesper (2005) half-real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lent, J. (2015) Asian Comics. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Licari-Guillaume, I. (2022) Vertigo Comics: British Creators, US Editors, and the Making of a Transformational Imprint. London: Routledge. Manshel, A., McGrath, L.B., and Porter, J.D. (2021) The Rise of Must-Read TV: How Your Netflix Habit is Changing Contemporary Fiction. The Atlantic. Accessed 11 March 2022 at https://www. theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/07/tv-adaptations-fiction/619442/

13

Astrid Ensslin et al. Mittell, J. (2015) Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press. Murray, C. (2017) The British Superhero. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Murray, S. (2012) The Adaptation Industry. London: Routledge. Murray, S. (2018) The Digital Literary Sphere. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. McCloud, S. (2009) The ‘Infinite Canvas’. ScottMcCloud.com. Accessed 2 November 2022 at https:// scottmccloud.com/4-inventions/canvas/ Rippl, G. (2015) Introduction. In Handbook of Intermediality: Literature–Image–Sound–Music, ed. G. Rippl. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1–31. Round, J. (2019) Gothic for Girls: Misty and British Comics. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Sheen, E. (2000) Introduction. In The Classic Novel: From Page to Screen eds. R. Giddings, and E. Sheen. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1–13. Simanowski, Roberto (ed) (2002) Literatur. digital. Formen und Wege einer neuen Literatur. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Thomas, B. (2000) ‘Piecing Together a Mirage’: Adapting The English Patient for the Screen. In The Classic Novel: From Page to Screen eds. R. Giddings, and E. Sheen. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 197–232. Thomas, B. (2010) Gains and Losses? Writing it All Down: Fanfiction and Multimodality. In New Perspectives on Narrative and Multimodality ed. R. Page. London: Routledge. Thomas, B. (2011) Trickster Authors and Tricky Readers on the MZD Forums. In Mark Z. Danielewski eds. J. Bray, and A. Gibbons. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Thompson, J. (2021) Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

14

PART I

Literary Media in Context

1 TOWARDS A NEW HISTORY OF LITERARY MEDIA Alexis Weedon

Why a New History of Literary Media? The history of literary media from the early twentieth century to today is often told through a narrative of technological innovation based on dating inventions and tracking their adoption in the remediation of stories. Remediation, as proposed by Bolter and Grusin (1999), derives from an analysis of the affordances of technological innovation, an approach which the disciplinary founders of Media Studies have explored in depth.1 Remediation affects stories through the process of retelling in different media and Bolter and Grusin recognise the significance of movements or waves in the ways of retelling over time. This is more than simply media specificity; it is also the result of the change in the value given to the story by different media audiences – in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, its symbolic value (Bourdieu 1993). Such an approach has had many adherents and it has been applied to the analysis of transmedia franchises developing from earlier comic books, and performance histories from the music hall to silent film. But the term itself has been over-used and debased, and its meaning reduced to a combination of its prefix ‘re’ (again) and the word ‘mediated’ to mean ‘stories retold’ in an over-simplification of its theoretical construct. Its critique of the disparity between the high status of literary storytelling and the lower status of film or mediated stories is also now outdated as this volume about ‘literary media’ testifies. Choosing to follow the remediation history of a story is easier than tracing, in Gledhill’s words, the ‘contradictory, liminal processes by which the new appears, goes underground, and reappears’ where aesthetic creativity succumbs within a media ecology or is squeezed out by the dominant culture. Gledhill has called for an alternative approach based on the ‘micro-analysis of the conditions of historical practice’ (Gledhill 2006: 15), which analyses intersectionality of artistic, professional, economic and social conditions affecting the media ecology of the time. This is difficult and painstaking work but it needs to be done because storytelling evolves within the media ecologies of each generation, atrophying what is outdated and hypertrophying what is pertinent to contemporary cultural concerns. It is also far more than a history: it is not a linear timeline of technological development and innovative processes, rather it traces a change in the expectations of storytelling within society. It builds an understanding of the media ecology in which some stories and literary innovations thrive and why

17

DOI: 10.4324/9781003119739-3

Alexis Weedon

others do not. To follow through the analogy, the success of a literary media form does not depend on its intrinsic aesthetic worth or unique application of the affordance of a new media technology, but on the expectations of it when it appears. Observing the effect of new media on artistic practices, Odin sees a fundamental transformation in how ‘an artistic work is to be conceived and created and what function it has in broader society’ (2010: 1). Barker and Brooks have similarly reflected, ‘It is not the medium which determines the manner of response, but the place of that medium within a social and cultural circuit’ (Barker and Brooks 1998: 136). For Odin writing in the 2010s this points to contemporary questions of gender and difference, for Barker and Brooks writing in the 1990s it is about how audiences responded to the action films of media franchises and the perception that such films gave rise to imitative violence. Implicit in Odin’s analysis is the role of the media in changing the social performance of gender and in Barker and Brooks’ example its function in providing acceptable behavioural role models. From their distinct time points, the two theories direct us to look at what societies across the globe expect of the media before seeking to interpret a text. Literary media storytelling is the object of study for a wide range of academic disciplines from literary criticism, film studies, adaptation, new media art and game studies and each has its own particular approach. Theatre history focuses on the actor’s performance, and traces influences between interpretations and how a play has been received by theatre audiences. Histories of early cinema record how audiences would recognise their beloved story in the new medium as a translation or transformation of an original, and in popular culture fidelity discourse has proven to be a perennial and ineradicable expectation, occurring even in today’s reviews and film notices. Historically, the role of film has been described by newspaper reviewers as ‘realising’ the story and early films ‘made real’ the characters and situations on screen for the audience to watch and enjoy, and this contrasted with theatre’s interpretative performance of story. Such media specificity is subject to the historical social context. Adaptation studies has questioned this privileging of the printed form as the first and original (Meisel 2014). Attempting to go beyond this discussion, such scholarship has sought alternative ways of conceptualising the role of film in retelling stories; Geraghty uses the term ‘rendition’, for instance, which reflects the interpretative nature of retellings in stage adaptation and recognises the role of performance in making the story relevant to the time (Geraghty 2009). Some of these arguments have been explored in new media and games studies where scholars such as Laurel and Ryan have conceptualised cyberspace’s potential as a theatrical space. They argue that in cyberspace authors and audience join in the performance of identity, create characters to inhabit storyworlds and devise their own narratives (Laurel 1991; Ryan, 2015). Despite deeply argued distinctions between their positions, at the core all these scholars are looking at the changing ways in which stories function in the life of that society. Marie-Laure Ryan offers a distinction between immersion and interactivity which goes beyond the application of technological affordances, and her categorisation of different kinds of interactivity provides a useful tool in the analysis of playerly texts. Ryan’s revisions to her categories from Narrative as Virtual Reality (2001) to Narrative as Virtual Reality 2 (2015) demonstrate how swiftly media ecology changed in the intervening years. The new history of literary media needs to be able to apply categories of interactivity for diachronic analysis to trace the shifting media ecology. Ryan’s typology is a welcome start but is not constructed for this purpose and further work is needed in defining types of interactivity within the ‘conditions of historical practice’.

18

Towards a New History of Literary Media

To focus our analysis, I propose a history of literary media in three movements. I mean this in the musical sense to introduce motifs, themes and variations which reoccur in later movements. The purpose of this is to allow us to identify the specific expectations of media storytelling within society at that time. I start with the nineteenth century, when the technologies of reproduction through mechanical printing presses gave rise to mass audiences and later photography and film emerged as popular forms of media storytelling. Arguably, I could start earlier with oral storytelling and trace it through the performance history of the commedia dell’arte, for example, but the nineteenth century is the better place to start to address the dominant technological narratives. A new history of literary media has to employ rigorous historical empiricism in handling the evidential record, but it is not bound to historical periodisation, rather it links moments in which the mediation of story takes a similar direction (see Table 1.1). The first movement sets up the expectation of reciprocation between the reader (or audience) with the storyteller. Early instances are found in the role of serial publishing in the nineteenth-century periodical which enabled readers to feel they could influence the direction of the storywriting and later as broadcast media sought feedback from the emerging mass audiences. Mediated reciprocation became a desirable goal of the mass media in the first half of the twentieth century through the vehicle of magazines, radio, film and later television. For example, in Britain broadcasters conducted surveys, sought feedback from public libraries, counted letters, and so on, and the American-based Hearst’s International Magazine company published letters from readers, advice columns, ran surveys and competitions. In the second movement, interaction became the preferred goal and this means giving greater agency to the reader and audience. Interaction comes to mean a plurality of storylines, greater freedom to role-play and experiment with identity and allows people to play with socially ascribed identities making choices which diverge from expectations of class, gender or racial groups. As a consequence, storytelling has become separate from the storyteller and we talk of ‘good storytelling’ in a transmedia brand or a film franchise (Weedon 2018). The effect of this separation is not always liberating for the audience: in advertising ‘good storytelling’ implies a control of the message and disempowering of audiences rather than giving agency as in roleplay. There were experiments in interactivity in narratives in analogue media, and scholars have traced its appearance in books, theatre and games prior to the adoption of the personal computer, and indeed far back into history with ancient games such as dice and Mah-jongg, to the literature of the eighteenth-century writer Lawrence Sterne and forward to modernists Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. But interactivity was greatly facilitated by digital convergence. In the third movement, the goal of storytelling through media is immersion in the story. Scholarship from Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text (1976) and Csikszentmihalyi’s work on Flow (1990) has linked this desire with a child’s imaginative play, a reader’s absorption in a novel, and a gamer’s flow-state when deeply in a videogame. In immersion the user, reader or audience become part of the action, in the form of a character or narrative point of view, or as member of the cast in a play. They inhabit the storyworld and the most intense media forms that emerge combine reciprocation and interaction with immersion (Johnston 2021, Ryan 2015). Analogue forms exist in immersive theatre while the digital technologies of VR and 360 cinema have been developed to provide complete immersive environments, such as Jeffrey Shaw’s Advanced Visualisation and Interaction Environment AVIE (Shaw et al. 2007). Shaw’s huge technical achievement in the 1990s was to combine 360 panoramic cinema with

19

Table 1.1  Development of literary media storytelling in three movements Reciprocation

Tasks given to that medium in the life of that society

Immersion

Aspiration

Example

Aspiration

Example

Aspiration

Example

Nationalism

Perception that media audiences would migrate from illiteracy to literacy and pre-existing readerships to new audiences

Participation

Future markets are thought to be in audience desire to give interactive feedback

Experience seeking

Mediation of encounters with real and fictional characters and events (being ‘live’ virtually at the Olympics, at our friend’s party)

Education

Choice

Digitalisation of recorded textual, visual and audio material for convergence

Re-creation of scenarios

Mediated witnessing the Ebola outbreak

Realisation of characters Cross-media audiences

Changing identity

Recreation and play Transformative power of the story

Immersive theatre

Auratic text

Serialisation (­magazine Separation of and film) storytelling from storyteller

Distributed authorship

Emerging fan activities Narrative inc. collectables absorption

Playthrough alternative paths

Reader-players

Fan writing, fan ownership of the canon Tie-ins, follow-ons and souvenir books

Enactment of (disaster) scenarios Engrossment and Flow

Advanced Visualisation and Interaction Environment (AVIE) Storyworld theme parks

Alexis Weedon

20 Shift in position of audience & reader, and their intimate experience of the unfolding story

Interaction

Reciprocation

Narrative devices

Interaction

Aspiration

Example

Aspiration

Example

Aspiration

Example

Realisation

Textual puzzles or game-play

New multimodal grammar of storytelling Game play

Multilinear storylines

Intuitive interaction

Player role-play

Characters’ role play

Social effects

Professional/ amateur border

Media specific allusions Author celebrity

Stories crossing cultural boundaries

Globalised grab for story content

Shifting of traditional identities

Branding

Publishers’ readers set up as literary agents

Rise of the Film studios send out agents – scouts literary, film and talent

Impersonation

Cosplay, Avatars, Mediated social celebrity players, living reading festivals and events (eg city of literature) Franchises Privacy concerns

Second lives

Cultural transduction

21 Integration of businesses

Reader/player role play PoV and screen edits

Horizontal integration, conglomeration and subsequent specialisation of the large corporates

Flow in game-play

Globalised online retailing

Safe narrative bubbles within class or social media groups Social media companies

Niche hypertext publishers

Funding platforms

Story-tourism

360 access

Towards a New History of Literary Media

Precarity

Commerce

Immersion

Alexis Weedon

real-time interactivity for the viewer. He and his colleagues have used this tromp l’oeil projection of space for creative and commercial purposes such as simulations of mine rescues. However, in the post-millennial media ecology investment in simulations has been directed to the more affordable VR headsets and away from running such a costly installation. Through these examples we can see that immersive media’s role in society has been to give the experience of alternative social realities in scenarios, and to inhabit other places and times. While each of these movements crest only in certain historical periods, their currents are there below the surface throughout the history of literary media, and their role in the life of any particular society is anchored in the needs of that time. So we must trace innovative practices as they appear, disappear and then reappear and look for evolving professional practices as they cross over between media.

First Movement: Reciprocation The key motif of this movement is the perception of how readers, filmgoers and gamers become cross-media audiences. This comes to the fore in the early twentieth century. It is evident in the reaction of theatre managers to the ‘stealing’ of their audiences by cinemas and similarly in the assumption by the BBC that a measure of its success is radio’s effect on public library borrowing (Weedon 2021, BBC Yearbooks n.d.). In this movement there are concerns around the impact of the loss of a live audience when the story is told on radio or acted on film. In my research I show that at the same time authors and agents are aware of the opening up of markets for their work across media: in the fiction story magazines, through lecture tours, on radio and in the film studios where there are lucrative additional revenue streams. This gave rise to author-celebrity as well-known names drew audiences. So in this movement fan activity has a commercial status and celebrity leads to the production of collectables such as the portrait postcard, cigarette card and the autograph album (Weedon 2016, Weedon 2021). Reciprocation in the 1930s focused commercial attention on the benefits of tie-ins to draw in wider audiences and within the profession there was an opportunity for agents – literary, film and later the talent agent – to broker stories and celebrity. Different techniques were tried to engage the audience in the lives of the authors, their work and their genre. A well-­ documented example is the 1930s Detection Club which produced a few multi-authored works for radio and print. Anthony Berkeley, who was instrumental in setting it up, depicted its prototype in The Poisoned Chocolate Case (1929) where each member of the club (called the Crime Circle) present solutions to a mysterious murder which the police cannot solve. In a real-life combination of the interactive and the reciprocal, each author contributed an episode to the Club’s radio serial ‘Behind the Screen’, and listeners could send in their deductions of who was the perpetrator to a prize competition. This direct encouragement by the author to the readers to follow the story from print to performance can be seen earlier too, in the mid-nineteenth-century periodical industry of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins who brought audiences to theatrical adaptations and readings of their novels. Writers have responded to the audience’s involvement in the story and their co-creation has produced specific narrative devices and forms. The technique of adapting or reappropriating a known story to attract its followers has a long history in literature. Examples include novels such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020), and similarly in the theatre the plays of Clemence Dane, ‘Will Shakespeare: An invention’ (1921) and Tom Stoppard’s ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’ (1967). Here it is pertinent 22

Towards a New History of Literary Media

that both playwrights went on to work on media adaptations of Shakespeare’s life, Dane with her own play for television and Stoppard on Shakespeare in Love (Madden dir, 1998). This is indicative of a particular literary form of fanwork amongst authors themselves: for example, the friends Sheila Kay Smith and G.B. Stern chatted about Jane Austen in the 1930s and then wrote a book reflecting their interests and conversations. They published their appreciation and it became a source of income (Kaye-Smith and Stern 1943). Readers sent letters and this encouraged them to put together a second volume where they address directly their fellow Janeites, albeit as published authors. From the interwar period the rise of fan culture became associated with brands, and the craft of copyrighting and wit of advertising slogans became a motif. At this time product placement replaced objet d’art as coded indicator of class and status in novels and film stories, distinctions made by the choice of rolled or tipped cigarettes to Heal’s department store as a standard of taste (Edwards 2018, Weedon 2021). Alongside this growing commercialism is counter-commercial fan activity; the distinction between reciprocity as in a gift economy and commercial exchange become more acute as leisure spending increased. In Fiske’s definition a fan does not make money from their texts; theirs is an amateur form of authorship and their work circulates within their fan culture, creating meaning (Fiske 1992). This is helpful for literary media mainly concerned with the textual, where fans create new texts which circulate among themselves (Hills 2002). Fiske’s distinction between amateur and professional is significant in the subsequent conversations between waged and voluntary labour (Jarrett 2015, Gregg and Andrijasevic 2019). In the period when the main or sole access to a readership was through capital investment in machine-printed books the difference between published and unpublished genres roughly equated to the border between the professional and amateur. Yet which genres were published and which were not has shifted through history and this offers an insight into period-specific forms of fan production (Sandvoss 2017). This hopscotch between the boxes of professional and amateur textual production is characteristic of this movement as readers and authors often delighted in reciprocation. Today we can look back at the early twentieth century and see many forms amongst published texts which later went onto the web ‘for free’ in the form of imitative fiction, blogs, diaries and personal commentaries. Going back to the nineteenth century Chasar (2012) and Colclough (2007) have both identified in the scrapbooking activity of readers and writers’ evidence of reading, fanwork and the gift economy in the USA and the UK. Further back still into the eighteenth century and many texts circulated in manuscript form, including letters, satires, and plays. Unauthorised sequels were written and published of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, leading to correspondence between fans and authors. Similarly, reciprocal responses between authors as readers of each other’s work can be seen in the interchange between the early eighteenth-century poets Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea and Alexander Pope in her witty poetic alternative to the story in his ‘The Rape of the Lock’, a period-specific example of reciprocity. There is in this a desire of the author-fan to attach themselves to the auratic text and identify with the aura of the celebrity (Hansen 2008). Fan studies often locates its origin in the first occurrence of the word in the 1880s and the source of fandoms to the popular magazines which grew up in the early twentieth century. For example, Edwards points out that in the 1890s through to the 1940s the ‘fan’ became for the magazine industry a term which identified a specific relationship as well as an identity which ‘encompasses particular practices […] of collection, mastery, and textual response’. It ‘changed the way the media talked about and to passionate readers’ (Edwards 2018: 58). 23

Alexis Weedon

Literary adaptations caught the critics’ attention at this time and the term ‘fan’ became associated with film audiences. The reach of those audiences meant that novelists could get many hundreds of letters following the adaptation of their work, as Ryan has shown in her analysis of Ben-Hur and Bruce Barton’s 1925 novel The Man Nobody Knows (B. Ryan 2013). Similarly, Stein and Busse have traced the transmedia fandoms of Sherlock Holmes to Conan Doyle’s writing for The Strand Magazine, while other fan studies scholars have argued that the popularity of Science Fiction stories in magazines in the war periods was the springboard, or that the early sale and success of comics at the turn of the twentieth century led to the phenomenal success of Marvel and DC Comics transmedia storytelling in the twenty-first century (Stein and Busse 2012, Sleigh and White 2019, Freeman 2017). There were, however, socio-economic currents which resisted reciprocation and the aspiration for a closer relationship between author and reader. Class separation was in the 1920s and 1930s encoded in the arts through access, location and price as illustrated by theatre and cinema seating, and commercial libraries. As it eroded the resulting class mobility caused tides of concern, from fears over sharing books to notions of educating the audience and encouraging them to ‘upgrade’ from cinema to theatre or to go from the radio melodrama to pick up serious literature from the library. Similarly, fan mail and surveys brought feedback that revealed the opinions of an unknown readership and the audience’s tolerances and intolerances to the producers. In these examples we can see the intra-actions of political and economic currents, of the themes of class, gender, and race, on the aspiration for a closer relationship between author and reader. Tracing this is necessary for understanding why transmedia storytelling emerged, went underground and re-emerged.

Second Movement: Interaction The key characteristic of the second movement is the desire for interactivity in storytelling. This may emerge as participation, decision-making or the opportunity to change identities and be other characters. Interaction differs from reciprocation by the extent of the collaboration in the storytelling and the built-in mechanisms for responding to audience’ choice. This can mean readers choosing the direction of the story and lead to multiple story lines such as in the Choose Your Own Adventure stories of the 1970s (CYOA). But examples extend from analogue narrative games to interactive electronic fiction (see Goicoechea, this volume). A motif of this movement is the desire for collaborative authorship by authors-as-readers. A.E. Coppard’s 1932 multi-authored book Consequences is a variation on this theme (Van Druten et al. 1932). Based on the design of the parlour game it attracted Irish authors Seán Ó Faoláin and Elizabeth Bowen to contribute the episodes ‘He said to her’ and ‘She gave to him’. Such games allow authors to interact with each other and the reader is an observer of the entertainment. Other forms of gamification allow readers to interact with the characters and plot and to role-play swapping identities and gender roles to ‘play a character’. Many have a long ancestry such as the murder mysteries and puzzles of serialised detective fiction such as Agatha Christie, through adaptations on stage, film, radio, TV to early CD games revealing clues to a mystery at a click, videogames based on genres such as L.A. Noire and its novelisations, to live performances in online mysteries where audiences puzzle out the clues across the web (Enfants Terribles, 2021). Overtly addressing a fandom, in fact the breadth of engagement required by these readerly and playerly texts demonstrates how this movement has led to higher levels of media literacy and the more interactive reading practices demanded by social media (Ensslin 2014). 24

Towards a New History of Literary Media

Gameplay’s rule-based narratives lead, by chance or choice, to different outcomes. In literary media storytelling interaction is rarely through play or chance and is commonly guided so the reader’s reaction has to be anticipated in the design. The challenge with interactivity in storytelling is that decision points lead to a rapid proliferation of storylines, and this has to be managed within the narrative design. Live interventions are often used in performance and online to keep the reader-audience on the path, but this is not possible in print-based storytelling which favours linear narrative. It took electronic hypertext to change this. George Landow, an advocate of hypertext, said the sentence was only one way words could be connected; with hypertext, words could be linked to many other contexts and this facilitated the multiplicity of character narratives in storytelling (Landow 1992). An early example is Geoff Ryman’s online story 253 (1996), in which the outward appearance of 252 train passengers (plus their driver) and their thoughts are described carriage by carriage. The hyperlinks join to other passengers or destinations showing the connections between them. This enables the reader to interact and explore both the main narrative and the stories which proliferate around it, culminating with the train’s crash. Despite Landow’s claims, word-to-word linkage is not unique to electronic hypertext, as many typographical and writing systems have connected words through to alternative contexts (e.g. the index). Again, it is a question of unearthing the conditions of historical practice to examine the occurrences of non-linear and choice-based storytelling. Authors need to know how far their readers will follow them down the different storylines and a game can be a swift way in for the reader-player as some rules are already known. The challenge to the general reader of 253 may seem minimal today for those familiar with reading on the Web, but reading practices have to be learned and there may be resistance. In 2015 novelist Iain Pears (2016) conceived a multilinear story app, Arcadia, written and published for the tablet. Like 253 it was later published in paperback for a traditional market but, unlike 253, which was a web-based story with a limited word count for each character on screen, Arcadia was designed for a readership now familiar with hyperlinks and multilinear stories and reading on a mobile device. Pears had the facility to show his storylines visually and to allow his readers to switch between them. To help the reader, the graphic design of the app displays the character’s storylines, and the reader can hop from line to line through the touch interface like an interactive underground map. If 253 explored the potential for a proliferation and democratisation of characters in a non-linear text, Arcadia takes these personal narratives and entangles them, each character becoming involved within each other’s stories, so that the various histories (there is time travel) change each other. A comparison of the two demonstrates how the expected skills of readers of new media had changed over the intervening twenty years. Online, it is the author’s assessment of their audiences’ reading capability and desire for a different reading experience that limits the design, and it was a niche market for publishers. One of those experimental publishers was Eastgate Systems who, in the 1990s, had an impressive list of authors trying out the possibilities of hyperlinks, interactivity and the electronic text mixing text and visuals, including Michael Joyce, Shelley Jackson and Stuart Moulthrop. Judy Malloy’s its name was Penelope (1989), Mary-Kim Arnold’s Lust (1994) and Carolyn Guyer’s Quibbling (1992) experiment with the interaction between the fragmentation of hypertextual combinations and narrative sequencing. In Hypertext and the Female Imaginary, Odin gives a reading of Malloy’s work alongside Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995), arguing that exploiting the reader’s proficiency with technology, and knowledge of historical texts, they unravel the ‘crisscrossing threads of connections that have been 25

Alexis Weedon

historically buried under the homogenising tendency of the dominant discourse’ and ‘dominant gender roles’ (Odin, 2010: 58). Offering both print and online versions allows readers to explore their own media-specific interpretations of the text. Stephanie Strickland’s ‘The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot’ was printed in the Boston Review (1999) and then with Janet Holmes a hypertext version was made and is available at the gallery, wordcircuits.com. As with Arcadia, the print version conveys a legitimacy, but in fact the electronic version offers a more innovative experience. For the reader there is no one reading, and their interpretation splinters as interactivity gives rise to multiple reading experiences. Also picking up another motif of this movement, in the electronic version authorship becomes diffuse as coders, designers and others were involved in the adaptation of the print ballad to its online presence. For N. Katherine Hayles, this is all part of electronic literature’s imitation and intensification of print (2008). Interactive fiction, argues Hayles (2008: 9), mixes novelistic components expanding ‘the repertoire of the literary through a variety of techniques, including visual displays, graphics, animations, and clever modifications of traditional literary devices’. She cites Emily Short’s Savoir-Faire (2002) where action completes the metaphorical association; opening the box opens the door. At this point the cognitive engagement is of a different quality; the distinction is in the decision-making when the reader-player of an interactive story has to make a choice. Aarseth used this to differentiate between literatures arguing that ‘ergodic’ literature requires an effort of calculation. He cites printed as well as electronic texts, including Apollinaire’s Calligrammes and Weizenbaum’s ELIZA (Aarseth, 1997). For Hayles, this is reflected in the structure of the text: in analogue print, footnotes, glossaries and indexes require the reader to physically interact with the book, arresting the flow of reading, while web hyperlinks open these texts while reading the linked page using embedded code. ‘Deep’ code adds an extra dimension to the interactive text for writers and their readers to explore. Many have used this engagement of the reader in the text creatively in their own fiction, for example in Mark Z. Danielewski in House of Leaves (2000) and J.J. Adams and Doug Dorst’s S (2013). In this movement, interactivity is a recurring aim of authors, designers and reader-players and a theme of the texts which they create. As an aim or aspiration it is not limiting. So my term is more expansive than Aarseth (1997) and the New Media theorists Noah WardripFruin and Nick Montfort’s (2003) definition of ergodic literature and their determination of what constitutes non-trivial effort. In this movement creative effort goes into enriching the experiential meaning of the interaction. Ensslin wrestles with this ambiguity in Literary Gaming (2014), where the unassailable ‘rules’ and aesthetic of digital games become the base for the literary text. Tracing game-book innovation in the early twenty-first century, Franco observed that as reader-players became fluent in the modes of interaction from the console to the gestural interface, their expectations and their gratifications changed (Franco 2016, 2017). This has led to audiences’ level of transliteracy becoming a significant factor when designing contemporary transmedia fictions (Thomas 2020). Moving in time with these evolving media literacies is Kate Pullinger’s investigation of digital storytelling in her many new media incarnations of Inanimate Alice (Pullinger 2005– 2016). Her experimental work shares with Lewis Carroll’s original Alice stories a ‘diverting curiosity in the mechanics of pedagogic texts as well as a desire to explore the imaginary through carnivalesque play with Cartesian order’ (Jarvis and Weedon 2022). Pullinger and her collaborators’ stories have mutated as their designs and storylines have followed the development of media storytelling, and the project’s exploration took in the transmedia potential of virtual reality in the co-production Inanimate Alice: Perpetual Nomads (Campbell and 26

Towards a New History of Literary Media

Breeze 2018). The audience who can interact with episodes of her character’s life are a techsavvy younger generation familiar with reading across media interfaces and literate in embedded social media. In a history of literary media storytelling, the movement for interactivity gives rise to the themes of collaboration, choice and gamification. Typically, the text is designed to be readerly or playerly, and may be multilinear or open-ended; it makes demands of the audiences’ transliteracy skills, and addresses them in the second person. We can find these themes in the eighteenth century as in the 21st and there are period-specific examples in each. Distinct from Henry Jenkins’ participatory culture with its focus on ‘widespread participation in the production and distribution of media’ (Jenkins 2006), the movement for interactivity in literary media storytelling does not necessarily invite bottom-up creativity or have a politically democratic leaning. But there are resistances to the commercial dominance of content providers through publication on open access websites, fan platforms and in software communities as well as considerable concern over the ownership of copyright and ease of copying texts (Table 1.2) (Hills 2002; McGill 2022). Other resistances come from interactivity’s challenge to normative identity through interaction in a mediated social space. This is easier to do through gaming or play, although those activities, through their association with an unsettled identity, can suffer from an association with the stigmas of immaturity, racism, and transgressed gender norms.

Third Movement: Immersion The key characteristic of the third movement is the desire for immersive experiences. This has been associated with kindred concepts in different discourses such as the level of reader ‘engagement’, or the sense of ‘presence’ within the storyworld, the players’ enjoyment of ‘flow’ within the game, the psychological ‘absorption’ within the experience and the ‘aesthetic illusion’ of the art within the architectural space as we will explore below (McLuhan 2005, Mangen 2008, Csikszentmihalyi 1990, Weedon 2018, Grau 2004). Thon (2008) considers immersion to be perceptual, ludic, psychological, spatial, narrative and social. What links all of these is the audience’s sensation of displacement from the real world into the sensorium of the created world. This imaginary sensorium, an alternate enveloping environment, is artificial and may be physical and/or mediated. Such a broad definition needs to be contextualised. In the twenty-first century the desire for immersion in storytelling is evident in cultural activities from immersive theatre to virtual reality storytelling. The nature of narrative absorption and the levels of immersion felt within different media has been a point for investigation and artistic experiment. In Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, Grau (2004) located this in the history of trompe-l’oeil from the frescoes of Pompeii through Renaissance and Baroque architecture. In Understanding Engagement in Transmedia Culture (2019), Evans analysed the many uses of the term engagement that have arisen from the commodification of screen audiences to focus on an interdisciplinary and practitioner-based definition. Making a distinction between them is necessary as engagement is closely associated with commitment to the characters and storyworld in all its ancillary forms while immersion is often used to relate to a psychological state (see also Murray 2012; Bell and Ensslin 2016). Contemporary immersive storytelling can be seen along a spectrum from ‘full’ immersion such as in enactments of disaster scenarios to a blend of the immersive world overlaying sensory input from the real-life environment. Perhaps the deepest divide comes between the artistic representation which seeks to make the outside world vanish through the physical experience of an architectural reality, and those that seek to do this through the cognitive engagement with a 27

Table 1.2  Some examples of socio-economic processes and concerns for researchers investigating liminal resistances to reciprocity, interactivity and immersion Reciprocation Societal concern Resistances

Interaction Literary media example Stratification of theatre and cinema audience by price

Distinction and social layers

Cheap fiction and novelisations under 1/-

Educate and inform reader response Neo capitalism

Radio reports and fan letters to authors Branding and product placement in texts

Societal concern

Literary media example

Societal concern

Literary media example

Social performance of an acquired identity (vs a given one). Cultural transduction Gaming viewed as play

Gaming gives performance legitimacy where other performances challenge normative responses

Immersion addiction

Socialisation within literary media.

Play is seen as an immature or comedic activity.

Pleasure seeking

Race and gender inequality

Representation of race and gender in the media Concern over ownership of intellectual property and ease of copying digital texts

Privacy personal data, consent

Social media gratification, creation of followers, trolling Subscription membership, access, streaming Gambling, gaming & immersive media deemed psychologically dangerous User- investment fundraisers

Commercial IP ownership

Behavioural role models

Precarity of creatives under neo-capitalism

Alexis Weedon

28

Class inequality and mobility. Generation gap

Immersion

Towards a New History of Literary Media

mediated virtuality. But these are not separate, they intersect, for example, in how the darkened lights of the cinema prepare the film-goer for a mental journey into the film narrative. The dimmed auditorium and the hidden orchestra were a feature of nineteenth-century operatic revolution: Richard Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk proposed that to attain the level of absorption in the narrative required silent attention from the auditorium and a total artistic synthesis of music, performance, and theatre architecture. In the twentieth century its application was extended to film and media, cyberart and theme parks. Smith has argued that the Disney Corporation’s ‘total entertainment’ goal is a legacy of this vision of the Gesamtkunstwerk and traced its history through leisure pastimes, including massively multiplayer online roleplayning games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft (Smith 2007). Today, role-playing experiences attract a range of audiences in real life through conventions, enactments, and themed tourist attractions, and, in cyberspace, through architecture of immersive storyworlds from Second Life to Minecraft. While they may all have the intention to be immersive environments, the experience each gives is very different. Historically, the poetics of immersion has been associated with the theatre as, for example, Shakespeare’s Globe theatre designed in an oval, figuratively associates the stage with the world in Henry V. Stories of great performances tell of enraptured audiences surrounding the players climbing over each other from the auditorium and creeping in from the side of the stage to get closer to the action (Dane 1964). Folk performances are also a recognised form of immersive storytelling where trained performers lead the community in a retelling, and the immersive experience may be enhanced by music and dance. Similarly, costumed pageants and re-enactments relating a historical event or characters and involving role-play offer a deeper experience. Immersion, however, is often linked with the psychological state of hyperfocus, where the individual forgets their surroundings in their profound absorption in the performance (Weedon 2018). Extraction from that state is disruptive as the person’s conscious awareness has to readjust to their real-life surroundings. The artist Char Davis’s immersive experience Osmose was one of the earliest virtual reality environments to aim for immersion (Davis et al. 1995). She combined a headset with a harness of sensors which picked up the player’s breathing and motion. As the player leaned forward or backward they glided, sank or swam, through a virtual ‘underwater’ storyworld. There were objects to discover and explore at depth and towards the light. Davis’ achievement was to employ the body in intuitive interaction as later gestural interfaces have sought to follow. As the title suggests, Osmose requires time for cognitive adjustment to the immersive world and to the real world on return, an adjustment similarly reported by readers, gamers and theatre-goers who have been deeply engrossed in the flow of the experience. Csikszentmihalyi defines flow as the psychology of optimal experience where the concentration on the physical interaction is so great that it absorbs the individual’s attention, and they have no awareness of time (Csikszentmihalyi 1990). Alongside this pursuit of emotional transformation are more playful motifs: role-play and impersonation in second lives, story-tourism and theme parks, and the desire to be ‘live’ at mediated performances. Mediated live experiences occur in the cinema watching a theatrical performance or in the Olympic city where bars screen the events outside the grounds for sports tourists (Horne and Whannel 2020). For the fans the transformative experience lies in being on site, watching it as it happens and sharing that experience, the fact that they are watching it mediated by the television screen is not an issue. Experiencing a world through virtual reality can do the opposite and let us be where in real life we cannot, such as in horror and joy of a survivor’s tale of Ebola in a Liberian village (Arora and Milk 2015). 29

Alexis Weedon

As transmedia literacy becomes commonplace, former distinctions of media specificity dissolve. Today we regard the use of ‘close-up’ and ‘fade out’ from film scripts as metaphors and when text messages appear on screen read it as a narrative device. They, like live screenings of events, have become part of the broader visual or textual vocabulary of storytelling. The aspiration of immersive storytelling has resistances too. Controversies over social media gratification, behavioural role models and trolling are all aspects of the discourse of socialisation which directs the purpose of literary media storytelling in society. Addiction is a recurrent motif as gambling, gaming and immersive media are deemed psychologically dangerous, and society requires the media to protect the individual from perilous engrossment. So in shared imaginary worlds, the media creators are given the task to safeguard privacy and ensure consent, while users are desirous of easy access to streamed content.

Conclusion: Tracing the Flows of Change In tracing the ‘contradictory, liminal processes by which the new appears, goes underground, and reappears’ we come across resistances, rubs and catches which deflect the course of the new. Table 1.2 lists some of these but there are more, and the intricacy is in the detail. A historical approach reveals some of the rubs and catches in the historical record, such as theatre managers refusing to employ actors who worked on films, but other factors such as the economic flows to the more profitable genres and formats have to be made manifest. Similarly, the structure of businesses, the precarity of workers in the creative industry, celebrity culture, the writer’s skillsets and the free labour of the reader-player are factors which combine to open one path open and close another. More broadly, the politics of power, class, race and gender all play a significant part in forcing the new underground. Articulating precisely what is driving – and what is resisting – the author and reader in literary media storytelling is fundamental to analysing how a text’s different elements come together. This requires us to assess the forces encountered and their intra-actions, to use Barad’s term (Barad 2003). The advantage of embodying the flows of change in these three movements is that it avoids the illusion of causality and the fiction of periodisation, and allows the researcher to interrogate the appearance – and disappearance – of themes and desires in literary media.

Note 1 I am referring here to the different positions taken on technological determinism by the members of the Frankfurt School (Bolter and Grusin cite Walter Benjamin specifically) and Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s.

References Aarseth, E. J. (1997). Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, MD; London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Adams, J. J., and Dorst, D. (2013). S. Edinburgh: Canongate Books. Arnold, M.-K. (1994). Lust. Eastgate Systems. Arora, G., and Milk, C. (2015). Waves of Grace VR film. Los Angeles: Vice Media, Vrs. Works for The United Nations. Barad, K. (2003). Post-humanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831. Barker, M., and Brooks, K. (1998). Knowing Audiences: Judge Dredd, its Friends, Fans and Foes. Luton: University of Luton Press.

30

Towards a New History of Literary Media Barthes, R. (1976). The Pleasure of the Text. London: Jonathan Cape. BBC Yearbooks from 1928–1988 downloadable from https://worldradiohistory.com/BBC_YEAR_ Book_Page_Key.htm (n.d.) Bell, A. A., and Ensslin, H. Rustad (2016). Analysing Digital Fiction. London: Routledge. Berkeley, A. (1929). The Poisoned Chocolate Case. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc. Bolter, J. D., and Grusin, R. A. (1999). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Bourdieu, P. (1993). The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University Press. Campbell, A., and Breeze, M. (2018). Inanimate Alice: Perpetual Nomads. From Mez Breeze Design and BradField Narrative Designs Inc. https://perpetual-nomads.com/ Chasar, M. (2012). Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America. New York: Columbia University Press. Colclough, S. (2007). Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities, 1695–1860. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1st ed.). New York: Harper and Row. Dane, C. (1921). Will Shakespeare: An Invention in Four Acts. London: William Heinemann Dane, C. (1964). London has a Garden. London: Michael Joseph. Danielewski, M. Z. (2000). House of Leaves. New York: Pantheon Books. Davis, C., Harrison, J., Mauro, G., Blaszczak, D., and Bidlack, R. (1995). Osmose, Immersive Interactive Virtual-Reality Environment Installation: SOFTIMAGE® 3|D Modeling. Silicon Graphics Onyx2. http://www.immersence.com/osmose/ Edwards, A. (2018). Literature Fandom and Literary Fans. In P. Booth (Ed.), A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies. Oxford: Wiley. Enfants Terribles, L. (2021). Sherlock Holmes, an Online Adventure. The Case of the Hung Parliament. https://www.sherlockimmersive.com/ Ensslin, A. (2014). Literary Gaming. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Evans, E. (2019). Understanding Engagement in Transmedia Culture, London: Routledge. Fiske, J. (1992). The Cultural Economy of Fandom. In L. A. Lewis (Ed.), The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. London: Routledge. Franco, C. P. (2016). Weaving Nature Mage: Collective Intertextuality in the Design of a Book-to-Game Adaptation. In C. Duret and C-M. Pons (Eds.), Contemporary Research on Intertextuality in Video Games, IGI Global. Franco, C. P. (2017). Reinventing the Book: Exploring the Affordances of Digital Media to (re)tell Stories and Expand Storyworlds. University of Bedfordshire Ethos. https://uobrep.openrepository.com/ Freeman, M. (2017). Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge. Geraghty, C. (2009). Foregrounding the Media: Atonement (2007) as an Adaptation. Adaptation, 2(2), 91–109. Gledhill, C. (2006). Play as Experiment in 1920s British Cinema. Film History, 20, 14–34. Grau, O. (2004). Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gregg, M., and Andrijasevic, R. (2019). Virtually Absent: The Gendered Histories and Economies of Digital Labour. Feminist Review, 123(1), 1–7. Guyer, C. (1992). Quibbling. Eastgate Systems. https://www.eastgate.com/catalog/Quibbling.html. Hansen, M. B. (2008). Benjamin’s Aura. Critical Inquiry, 34(2), 336–375. Hayles, N. K. (2008). Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame. Hills, Matt. (2002). Fan Cultures. London: Routledge. Horne, J., and Whannel, G. (2020). Understanding the Olympics. Abingdon: Routledge. Jackson, S. (1995). Patchwork Girl. Eastgate Systems. https://www.eastgate.com/catalog/PatchworkGirl. html Jarrett, K. (2015). Feminism, Labour and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife. Abingdon: Routledge. Jarvis, T., and Weedon, A. (2022). Gamification and Digital Fiction. In K. Capshaw, Z. Jaques, and K. Kidd (Eds.), Cambridge History of Children’s Literature in English, Volume 3: 1914-the present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

31

Alexis Weedon Landow, G. (1992). Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jenkins, H. (2006). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture (Part One). http://henryjenkins. org/blog/2006/10/confronting_the_challenges_of.html Johnston, K. (2021). Engagement and Immersion in Digital Play: Supporting Young Children’s Digital Wellbeing. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(19), 10179. Kaye-Smith, S., & Stern, G. B. (1943). Talking of Jane Austen. London. Cassell & Co. Laurel, B. (1991). Computers as Theatre. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing. Madden, J. (dir). (1998). ‘Shakespeare in Love’ Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard writers. Universal Pictures, Miramax, The Bedford Falls Company. Malloy, J. (1989). Its name was Penelope. Eastgate Systems. http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/Penelope. html Mangen, A. (2008). Hypertext Fiction Reading: Haptics and Immersion. Journal of Research in Reading, 31, 404–419. McLuhan, M. (2005). Inside the Five Sense Sensorium. In D. Howes (Ed.), The Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. London: Routledge. McGill, K. M. (2022). The Digital Lineage of Narrative: Analyzing Interactive Fiction to Further Understand Game Narrative. In B. Bostan (Ed.), Games and Narrative: Theory and Practice. Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 77–90. Meisel, M. (2014). Realizations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Murray, J. (2012). Inventing the Medium. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Odin, J. K. (2010). Hypertext and the Female Imaginary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. O’Farrell, M. (2020). Hamnet. London: Tinder Press. Pears, I. (2016). Arcadia. Toronto: Knopf Canada and App. Pullinger, K. (2005–2016). Inanimate Alice. Episodes 1–4. Online InanimateAlice.com Rhys, J. (1966). Wide Sargasso Sea. London: André Deutsch. Ryan, B. (2013). Teasing Out Clues, Not Kooks: The Man Nobody Knows and Ben-Hur. Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, 5, 9–23. Ryan, M.-L. (2001). Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ryan, M.-L. (2015). Narrative as Virtual Reality 2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ryman, G. (1996). 253 online at www.ryman-novel.com/ in print Ryman, G. (1998). 253. The Print Remix. Flamingo. Sandvoss, C. (2017). 1. The Death of the Reader?: Literary Theory and the Study of Texts in Popular Culture. In G. Jonathan, S. Cornel, and C. L. Harrington (Eds.), Fandom, Second Edition: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. New York, NJ: New York University Press, 29–44. Shaw, J., Del Favero, D., McGinity, M., Hardjono, A., and Kuchelmeister, V. (2007). Advanced Visualization and Interaction Environment. https://www.jeffreyshawcompendium.com/platform/ avie/ Short, E. (2002). Savoir-Faire Freeware. IFID: ZCODE-8-040205-6630 Sleigh, C., and White, A. (2019). War and Peace in British Science Fiction Fandom, 1936–1945. Osiris, 34(1), 177–197. Smith, M. W. (2007). Total Immersion: Cyberspace and the Total Work of Art. In Matthew Wilson Smith (Eds.), The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace. New York: Routledge. Stein, L. E., and Busse, K. (Eds.). (2012). Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom. Jefferson NC: McFarland. Stoppard, T. (1967). Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. London: Faber & Faber. Strickland, S., and Holmes, J. (1999). The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot. World Circuits at www.word circuits.com/gallery/sandsoot/ Thon, J.-N. (2008). Immersion Revisited. On the Value of a Contested Concept. In A. Fernandez, O. Leino, and H. Wirman (Eds.), Extending Experiences. Structure, Analysis and Design of Computer Game Player Experience. Rovaniemi: Lapland University Press, 29–43. Thomas, B. (2020). Literature and Social Media. Abingdon: Routledge. Van Druten, J., Stern, G. B., Coppard, A. E., O’Faolain, S., Hoult, N., Maclaren, H., Bowen, E., Frazer, R., and Whitaker, M. (1932). Consequences, a Complete Story in the Manner of the Old Parlour Game, in Nine Chapters, Each by a Different Author. Waltham St. Lawrence: The Golden Cockerel Press.

32

Towards a New History of Literary Media Wardrip-Fruin, N., and Montfort, N. (2003). The New Media Reader. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press. Weedon, A. (2016). The Effect of Emerging New Media in Book Publishing: Lessons from the Origins of Cross-Media Storytelling in the Early Twentieth Century for Contemporary Transmedia Researchers. In Kenneth Womack, and James M. Decker (Eds.), Victorian Literary Cultures: Studies in Textual Subversion. Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Rowman & Littlefield, 101–114. Weedon, A. (2018). Story, Storyteller and Storytelling. Logos: Journal of the World Publishing, 29(2–3), 46–53 Weedon, A. (2021). The Origins of Transmedia Storytelling in Early Twentieth Century Adaptation. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

33

2 INTERMEDIALITY AS A MATERIAL PRACTICE AND ARTISTIC EVENT Marina Grishakova

Introduction: A Historical Overview ‘Intermediality’ is a famously rich and controversial concept: its history intermittently reflects branching, diverging or converging conceptions of ‘medium.’ Whereas the idea of the materiality of media features prominently in the pioneering works of Kittler, McLuhan and others, those media which have been given the highest place in the hierarchy of the arts and valued for their spiritual, intellectual or moral impact – such as literature, music or certain genres of painting – have traditionally been less susceptible to materialistic analyses. Interart studies instead linked these high cultural media to historical-contextual, semiotic or hermeneutic interpretations and the issues of signification, textuality or aesthetic form. As noted by Jost (2005), comparative narratology – with its interest in the different types of narrativity that various media avail – brought into focus the relationships between media and the specific features of each medium. Further, the rise of digital media cast a fresh light on materiality, most importantly that of the book, including its new forms and formats and, retrospectively, its old ones. In this context, Hayles coined the concept of ‘comparative textual media’ (Hayles and Pressman 2013), referring to the fact that the digital format made the materiality of print visible in hindsight. However, as I argue in this chapter, intermediality, understood as an artistic practice and an ingenious blending of media, reveals and brings to the fore material, semiotic and expressive (aesthetic) features of these media also before and beyond the digital formats. From this perspective, intermediality has always been and still is an incentive for experimentation with new materials, perceptions and cultural forms and extension of their perceptual, aesthetic, and social effects. The chapter offers a brief history of the concept and discusses various forms of intermediality in which literature participates via verbality and textuality. In the 1980s–1990s, academic research on intermediality was largely informed by literary theories and concepts. Hansen-Löve (1983), who introduced the German term Intermedialität in 1983, and other German scholars (Jürgen Müller, Werner Wolf, and Irina Rajewsky) viewed intermediality as an extension or a new version of intertextuality. In her 2005 chapter, Rajewsky proposed to distinguish the concept of intermediality, as used by herself and other German scholars, from the American term ‘intermedia’ (referring to Dick Higgins’ (1984

DOI: 10.4324/9781003119739-4 34

Intermediality as a Material Practice and Artistic Event

[1966]) coinage). Whereas the former was employed as an analytical tool, the latter originates in experimental artistic practices of the twentieth century. However, the distinction between intermedia and intermediality largely conceived as amalgamations of various media or artistic forms, even avant la lettre, before the respective concepts emerged, was not, in fact, so neat. In the Italian theatre of the Renaissance, a musical or theatrical interlude shown between the parts of the main play was called an ‘intermedio’. The term ‘intermedium’ was introduced by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his lecture on Edmund Spencer (1812) to refer to the works that fall between traditional genres or media. Coleridge calls narrative allegory in literature and visual arts an ‘intermedium’ between ‘person and personification’ (Coleridge 1936: 33), that is between an image of reality and a symbolic quality attributed to it. Further, he uses the term in his discussion of poetic metre in Biographia Literaria (1817). Metre does not pertain only to poetry, yet ‘whatever else is combined with metre must, though it be not itself essentially poetic, have nevertheless some property in common with poetry, as an intermedium of affinity’ (Coleridge 1891: 181). More recently, Fluxus artist Dick Higgins applied both ‘intermedium’ and ‘intermedia’ to experimental artistic practices. For Higgins (1984 [1966]), ‘intermedia’ was a distinctive feature of Fluxus works as compared to traditional art practices. Fluxus was an international community of experimental artists, including, among others, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, Alison Knowles and Yoko Ono, who propagated an understanding of artistic practice as an experiment, happening or performance: in other words, an exciting encounter of artistic forms and media and their fusion in a new, innovative work. Similarly, for McLuhan, ‘the moment of the meeting of media is a moment of freedom and release from ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses’ (McLuhan 2003 [1964]: 81). From this perspective, as Rippl and other researchers observe, intermediality works against any essentialist conceptions of media (Rippl 2015: 16): it conveys a sense of transformation and renewal of practices, perceptions and experiences. Rippl’s observation is seconded by Glaser: ‘The term ‘intermediality’ is today used in a variety of ways, one of which is to describe creative works that resist classification into the “pure” or conventional categories of literature, music, or the visual arts’ (Glaser 2009: 12). Baetens and Sánchez-Mesa point out that ‘intermediality […] is not only the general term that defines the relationships between autonomous media, it is also the term that identifies the internal plurality of each medium’ (Baetens and Sánchez-Mesa 2015: 292). Intermediality as an internal heterogeneity of the verbal medium may include verbal imagery (metaphors, vivid descriptions), ekphrasis (situated in-between verbal and visual representations), or even percepts, memory images and dreams evoked by verbal texts. Intermediality of the book involves its design, page layout and other visual and material aspects. Higgins distinguished ‘mixed media’ such as opera or song, which demonstrate complementary relations, from ‘intermedia’, where the media are fused and inextricably entwined: visual poetry is both a graphic image and a printed text. ‘Intermedia’ also embraces any kind of conceptual art (e.g. John Cage’s music) and writing (Roland Barthes’ essays) that fuse art with philosophy or the social sciences (Higgins 1984 [1966]: 26). ‘Intermedium’, as Higgins puts it, is the ‘uncharted land that lies between’ different media: intermedial works are ‘not governed by rules; each work determines its own medium and form according to its needs’ (Higgins 1984 [1966]: 22). Arguably, ‘intermediality has always been a possibility since the most ancient times … it remains a possibility wherever the desire to fuse two or more existing media exists’ (Higgins 1984 [1966]: 25). Higgins also defines intermediality in terms of its experiential and mental effect, as a ‘holistic mental experience’. The idea that media, working together towards a unique artistic event, produce a specific cognitive-perceptual effect and 35

Marina Grishakova

involve the viewer or user in the production of this effect through somatic and perceptual circuits was prominent in the theoretical and philosophical conceptualisations of new forms of intermediality, from McLuhan’s view of media as extensions of human senses (1964) to Youngblood’s concepts of ‘expanded cinema’ as extended human consciousness and ‘videosphere’ as multisensory intermedia environments of the near future (see Grishakova 2020). As Youngblood explains: on the one hand, intermedia environments turn the participant inward upon himself, providing a matrix for psychic exploration, perceptual, sensorial, and intellectual awareness; on the other hand, technology has advanced to the point at which the whole earth itself becomes the “content” of aesthetic activity. (Youngblood 1970: 348) The history of intermedia includes bold experiments that have changed conventional views of media, cultural practices and book cultures. Manipulation of material, technological and semiotic facets of media and artefacts transforms cultural habits and conventions and, at the same time, reveals the potentialities of media as vehicles of cultural, aesthetic and social functions. However, intermediality as an artistic practice and insight, evoking rich and transformative perceptual and cognitive experiences, is not historically new, nor is it typical exclusively of twentieth-century avant-garde cultures. Visual poetry was well known in Ancient Greece and in Europe during the Middle Ages and later. Richly illustrated and ornamented medieval and Renaissance books can be seen as both books and artefacts, collages of jewels, metalwork, calligraphy and painting. The Baroque aesthetics of exuberance and abundance in church and palace interiors, theatre, and poetry also involved fusions of the arts and media. More recently, intermediality has been associated with Eisenstein’s ‘montage of attractions’, Kandinsky’s Bühnenkompositionen (stage compositions), where different arts affect each other (Kattelbelt 2008), and with Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk. The concept of Gesamtkunstwerk or a total work of art – coined by Richard Wagner as a means of reshaping musical theatre and of recovering the synthesis of the arts at the core of Greek tragedy – played a prominent role in the practices of Symbolism and Aestheticism. Further, avantgarde experiments blurred the borders between the verbal and the visual arts, introducing multimodal poetic forms which made use of typography, colours, typefaces and texture, while also emphasising the material and visual aspects of language. Similarly, avant-garde collages combined randomly assembled objects, everyday materials, pieces of painting, graphic elements and texts. Following Adorno’s critique of Wagner’s total work of art as a commodity, Smith considers the twentieth-century syntheses of the arts and entertainment (e.g. in attraction parks, such as Disneyland, or the advertisement industry) as a variety of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk transformed into ‘total entertainment’ (see Smith 2007; Fusillo and Grishakova 2020). To describe and interpret various types of media interactions, contemporary scholars coined new terms, such as Wagner’s iconotext and Mitchell’s imagetext. Both concepts apply to relationships between word and image that, due to their concurrently complementary and antagonistic nature, have always been of central importance in artistic practices (see Steiner 1982). Illustrated books, where images are part of the narrative and shape the textual whole, for instance, or images that include writing, are iconotexts or imagetexts, given their verbal and visual parts cannot be separated without distorting or impoverishing their meaning.

36

Intermediality as a Material Practice and Artistic Event

The volume Icons – Texts – Iconotexts edited by Wagner includes such examples of iconotexts as Evelyne Sinnasamy’s novel with photographs, La femme se découvre, and James Gillray’s and William Dent’s caricatures (Wagner 1996). Mitchell’s case studies are the illustrated books of William Blake and photo-essays, such as Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), which use tightly integrated imagetext structures (Mitchell 1994). While applying Mitchell’s concepts (metapictures, the linguistics of image and the iconology of verbal text) to visual and verbal representation, I added ‘intermedial metarepresentations’ to the category of imagetexts: that is to say, features of verbal texts that evoke images and features of visual representation that call for verbalisation (see Grishakova 2010, Lopez-Varela and Khaski 2013), both conveying a sense of incompleteness and inability of a single medium to capture the multimodality of natural perception. Intermediality as both a concept and a practical principle culminates in neo-avant-garde and postmodernist experimental cultures. Whereas the avant-garde invested in an authored artistic event or performance, postmodernism downplays the role of the author and celebrates the event of hybridisation and intermediation: ‘Since the seventies, the very idea of an avant-garde, or of individual genius, has fallen under suspicion. Combative, collective movements of innovation have become steadily fewer, and the badge of a novel, self-conscious ‘ism’ ever rarer. For the universe of the postmodern is not one of delimitation, but intermixture – celebrating the cross-over, the hybrid, the pot-pourri’ (Anderson 1998: 93). Neo-avantgarde and postmodernist experimentation is often considered as the anticipation of the potentialities of digital media. Such phenomena as visual or pattern poetry, collage, cinenovel, and comics appear in new digital guises, revealing and developing the opportunities offered by new media. Techniques of remix and mashup enjoy new possibilities made available by digital cut-copy and paste technologies. As modes of appropriation and re-shaping of pre-existing materials (verbal, visual, audio), they had their predecessors in poetry (T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, 1922), fiction (Kathy Acker’s novels and collections of essays and poems), and essayistic writing, such as Walter Benjamin’s collection The Arcades’ Project (1927–1940). The Oulipo experiments with constrained writing or the tradition of dictionary novels, combining the ‘database’ and ‘narrative’ principles (Grishakova 2018), in turn anticipated digital hypertexts and other forms of electronic literature (see, for example, O’Sullivan; Bell; Skains; Erslev; and Patti, this volume). The emergence of digital culture changed the functions and forms of intermediality altogether. Text merges with technologies (programs, algorithms) and becomes a ‘techno-text’, revealing that ‘the physical form of the literary artifact always affects what the words and other semiotic components mean’ (Hayles 2002: 25). In this way, rather than seeing techno-text as ‘more developed’ as regards to printed or written text, Hayles considers it as a means to prompting us to reconceive and reinvent print cultures in hindsight and thereby casting a fresh light on the history of the book. In the digital age, ‘intermediality’ is reconceived as the process and product of digitisation. The digitisation perspective is especially critical in countering Jenkins’ conception of media convergence (2006), as it demonstrates that media environments foster variation and transformation of media features and formats along various trajectories, and proliferation of repertoires. Indeed, rather than constituting a convergence, ‘digital media [is a] pattern made up of a set of interlaced devices, markets, aesthetics and practices woven together – a textile metaphor underlining the fact that today’s digital media are an interwoven environment where the original elements are still recognizable but constitute now a new and distinctive object’ (Balbi and Magaudda 2012: 154). In offering

37

Marina Grishakova

‘a less linear explanation of what has been happening to digital media in recent years’ (Balbi and Magaudda 2012: 156), intermediality thus helps to identify trajectories of proliferation and hybridisation of various media features. It appears in condensed but also fuzzier forms in digital environments. The environment binding together tools, formats, and platforms with human interaction in co-constructing these environments is a crucial factor in the development of new forms of intermediality. In Narrative Complexity (2019), Maria Poulaki and I adopted Gubrium and Holstein’s concept of ‘narrative environments’ to describe the material spaces where storytelling takes place. Different narrative environments foster different types of storytelling through developing various participation frameworks and formats, communication channels, and settings that mediate storytelling and determine participants’ roles. These settings, in which the boundless stories develop, in turn shape – from the bottom up – their narrative environments. Interestingly, the concept of narrative environments was earlier introduced in artistic practices. New media artist and philosopher Mark Amerika (1997) referred to his web-based projects, such as Grammatron, as ‘public-domain narrative environments’. ‘Grammatron’, he explained, ‘depicts a near-future world where stories are no longer conceived for book production but are instead created for a more immersive networked-narrative environment that, taking place on the Net, calls into question how a narrative is composed, published and distributed in the age of digital dissemination’. According to Ryan, by ‘narrative environment’ Amerika means ‘the stream of information that flows through cyberspace, waiting to be harnessed into “a nomadic narrative”’ (Ryan 2006, xvi). The traditional, classical understanding of a story – with a beginning, middle, and end that is locked in a book or film – cannot accommodate more recent practices that involve wider layers of context, information, and recipient involvement (Grishakova and Poulaki 2019; Bellini 2022).

A Terminological Excursus: Types of Intermediality The term ‘intermediality’ engendered a plethora of related concepts and typologies. Among the literary-informed frameworks, Rajewsky’s (2005) three types of intermediality gained prominence:

• Medial transposition (e.g., film adaptations), where intermediality is an aspect and principle of text production;

• Media combination (film, opera, comics, etc.), where intermediality is the principle of a media product’s or texts’ constitutions;

• Transmedial reference (e.g., evocation of film’s features in literature or vice versa). In other conceptual frameworks, these categories may overlap with plurimediality, multimodality, transmediality or multimediality conceived as either different types of media relations or as different research perspectives (see Wolf 2005; Rippl 2015; Grishakova and Ryan 2010; Ryan and Thon 2014). Schröter’s (2012) four types of intermediality are more inclusive and broader as compared with literary-oriented concepts. They manifest in artistic practices and critical talk around these practices, rather than only in scholarly writing.

• Synthetic intermediality involves the fusion of several media into a new medium and is seen as the triumph over monomedia and as a way of social liberation. It is a Gesamtkunstwerktype intermedia, with social-utopian potential that implies a merger of art and life in a 38

Intermediality as a Material Practice and Artistic Event

single liminal experience, as described in Yalkut’s (Fluxus artist’s) Understanding Intermedia (1967). Ascott’s coinage Gesamtdatenwerk (‘total data work’) was inspired by Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk and refers to the new forms of synthetic intermediality that are possible in the digital age (Ascott 1990). • Formal (transmedial) intermediality is based on structural homologies or transmedial features, for instance forms and structures shared by painting, photography, and cinema or narrative features found across media. Instead of a clear-cut division between the institutionalised media (such as literature, cinema, photography, etc.), porous categories such as ‘media narrating cinematically or literarily’ allow for further, subtler, and more sophisticated distinctions. • Transformational intermediality as a representation of one medium by another overlaps with Grusin and Bolter’s (1999) concept of ‘remediation’ and brings to the fore media-­ specific differences (e.g. predominantly iconic classical painting versus predominantly indexical abstract painting or music). • Ontological intermediality is viewed as a hypothetical synthetic condition (arch- or ontomediality) preceding separate media and undermining the idea of clearly separated ‘monomedia’: to see a specific character of a medium the latter should be juxtaposed to other media. Schröter cites Kittler’s thesis ‘according to which new media do not replace old ones but rather attribute different positions in the system to them’: the (terms for) other media are necessary to define a separate medium and therefore are already contained in it as a trace (Schröter 2012: 29). At some points Schröter’s schematic overlaps with Rajewsky’s and other types of intermediality, which is no surprise given intermediality is generally understood by various researchers as a relationship or interaction between different media. The relationships involve proximity or distance between interacting media (defined as fusion to reference in Rajewsky), with media distinctions, resistance, and transformations of different degrees acting as parameters on which different types of intermediality are based. Nevertheless, Schröter’s taxonomy has the unique advantage of also embracing social and cultural functions of media. However, before defining and discussing the phenomenon of intermediality, it is necessary to pinpoint what is meant by ‘medium’ – a step which is rarely taken (see Elleström 2010 for an exception), with more effort usually put in the analysis and interpretation of various media conjunctions (whether these be between literature, painting, film, digital, or other arts, or between word and image). Three meanings of ‘medium’ adopted across various works were succinctly summarised by Marie-Laure Ryan (2005):

• materials and tools (clay, stone, the human body; writing, print, digital media) • semiotic (or, rather, perceptual-semiotic) media: verbal, visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, or – based on the dominant type of semiotic signs – iconic (classical painting), indexical (music, abstract painting), symbolic (verbal arts) • cultural media (literature, film, TV, etc.) as both practices and institutions. I would add a fourth type to Ryan’s schematic: ‘media’ as aesthetic expressive systems that involve sets of specific aesthetic features and forms. Discussions and studies of intermediality may be based on any of these four meanings. Apparently, distinctions between the four meanings of ‘medium’ are not clear-cut: these meanings can also be viewed as four levels of mediation present in any intermedial works or blends. In the subsequent subsections, I touch on the 39

Marina Grishakova

three types of the most prominent media interactions or blends in contemporary culture, in which literary media (through the word and verbality) is involved. My emphasis will be on the material and semiotic aspects of media and, as a result, on the most significant intermedial combinations, such as 1) paper/print, word, and image, 2) electronic (digital) medium, word, and image, and 3) ambient (environments), and word or image in digital media.

Word as Image: From typographic experiments and concrete poetry to postmodernist fiction ‘Concrete poetry’ refers to any kind of typographically experimental or visually shaped poetry (see also Patti, this volume). Visual or pattern poetry include iconic shapes, for instance, Hellenistic Greek texts in the shape of urns, altars, axes, wings and other forms from the third and fourth century BC that combine pictorial and verbal patterns. Concrete and visual poetry modify and disturb the conventional uses of page space; foreground the materiality of the verbal; and illustrate, disrupt or de-naturalise the connection between the signifiers and signifieds. Visual poetry culminates in avant-garde typographic and calligraphic experiments of the twentieth century, such as the calligramatic poems of Apollinaire, which use iconic forms in the arrangement of words, or Blaise Cendrars’s poem La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (1913), which was created in collaboration with Sonia Delaunay whose watercolours intermingle with Cendrar’s stanzas printed in varied colours, sizes and typefaces. Italian Futurists used mathematical symbols in their typographic experimentation; arrangements that imitate musical notation were characteristic of Russian Futurism; and cut and paste typography (collage techniques), along with the use of different typefaces, have been recruited by the Dada movement in France. Concrete poetry features the merging of visual form and meaning (such as in Eugen Gomringer’s Silencio, where blank spaces – entering the arrangement of the word ‘silencio’ repeated on the page – epitomise silence) or the subversion of meanings altogether through experimental forms. In the 1950s–1960s, concrete-poetic practices and theoretical meta-reflections appeared in Switzerland (Max Bill), Brazil (the international Noigandres group), the U.S. (Charles Olson’s ‘projective verse’), and Canada (Toronto Research Group, including works by Steve McCaffery and bpNichol collected in Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine, 1992). Moreover, the Fluxus group used written, typeset and scribbled verbal elements as an art material in the context of artistic performance, seeking inspiration in graphic experiments and visual poetry of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Typographic and visual experimentation was not limited to poetry, however. It spread in prose fiction, philosophical writing (Derrida’s Glas, 1974), and cultural criticism (The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, 1967, by McLuhan and Fiore; Learning from Las Vegas, by Robert Venturi et al., 1972). The Medium is the Massage, a collaboration of McLuhan with graphic designer Quentin Fiore, is considered a landmark of visual poetics and the usage of the collage style with a mixture and superimposition of verbal, visual, and graphic elements: …the book aspires to show its argument, to exemplify the dissonance and confusion of the coming ‘electronic’ age in the mash-up formats of multiple mediated ‘messages’. The hybrid text is to some extent a work of deconstruction avant la lettre. And what it first deconstructs is our conventional assumptions about an orderly ‘linear’ argument. (Sandywell 2015: 1408) 40

Intermediality as a Material Practice and Artistic Event

Experimentation with page space and text segmentation in postmodernist fiction, including the use of blank spaces, short text segments, boldface or upper-case type, and coloured pages, was disruptive of the usual perception of textuality, foregrounded the materiality of the book, created porous relations between media, and fostered cross-overs and metamorphoses of the verbal into the visual and vice versa. For example, in Ronald Suckenick’s Out (1975), pages include increasingly wide empty spaces. There are eleven chapters (from 10 to 0) in Suckenick’s novel, with the number of lines in each paragraph of the chapter decreasing and empty space growing – the design of which, combined with the motifs of emptiness, nothingness, and the void, is an intermedial (meta)representation of the novel’s Buddhist underpinnings. As McHale notes (1987, 182), narrative discontinuity in postmodernist texts has a physical ‘objective correlative’ through, for instance, the spacing of the text or ‘extremely short chapters or short paragraphs separated by wide bands of white space’ in texts by Brautigan, Barthelme and Vonnegut. McHale also discusses Christine Brooke-Rose’s bold experimentation with text, page space and visual elements (aka verbal images) – which require the ‘learning and unlearning’ of mimetic conventions (White 2005: 145) – and which attracted both praise and sharp critique, establishing her reputation as a difficult, almost unreadable writer.

Digital medium and word: Electronic literature as an event and performance The emergence of computer-mediated literature replaced the fusion of analogue media (the materiality of the paper, combinations of print, fonts, images, etc.) with the constraints and affordances of the digital medium. ‘The immediacy of code to the text’s performance’ has become ‘fundamental to understanding electronic literature, especially to appreciating its specificity as a literary and technical production’ (Hayles 2016: 199). The ‘intermediation’ of literature via the digital medium activates the aesthetics of play and interaction that require specific cognitive, interpretive and participatory skills from the reader. The features of the digital medium listed by Ryan (2006: 98) – such as reactivity-interactivity (that is, the medium’s sensitivity to user’s behaviour); multiple sensoriality; networking; volatility of signs (­dissemination and unprecedented variability of the digital image); and modularity – had an immediate impact on the ways electronic texts were made available, appeared to, and used by readers. Stephanie Strickland and Nick Montfort’s Sea and Spar Between (2010), for example, recombines and integrates lines from Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville with input from readers, resulting in the text constantly changing on the screen. Similarly, Eugenio Tisselli’s degeneration (2005) deletes pieces of the author’s prior content with every site visit, while its counterpart regeneration pulls in new text from the Internet. Works such as these illustrate the volatility and performativity of electronic texts. Hayles explains the difference between the first- and second-generation hypertext, such as Michael Joyce’s afternoon and Twelve Blue, as a difference between a journey (i.e. movement through the text mediated by the pre-given nodes and links) and a flow (‘continuous stream of images, characters, and events that seep or surge into one another, like tides flowing in and out of an estuarial river,’ Hayles 2008: 63). From this perspective, visual print poetry – with its ambiguous status as both image and text – functions as a resource for digital poetry, particularly through its ability to support multilinear or multi-sequential reading, to disrupt smooth and transparent signification, and to probe the limits of media. Nevertheless, digital poetry makes some key departures from its predecessors, as this medium not only combines linguistic and graphic features in the vein of visual print poetry, but also provides additional ways of expression: time, movement and 41

Marina Grishakova

interaction. The movement, shift and displacement thematised and illustrated by visual print poetry are animated in digital poetry and turned into the process of making the artwork. The moving text as such was nothing new to the reader: it appeared in film, TV and advertising long before the digital turn. Similarly, production and functioning of generative and code poetry are considerably facilitated by computer mediation, but the principles of production (selection, combination, permutation, compression) are not new. Instead, novelty has been introduced through the computational aesthetics and participatory affordances of new media that integrate participatory-interactive verbal works in everyday vernacular practices and destabilise the traditional roles of the author and reader. By combining poiesis (from the Greek ‘bringing into existence, creating’) and techne (skill, craft, technology), digital poetry develops a considerable self-reflexive and critical capacity and becomes a site where ‘as nowhere else the function of literature in the technical age is made clear’ (Block 2007: 241). That is where the Fluxus’ and Higgins’ understanding of intermedia as an artistic performance or happening enters. The transition from classic hypertext towards more fluid, processand game-​like practices is discussed by Ensslin and Skains, with reference to Rob Wittig’s Netprov which ‘identifies a robust digital aesthetic that has reinvented itself with each and every personal publication platform the engineers and programmers have devised, from Bulletin Board Services (BBS) in the 1990s to today’s social media platforms’ (2017: 295). Indeed, this brings us back to the Fluxus understanding of intermedia as an event: a novel and exciting encounter of media or a synthesis of art and life, rather than an autonomous work. The connection between electronic literature installations, which combine features of literature and an art installation, and Dick Higgins’ intermedia has also been noted by Rettberg (2014). In such works, the ontology of a pure form breaks down, as Rettberg observes, and the reader adopts additional roles, such as viewer or participant. Literary forms have spread across multiple platforms and communication channels that impact style and content of writing but, when perceived as an event or performance, these also extend the territory of art into everyday life.

Environment and Word: Ambient Practices Recent forms of context-sensitive intermedia performances and events extend to their surrounding environments and blend places (parts of landscapes, urban settings) or artificially shaped parts of the environment with movement of the human body (the experience of walking, sensory impressions) and artistic representations (see Murray and Dovey and Pullinger, this volume). Such forms may include literary walks and their conceptualisation within the psychogeography framework (combining interplay of imaginary and real spaces with experiencing the city), ambient literature, and eco-art. Psychogeography as a movement was initiated by the Situationists International, a group of intellectuals and artists led by Guy Debord, in the 1950s–1970s. The Situationists opposed the consumerist culture of ‘spectacle’ and developed new approaches to discover the ‘authentic life of the city’ (Sadler 1998: 15) and to identify its various ambiences, with the view of transforming the habitual environments and building a better milieu. The Situationist practice was mainly spatial, but the concept of literary psychogeography coined by Tjebbe van Tijen, a Dutch sculptor and performance artist, captured an emergent combination of experienced urban space with writing, filmmaking, and other practices. In his overview, Coverley (2012: 12–14) lists the characteristics of the movement shared by all its varieties: the activity of walking; a critical or subversive political stance, allied with ‘a playful sense of provocation 42

Intermediality as a Material Practice and Artistic Event

and trickery’, originating in avant-garde cultures; perception of the city as a site of mystery or a dreamscape, and antiquarianism, a view of the present through the lens of the past. The movement of psychogeography, where the practices of walking, rambling or drifting serve as incentives for creative writing or artistic experimentation, was anticipated by the modernist cultivation of flâneury and urban images in literature and other arts. Peter Ackroyd’s (Hawksmoor, 1982; The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, 1983; London: The Biography, 2000; The Lambs of London, 2004) and Iain Sinclair’s (London: City of Disappearances, 2006 and others) books explored the practices of interweaving personal experiences with cultural-­ historical patterns and layers of city life. The spread of psychogeography in the United Kingdom engendered not only new peripatetic practices, but also new arts collectives, networks, fanzines, blogs and modes of artmaking (Richardson 2015). Similar movements developed also elsewhere: for example, Travesias (Crossings) or creative journeys initiated by poets, philosophers, architects and painters in Latin America in 1965, resulting in a collective poem Amereida composed by the participants. Travesias have been repeated annually by the students and professors of the School of Architecture and Design of the Catholic University of Valparaiso in Chile. Ambient literature or book walks combined place-based writing with location-based technologies. The Ambient Literature Project, launched in the UK by Birmingham, West of England, and Bath Spa Universities (2016–2018), created experimental book-walks and explored new reader experiences (see also Dovey and Pullinger, this volume). The technology used in the project was not entirely new. For some time, artists and performers had experimented with locative storytelling and tagged stories to locations using GPS tracking. For example, the Walking Cinema location-based apps were used to create documentaries in which the storytelling was paced with the real exploration of the city (e.g. Murder on Beacon Hill, Boston, 2009, or Museum of the Hidden City, San Francisco, 2015). Similarly, the Ambient Literature project experimented with ubiquitous technologies in order to access the data of surrounding environments and to produce literary works. Each user created her or his unique trajectories through textual, sonic and networked spaces mediated by mobile electronic devices. Finally, works by eco-artists merged environmental art with poetry or narrative as the core of, or commentary to, their experimentation (e.g. bron by Herman de Vries or Walks by Hamish Fulton). Such ambient artistic practices were anticipated by Dick Higgins in his description of ‘the intermedium’ as emerging from sound poetry being experienced in environments or situations that are not normally considered poetic: ‘We could use aspects of those places that would aestheticize our relationships to them, as traditionally, a prayer was supposed to spiritualize our relationship to its circumstances’ (Higgins 1984 [1966]: 54). Eduardo Kac, an American artist and poet, anticipated the opportunity of extending his project of biopoetry, as ‘a new realm of verbal, paraverbal, and non-verbal creation’, to the non-human worlds of bees, atoms, dolphins, bacteria, plants, genes, and tissues (2007: 191–192).

Back to the Book? The book as a material and semiotic object may appear in collages, architecture, sculpture, painting or film. The materiality of the book is also displayed and highlighted by a mixture of digital and analogue techniques. The nostalgia found in the digital age for earlier print formats, and the ambiguity at the core of digital formats that have adopted old-media 43

Marina Grishakova

techniques, manifest in analogue books that, in their turn, absorb or imitate digital textual strategies and reading techniques, such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World (2005), and S. (2013) by J.J. Abrams, the Hollywood filmmaker, and Doug Dorst, an adventure-fantasy novelist. The creative use of digital techniques in the book’s design is typical of these works: coded messages, layered text, and a flip-book animation in Foer; multimodality, layering and ergodic techniques in Danielewski; and cut-copy-paste techniques in Rawle. Rawle’s four-hundred-page novel is a collage compiled from cutouts of vintage women’s magazines and features a story of a female who struggles to live up to the ideals of female perfection imposed by society. Abrams and Dorst’s (2013) S. is reminiscent of a philosophical thought experiment, based on the mythical story of the ship of Theseus, asking whether an object (a text, book) that has all its pieces replaced remains the same object. The text-palimpsest – including hand-written comments, letters, postcards, maps, diary pages and photocopied newspaper articles – refers to the presumable ‘original text’, a copy of the novel Ship of Theseus written by a fictional author Straka, borrowed from a school library and never returned. The book makes use of different ink colours and writing styles in the marginalia made by two characters, students Eric and Jen, discussing Straka’s identity. In this way, the book also imitates digital reading and navigation strategies (multilinear, interactive). On the other hand, it imitates the materiality of print books (yellowed pages, hardcover, and appendices) and, therefore, embraces multiple layers of mediation. Navigating multiple layers of mediation and intricate narrative patterns, experiencing imaginative shifts and permeability of borders between the discourse world and objects in the storyworld (e.g. the book which is simultaneously the house in Danielewksi’s House of Leaves, see Gibbons 2011) turns writing and reading these books into complex and cognitively challenging events. Intermedial blends (collage techniques; inserted documents, maps or cutouts; handwritten marginalia) provoke an oscillation between the materiality of the real world and virtuality of imaginary worlds at the core of fictional narrative.

Film as a Book and an Artistic Event: Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates Such film ‘adaptations’ as Peter Greenaway’s Pillow Book (1996) or Sergey Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates (1969) demonstrate a tighter connection between visual, verbal and auditory media, using the blending of textuality, word, writing and poetry with film images and music as a structural principle. By blending images of the body and material world with verbal and textual features, these films reveal, amplify or erase the distinctions between the material, tangible and semiotic, intangible aspects of writing and textuality. Sergey Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates (Sayat-Nova, Armenfilm 1969), which was ruthlessly reedited and banned by Soviet censorship at the time of its release, was admired by leading masters of film art, such as Godard, Antonioni, Pasolini and Coppola, and is considered a landmark of world arthouse cinema. The Parajanov-Vartanov institute was founded in Hollywood in 2010 to study the legacy of these two celebrated filmmakers. The fact that both the filmmaker and the prototype of the film character (the real poet of the eighteenth century) originated from the multicultural region of Transcaucasia (Armenia and Georgia) impacted the materiality of Parajanov’s film. The region’s rich ancient cultures, kingdoms and royal dynasties; survival through periods of rise and fall; and historical neighbouring and

44

Intermediality as a Material Practice and Artistic Event

influences of Persia, Russia and Turkey resonate, for example, in the abundance and diversity of handicrafts, rugs, ornaments, fabrics and furniture in the film’s episodes. Sayat-Nova’s multilingual (Azerbaijani, Armenian, Georgian, with occasional borrowings from Persian language) poetry survived in the 1765 manuscript. The multilinguality, alternation of different scripts (for instance, the use of the Georgian script in Armenian poems) and multilingual puns in his poetry serve as evidence of the close contacts and intermingling of cultures of Transcaucasia (Steffen 2013: 119). Overall, the film is a rich illustration of the book’s ability to function within tangible intermedial practices. It presents the life of the eighteenth-century Armenian poet Sayat-Nova as a series of symbolic or allegorical scenes, tableaux vivants or still-life compositions, made in the style of medieval Armenian and Persian book miniatures, including richly decorated fabrics, music instruments, church vessels, mosaics, and other artefacts. The film’s prologue shows a manuscript lying open and a male voice reciting Sayat-Nova’s poem. Fragments of Sayat-Nova’s poetry appear in the intertitles, establishing analogies between the poet’s life and texts (the latter including a book of his poetry, an allegorical book of his life, and the Book of Creation, that is the Bible, in the Sanahin monastery scenes). The first monastery episode shows the young boy Arutin (Sayat-Nova) amidst wet books left to dry on the monastery roof after a huge thunderstorm (an analogue of the Bible story of Creation), with the wind browsing book pages and the boy imitating a book spread on the roof, as if crucified. The image is further juxtaposed with the images of Jesus and the Apostles in a manuscript. In Parajanov’s film, the book features as a material medium (an object among other artistic or mundane objects, such as rugs, wool, fabrics, jewels); a semiotic medium (text); and a cultural, poetic and symbolic medium (poetry, the Bible). Many of the film’s shots refer to the Bible’s text and religious iconography. The first sequence, for example, juxtaposes images of three pomegranates seeping red juice over white linen (drawing associations with blood and fertility, but also death and sacrifice); a dagger (death and martyrdom); two loaves of bread and three fishes (referring to Jesus’s miracle of feeding the multitude); and a tangle of thorns (Jesus’s martyrdom and death). Later, the figure of St. George on a white horse and in armoury appears as a living picture, mimicking iconographic images of the saint. Throughout the film, the juxtaposition of richness, abundance, materiality and eroticism of the physical world with Christian iconography and images of a monastery illustrate the poet’s inner struggles between sensuality and asceticism or, more specifically, his unhappy love for the king’s sister Ana and his duties in becoming a monk. Further cues are provided by the intermingling of these visual juxtapositions with fragments of his poetry as intertitles and the almost total avoidance of synchronised speech, the soundtrack being reduced to music, song, recorded church hymns, recited poetry, and natural sounds, such as the sound of water dripping into metal trays in the wool-dyeing scene. In this way, juxtaposition of materiality of the image and sound to intangibility or spirituality of the word and voice resonate in the symbolic binary of asceticism and sensuality, but also change places and intermingle in the film’s rich poetic texture. Parajanov’s poetics of tableaux vivants and film’s visual richness resonates with his passion for decoration, staging, performance, collecting rare beautiful things and giving them as gifts to his friends, experimentation, playfulness, fantastic stories, collages and drawings – his way of life as art-making or an ‘eternal feast’, as the scriptwriter Vasily Katanyan called it in his memoirs (1994), which was in stark contrast with scarcity of Parajanov’s means and the grim Soviet reality, with prisons and labour camps (Parajanov was repeatedly arrested on false charges and

45

Marina Grishakova

spent four years in camps). Parajanov’s favourite genre of collage is a celebration of creative freedom, insight and lucky finding, an intermedial experiment integrating apparently random materials (rags, beads, shells, feathers, plants, straw, glass, paper, fabric, lace) with painting or drawing, and blending the artist’s life with his artistic project.

Conclusion Forms of intermediality discussed in this chapter situate literary media in various contexts, environments, landscapes and ideoscapes, ranging from high religious art to the sensual exuberance of the Baroque, from striking avant-garde performances to everyday (vernacular) creativity of the digital age. Intermediality, as an artistic practice and an ingenious blending of media, reveals and intensifies material and expressive (aesthetic) features of these media, fosters their variation, transformation and proliferation along various trajectories. Shifting away from neat academic classifications and approaching intermediality as a material practice and artistic event opens up new vistas for further exploration of social, cognitive and artistic functions of intermediality, linking it with various social utopias and dystopias, totalitarian systems or counter-projects; spread of media neutrality, homogenisation and perceptual numbness or, on the contrary, a transformative potential, nurturing subtler perceptual discrimination, attunement and navigation in everyday multisensory environments.

References Amerika, M. (1997). “About GRAMMATRON,” http://www.grammatron.com/about.html. Accessed on October 10, 2022. Anderson, P. (1998). The Origins of Postmodernity. London-New York: Verso. Ascott, R. (1990). “Is There Love in Telematic Embrace?” in Art Journal 49:3, 241–247. Balbi, G. and P. Magaudda (2012). A History of Digital Media: An Intermedia and Global Perspective. New York and London: Routledge. Baetens, J. and Sánchez-Mesa, D. (2015). “Literature in the Expanded Field: Intermediality at the Crossroads of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature,” in Interfaces: Image – Text – Language 36, 289–304. https://doi.org/10.4000/interfaces.245 Bellini, Mattia (2022). “Interactive Digital Narratives as Complex Expressive Means,” in Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 3. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frvir.2022.854960 Block, F. W. (2007). “Digital Poetics or on the Evolution of Digital Media Poetry,” in E. Kac (ed.) Media Poetry: An International Anthology. Bristol-Chicago: Intellect Books, 129–156. Bolter, J. D. and R. Grusin (1999). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. Coleridge, S. T. (1936). Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Coleridge, S. T. (1891). Biographia Literaria. London: George Bell and Sons. Coverley, M. (2012). Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials. Danielewski, M. Z. (2000). House of Leaves. New York: Pantheon, Random House. Dorst, D. and J. J. Abrams (2013) S. Boston, Massachusetts: Mulholland Books. Elleström, L. (2010). “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations,” in L. Ellestrom (ed.) Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 11–48. Ensslin, A. and L. Skains (2017). “Hypertext: Storyspace to Twine,” in J. Tabbi (ed.) The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 295–310. Fusillo, M. and M. Grishakova (eds.) (2020). Gesamtkunstwerk as a Synergy of the Arts. Bruxelles-BernBerlin-New York-Oxford-Wien: Peter Lang. Gibbons, A. (2011). Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature. London: Routledge. Glaser, S. A. (2009). “Dynamics of Intermedial Inquiry,” in S. A. Glaser (ed.) Media inter Media. Essays in Honor of Claus Clüver. Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 11–36.

46

Intermediality as a Material Practice and Artistic Event Grishakova, M. (2010). “Intermedial Metarepresentations,” in M. Grishakova and M.-L. Ryan (eds.) Intermediality and Storytelling. Berlin-New York: De Gruyter. Grishakova, M. (2018). “The Abecedarian Imagination: On Dictionary Structures in Literature,” in LWU: Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 1–2. Special issue “Lists and Narrative,” ed. by E. Neven, B. Vervaeck, and L. Herman, 93−103. https://verlag.koenigshausen-neumann.de/zeitschriften/ lwu/. Grishakova, M. (2020). “The Myth of Total Cinema: Perceptual Realism, Digital Artifice, and the Cinematic Imaginary,” in M. Fusillo and M. Grishakova (eds.) Gesamtkunstwerk as a Synergy of the Arts. Bruxelles-Bern-Berlin-New York-Oxford-Wien: Peter Lang, 77–90. Grishakova, M. and M. Poulaki (eds.) (2019). Narrative Complexity: Cognition, Embodiment, Evolution. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Grishakova, M. and Ryan, M.-L. (eds.) (2010). Intermediality and Storytelling. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. Hansen-Löve, A. (1983). “Intermedialität und Intertextualität : Probleme der Korrelation in Wort- und Bildkunst : Am Beispiel der russischen Moderne,” in W. Scmid and W.-D. Stempel (eds.) Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, vol. 11. Dialog der Texte, 291–360. Hayles, K. N. (2002). Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hayles, K. N. (2008). Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press. Hayles, K. N. (2016). “Electronic Literature: What Is It?” in C. Crompton, R. J. Lane, and R. Siemens (eds.) Doing Digital Humanities: Practice, Training, Research. London-New York: Routledge, 197–226. Hayles, K. N. and J. Pressman (2013). Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Higgins, D. (1984). Horizons, the Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Jost, F. (2005). “Des vertus heuristiques de l’intermédialité,” Intermédialités/Intermediality 6, 109–119. https://doi.org/10.7202/1005509ar Katanyan, V. (1994). Cena vechnogo prazdnika [The Price of an Eternal Feast]. Moscow: Four Arts. Kattelbelt, C. (2008). “Intermediality in Theatre and Performance: Definitions, Perceptions and Medial Relationships,” in Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación / Culture, Language and Representation VI, 19–29. Lopez-Varela Azcárate, A. and C. Khaski Graglia (2013). “Intermedial Metarepresentation in Serial Novels: Dickens’ Pickwick Papers,” in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15, 7 https:// doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2390 McHale, B. (1987). Postmodernist Fiction. London-New York: Routledge. McLuhan, M. ([1964] 2003). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Berkeley, CA: Ginko Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1994). Picture Theory. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Rajewsky, I. O. (2005). “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality,” Intermédialités/Intermediality 6, 43–64. Rawle, G. (2005). Woman’s World. London: Atlantic Books. Rettberg, S. (2014). “Electronic Literature,” in Ryan, M.-L., L. Emerson, and B. J. Robertson (eds.), The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 169–174. Richardson, T. (ed.) (2015). Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography. LondonNew York: Rowman & Littlefield. Rippl, G. (ed.) (2015). “Introduction,” in Handbook of Intermediality: Literature – Image – Sound – Music. Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter, 1–31. Ryan, M.-L. (2005). “Foundations of transmedial narratology,” in J.-C. Meister (ed.) Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity. Berlin-New York: De Gruyter. Ryan, M.-L. (2006). Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ryan, M.-L., and Thon (eds.) (2014). Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Sadler, Simon (1998). The Situationist City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sandywell, B. (2015). “The Medium is the Massage,” in Information, Communication & Society, 18:12, 1408–1412, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2013.868021

47

Marina Grishakova Schröter, J. (2012). “Four Models of Intermediality,” in B. Herzogenrath (ed.) ReBlurring the Boundaries. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 15–36. Smith, M. W. (2007). The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace. London-New York: Routledge. Steffen, J. (2013). The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Steiner, W. (1982). The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wagner, P. (1996). Icons – Texts – Iconotexts. Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality. Berlin-New York: De Gruyter. White, G. (2005). Reading the Graphic Surface: The Presense of the Book in Prose Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wolf, W. (2005). “Intermediality,” in D. Herman, M. Jahn, and M.-L. Ryan (eds.) Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 252–256. Youngblood, G. (1970). The Expanded Cinema. New York: Dutton & Co.

48

3 WHAT IS THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE EBOOK?* Simon Rowberry

Introduction When was the first ebook published? What was the first e-reader? Historians of digital publishing have struggled to find answers to these supposedly simple questions. Williams argues that ‘there is no such thing as “first” in any activity associated with human invention. If you add enough adjectives to a description you can always claim your own favorite’ (Williams, 2002: 3). His logic applies to ebooks as much as any other technology: Does an e-reader need to be a computer or can it be mechanical? Does it have to be portable or just readable on any screen? While this could lead to interesting liminal cases and alternative histories of the ebook, most historical research into ebooks has instead relied on an established ‘Standard Narrative’ that offers little interrogation of earlier accounts and their sources with a few notable exceptions (Borsuk 2018; Tenen 2020). I will refrain from citing specific examples of authors reciting the Standard Narrative in the next section to avoid suggesting this is an individual issue. In this chapter, I problematise these notions by first reciting the established narrative and then unpacking the historiographical challenges around both confirming and contesting this narrative. Ebooks are a form of literary media that have yet to be institutionalised and preserved in traditional archives. Projects such as the British Library’s Emerging Formats have often overlooked ebooks in favour of more digitally native formats such as interactive narratives and mobile-based book apps (British Library 2020). These forms of literary media present clearer difficult problems for preservation but at the expense of a larger body of work. Where historical born-digital data still exist, it often gives an incomplete impression. As a consequence, there are substantial challenges ascertaining how much we do not know about ebook history. Drawing upon examples, including the early ebook market in Japan in the 1990s and gaps in Project Gutenberg’s development between 1971 and 1989, I argue that the  history of digital publishing is best understood through media archaeological analysis *  This research was made possible with generous funding from the Carnegie Trust’s Research Incentive Grant scheme and the Bibliographical Society of America’s McCorison Fellowship for the History and Bibliography of Printing in Canada and the United States.

49

DOI: 10.4324/9781003119739-5

Simon Rowberry

(that is, considering literary media history as cyclical and using previously untaken paths to understand the present) rather than futilely attempting to reconstruct an apocryphal linear media history.

The Standard Narrative On 4 July 1971, the 24-year-old Michael Hart, then a student at the University of Illinois, typed up a copy of the United States’ Declaration of Independence on the University’s Xerox Sigma V to celebrate Independence Day. Hart chose this document as he received a copy as part of his grocery shopping (Peters 2017: 97). As Illinois was one of the early nodes of the emergent ARPANET network, a military-academic precursor to the Internet, Hart therefore published the first ebook online. He branded this work as “Project Gutenberg,” comparing his pioneering work as the ‘father of ebooks’ with Johannes Gutenberg, who is often considered the inventor of the printing press. Building upon this early success and the emergence of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, Project Gutenberg became a forerunner of other digitisation projects, which would in turn provide the content for early adopters of e-reader technology. Hardware adoption was a trickier proposition. Early computer screens relied on display technologies that were optimised for televisions (Cathode Ray Tubes) and were not ideal for long-form reading. Start-ups, including Franklin Electronic Publishing and NuvoReader, released early e-readers in the late 1990s but there was insufficient content for readers on the devices and the market fizzled out along with the Dot-Com bubble in the early 2000s. Ebooks remained dormant until 2007 when Amazon released the Kindle, boasting a catalogue of 88,000 titles at launch. The combination of the print-like electronic paper screen, reliable wireless downloads and Amazon’s large infrastructure ensured the Kindle succeeded where others had failed. While there was initial excitement in reading on-screen, interest quickly dissipated as readers preferred the touch and smell of print and broader uptake of digital publications would have to wait until a surge in audiobook listening and a renewed interest in interactive publications by companies, including Vooks towards the end of the 2010s. While e-readers showed some initial promise, the meteoric rise and adoption of smartphones, and the perceived decline in ebook sales, ensures that ebooks will largely be an interesting diversion in grander histories of digital media and publishing.

Questioning the Standard Narrative While there is sufficient evidence to construct the aforementioned narrative, it narrowly focuses on the most accessible historical evidence without extending beyond familiar sources. It is not clear how many of these claims are based upon original evidence or how much has instead come from a trail of secondary research without interrogating the reliability of sources, which can lead to what Randall Monroe has entitled citogenesis, where unsubstantiated facts from Wikipedia are referenced in academic journals, providing them with a sense of legitimacy (Munroe, 2011). With few exceptions (for example, Kirschenbaum 2016; Rubery 2016; Rowberry 2022), most scholarship on digital publishing either focuses on the contemporary or primarily relies on anecdotes rather than archival research. As I discuss in this chapter, there are clear practical reasons for many of these decisions but equally this leads to a poorer understanding of the history of the ebook. To illustrate the limitations of the Standard Narrative in relation to contradictory evidence, I will briefly outline three counternarratives: 50

What is the Historiography of the Ebook?

the discrepancies in early accounts around Project Gutenberg prior to 1989; the original development of electronic paper in the 1970s and why there was such a delay to its commercial launch in the mid-2000s; and how commercial e-readers launched in Japan in the early 1990s complicate our understanding of e-reader generations.

Project Gutenberg (1971–1989) Hart’s established narrative around Project Gutenberg fails to withstand greater scrutiny from multiple angles. He based several of his claims around being both an early Internet user – going as far as to describe himself ‘Internet User #100’ in email signatures (Hart 1997) – and that Project Gutenberg was the very first digitisation project to work online. The latter statement is contradicted by contemporaneous evidence from Computing and the Humanities (CHum), which published a list of digitisation projects started prior to 1970 (e.g. Carlson, 1967). While CHum only published four lists which did not contain every project underway at that time, it revealed at least 300 texts had already been digitised prior to Hart starting work on the Declaration of Independence. Hart even acknowledged the existence of earlier work in the introduction to an edition of John Milton’s Paradise Lost digitised by Joseph Raben at CUNY in the early 1960s, hinting at its mythological qualities: We had heard of this etext for years but it was not until 1991 that we actually managed to track it down to a specific location, and then it took months to convince people to let us have a copy, then more months for them actually to do the copying and get it to us. (Milton 1991) At the same time, major infrastructural information retrieval systems, including the precursor to LEXIS NEXIS, started work in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Bourne and Hahn 2003). LEXIS NEXIS originated as a way for members of the Ohio State Bar to access digital copies of legal records which eventually developed into one of the largest sources of digital legal materials globally. Digitisation projects that simultaneously focused on content and infrastructure, especially information retrieval, were more transformative as they led the way for more sophisticated systems in the future. Conversely, Project Gutenberg started off as a ‘digitise it and they will come’ initiative until the arrival of the Web pushed Hart to consider developing more serious infrastructure. Even when we get to the actual origins of Project Gutenberg, Hart muddied his own historical narrative while constructing and revising his own mythology. His choice of the fourth of July for the Project’s official launch is convenient given his early focus on important documents in US political history. Elsewhere, however, Hart claimed that both March and December were important anniversaries for the Project (Carroll 1994; Project Gutenberg 2018). There is evidence to suggest that December is the more likely candidate. Every subsequent Gutenberg publication was posted once a year in December. In terms of where Hart posted his content, there were some doubts around his claim to be on ARPANET as early as 1971. Diagrams of ARPANET in August 1971 show that there were two Illinois terminals, a PDP-11 and a B6500, but crucially not a Xerox Sigma (Heart et al. 1981: 178). José Menéndez called Hart out on this on the Book People mailing list in June 2006, arguing that Hart’s account did not match the available historical evidence (Menéndez 2006). Menéndez did not explicitly suggest why he was following this line of enquiry other than an implicit threat of undermining Hart’s credibility within the community. In his response, 51

Simon Rowberry

Hart noted that his computer may not have been on ARPANET but was able to send emails (Hart, 2006). These disagreements about the early history of digital publishing reveal the tensions around claiming important landmarks: accounts often rely on fallible memories and without adequate documentation, coupled with the deterioration of computers and digital storage from more than twenty years ago, any historical claims are highly contingent. Even if there were not abundant records to show that there were digitisation initiatives that started earlier than Project Gutenberg, Hart was not very active between posting the Declaration of Independence to six people in 1971 (Peters 2017: 97) and 1989. Every Project Gutenberg publication released during this time was an important document in US political history, but all of them were shorter than a full-length novel. This approach was understandable: Hart was largely typing in these publications manually when he was able to access computer resources. His archives at the University of Illinois confirm that while he did conduct this work sporadically over the 1970s, the Project remained semi-dormant for the majority of the 1980s when others were far more active in establishing the foundations of the ebook. Most curiously, Hart’s retrospective histories of the 1980s suggest that he was not just working on the King James Bible digitisation but that he also had plans to digitise Shakespeare, which never came to fruition due to unexpected copyright issues with the edition he was using (Hart, 1992). He was active with the University of Illinois Personal Computer User Group during the mid-to-late 1980s and discussed the Shakespeare project at that time, but he never revealed what edition he used that caused this problem (Hart 1989). Without the infrastructure and know-how to publish these keyed-in texts, Hart’s historical accounts remained apocryphal but, nonetheless, the mythological allure of a single man typing in the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible akin to a monastic scribe in a medieval scriptorium remains central to how academics conceptualise the history of digital publishing.

Electronic Paper (1970–2006) Screen technologies remained one of the trickiest elements to perfect with commercially viable e-readers. Mainstream technologies were either too bulky, too difficult to read on for extended period of times or required too much power for a reading session. For example, Cathode Ray Tubes (CRT), the most popular screen technology for televisions during the twentieth century, relied on an array of electron guns to produce the correct coloured light to display an image. CRT screens were cumbersome and bulky in order to accommodate their vacuum tubes. The technology also relies on a constantly refreshing screen to display an image. This is not necessarily a problem for time-based media such as television, but it can place an undue burden on attempting to read a static image. This challenge would remain the greatest obstacle for mainstream adoption of e-readers as early generations of the technology, including the Sony Data Discman and Franklin eBookMan. Both devices compromised on screen technology with difficult-to-read Liquid Crystal Displays, as the alternatives would drain the device’s batteries too quickly. Electronic paper solved these problems. It was lightweight, did not have a backlight, and only required power consumption when the reader changed the page or made a different selection on the screen. These advantages ensured electronic paper felt more print-like to consumers than previous attempts at low-resolution Light Emitting Diode (LED) or Liquid Crystal Display screens. To most consumers, the technology was the realm of science fiction until the launch of the Kindle in North America in 2007. Yet this was not strictly true:

52

What is the Historiography of the Ebook?

Sony launched an electronic paper e-reader the year prior across territories but this was not met with the same fanfare. The earlier history of electronic paper is often overlooked by digital publishing historians as the intended purposes were tangential. As with many important inventions, there was no one single ‘eureka’ moment that led to its invention and patent filings demonstrate that both Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) and Matsushita (now Panasonic) worked on prototypes and filed patents in the 1970s (Ota et al. 1973; Sheridon and Berkovitz 1977). Xerox PARC intended to use the technology as part of its nascent desktop computer as it provided a more reliable display than CRT monitors. Conversely, Matsushita was interested in electronic paper’s application for marketing where a screen can be set up and then left at a location without requiring additional power. It is interesting to note that in the interim decades, digital advertising has been a more successful application than electronic paper screens for computers, partially due to the rise of time-based media as the dominant format for computer consumption. Electronic paper represented a new direction for Matsushita, but it was a clear continuation of Xerox’s strengths in photocopier hardware. Photocopying worked by taking a photostatic image of the material in the scanner and then imprinting it temporarily elsewhere. Electronic paper likewise used the same basic concept: As Figure 3.1 shows, black and white pigment capsules are sandwiched between two transparent electrode layers that use positive and negative charges to create an impression of the rendered page, which remains until it is refreshed. Despite how beneficial this approach would have been to the development of early computers, Xerox shelved the technology for over a decade. Nick Sheridan, the lead inventor, remained at the company, and continued his work in the 1990s when Xerox were trying to rebrand themselves as the digital document company. The rise of the Web and greater adoption of email threatened its core business model and earlier experiments at Xerox PARC had largely been undermined by the greater success of rivals such as IBM and Apple. Xerox PARC offers an intriguing alternative trajectory because it, along with several other prominent companies including Hewlett Packard, invested significantly in conceptualising the electronic book in the 1990s. This can be seen in Mark Weiser’s research papers, housed at Stanford University’s Archives. Xerox hired Weiser as Chief Technologist for his pioneering research into ubiquitous computing, or ubicomp (the 1990s equivalent of the current ‘Internet

Figure 3.1 The mechanics of electronic paper (public domain from Wikicommons: https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Electronic_paper#/media/File:E-ink.svg)

53

Simon Rowberry

of Things’), which sought to explore forms of computers beyond screens, PCs and terminals. Weiser looked for synergies with Xerox’s pre-existing strengths, which included Nick Sheridan’s earlier work. For example, the company were interested in producing PARCPad, an early Personal Digital Assistant which would use the screen technology (Weiser, n.d.). Likewise, in 1996, Ken Fishkin proposed Xerox create the ‘Electric Paperback’, a device that very much resembles a contemporary e-reader (Fishkin 1996). When coupled with Keith Davidson’s proposed ‘Activity-based Information Retrieval’ which was designed to enable paperwork on a desk to be converted to portable digital form, all the building blocks for the Kindle’s success were already in place a decade before Amazon’s hardware launched (Davidson and Weiser 1992). Why then did electronic paper, and indeed the contemporary e-reader, take much longer to emerge? Since the technology was already sufficiently advanced by the 1990s, the challenges were instead logistical and legal. Logistically, even though a technology is available, it can take time to mass produce at a price point acceptable to sell. Electronic paper would not be commercially viable until the end of the decade when E-Ink, a start-up formed of MIT ­students and professors, launched. The company promised so-called ‘Radio Paper’, which was announced by Megan Costello (2001) in Publisher’s Weekly. This was positioned as a hybrid between the flexibility of paper and the updateability of screen technologies. The device would be created in partnership with electronics manufacturer Phillips under exclusive license, restricting others from using the technology. Since ‘Radio Paper’ was vaporware, a product that never made it to market over an extended period, no one else could use electronic paper until the exclusivity license expired in 2005 when both Sony and Amazon used the technology for their next-generation e-readers. The bottleneck was therefore largely legal and if another company had invested as much money as Amazon into launching a viable e-reader earlier, the history of digital publishing would have been very different.

Japanese E-readers (c.1990) My final example of the Standard Narrative’s limitations reveals the Anglo-normativity that plagues histories of technology in general. All canonical examples of early e-readers come from the United States with little consideration for alternatives in other Anglophone countries, let alone the rest of the world. This can only present a partial picture. The global history of ebooks cannot be told by one person due to the linguistic and cultural barriers one faces but the launch of commercial e-readers in Japan in the early 1990s (which were even launched in Anglophone markets) brings these historical blind spots into focus. Three Japanese technology companies – Sony, Fujitsu and NEC – all launched hardware, to varying degrees of success, which are often excluded from historical overviews of digital publishing. There is little evidence of the latter two technology companies’ e-readers beyond news reports. In a 1994 report for WIRED magazine, Bob Johnstone outlined Fujitsu and NEC’s plans to launch e-readers. Both were trying to figure out how to insert new ebooks onto the device through removable media: ‘both players will use writable media. NEC’s Digital Book Player has floppies, while Fujitsu’s View Art uses memory cards’ (Johnstone 1994). NEC was ambitious, believing that it would ship one million devices in the first year (Johnstone 1994). Neither company appears to have released their devices but it shows the critical mass of work in the field occurring in Japan at the time. Sony’s efforts were more sustained, and clearly paid off with the line of Data Discman building upon the company’s successful Discman portable CD player range that launched in 54

What is the Historiography of the Ebook?

1984. The Data Discman went through multiple iterations during the early 1990s and evidence in patent filings show that Sony continued to consider how to refine the product towards more book-like hardware in 1992 (Akimoto and Yamamoto 1993). Sony’s early products succeeded because of its inherent understanding of the limitations of e-readers in the 1990s and focusing on the reference guide market, as seen by the title of a Wall Street Journal article: “Walkman of Words: Sony’s Data Discman Can Squeeze An Encyclopaedia Into a Portable Electronic Book” (Schlesinger 1991). Most of the extant publication data reveals the device was popular for encyclopaedias, dictionaries, travel guides and Shakespeare. This even fits into the longer history of Anglophone e-readers where Franklin Electronic Publishing released a series of specialist single use computers aimed at specific reference guides over the 1980s and 1990s (Franklin BOOKMAN Data Archive 2021). The ebook has a much longer history, it often just existed outside of the narrow field of vision of trade publishing.

The Limits of Evidence As I demonstrated above, the Standard Narrative does not bear up to closer scrutiny. This is not necessarily the fault of inattentive researchers but rather a challenge with the availability of evidence. The early history of digital publishing was not centralised but rather was the result of research by private individuals and companies who may not have publicly available archives. Further to this, the half-life of digital products is far shorter than many other media formats. While researchers can still access many copies of the Gutenberg Bible or Shakespeare’s First Folio, it is very difficult to access a working version of a computer from the 1950s and even digital publications from the 2000s can be impossible to find. As such, available evidence is scarce and often spread across multiple archives. Companies such as Amazon do not have publicly available archives and the best evidence base remains the accounts of former employees, however flawed (Marcus 2004; Merkoski 2013), or patents, which come with their own limitations. Equally, relying on interviews or other contemporaneous data can always be clouded for historical events or wrapped in marketing for those currently working at companies. Even when institutional archives hold materials relevant to ebook history, there can be challenges with the data. Most readily, many prominent actors within the history of ebooks have not deposited their papers in archives. Most archival material will either be partial donations, such as Gregg Zehr’s (lead designer of the Kindle 1) early Kindle prototype to the Computer History Museum, or buried within other archives, such as the material related to Xerox’s electronic paper initiatives (discussed above) sitting in the Mark Weiser papers at Stanford University Archives that I discovered through serendipitous means having visited the archives to view its Apple and Donald Knuth papers. The University of Virginia’s Rare Book School has a teaching collection of historic e-readers which might be the only institutional archive currently in existence. There have been several attempts at creating an ebook museum but none of these have come to fruition (Rothman 2016). The lack of archival presence for these materials relating to the history of digital publishing remains a fragile point in the continued study of these emerging formats. Even when institutions have collected archives related to a prominent individual in ebook history, these archives can come in incomplete form, especially if they make strong use of born-digital materials. Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg discussed above, included several born-digital artefacts when he submitted his papers to the University of Illinois. These materials include email correspondence, personal papers and political statements stored in 55

Simon Rowberry

plain text files, and software for MS-DOS. The email correspondence is the most interesting of these archives but it is highly limited. The correspondence mostly dates from 1989 and 1993. Since the material comes directly from an old version of Hart’s inbox, many of the messages are corrupted and compiled into long threads. We also only see whatever Hart preserved rather than complete conversations. As a consequence, it is difficult to determine if Hart solidified connections through emails or if requests to important individuals went unacknowledged. While some further history can be patched together through contemporaneous email mailing lists and Usenet discussions, the history of digital publishing relies on the actors maintaining good records in real time. These blind spots are not just limited to individuals. Several major corporations involved in early ebook efforts have removed substantial evidence of their early work. There was general consternation when Microsoft announced it would close its ebook store in 2019 (Lee, 2019), but this was not even the first time Microsoft had shut it down. Microsoft developed an ebook format .LIT that worked with Microsoft Reader. The file format had extended from Compressed HTML, the basis for Help Files on Windows, which other creators had used as the basis for amateur publications (Salamon and Motta 2010: 353). The format was popular enough for Microsoft to develop a webstore of 60,000 ebooks by 2012 including the Encarta Dictionary, Dan Brown’s novels and extended universe Star Wars books like Darth Maul: Saboteur. In short, an encapsulation of the ebook market at the time. Microsoft Reader books were available through MSLit.com as well as third-party locations but all of these references have since been removed and only traces can be found through the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine (Microsoft 2006). As a consequence, any books published exclusively for Microsoft Reader are no longer available and may not have left a single trace unless the publisher has maintained the details or since reuploaded the material elsewhere. Despite the ability to make many copies of digital objects, we are still losing much history unless someone is actively preserving it. Microsoft were far from the only company to remove their longer history of ebook sales. Prior to the launch of the Kindle, Amazon sold ebooks, including for Microsoft Reader, Mobipocket, and Adobe, under the umbrella of ‘E-Texts and E-Docs’. While Jeff Bezos, then CEO of Amazon, argued that this was an insignificant part of the company’s revenue, it was nonetheless a relatively large ebook store for the time. With the arrival of the Kindle, all prior traces of Amazon’s ebook sales were removed and consolidated into a single product line. Ironically, Amazon’s marketing of its e-texts revolved around the concept of permanence but, as with other companies, this was illusory in the face of rebranding. This early evidence was easily erased and digital publishing historians are left to dig around the extant archival material to piece together a counternarrative.

The Importance of Preservation The challenges of finding relevant historical evidence from previous iterations of ebooks reveals one of the primary issues around contemporary digital publishing: The systems for preserving this culture are still immature and overlook large parts of the industry. Most readily, given our reliance on third-party bookstores instead of cataloguing ebooks, once an ebook store is taken down, we do not know what books were published via that platform, even by print-oriented publishers that might be captured elsewhere. This can lead to historically inaccurate statements such as Stephen King holding out from publishing via Amazon

56

What is the Historiography of the Ebook?

until the release of the Kindle 2, when King produced an original short story just for the device’s launch (Amazon Inc. 2009). Instead, King was a central character in one of the earliest well-known failures within ebook publishing, when a serialised version of Riding the Bullet remained incomplete after his revenue threshold for continuing publishing was not met (King 2000). Since Digital Rights Management (DRM) can allow bookstores to pull ebooks directly from users’ virtual bookshelves, as was the case with a legally problematic version of George Orwell’s 1984, which users had innocently bought thinking it was legitimate (Newman 2009), ebooks can disappear but traces of their metadata remain. Even if the original copy is lost, the metadata can be a useful reminder that ebook culture was richer than what remains. These issues are exacerbated for self-published authors on platforms such as Kindle Direct Publishing or Kobo Writing Life. The initial stigma around self-publishing has faded and many authors have found these platforms to be a viable and financially rewarding alternative to traditional publishing (see Dietz’s chapter in this volume). Unfortunately, there are no established workflows for preserving this work beyond relying on the benevolence of the corporations. This is also true for print-oriented publishers who may choose to let an author’s work go out of print and never produce an ebook version but publishers are required to submit copies of their publications to the Legal Deposit Libraries in the UK whereas this legislation does not cover self-published works (The Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations 2013, 2013). As a result, many titles on Kindle Direct Publishing will disappear with Amazon unless the authors can release another version. The vibrant self-­ publishing culture on platforms such as Amazon merits academic attention but this can only be conducted historically unless effective mechanisms are put in place now. This kind of preservation could happen at an informal guerrilla level – for example, individual users could think about maintaining hardware for donation to libraries and archives – or more formal mechanisms for preservation need to be in place to protect this culture. In the meantime, the vibrant self-publishing scene on Wattpad, Kobo Writing Life, Kindle Direct Publishing and elsewhere is precarious. The content within ebooks will always be the single most important element for preservation but it is also worth considering the importance of file formats. An EPUB is not always identical to a Kindle file, for example, as I have shown elsewhere with an example of J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S for the Kindle and Apple Books, where the EPUB version of the file treats the additional material as a layer on top of the main book while the Kindle version represents everything as a static facsimile (Rowberry 2015: 296). Just as with print, an EPUB and Kindle file can be as different as a paperback and luxury hardcover edition. Even more so, the differences between reading system configurations (hardware and software can both affect the file that’s generated on many e-reading platforms) can create dramatically different files. With this abundance of formats and the possibility for updates without informing the user, it may appear absurd to take a maximalist approach to ebook preservation. Conversely, we are now in the formational stage of ebook design where standards remain in flux as best practice and consumer expectations continue to shift. Through taking a laissez-faire approach to preservation, future historians will be able to fully understand contemporary developments and map the early years of a mature format. Just as we celebrate the remaining number of Shakespeare’s First Folio or Gutenberg’s Bible, we may look back at the early decades of ebook history and wish for a greater level of collection, especially for any title that only exists in digital form.

57

Simon Rowberry

Conclusion As I have demonstrated in this chapter, the Standard Narrative of digital publishing does not hold up against further historical scrutiny. Nonetheless, it remains the accepted convention as the evidence to the contrary is far less prevalent and currently too scattered. As a consequence, we do not know much of the longer, more inclusive history of the ebook. The next steps should be to consider the historiography of the ebook in greater detail. Publishing studies and literary media are still emerging disciplines and the historical study of both requires greater precision than many accounts currently offer. This thread can be developed through institutional prioritisation of important archives and acquisitions around ebook content but also through moving from relying on anecdata. A sixteenth-century book historian would not overlook important material evidence and there is no clear rationale for why more contemporary researchers should not do the same thing. As Werner and Kirschenbaum remind us, ‘the digital is no longer exclusively a presentist form, if it ever was: the digital itself is now historical’ (Kirschenbaum and Werner 2014: 452). The more researchers shift towards this mode of thinking, and adjust their methods accordingly, the richer the historical record becomes and the current inaccurate Standard Narrative will be corrected. Pushing back from the Standard Narrative has the strong possibility of a more inclusive, less corporate history of the ebook. The current narrative revolves around great men and inventors, including Jeff Bezos and Michael Hart, when there is instead a much richer history of innovation in the margins both within and beyond the initiatives they spearheaded. Likewise, through re-centering current trends around self-published works rather than mainstream publishers (see also Skains, this volume), we can begin to see successes from marginalised groups. The opportunity to present this history is there but it requires a shift in attitude. This historiographic shift would also help to change the focus of ebook history from a technological orientation to discussing the importance of accessibility and equity within the development of reading technologies. Ebook historiography also points towards grander challenges within our understanding of the development of literary media. If researchers prioritise the novel over the seemingly mundane, there is a risk that significant literary media are ignored. While electronic literature and locative media have helped to shape the limits of how digital technology can help develop new forms of narrative, their appeal is niche compared to ebooks. The book might appear to be a mundane technology but we have a rich historical record as people knew it was important. All emerging literary media would benefit from early preservation. As we have seen from the Standard Narrative, it can be tricky to counter claims that become naturalised over time which disguise the full extent of the field.

References Akimoto O and Yamamoto M (1993) Book Type Display Apparatus. GB2260844. Amazon Inc. (2009) Stephen King Kindle Exclusive. Available at: http://web.archive.org/ web/20090217191756/http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/A1F8Z0JAEIDVRY/ Borsuk A (2018) The Book. Cambridge: MIT Press. Bourne CP and Hahn TB (2003) A History of Online Information Services, 1963–1976. Cambridge: MIT Press. British Library (2020) Emerging Formats | Projects | British Library. The British Library. Available at: https://www.bl.uk/projects/emerging-formats. Carlson G (1967) Literary Works in Machine-Readable Form. Computers and the Humanities 1(3): 75–102.

58

What is the Historiography of the Ebook? Carroll L (1994) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/old/ alice30.txt Costello M (2001) ‘Radio Paper’ from E Ink. Publishers Weekly 248(12): 26. Davidson KT and Weiser M (1992) 1992 Mid Year Status Report: Activities for the period January-June 1992. 17 July. Mark Weiser papers, ca. 1975–1999 Series 5 Box 35 Folder 10. Fishkin K (1996) The Electric Paperback: A Project Proposal. Palo Alto: Xerox PARC. Mark Weiser papers, ca. 1975–1999 Series 2 Box 8 Folder 19 Franklin BOOKMAN Data Archive (2021). Available at: https://jsyang.ca/franklin-electronics/ Hart M (1989) More Shakespeare and Other Machine-Readable Texts Available. Off-line 17(4): 6–7. Hart MS (1992) Blurb. Bit.listserv.gutnberg. 9 February 1992. Hart MS (1997) !!!Re: New Copyright Dates on Old Works and Scanning. Book People mailing list. 1 April 1997 Hart MS (2006) Re: ARPANET Records (fwd). Book People Mailing List. 6 July 2006. Heart F, McKenzie A, McQuillan J, et al. (1981) A History of the ARPANET: The first decade. 4799, 1 April. Arlington, VA: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Available at: https://apps.dtic. mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a115440.pdf Johnstone B (1994) Electronic Paperbacks. Available at: https://www.wired.com/1994/03/electronicpaperbacks/ King S (2000) Messages from Stephen. Available at: http://web.archive.org/web/20081007114133/http:// stephenking.com/stephens_messages.html Kirschenbaum M (2016) Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Kirschenbaum M and Werner S (2014) Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies: The State of the Discipline. Book History 17: 406–458. Lee D (2019) Microsoft’s eBook Store: When this Closes, Your Books Disappear Too. BBC News, 4 April. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47810367 Marcus J (2004) Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut. New York: The New Press. Menéndez J (2006) ARPANET Records. Book People Mailing List. 29 June 2006. Merkoski J (2013) Burning the Page: The Ebook Revolution and the Future of Reading. Naperville: Sourcebooks. Microsoft (2006) Microsoft Reader. Available at: http://web.archive.org/web/20060101015440/http:// www.mslit.com:80/ Milton J (1991) Paradise Lost (ed. J Raben). Project Gutenberg. Available at: http://gutenberg.org/ cache/epub/26/pg26.html Munroe R (2011) Citogenesis. Available at: https://xkcd.com/978/ Newman J (2009) Amazon Settles Kindle ‘1984’ Lawsuit. Available at: https://www.pcworld.com/article/ 172953/amazon_kindle_1984_lawsuit.html (accessed 28 September 2017). Ota I, Ohnishi J and Yoshiyama M (1973) Electrophoretic Image Display (EPID) Panel. Proceedings of the IEEE 61(7): 832–836. Peters J (2017) The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet. London: Duckworth Overlook. Project Gutenberg (2018) The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America by Thomas Jefferson. Available at: http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20180103200450/http://www.gutenberg.org/ ebooks/1 Rothman D (2016) E-book Museum Will Open in Paris: How about a U.S. One, Too? In: TeleRead News: E-books, publishing, tech and beyond. Available at: http://teleread.com/e-book-museum-will-openparis-donate-old-e-readers-u-s-museum/ Rowberry SP (2015) Ebookness. Convergence 23(3): 289–305. Rowberry SP (2022) Four Shades of Gray: The Amazon Kindle Platform. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rubery M (2016) The Untold Story of the Talking Book. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Salamon D and Motta G (2010) Handbook of Data Compression. London: Springer. Schlesinger JM (1991) Walkman of Words: Sony’s Data Discman Can Squeeze An Encyclopedia Into a Portable Electronic Book. Wall Street Journal: r12. Sheridon NK and Berkovitz MA (1977) The Gyricon – A Twisting Ball Display. Proceedings of the Society for Information Display 18(34): 289–293.

59

Simon Rowberry Tenen DY (2020) Reading Platforms: A Concise History of the Electronic Book. In: The Unfinished Book. Edited by Alexandra Gillespie and Deidre Lynch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 316–331. The Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations 2013 (2013). Available at https://www. legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2013/777/made Weiser M (n.d.) Design Proposals. Mark Weiser papers, ca. 1975–1999 Series 2 Box 8 Folder 8. Williams MR (2002) A Preview of Things to Come: Some Remarks on the First Generation of Computers. In: Rojas R and Hashagen U (eds) The First Computers: History and Architectures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1–14.

60

PART II

Forms, Media, Materialities

4 LOCATIVE NARRATIVE Exploring Place-Based Storytelling Simone Murray

Great literary works have traditionally been praised for their ability to transcend time and place. A skilled author can engineer readerly immersion so intense that readers forget their location and instead imagine themselves existing inside the world of the narrative (Greenspan, 2011). Hence the stereotypical scenario of an interrupted reader having to blink and momentarily recall where they are, so transported have they been by a book’s illusion of an alternative reality. Locative literature, however, represents the polar opposite of such a scenario. Locative literary works can only be experienced in a specific location because they are designed with that precise geographical setting in mind and demand experiencing in situ. Taking a locative work out of its intended locale would render it meaningless and likely non-functional. In this sense, site-specific stories involve a radical rethinking of literature’s traditional relationship to geographic place. They go beyond standard travel writing attempts to impart the characteristic atmosphere of exotic locales, and even beyond the undeniable thrill of reading about a familiar setting precisely evoked in a fictional text. Rather, locative literature is concerned with defamiliarising a reader-user’s current location. Much like German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s famous alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt), in which audience members are jolted into critical analysis by the ‘making-strange’ of habitual behaviours or scenarios, locative literature aims to help reader-users perceive a familiar location with fresh eyes. By revealing hitherto obscured or marginalised stories of a specific place, or by exploring the narrative possibilities of everyday topographic and architectural features, locative works aim to engender in their users a deeper awareness of place. In technological terms, locative narratives (whether fiction, non-fiction or poetry) utilise location-aware digital devices and platforms such as tablet computers, smartphones, GPS (Global Positioning System), Bluetooth and Google Maps. Reader-users move around a physical space (sometimes with the aid of an on-screen map) with a GPS-enabled mobile device that registers their presence at specific ‘hot spots’ or ‘trigger points’, granting them incremental access to segments of the story. Users therefore exist simultaneously in two dimensions: geographical place and a narrative space superimposed upon the physical location. The phenomenon is comparatively recent, even by the standards of digital media, having only become possible since the year 2000 when GPS moved from restricted US military use to public access. Hence, the first years of the new millennium saw a proliferation of 63

DOI: 10.4324/9781003119739-7

Simone Murray

locative narrative projects emerging from experimental artists and digital media enthusiasts (Hight 2021). The term ‘locative narrative’ derives from the Latin word for place (locus). However, the phenomenon is so recent that there is a bewildering number of competing terms in circulation describing broadly related phenomena: mobile storytelling; location-based/location-aware literature; geolocative literature; geostories; geospatial narrative; site-specific digital storytelling; immersive/pervasive/ubiquitous storytelling; and ambient literature (Abba, Dovey and Pullinger 2021; see elsewhere in this volume). There is clearly also considerable conceptual overlap with location-specific practices emerging from the gallery, museum and tourism sectors, such as digital art installations, exhibition audio-guides and city walking tours. Technological advances in augmented reality (AR) during roughly the same period have created intriguing parallels between more literary explorations of digitally-enhanced place and entertainment-driven commercial games such as Pokémon Go (2016; see Hjorth and Richardson 2020). This issue of fluid nomenclature arises from the phenomenon’s very novelty and its still-evolving nature. This chapter selects the term ‘locative narrative’ because it encompasses both fictional and non-fictional varieties, while emphasising a work’s irreducible relationship to place.

Characteristics of locative narrative The chief way in which locative narratives differ from literature’s traditional medium of the printed codex is in their multisensory nature. Unlike print culture’s overwhelming emphasis on the visuality of text, locative narratives complement the written word with other sensory channels: a user may simultaneously read the story and view images on a screen; hear narration, instructions, music or sound effects via headphones; and touch or otherwise interact with their mobile device and proximate physical objects. Uniquely, the literary work, usually bounded by its covers, here becomes an immersive environment through which the user moves, much like orienteering or geocaching. Such active exploration of a creative work requires a new conceptualisation of literary consumption. Former understandings of reading as a sedentary and largely passive practice give way to more active verbs, such as ‘navigating’, ‘participating’ or ‘performing’ (Raley 2009: 1; Fan 2017: 11; Hight 2021: 299). In this conceptualisation of the creative work as an environment explored by an active, self-determining reader, locative narrative draws upon older electronic literature discourses, specifically the idealisation of active, co-creating users prevalent in hypertext theory of the early 1990s. For theorists of this ‘first-generation’ electronic literature, entranced as they were by the new possibilities of hypertext software for literary creation, the historically passive reader was finally freed from plodding along an author-determined linear path and was liberated to become a kind of co-creator, actively exploring the networked text through their choice of lexia (Hayles 2008: 7; Bolter 1990; Landow 1992; Coover 1992). As with Shelley Jackson’s paradigmatic Storyspace fiction Patchwork Girl (1995), the reader-user pieces together the story by clicking on links, just as the body of Jackson’s female Monster is pieced together from diverse body parts. However, locative narratives actualise these long prevalent metaphors of readers ‘navigating’ a text (e.g. Ryan 2006: 102, 108, 171): The thematic and aesthetic aims of early hypertext and cybertext, which place a premium on non-linearity and the notion of reading as physical action, are thus in some sense finally realized with readers equipped with mobile media devices and invited to navigate portions of the city. (Raley 2008: 129–130) 64

Exploring Place-Based Storytelling

An evocative term for the resulting phenomenon of a reader pursuing storylines through geographic space is the ‘human cursor effect’ (Berry and Goodwin 2012: 918). Like the blinking cursor on the computer screen that shows the reader-writer where they are in a text, so too the physical reader-user moves around within a textual environment – the difference being that the text now suffuses their geographic location. For technological, financial and logistical reasons, locative narratives are commonly designed for inner-urban environments such as large, disused buildings, laneways or reasonably compact historical precincts. Partly, these are the locales most likely to have the necessary Wi-Fi connectivity and a sufficiently large base of potential user-readers, and partly also the cultural-sector funding agencies that tend to subsidise locative artistic works are firmly urban in their orientation. One example of a successful locative narrative that made full use of its inner-urban location was Twists and Turns, created for the 2014 Melbourne Writers Festival and based upon that city’s famous Victorian-era laneways with their vibrant cultural life. The free app invited festival participants to trace one of a number of potential plotlines through the laneways adjacent to the festival’s main site. Reader-users employing their smartphones and headsets started at a marked location and proceeded down a set path; at various intersections reader-users would be presented with a narrative choice, and their physical movement down a new laneway would prompt their mobile phone to play the relevant narrative segment (see Figure 4.1). These short stories, voiced by festival authors and local actors, at points wove into their narratives physical phenomena the reader-user was passing, such as bank machines or ‘ancient gas meters’, reinforcing the sense that this particular narrative came indelibly dyed with the characteristics of the specific locale. As its promotional trailer put it, the app ‘turned Melbourne, the [UNESCO] City of Literature, into literature’.1 Locative narratives need not, however, be solely fictional. Where a site-specific work deploys true stories, the effect can be powerfully defamiliarising and probingly ideological. A given work might take as its creative impetus a desire to unearth the hidden histories of a specific locale, working in the psychogeographic vein associated with UK writer Iain Sinclair

Figure 4.1  Screenshot of Twists and Turns.

65

Simone Murray

and his examinations of changing London streetscapes (2002, 2006). Jeremy Hight, co-­creator of what is widely acknowledged as the first locative narrative, 34 North 118 West (2002), coined the term ‘narrative archaeology’ to describe his ‘mining’ of the history of a disused Los Angeles railway yard (2006, 2021)2: ‘Locative media and locative narrative aims to allow the place itself to trigger all of its lost incarnations and their artifacts [sic] awash in time.’ For Hight and his collaborators, this involved substantial historical research about the site and creation of detailed user maps, but they also employed actors to give voice to imagined first-person accounts of events that had transpired there. Told from the various perspectives of a time-obsessed railway manager, a blue-collar employee or a cynical prostitute, these snatches of story combined to create a polyphonic mapping of the locale, revealing the impossibility of any place bearing only a single, official story (Ryan, Foote and Azaryahu 2016: 101–137; Hight 2021: 298). The idea of place being always the subject of multiple, competing narratives is especially foregrounded in postcolonial contexts where ownership of land is a recent – and ongoing – point of political contention.3 A locative narrative emphasising how multiple stories attach to any specific location implicitly draws attention to the fact that whose stories get told is a reflection of power relations. Why are Indigenous stories of this place obscured or lost while colonialist narratives are common knowledge?, such works prompt their reader-users to consider. In this sense, locative narrative is part of a longer history of ‘urban markup’ (McCullough 2008): i.e. the multiple ways in which cities are inscribed with stories, from the most official to the archly subversive. This can encompass, at the formal pole, inscriptions carved in stone, memorial statues, the UK’s famous ‘Blue Plaques’, or government-authorised Writers Walks such as those in Sydney or Wellington, while at the most informal pole, the concept takes in ephemera such as protest installations, posters, street art and graffiti. Despite their widely different registers of prestige, sanction and longevity, each of these aspires to infuse physical settings with narrative significance. To cite Hight again: ‘Cities may become a new book shelf, a new collection of works in streets or fields’ (in Schäfer and Gendolla 2010: 322). Because of its pervasive conception of story, locative narrative returns literature to the public, embodied and spatial dimensions of oral culture, generating possibilities for social interaction with other users as they navigate a narrative together.

Theoretical foundations of locative narrative The technologies on which locative narratives depend were developed comparatively recently, but the genre invokes much older theorisations of urban space. Practitioner-analysts of locative narratives often reference the figure of the flâneur: a species of urban idler indelibly associated with the boulevards of nineteenth-century Paris (Lovlie 2012; Barber 2014; Fan 2017: 9; Abba, Dovey and Pullinger 2021: 12–13). The figure was first depicted in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840) and was celebrated in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, but it was most famously theorised by Walter Benjamin only in the 1930s. The flâneur studies humanity from a semi-detached viewpoint, being both participant in and observer of the urban throng. His characteristic act of flânerie sees him ‘go botanizing on the asphalt’ – savouring the myriad sensations of urban life and classifying the human mass into various archetypes for his personal amusement (Benjamin 1983: 36). The privileged male flâneur wanders the streets, seemingly free of all economic or domestic constraints and without concern for his personal safety. He has no specific destination in mind; instead he remains perpetually open to the serendipitous, panoramic spectacle of urban life. Like the typical 66

Exploring Place-Based Storytelling

reader-user of locative narratives, the flâneur gravitates towards inner-urban locales, specifically the shopping arcades because these structures’ blurring of exterior and interior space mirrors the collapse of public and private realms so attractive to the street-haunting flâneur: ‘The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the façades of houses as a citizen in his own walls’ (Benjamin 1983: 37). While the implicitly gendered, classed and raced figure of the flâneur has come in for significant criticism in recent decades, the idea that wandering the urban locale might be more about the journey than the destination has been inspiring for many artists, from the Situationist International’s concept of dérive [drift] in the late 1950s onwards (Wolff 1985; Parsons 2000; O’Rourke 2013; Elkin 2016; Cadogan 2016; Kern 2020; Beaumont 2020; Carroll 2021). Creators of locative works, in particular, have been energised by the idea that a reader-user’s typical path through a city such as a daily commute, where getting somewhere is the sole point, could be transformed by revealing new aspects of an otherwise banally familiar environment. Through actualising a certain site’s ‘narrative archaeology’, locative narratives can put reader-users in touch with the layered histories of even comparatively young cities, showing how the taken-for-granted streetscape through which they move is, in fact, a palimpsest of generations of stories, only some of which have left discernible traces. From the realisation that we have only begun to scratch the surface of a familiar place, it is a short step to asking why and how certain stories became obscured, and which authorities were doing the obscuring. Such questions of latent ideology have also drawn creators of locative works to a school of cultural sociology concerned with competing expressions of power in urban settings. French theorist Michel de Certeau’s book The Practice of Everyday Life (1984 [1980]) has been especially influential in this regard. De Certeau reflects on urban walking and cultural legibility, drawing a distinction between ‘place’ (authorised, formal uses of geographical settings) and ‘space’ (informal, bottom-up uses of a physical locale). He is specifically interested in how ordinary people can deploy creative ‘tactics’ in their daily lives as small acts of resistance to authorised ‘strategies’ determining how public space ought to be used. Hence urban phenomena such as street art, pop-up installations, guerrilla gardening or artistic appropriation of official street furniture like anti-terrorism bollards all attest to ongoing contestation over the meaning of and access to public areas. This is reflected in the way locative narratives take the typically privatised, sedentary, leisure-based activity of reading and transport it to public space, making it a mode of ambulant public performance and potentially a point of group sociability (Greenspan 2011). Two UK-based locative literature research projects, StoryPlaces (based at the University of Southampton)4 and Ambient Literature (a collaboration between the University of West of England, Bath Spa University and the University of Birmingham),5 explore this reclassifying of public space for creative, playful, potentially subversive purposes. They typically select run-down, brownfield sites with limited official cultural capital and infuse them with rediscovered historical or invented narratives, inviting reader-users to linger and reconsider their habitual dismissal (Dawson 2016). As the Ambient Literature website provocatively asks: ‘What does it mean when the place you’re reading becomes the stage for the story?’

Affordances of mobile technologies In discussing born-digital literary works, critics often borrow from the visual arts in referring to the ‘affordances’ of a particular medium: i.e. the characteristic qualities or possible uses that a medium offers (Levine 2015). For electronic literature theorists such as N. Katherine 67

Simone Murray

Hayles, it is essential not simply to carry over print-formed critical precepts to reading digital works, but to engage in ‘media-specific analysis’ – factoring in the technological substrate of a work and considering how it opens up or closes off various communicative and artistic possibilities (2004). Such a mindset foregrounds how locative literature is enabled not just by digital technology, but specifically by mobile technology (i.e. smartphones). If earlier generations of electronic literature such as hypertext fiction and blogging were creations of, respectively, desktop computing and laptops, locative narrative is only conceivable with mobile technology (Rettberg 2018: 185). The mobile phone’s portability – the fact that the user can move freely through space while using it – is crucial. Passive consumption of a locative text is simply not possible, as are the merely intellectual decoding or ‘non-trivial effort’ of clicking that characterised earlier print-based and hypertext modes of consumption (Aarseth 1997; Fan 2017: 7). When it comes to consuming a locative narrative, bodily movement is required or the story stalls. Also essential for the genre’s emergence has been the increasing ubiquity of mobile phone usage, at least in urban settings, and the way that the mobile has, as a result, become a vernacular technology. Unlike early hypertext fictions that required mastery of dedicated authoring programs such as Storyspace, locative narratives require no special, additional technology or programming languages in order to be enjoyed and are hence democratically accessible. Equally importantly, the Wi-Fi connectivity on which locative narratives depend for their dissemination is now a fixture of urban environments – deemed by contemporary authorities as necessary an element of ‘smart city’ infrastructure as electricity, gas and water mains (McQuire 2016). On top of these issues of hardware and networks is the more recent development of location-based social network (LBSN) technology (as used by apps such as Uber, Tinder, Grindr etc.). This allows users to broadcast their precise geographic location to their social network via real-time updates. Accordingly, it creates ‘a type of technological filter to public spaces’ (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2014: 40). This is to say that a kind of digital skin is placed over geographic space, so that the location evident to the naked eye is augmented by another layer of information, this time only accessible via a digital device. Hardware portability, ubiquitous connectivity and location-aware programming permit creators of locative works to model narrative threads on specific geographical features: topographical characteristics and physical structures observable while walking may be literally or metaphorically woven into the narrative (Greenspan 2011). For example, arriving physically at an intersection may prompt a choice between one of several narrative paths (as in Twists and Turns) or a gateway can signal a new phase in a character’s story, a threshold to some new reality. Finally, the affordances of mobile communication create temporal possibilities for locative literature that have rarely been possible in the realm of print, with its traditional sequestration of author and reader in different spatiotemporal dimensions. With locative narrative, by contrast, the fact of the reader-user exploring a narrative in real time creates the possibility of time-lock: i.e. where real time and story time are equivalent. Previously, timelock was an affordance of time-based media such as cinema, where filmmakers could create narrative tension by the making the characters’ lived time precisely match the running time of the film (the movie High Noon (1952) is a classic examples of the device). Print narration, by contrast, had long played fast and loose with narrative time, as where story time runs faster than actual time (e.g. a narrator skips over ‘dead’ time to cut to the action) or story time runs slower than lived time (e.g. a character’s life flashes before their eyes as they face imminent death). Formalist and Structuralist critics devised specific terms such as ellipsis, prolepsis or analepsis for these complex relationships between story time and discourse time (Genette 68

Exploring Place-Based Storytelling

1983). Yet even then, a print author could not hope to control the actual time a reader spent consuming their work. Locative narrative creators, however, can be reasonably certain that if a narrative runs for a set time the reader-user will need to undertake the specified actions within that time and creators are thus free (or constrained) to tailor their narrative’s length accordingly.

Exploratory versus constructive locative narratives The still new and somewhat experimental literary medium of locative narrative can itself be divided into two subgenres: exploratory locative narratives (where users largely follow paths mapped out by the author-artist-creator/s); and constructive locative narratives (where users can contribute to the work’s content, for example via text messages projected in a public place or by uploading their own, geotagged sound files). In making this distinction, I borrow the terminology of pioneer hypertext creator and theorist Michael Joyce, author of afternoon (1987), who drew a useful contrast between two kinds of hypertexts (1995: 41–42). ‘Exploratory’ hypertexts are those where the reader is invited to explore an author-scripted environment, such as the aforementioned Patchwork Girl. Constructive hypertexts, by contrast, allow reader-users the greater agency of actively contributing to an evolving text by changing the ending/s, inventing new characters, or shifting the text’s genre. As digital interactivity has grown more technologically sophisticated over the intervening years, the participatory promise of first-generation hypertext theory has finally been matched by reality. An example of an exploratory locative narrative is Dickens: Dark London (2012), an app created by the Museum of London based on insomniac novelist Charles Dickens’s night-time peregrinations around Victorian London (Beaumont, 2016).6 Described as an ‘interactive graphic novel’, the app led users around various London sites, displaying period images and playing sound files of Dickens’s writings in the locations which inspired them. A similar example is the previously mentioned 34 North 118 West (2002), where users walked around a disused freight depot equipped with a tablet computer and headphones that delivered detailed maps and evocative sound files. Note that, for all their technological bells and whistles, both works are actually closer to the traditional, author-centric model of literary creativity than might at first appear. Granted, a creator such as Hight relinquishes total control over the narrative because of the role chance plays in any individual participant’s experience; meaning-making remains dependent on contingencies such as the weather, traffic, behaviour of passers-by, urban wildlife etc. In this sense, 34 North 118 West exemplifies digital literary theorists’ preferred aleatory quality (i.e. a work whose form is subject to the element of chance). Nevertheless, the limitations of exploratory locative literature uncomfortably recall those of exploratory hypertext: the reader-user can only move around within a pre-scripted environment, never alter nor add to it. So while the author, as is often observed, relinquishes total control, it is less commonly acknowledged that they continue to exercise decisive control.7 Even Hight concedes this: ‘the process creates a sort of bowling alley conundrum – the pins will reset and then stand again as before; the narratives and data will repeat the same selected section of information when crossed again from the same or another direction’ (2006). For a genre championing participatory agency, this seems a lamentably constrained form of freedom (Figure 4.2). Within a short time, restiveness with the constraints attending the putatively liberating experience of exploratory locative narratives had given rise to the genre’s ‘second generation’. These constructive locative narratives are akin to digital geo-annotation projects in that they 69

Simone Murray

Figure 4.2  Screenshot of 34 North 118 West.

encourage – even demand – that participants add personalised content to the overarching project by tagging certain urban sites with individually crafted stories. For example, creators of the international project [murmur] (2002) stuck green ear signs around the original host city of Toronto with a telephone number at which passers-by could record a voice message about the personal or public significance of that specific location (Farman 2012: 117). Catering to a different human sense, Yellow Arrow (2004) involved yellow arrow stickers with a unique code and mobile number being posted around a city inviting users to send a text message about the site’s significance (Farman 2012: 121–122). This project has also been recreated in several cities around the world, with content customised for each locale by the host city’s residents. Deploying still another platform for user interaction, textopia (2010) involved users in Oslo, Norway contributing creative content via a wiki, with submitted content being tagged to a specific site in the city (Lovlie 2012). As successive digital platforms emerge, creators of constructive locative narratives are quick to appropriate the new technology’s specific affordances for creative ends. For example, Poetry 4 U (2009–2010) was a project convened by Melbourne’s RMIT University in which users submitted poems which were then tagged on a Google Map of the city’s main thoroughfare, Swanston Street, and were experienced as augmented-reality overlays when users directed their mobile phones at specific sites on the street (Berry and Goodwin 2012). Participants could further share the poems through Twitter and Facebook, aligning the project more with a crowdsourced concept of literary creativity along the lines of collaboratively written wikinovels. One appealing aspect of such constructive locative narratives is how they generate readings of a city that are highly personal and may be customised to the preferences of specific subcultures. While official tourist publications may portentously recount the approved narrative of a site’s significance (‘strategies’ in de Certeau’s terminology), personal, geo-tagged narrative maps of a locale record alternative, ‘tactical’ histories such as sites of political protest, street parties, student pranks, urban legends or simply the vital emotional co-ordinates of myriad personal lives. Yet orchestrating such mass-collaborative projects requires creators to practise an unaccustomed modesty. They must step down from a high-Romantic pose of 70

Exploring Place-Based Storytelling

omnipotent author or artistic genius and instead become more a curator of a decentred, distributed, innately collaborative project (Lovlie 2012: 2; Oppegaard and Grigar 2014: 19; Hancox 2021: 3). Author-creators thus cede a significant degree of power to users, to the extent that if users choose not to participate in the platform prepared by the creators, there will be no artwork.

Questions raised by locative narrative Locative narratives have been an area of significant creative experimentation and critical interest during the first two decades of the twenty-first century because of the ways that they reinvigorate storytelling through digital media. Print culture’s traditional triad of author, text and reader is thoroughly destabilised when anyone may post about a geographic site’s significance, where a creative text continues to expand as long as more content is added, and where readers are physically and creatively liberated, to the extent of becoming ambulant readerwriters. Nevertheless, it is fair to ask whether these works are as genuinely accessible as they purport to be. For all their modish championing of stories ‘from below’, they invariably require access to a smartphone – an expensive, rapidly obsolescing and environmentally questionable consumer technology. Amy Spencer, a researcher involved in the StoryPlaces project, relates that the work’s creators had to advise users to explore one of the project’s locative narratives in groups and only during daylight hours as it was set in a rundown part of Southampton where the sight of literati absorbed in their latest iPhone while wandering down dark alleys might have proved too tempting a target for muggers.8 Considering issues of accessibility also foregrounds how the typically inner-urban, laneway setting of locative narratives might debar wheelchair users and those with prams, or whether lo-fi versions might be developed to include those with older handsets or patchy connectivity. Relatedly, might locative narratives constitute a public safety risk? Again, Spencer talks of trying to lull the user into ‘an absorbed trance as they navigate a space’ (2018: 155). But does encouraging people to zone out of their immediate physical environment by distracting their eyes and ears from normal sensory inputs – even if in groups and during daylight hours – actually expose them to dangers such as oncoming traffic? Media coverage of numerous vehicle accidents attributed to drivers playing Pokémon Go while behind the wheel are hardly reassuring in this regard. Yet proponents of locative narratives counter such concerns by reiterating how the genre prompts users to look in new ways at their urban surroundings, to the extent that locative narratives actually ground users in physical space more firmly than usual (Stein, Ruston and Fisher 2009: 46; Berry and Goodwin 2012: 914; Farman 2014: 6; Fan 2017: 7; Halegoua 2020; Abba, Dovey and Pullinger 2021: 5, 20). A common aspiration of creative practitioners working in the mobile space is that their projects might help overcome the mobile phone’s coding as an individualistic medium which envelopes its user in a personalised bubble within public spaces. This pervasive fear that twenty-first-century urbanites are becoming ever more cocooned from their fellow citizens – atomised denizens of a lonely crowd9 – drives experiments to design user interactivity into art projects or, even better, to prompt user-to-user interactions. These might occur, for example, where strangers exploring a locative narrative in the same locale trade notes on their narrative choices and thereby connect with a passer-by. Finally, locative narratives manifest especially acutely the problem of technological obsolescence that bedevils all digital media. The inevitable flipside of locative narrative creators’ avid appropriation of each new social-media platform is that locative works become unplayable equally rapidly, with software updates often 71

Simone Murray

rendering non-functional works created only a short time ago. Emblematically, the Poetry 4 U project mentioned above has been inaccessible for many years, though created barely a decade ago. Granted, locative works may be preserved through migrating them to newer programs or creating emulators so that older software can run on newer hardware, but this is not only labour-intensive but also usually results in some loss of functionality or features (Montfort and Wardrip-Fruin 2004). Electronic literature scholars focussed on combatting obsolescence have often advocated the fall-back position of preserving old hardware and software in museum-like settings, to ensure that a history of digital-media creativity is not lost to bit rot and cultural amnesia (Moulthrop and Grigar 2017). While consumers do frequently keep old mobile handsets in bottom drawers at home, the fact that software updates are automated by service providers means that, in practice, users have little control over what version of software is loaded on their smartphone, resulting in unilateral overwriting of older versions and consequent erasure of settings.

Conclusion It goes against the grain of academic disciplinarity, invested as it is in creating canons of prior works, but perhaps locative narrative should confront the threat of technological obsolescence by embracing ephemerality. Participants wandering around an urban locale with their smartphone and headset should be aware that they are partaking in a transient, quasi-live experience. Due to the medium’s innately aleatory nature, any user’s encounter with the streetscape and its populace will not be the same even five minutes from now, let alone in five months or five years. This invests the experience with a precious sense of time passing, which is perhaps the key point that locative narratives seek to make in their palimpsestic conception of the urban landscape. All of this is temporary, merely provisional, they seem to say; see it now – really see it – before it too is swept away, remodelled, regenerated, redeveloped, built over. Yours will not be the final story that is told about this place, so be mindful of how you tread upon this earth.

Notes 1 Melbourne Writers Festival – Twists and Turns Case study JWT Melbourne on Vimeo. See similar remarks by Jeremy Hight in Schäfer and Gendolla, 2010: 322. 2 34 North 118 West was a collaboration between Hight, Jeff Knowlton and Naomi Spellman. See: 34 North 118 West (eliterature.org) 3 For example, Brian Greenspan describes a planned project based at Carleton University in Ottawa that ‘infuse[s] geographical sites with historical context – in particular, the Indigenous, immigrant, environmental, and other “minor” histories effaced by imperialism and the project of modernity’ (2011). Similarly, the Fort Vancouver Mobile Project (2013), based in Vancouver on the Washington– Oregon border, was created around an Indigenous national historical site and aimed to make the rich archaeological records of the site ‘available through a direct experience with the site with the aid of mobile phones’ (Oppegaard and Grigar, 2014: 17). 4 storyplaces.soton.ac.uk 5 Ambient Literature – This is your part of the story 6 http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/Resources/app/Dickens_webpage/ 7 Lai-Tze Fan argues, by contrast, that exploratory locative narratives do allow reader-user agency because each individual’s path through the story can be considered a creative act (13). This would seem to put understandings of agency and individual creativity under considerable strain, especially given digital media’s interactive affordances.

72

Exploring Place-Based Storytelling 8 Comment made in response to a question after her paper ‘Authoring Uncontrollable Narratives: Literary Unpredictability in Ambient Experiences’, delivered at the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) conference in Victoria, Canada on 12 June 2017. 9 For a classic encapsulation of this thesis, see Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, first published in 2011 and now in its third edition.

References Aarseth, Espen J. (1997) Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Abba, Tom, Jonathan Dovey, and Kate Pullinger, eds. (2021) Ambient Literature: Towards a New Poetics of Situated Writing and Reading Practices. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Barber, John F. (2014) ‘Walking-Talking: Soundscapes, Flâneurs, and the Creation of Mobile Media Narratives.’ The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies. Ed. Jason Farman. New York: Routledge 95–109. Beaumont, Matthew. (2016) Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London. London: Verso. Beaumont, Matthew. (2020) The Walker: On Losing and Finding Yourself in the Modern City. London: Verso. Benjamin, Walter. (1983) Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Verso. Berry, Marsha and Omega Goodwin. (2012) ‘Poetry 4 U: Pinning Poems Under/Over/Through the Streets.’ New Media and Society 15.6: 909–29. Bolter, Jay David. (1990) Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Cadogan, Garnette. (2016) ‘Walking While Black.’ Literary Hub 8 July. Walking While Black ‹ Literary Hub (lithub.com) Carroll, Tobias. (2021) ‘On Iain Sinclair and the Radical Act of Walking Through a City.’ Literary Hub 28 April. On Iain Sinclair and the Radical Act of Walking Through a City ‹ Literary Hub (lithub. com) Coover, Robert. (1992) ‘The End of Books.’ New York Times Book Review 21 June. http://www.nytimes. com/books/98/09/27/specials/coover-end.html Dawson, Tory L. (2016) ‘Locating Digital Fiction in Victorian Southampton.’ The Writing Platform, 21 June. http://thewritingplatform.com/2016/06/locating-digital-fiction-in-victorian-southampton/ De Certeau, Michel. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. [1980] Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. De Souza e Silva, Adriana, and Jordan Frith. (2014) ‘Re-narrating the City through the Presentation of Location.’ The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies. Ed. Jason Farman. New York: Routledge. 34–49. Elkin, Lauren. (2016) Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London. London: Chatto & Windus. Fan, Lai-Tze. (2017) ‘Writing While Wandering: Material and Spatial Contingency in Locative Media Narratives.’ Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 23.1: 5–19. Farman, Jason. (2012) Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media. New York: Routledge. Farman, Jason. (2014) ‘Site-Specificity, Pervasive Computing, and the Reading Interface.’ The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies. Ed. Jason Farman. New York: Routledge. 3–16. Genette, Gérard. (1983) Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Greenspan, Brian. (2011) ‘The New Place of Reading: Locative Media and the Future of Narrative.’ Digital Humanities Quarterly 5.3 DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: The New Place of Reading: Locative Media and the Future of Narrative Halegoua, Germaine R. (2020) The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place. New York: NYU Press. Hancox, Donna. (2021) The Revolution in Transmedia Storytelling through Place: Pervasive, Ambient and Situated. London: Routledge.

73

Simone Murray Hayles, N. Katherine. (2004) ‘Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.’ Poetics Today 25.1: 67–90. Hayles, N. Katherine. (2008) Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame. Hight, Jeremy. (2006) ‘Views from Above: Locative Narrative and the Landscape.’ Leonardo Electronic Almanac 14.7–8 Nov. http://leoalmanac.org/journal/vol_14/lea_v14_n07-08/jhight.asp Hight, Jeremy. (2021) ‘Locative Narrative.’ Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms, and Practices. Eds. Dene Grigar, and James O’Sullivan. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. 295–303. Hjorth, Larissa, and Ingrid Richardson. (2020) Ambient Play. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jackson, Shelley. (1995) Patchwork Girl; or, A Modern Monster. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems. Joyce, Michael. (1995) Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Kern, Leslie. (2020) Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-made World. London: Verso. Landow, George P. (1992) Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Levine, Caroline. (2015) Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lovlie, Anders Sundnes. (2012) ‘flâneur, a Walkthrough: Locative Literature as Participation and Play.’ Proceedings of DiGRA Nordic 2012 conference: Local and Global – Games in Culture and Society. http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/flaneur-a-walkthrough-locative-literature-asparticipation-and-play/ McCullough, Malcolm. (2008) ‘Epigraphy and the Public Library.’ Augmented Urban Spaces: Articulating the Physical and Electronic City. Eds. Alessandro Aurigi and Fiorella de Cindio. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 61–72. McQuire, Scott. (2016) Geomedia: Networked Cities and the Future of Public Space. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Montfort, Nick, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. (2004) ‘Acid-Free Bits: Recommendations for Long-lasting Electronic Literature.’ Electronic Literature Organization 1.0 www.eliterature.org/pad/afb.html Moulthrop, Stuart, and Dene Grigar. (2017) Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Electronic Writing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Oppegaard, Brett, and Dene Grigar. (2014) ‘The Interrelationships of Mobile Storytelling: Merging the Physical and the Digital at a National Historic Site.’ The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies. Ed. Jason Farman. New York: Routledge. 17–33. O’Rourke, Karen. (2013) Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Parsons, Deborah L. (2000) Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Raley, Rita. (2008) ‘On Locative Narrative.’ Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 41.3–4: 123–47. Raley, Rita. (2009) ‘Mobile Media Poetics.’ Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, 12– 15 Dec., Irvine, CA. Mobile Media Poetics (escholarship.org) Rettberg, Scott. (2018) Electronic Literature. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Ryan, Marie-Laure. (2006) Avatars of Story. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu. (2016) Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Schäfer, Jörgen, and Peter Gendolla, eds. (2010) Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres. Media Upheavals series. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript. Sinclair, Iain. (2002) London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25. London: Granta. Sinclair, Iain, ed. (2006) London: City of Disappearances. London: Hamish Hamilton. Spencer, Amy. (2018) ‘Literary Thresholds: Exploring the Edges of Ambient Literature.’ Materialidades da Literatura 6.1: 149–58. DOI: 10.14195/2182-8830_6-1_10 Stein, Jennifer, Scott Ruston, and Scott S. Fisher. (2009) ‘Location-based Mobile Storytelling.’ International Journal of Technology and Human Interaction 5.1: 41–50. Wolff, Janet. (1985) ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity.’ Theory, Culture and Society 2.3: 37–46.

74

5 AMBIENT LITERATURE Kate Pullinger and Jon Dovey

Introduction Stories that readers grip so tightly they can’t let go, shows that viewers return to repeatedly, artists whose audiences clamour for their next work: this is the holy grail for many creators, from the lone graphic novelist producing her hand-drawn zine to the lead writer on the biggest game franchise. The best work engages all our senses; the best work simultaneously takes us out of ourselves while returning us to consider what we feel and believe, work that is both of the world and in the world. Work that is situated and situating. New ways of presenting narrative using systems that are contextually aware offer opportunities for recalibrating the site of reading. Text is mediated through devices that know a great deal about their situation and therefore about your context as a reader. The device in your pocket, or the tablet in your bag, may have access to any or all of the following data points: your name, your contacts, your most recent likes or mentions or purchases, if you are running, walking or standing still, your elevation, the angle and brightness of the sun, the weather, the time, where you are and what you are near on the digital map, what Wi-Fi networks are around you, which way round the device is being held, the level of sound around you, the amount of moisture in the air, your calendar, music tastes, fitness and wellbeing as well as the rate at which your heart beats. The Ambient Literature Research Project1 set out to explore a range of writing and reading practices that produce heightened experiences of ambience by responding directly to the reading context – a new poetics for situated reading and writing. We locate the idea of ambient literature in an emergent tradition of cultural forms that require the reader or viewer to connect with place (Murray, this volume), to manipulate time and presence in order to have us attend to the world around us with greater intensity, simultaneously immersing us in story and in situation. This understanding of ambience is proposed as a direct challenge to the dominance of the cinematic tradition of immersion which relies on sitting in the dark, ignoring the body whilst privileging vision, sound and particular forms of narrative cognition. Instead it is proposed as affording a mode of storytelling that allows us to be present in the shared world rather than absent in an imagined one.

75

DOI: 10.4324/9781003119739-8

Kate Pullinger and Jon Dovey

The thing that, maybe, makes it ambient storytelling is that it utilised your universe, what’s surrounding you, differently than stories that absolutely ignore who you are and where you’re going … it didn’t impose an identity on you which sometimes happens in games […] It didn’t tell you who you are. I think that it was immersive, but it’s strange to be immersive but also be in the place where you are. (Dovey, Hayler 2020: 149) We explored these concepts through a research programme that produced three core creative works and a co-written scholarly book. This chapter will briefly summarise that project, while looking at developments since. The idea of Ambient Literature was picked up in the press in the spring of 2018, after the publication of Kate Pullinger’s ambient work Breathe, resulting in a definition offered, not by our research team, but by Cambridge Online Dictionaries (2019) ambient literature noun [U] UK /ˌæm.bi.ənt.ˈlɪt.rə.tʃəʳ/ US /ˌæm.bi.ənt.ˈlɪt̬.ɚ.ə.tʃɚ/ books that are read on an electronic device such as a tablet and which use information about the current date and time, the reader’s location, weather conditions etc. to personalise the experience for the reader.

Content and Context In our book, Ambient Literature: Towards a New Poetics of Situated Writing and Reading Practices (Abba, Dovey & Pullinger 2020), we reported the findings of our research into how the visual, sonic, social and historic resources of place become the elements of a live and emergent scenography for storytelling. Our core commissioned works – The Cartographer’s Confession, It Must Have Been Dark by Then, and Breathe – each use specific techniques of narration, including memory, history, place-based writing, documentary, hallucination and drama, as well as reworking traditional forms of narrative, including the short story, the novel and cinematic and audio storytelling. Such techniques are combined with the work of app design, user experience design, interaction, software authoring, networked content management, localisation and GIS (geographical information systems) to produce ‘ambient’ experiences where the user is taken through a textual, networked or sonic space that engages with the world surrounding us but does not aim to map it, navigate it or become an ‘enhanced guidebook’. The contextual awareness of phones or tablets has been understood as offering the opportunity to localise and personalise existing media content. The BBC R&D labs in the UK (BBC R&D 2022) have had a long-running research programme into what they term ‘objectbased media’ where the aim is to think about how existing content can be reordered or streamed differently depending on the context of consumption. For example, your phone might know that your 15-minute bus ride was a regular feature of your day and would serve you an edited version of the day’s news fitting that time-length and tailored to your ‘interests’ understood from your browsing history and device settings or platforms. Media of all kinds can be personalised by using contextual information to offer different content to different users in different places. 76

Ambient Literature

This is, in our view, an instrumental and reductive (if inevitable) use of the situational awareness of our reading devices. We are interested in emergent forms that make the entangled background of network operations and of situated place the stage on which narrative can unfold. Our aim is to invert Brian Eno’s famous formulation that the ambient should be ‘as ignorable as it is interesting’ and build on his idea, in the same passage, that ambient arts should produce ‘a space to think’ (Eno 1978). We have developed the idea of situated writing and reading practices as a way to start to describe the field we propose. This use of the idea of situatedness helps us to connect this emergent field with existing cultural forms and traditions rather than a mere technologically determined effect. All writing and reading has always been situated. Situated reading practices have been a feature of urban life for the past three hundred years (McCullough 2013: 81 and 236–242). The ‘solitary reading’ paradigm of the private collection or university library is a comparatively minor part of the history of reading (Gadd 2020). However, the embodied, situated experience of the reader is often elided when we think of the ways that texts make meaning. Nevertheless, literature has often mediated place. In an essay called You Are There Anne Fadiman wrote about the pleasures of reading literary fiction and travel literature in situ, where our internal mental imagery of the ‘eidetic’ realm – unusually vivid and detailed – becomes actually present to the reader: ‘The consummate You-Are-There experience requires us to see exactly what the author described, so that all we need to do to cross the eidetic threshold is to squint a little’ (Fadiman 1999: 54). More recently, the writer of place Robert MacFarlane used his Twitter account to ask his followers to share their experiences of what he called ‘in situ reading’; he had more than 400 responses, including Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath whilst driving across the Oklahoma panhandle, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness on the Sangha River in the Cameroon, and The Hound of the Baskervilles on Dartmoor (Macfarlane 2017). This strand of reading in place of place has until now been a minor tributary to the ocean of reading experience. Now, however, we have the potential to make it more substantial. If we add audio as a means of mediating literature through audio books, podcasts and software like Amazon’s Whispersync (which will flip into audio from reading mode), we already have a more environmentally attuned form of literary experience (Kuzmičová 2016, 230). From the point at which the Walkman became ubiquitous, literary experiences as mobile audio have become part of our mediated environments. The first ‘soundwalks’ were made at R. Murray Schafer’s World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University in the late 1960s and early 1970s and developed later by Janet Cardiff (subsequently with Georges Bures Miller) in Forest Walk (1991) and many other audio walks and sound installations (Cardiff and Miller 2019). This field has been explored widely in sound studies which by and large have treated what we now propose as ambient works as forms of sonic ‘overlay’ anchored through GPS (see e.g. Behrendt 2018: 249–257). The use of sensor-based systems and devices further developed the potential of this work by making sound, text and image all responsive to device location. In turn, these situated literary and audio experiences fed into the development of the field that became known as locative media (see Wilken 2012: 243–247; Murray, this volume). The period between 1999, when GPS data first became publicly available, and 2005, when it was designed into the mobile phone, spawned a wave of new location-based cultural forms from Sat Nav voice artists to high-tech treasure hunts that used geocaching as well as the first generation of location-based games such as Botfighters (Valve 2002). Google Maps’ open API and the development of the smartphone from 2005 have, as Wilken (2012: 243–247) observed, made the availability of location-based media banal. Situated reading practices, 77

Kate Pullinger and Jon Dovey

mobile audio and locative media delivered on contextually-aware devices all feed into the literary forms that are constituted through the ambient characteristics of signal rich environments.

Everyday Mixed Realities: Attention, Distraction, Mobilisation Building on these patterns of innovation, the category of ambient literary works that we propose arises in response to the conditions of everyday life where mobile acts of reading, listening, watching and sense-making have become the norm. Digital texts of all kinds are interwoven into our daily consciousness. These conditions ensure that a more or less always available everyday mixed reality is a very common experience for significant parts of the global population. By mixed reality here we refer to the sensory experience of inhabiting embodied and emplaced time, in the kitchen, in the car, or on the street, simultaneously with an extended sense-making horizon defined by whatever pattern of information and mediation processes we are connecting with at any given moment. Our ‘on the go’ mobile mediations might be distinguished by the different kinds of constantly refocussing attention they both produce and require. Firstly, there is instrumental content that produces navigational and wayfinding messaging for the times and places of everyday life, where attention is brief, dynamic and rapidly actionable. Navigational information is available through the whole array of GIS systems offering us mapping and wayfinding services in our cars or in our pockets on mobile devices. For many of us navigational information is increasingly intermeshed with diary adjustments. Our daily lives are punctuated by a constant reshuffling of our personal timelines as dates and locations are determined by our work, social or family arrangements, whether this is for a delivery driver, parent organising after school care or global executive working across different locations and timezones. Secondly, our wayfinding attention is switched between equally brief scrolling of social media timelines for the tiny pleasurable strokes conferred by the emoji world that produces a different kind of self-conscious attention. Social media design invites us to endlessly check and update our infinitely productive, continually refreshing timelines (Gilroy-Ware 2016) filling up every interstice of unaccounted time with micro-messaging from our virtual social world. Finally, there is a third kind of mobile mediated text, requiring more considered reading and attention. Email and other work related communications, long-form online reading, news services, TV, movies and games: online content of every kind is available wherever we are within distance of a good enough Wi-Fi or phone signal. All three of these modes of screen attention are predicated on reading and may be accompanied by audio and video delivered via phones, tablets or laptops using either ear buds or noise-cancelling headphones. Noorda and Berens’ (2021) US-focussed study into immersive media consumption shows that most people multitask while engaging with long-form narrative books, including print books as well as the more obviously multitasking-friendly ebook and audiobook formats. The study’s data supports ‘broadening the notion of what constitutes “immersive” attention […] “Immersion” can also happen while multitasking.’ The second finding relevant to our work is that ‘avid book engagers are more ethnically diverse and younger than the general survey population […] They engage with more books than middle-class boomer women’ (Noorda & Berens 2021), a demographic that the mainstream publishing industry still mistakingly considers its core readership. These new forms of attention have produced both a general level of social unease at the problem of distraction (‘No phones at the dinner table please’) and also a scholarly volte face 78

Ambient Literature

by formerly enthusiastic proponents of digital technologies now raising the corrosive effects that the distractions of the attention economy have on social and civic life, including the rise of fake news and the privatisation of the internet (see e.g. Lanier 2010; Turkle 2011; McCullough 2016). Rather than fall into this ‘attention anxiety’, we argue that these new forms of literary attention remain a powerful way of mobilising consciousness. Two key social and political movements of the past five years – Black Lives Matter and Me Too – are driven and supported by reading and it is not a stretch to reframe these movements and the important conversations, protest, and actions they’ve inspired as reader-led. The key texts for these movements – from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Margaret Atwood – have been attended to in the conditions and by the people referenced by Berens and Noorda above. They have been written on the city, remixed and repurposed across multiple platforms, augmented by social media, ripe for remediation by new and future generations of readers and creators at home with literary forms that are built around the potential for multitasking, mixing the database, the algorithmic, and personal story in ways that our initial ambient literature commissions only hint at. Our Ambient Literature project argues that the very process of distraction is the ground for new cultural and creative forms. Our work is concerned with the kind of attention that produces aesthetic form from the infrastructure and devices constituting the everyday information flow and indeed designs those modes of attention as the key experience for a new kind of ambient art work. Our starting point has been that cultural work in this domain begins with an understanding of the ways in which our immediate environments hum not only with the cybernetic cycles of the information loops that sustain biological life but also with human data, information and communications. Our experience is produced through our entanglements and encirclements with the everyday mixed realities produced by the enmeshing data exchanges described above. The characteristic modes of attention produced by this environment involve continuous reframing between the immediate and the distant, between what needs to be dealt with now and what can be deferred, between what is foreground and what is background. It is this constant reframing that produces the contemporary experience of ambience. We are constantly being called upon to refocus our attention between Eno’s ‘ignorable background’ and his ‘space for thinking’ (Eno 1978). This sense of being surrounded in newly demanding ways leads us to the ambient as opposed to the locative, or the immersive. The number of possible touchpoints between user, system and meaning are proliferating. Texts interweave and entangle with their contexts. In some sense this is the use of the term that the poet, filmmaker and teacher Tao Lin mobilises when describing his work as a form of ambient literature. His texts are interwoven with elements from Twitter, news feeds, Google search results, and blog posts as well as Post-It notes or cookbooks. The work is porous to the networks of textuality that enmesh us (Sanders 2010). However, the Ambient Literature experiments that we produced were intent on a different kind of embodiment for the reader and concerned themselves with particular kinds of atmospheres and contexts.

Ambient Experiments The core commissions of new work in our practice-led research programme were designed in order to represent a spread of approaches to the challenge of the ambient that emerges from the locative. Sound artist Duncan Speakman’s It Must Have Been Dark by Then (IMHBDBT) is a book and audio experience that uses a mixture of evocative music, narration and field 79

Kate Pullinger and Jon Dovey

recordings to bring you stories of changing environments, from the swamplands of Louisiana, to empty Latvian villages and the edge of the Tunisian Sahara. Unlike many audio guides, there is no pre-set route; the software builds a unique map for each person’s experience. It is up to you to choose your own path through the city – any city – connecting the remote to the immediate, the precious to the disappearing. The work, usually made available as a bookable experience via festivals and conferences, asks the listener to seek out types of locations in their own environment; once there it offers sounds and stories from remote but related situations. At each location, the listener/reader is invited to tie those memories to the place they are in, creating a map of both where they are right now and of places that may not exist in the future. The piece requires the audience to switch between a smartphone and a book; the reader/listener is asked to walk, marking specific moments of connection on the phone’s screen. I had the great privilege of experiencing IMHBDBT on a hot summer’s day in London in 2017. I was extremely jet-lagged, it was a stifling day (even for an Australian) and I was in a city I don’t really know and don’t especially like, so walking around and exploring my environment was the last thing I wanted to do. Fast forward an hour and I am sitting in a tiny garden oasis in the middle of Soho weeping at the fleeting beauty of the world we live in. Such is the unexpected and subtle power of this work. (Hancox 2021: 121–2) IMHBDBT, in fact, derives from the locative media traditions of the early noughties, modelled as it is on previous Speakman work that attempted to design at the time what was described as a ‘portable media scape’ (Hewlett Packard 2007), a work that made use of locative sensing but was not tied to one place. In IMHBDBT, the narration invites us to make a map of a walk considering various features of the landscape as we go, encouraging us to look hard at our shared world and the people in it. Simultaneously, we find this world re-mapped with the experiences of peoples in far-away places whose habitations are disappearing due to climate change and geopolitical economic pressures. This translocation produces an extraordinary experience of global connectedness and fragility. The poetic strength of this work lies in its command of our attention through its meticulous control of pacing and prompting; the world itself, the stage for your walk, constitutes your experience through the interaction of score and text. IMHBDBT sits within a growing tradition of work mobilising ambient aesthetics and locative technologies to draw our attention to the climate catastrophe. The artists Nadir and Peppermint (EcoArtTech) (Nadir and Carey 2016) produced Indeterminate Hikes + supporting walkers using smartphone mapping to go for a walk in which a series of instructions transposes wilderness experience into urban spaces. J.R. Carpenter’s ‘This Is A Picture Of The Wind’ (2018) is a series of poetic texts about the weather written in response to the terrible storms in the UK of 2014. It uses the location and weather data enabled by the reading device to make the reading experience different each time, a use of conditional text further explored in Breathe below.2 Our second core example, James Attlee’s The Cartographer’s Confession, combines fiction and nonfiction, imagined and real locations, to create a story of migration, loss, betrayal and retribution that builds to a savage denouement. The smartphone app allows the reader personal access to source materials for the film The Cartographer’s Confession, collected by an imagined screenwriter, Catriona Schilling, investigating the life and times of a fictional 80

Ambient Literature

cartographer, Thomas Anderson. It features audio, prose, illustrations, an original collection of 1940s London photographs, 3D soundscapes, and a bespoke musical score. Readers in London can immerse themselves in the film’s locations, experiencing elements of the plot in the places where they happened. A chapter at a time, cassette tapes of Thomas Andersen’s memories, contemporary photographs taken by his childhood friend Alessandro, personal letters, and Schilling’s research notes are released, leading the reader on a journey to the dark secret at the story’s heart. The walking experience unfolds over several hours between London’s South Bank and the West End before taking the reader to Bermondsey for the climax. The app’s ‘Armchair Mode’ offers a different experience, enabling the reader to explore the research materials and construct their own narrative, anywhere they may be. This piece of work clearly belongs in a tradition of heritage-based soundwalks that enable the hidden histories and archaeologies of place to be made available to contemporary audiences. The heritage soundwalk triggered by QR code or app download has become a common feature of contemporary heritage interpretation (see e.g. Satsymph 2022). Unlike IMHBDBT, The Cartographer’s Confession is very much tied to particular locations. However, in its scale and use of mixed media to unveil its ramified, layered storyworld it prefigures the kinds of fictional worlds that 5G/6G future networks could enable. The scale of The Cartographer’s Confession is itself part of the experiment here, posing the question: can this kind of experiential storytelling work for readers when it requires so much time (at least half a day) and includes this amount of content – like reading a short novel in fact? It was designed as a demanding audience experience that is suggestive of the way that locations and networks can, in future, constitute the stage for new kinds of embodied narrative experience. Kate Pullinger’s Breathe was commissioned as a very different kind of experience from the ambulant ambient works of Speakman and Attlee above. Recognising the critique of locative and soundwalk experiments that assume particular spatial privileges around safety and exposure in the city, Pullinger set out to make a piece that would operate in a domestic context, to be experienced at home. Breathe tells the story of Flo, who has the ability to talk to ghosts. As Flo struggles to communicate with her mother, Clara, who died when she was a young girl, other voices keep interrupting. As these ghosts disrupt Flo’s search for Clara, they recognise the readers’ surroundings and begin to haunt the reader in the same way as they haunt Flo. Breathe is a literary experience delivered through a single URL via the smartphone’s browser; it responds to the reader’s presence by internalising the world around the reader. Using APIs – application programming interfaces – the story leverages data about the reader, including place, weather and time, in order to create an experience that is personal and uncanny. Breathe makes use of conditional text, for example, dropping in details scraped from the user’s actual location; for example, the ghosts gather in the street near you as you read the story. The story also accesses the phone’s camera and uses it to feed colour and light data into the interface design. The UX of the work itself becomes more and more uncanny as the ‘ghosts in the machine’ produce uncanny narrative effects. However, here the apparatus of localisation is also revealed as the superstructure of surveillance capitalism – the reader is brought into a profound and unsettling encounter with the data environments that enfold and entangle us. As a born-digital set of practices, ambient literature avails itself of the enormous possibilities of data manipulation which its digital platforms and networks afford. However, it can do so in a way that preserves immersion by engaging with the reader’s world. By using all the data points that the device knows about itself and knows about its user, by mobilising that mesh of data into a way of shaping a narrative experience, the reader is not called upon to make ‘interactive’ or hypertextual choices that push us out of the narrative experience. On the 81

Kate Pullinger and Jon Dovey

contrary, the meshing and intertwining of the narrative content with the very moment of its consumption through the way in which a device knows where it is, knows what the context is, and knows something about you, can produce content that is personalised to the moment of your consumption, producing a sense of presence in the moment and in the story which can be quite frictionless. This is not, of course, a technological effect but an affordance. Its realisation depends on the skill of an author who can write into place without writing about place. The writer or artist has to leave ambiguous space for the world, the environment of reading, to find its sensory way into the storyworld. The position of the ambient literature author in this sense is akin to that of a playwright, understanding as precisely as they can where an actor is on stage, in relation to which other actors, props, sounds and lighting in order to write lines and actions that resonate within the whole mise en scène. The background work of the databases contextualise the story data itself. The background work of ambient computing, always working, maintains an invisible presence in much the same way that ambient music has been thought of in the past. However, the reading experience is anything but background. Here the force of the ambient is to shape content through that background computing mechanism into a foreground state of awareness of the reader’s precise place – situation – in the world.

Atmosphere and Ambience The work that interests the Ambient Literature Research Project seeks to bring us into a new relationship with place, a new aesthetic relation that helps us to experience the complex entanglements of subject and environment. In this way the work has particular trajectories for thinking about ecologies, histories and networks. This work builds on a tradition of the literary relationship between story and place often characterised as ‘atmosphere’. Critical accounts of this idea often begin with Heidegger’s (1967) ‘Stimmung’, usually translated as attunement to atmosphere or mood (but also, interestingly for our argument, having overtones of climate or listening). Its importance for us is that it establishes how mood can be a foundational experience; our experiences are subjected to mood or atmosphere before they are determined through cognition (Roquet 2016: 133). Moreover, when ‘attuning’, we are being co-constituted by our environments, moulded to its surroundings. Of course, the environment is no longer just building, or landscape, or climate, it is ‘the material and informational environment’, the transnational space of global information flows imbricated into the semiotically super-abundant textures and tools of everyday life. In his book on ambience in Japanese culture, Paul Roquet (2016) argues that our characteristic, pre-linguistic structuring through mood finds its contemporary intensification in processes of ambient subjection through our use of portable media and all manner of audio/visual product, including music, games and literature, each medium having the potential to support the kinds of mood regulation necessitated by over-stimulated urban lifestyles. Roquet here builds on Michael Bull’s (2000) observation that the use of portable playlists ‘make life easier’ by matching ‘the energetic demands of working life’ (Bull: 154–7). In his own chapter on ‘Ambient Literature’, Roquet (2016) argues that such a phenomenon can be found in particular tropes and narrative styles of the Japanese novel. However, here he begins to develop a position close to our own approach to ambience: Ambient Literature can, he writes, ‘enable readers to dissolve discrete identities into moods of open ended affective exploration free from the usual demands of their social and discursive selves’ (2016: 3094 ff); the ‘calm uncertainty’ that it generates ‘can take a critical rather than a comforting route’ (3160). In the end Roquet develops a 82

Ambient Literature

position not far from Malcolm McCullough’s (2013) in so far as he suggests that a critical ambience might produce a greater sense of responsibility for the ‘affective attunement of shared space’ (2016: 3347). More pertinently for our argument here, he also wants to understand ambience as productive of a mode of subjectivity that decentres the human through its reconnection with wider energies and forces; An ambient media understanding of self necessarily situates the person in an intimate relationship with larger ecologies, affirming our interdependency not only with other people but with the affordances of the objects and environments we live with and through. (2016: 3347) This account of ambience suggests that it is a more nuanced and useful term than the popular idea of ‘immersion’ where we are ‘lost in a book’ or a film, game, metaverse environment or so on. Ambience is about more than settling into a placid background, or the reader or viewer being absorbed into a storyworld. Content producers working for audiences across a number of platforms, all of which have different interactive affordances, have begun to understand themselves as experience designers. One way of conceptualising the task of the authors (or design teams) for such media is that they are designing for a range of user behaviours. In the case of the Ambient Literature projects, we were designing for users who were variously listening, reading from screens and from books, tapping and swiping screens, walking, sitting, or lying down. Far from assisting in a silencing of the body tied to a world to be left behind, the authors are producing texts that choreograph the user in and alongside their environments. In our proposition for the critical potential of ambient literature, this encounter with the wider flow of energies present in the reading is characterised by particular forms of attention, shifting between the foregrounded content of the work itself and the background setting for the experience. This movement back and forth is a feature of ambient artworks (see Marcinkowski 2020); here, however, our ambient literature projects hail the user on the digital ground of the contemporary attention economy. They call attention not only to the particularities or generalities of the environment but also to the global data networks of control and surveillance that co-constitute them. Our argument for critical ambience tries to shift the ground of the debate from an argument about how content (music, text, VR, games) could ‘do’ environmental work to one of how the encounter with the work can ‘be’ environmental. This state of being is one in which our attention is called not only to the content but also to the immediate context for that delivery of that content; the critical potential of the ambient arises in the movement of attention between the text and the constituting context producing a very particular kind of presence.

Homing Ambience For many people, one of the results of the pandemic was a huge rise in the amount of film and television streamed into our homes. The past century has been characterised by the irresistible rise of visual media and the moving image, with the internet, and internet-enabled devices like smartphones and tablets, accelerating that rise exponentially. Both short-form video, e.g. TikTok videos, Twitter Reels, and Instagram Stories, and long-form narrative, e.g. Netflix series and the Marvel franchise, have boomed, as have all forms of computer games 83

Kate Pullinger and Jon Dovey

from casual online puzzles through to AAA video games. Augmented reality continues to find new uses across industry, from replacing the high street clothes shop dressing room to enabling architects to work with structural engineers more fluidly. Virtual reality continues its stop-start progress with hyper-reality opera experiments and medical use-cases. The so-called Metaverse promises yet another run at the screen-based experiences of mass participation in performed and performative worlds that we already explored in Second Life. We cannot know how far ambient aesthetics will find a literary niche. However, its insistence on the specificity of place, in what the documentary scholar Judith Aston terms ‘emplacement’ (Aston 2017), seems a necessary strategy that grounds us in the face of the relentless onslaught of globalised content delivered by globalised systems. Our mediated experiences are by now largely structured by business models that rely on the widest possible global audience. The services that we depend on for our daily informatic existence are based on delivering tiny slivers of attention which – on a mass scale – become online advertising revenue. The distracted attention of billions of users produces enough significant engagement to sustain advertising revenues and subscription services. The latter (e.g. Netflix, Spotify) are in part distinguished by any content, from anywhere and everywhere, available instantly. In this sense we find ourselves in broad agreement with the argument that underpins Donna Hancox’s recent book on transmedia storytelling (Hancox 2021) for what she categorises as ‘pervasive, situated and ambient’ forms of storytelling. In this analysis it becomes clear that the need for situated storytelling from places of marginalised communities and peoples is produced as a direct counterbalance to the hegemony of Marvel and Disney transmediation or endless Friends reruns. There is, however, a significant caveat that we would add to this call for the situated experience that uses ambient affordance. The growth of political localism as a reaction to globalisation is also the route to nationalism, populism, neo-fascism and fundamentalism of many different kinds. So situated storytelling in our view always needs to enact connectedness, with one another, with the environment, with the ecologies that sustain us. Places are not, as Doreen Massey argued in 1994, ‘areas with boundaries around’ with a ‘long internalised history’; rather, they are ‘articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings’ that ‘integrate in a positive way the global and the local’ (see Massey in Hayler 2020: 94–95). In this context the ambient literature projects referred to above all enact a temporary situatedness where the place, the situation is always understood as a temporary, historically contingent articulation of a network of relations. However, the theoretical analysis of the need for this kind of work hardly constitutes any kind of business model. It seems likely that given that the market for content is becoming increasingly globalised, the audience for situated storytelling will be served through local arts practices and cultural and third sector investments. If ambient literary practices have a future it may well be as part of cultural sectors that aim to engage audiences face to face, on the ground, with the stories that are meaningful to their own lives in their own situations at the precise moment of their encounter.

Notes 1 Ambient Literature Research Project, funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council, grant number AH/N003683/1. 2 For further discussion of the ambient and the anthropocenic, see Dovey and Speakman (2018, 32–56).

84

Ambient Literature

References Abba, Tom, Dovey, Jon, and Pullinger, Kate (eds.), 2020. Ambient Literature: Towards a New Poetics of Situated Writing and Reading Practices. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Aston, Judith, 2017. “Interactive Documentary and Live Performance: From Embodied to Emplaced Interaction.” In Judith, Aston, Sandra, Gaudenzi, and Mandy, Rose (eds.), I-Docs the Evolving Practices of Interactive Documentary. New York: Wallflower Press. BBC R&D, Object Based Media. Accessed April 25, 2022. https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/ object-based-media Behrendt, Frauke, 2018. “Soundwalking.” In Bull, Michael (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies. Abingdon: Routledge. Bull, Michael, 2000. Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg. Cambridge Dictionary, 2019. About Words: New Words. Accessed April 1, 2019. https://dictionaryblog. cambridge.org/2019/03/11/new-words-11-march-2019/ Cardiff, Janet, and Miller, Georges Bures, Walks 1999–2014. Accessed April 20, 2019. http://www. cardiffmiller.com/artworks/walks/ Carpenter, J.R., 2018. This is a Picture of the Wind. Accessed April 25, 2022. https://luckysoap.com/ apictureofwind/ Dovey, Jon, and Hayler, Matt, 2020. “Critical Ambience.” In Abba, T., Dovey, J., and Pullinger, K. (eds.), Ambient Literature: Towards a New Poetics of Situated Writing and Reading Practices. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Dovey, Jon, and Speakman, Duncan, 2018. “Anthropocene Elegy & GeoSpatial Presence.” Media Theory 2, no. 1, 32–56. Eno, Brian, 1978. Ambient Music from Liner notes Music for Airports/ Ambient 11. Accessed February 5, 2019. http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/MFA-txt.html) Fadiman, Anne, 1999. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. London: Penguin. Gadd, Iain, 2020. “Ready Reader One: Recovering Reading as an Ambient Practice.” In Abba, T., Dovey, J., and Pullinger, K. (eds.), Ambient Literature: Towards a New Poetics of Situated Writing and Reading Practices. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gilroy-Ware, Marcus, 2016. Filling the Void: Emotion, Capitalism & Social Media. London: Repeater Books. Hancox, Donna, 2021. The Revolution in Transmedia Storytelling through Place Pervasive, Ambient and Situated. London: Routledge. Hayler, Matt, 2020. “Objects, Places, and Entanglements.” In Abba, T., Dovey, J., and Pullinger, K. (eds.), Ambient Literature: Towards a New Poetics of Situated Writing and Reading Practices. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Heidegger, Martin, 1967. Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell. Hewlett, Packard, 2007. “HP Unveils Do-it-Yourself Toolkit to Create and Share Mobile, Interactive Experiences.” Accessed April 26, 2022. https://www.hp.com/us-en/hp-news/press-release.html? id=170192#.YmkajvPMIUs Kuzmičová, Anežka, 2016. “Audiobooks and Print Narrative: Similarities in Text Experience.” In Jarmila, Mildorf, and Kinzel, Till (eds.), Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative, 217– 238. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Lanier, Jaron, 2010. You Are Not a Gadget. London: Penguin. Macfarlane, Robert, 2017. “Putting Books on the Map.” The Guardian, July 21st, 2017. Accessed January 23, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/21/robert-macfarlane-why-its-timeto-put-our-reading-experiences-on-the-map McCullough, Malcolm, 2013. Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marcinkowski, Michael, 2020. “Developing Ambient Attention.” In Abba, T., Dovey, J., and Pullinger, K. (eds.), Ambient Literature: Towards a New Poetics of Situated Writing and Reading Practices. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Nadir, Leila and Carey, Adams, 2016. Indeterminate Hikes. Accessed February 3, 2018. http://www. ecoarttech.net/project/indeterminate-hike/

85

Kate Pullinger and Jon Dovey Noorda, Rachel, and Berens, Kathi Inman, 2021. “Immersive Media & Books: Consumer Behavior and Experience with Multiple Media Forms: Panorama Project.” English Faculty Publications and Presentations. 74. Roquet, Paul, 2016. Ambient Media. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Satsymph. Accessed April 25, 2022. https://satsymph.co.uk/ Turkle, Sherry, 2011. Alone Together. New York: Basic Books. Wilken, Rowan, 2012. “Locative Media: From Specialized Preoccupation to Mainstream Fascination.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 18, no. 3, 243–247.

86

6 AUTOFICTION IN WORDS AND IMAGES The Visual–Verbal Dialectic Hywel Dix

Autofiction in Words and Images: The Visual-Verbal Dialectic Although coinage of the term autofiction is often attributed to Serge Doubrovsky in France in 1977, Myra Bloom has recently argued that its first published use was made by the BritishAmerican novelist and critic Paul West ‘in a New York Times review of Richard Elman’s novel Fredi & Shirl & The Kids’ in 1972 (Bloom 2019: 4). Bran Nicol says that autofiction was ‘introduced to American readers’ by Jerzy Kosinski in the article ‘Death in Cannes’ in 1986 (Nicol 2018: 258), while Max Saunders has described it as ‘Edmund White’s term’ (2010: 329). These diverse attributions need not necessarily imply factual inconsistency as much as multiplicity of origin and one thing that is certain is that the practice of autofiction has attracted an increasing degree of critical and theoretical attention: Bloom used a Google Ngram search to show that between 2011 and 2019 usage of the word, in English at least, enjoyed a staggering four-hundred-fold increase (5). Much critical work has been devoted to exploring the extent to which autofiction can be considered a literary genre, a literary theory, or merely a mode of writing. Moreover, analysis so far has focused overwhelmingly on prose fiction, with important theoretical studies by Vincent Colonna (2004), Max Saunders (2012), Lut Missinne (2013) and Marjorie Worthington (2018) treating the printed novel as the sole vehicle of autofictional expression. By contrast, the possibility of considering works in other genres such as poetry or other media such as visual art, film, television or drama as instances of autofiction has been under-explored (with some important exceptions such as Brandt 2014; Michael 2018; Mira 2013). Yet since autofiction presumes a close identification between author and protagonist, the primary means by which this identification can be apprehended is through recourse to a range of paratextual material – the consideration of which, by definition, shifts critical attention away from the written text. This is why Allira Hanczakowski (2020) has recently argued that works of autofiction can best be understood by situating their paratexts within a number of external ‘contexts and trends’ (3). This chapter draws on Hanczakowski’s work, plus important innovations by Renée Larrier (2006) on autofiction and traditional Caribbean dance, Joost de Bloois (2007) on autofiction and visual art and Boel Ulfsdotter (2018) on autofiction and documentary film to suggest

87

DOI: 10.4324/9781003119739-9

Hywel Dix

that that because autofiction is primarily identified as such paratextually, the identification of ‘author’ with ‘subject’ is enabled by a dialogue between two or more different works in the author’s oeuvre. Having established this, the chapter goes on to argue that texts integrating words and images employ a visual-verbal dialectic, with each element (the visual and the verbal) contributing meaning in different and often-complementary ways. Through a reading of Pedro Almodóvar’s 2009 film Broken Embraces, Amy Sackville’s novelisation of the life of the seventeenth-century artist Diego Velázquez, Painter to the King (2018) and Siri Hustvedt’s 2014 novel about the contemporary art world, The Blazing World, the chapter identifies this visual-verbal dialectic as a form of autofictional intervention in specific areas of cultural politics and cultural conflicts.

The visual-verbal dialectic in Broken Embraces At the heart of Pedro Almodóvar’s 2009 film Broken Embraces (Los embrazos rotos) is an extraordinary scene. The protagonist of the film is a fictional movie director, Mateo Blanco, who, over the course of the film, tells his theatrical agent’s son the story of his doomed love affair with an actress, Lena, and of her relationship with the financial backer of a film they had both worked on years earlier, Ernesto Martel. As the retrospective narrative advances, in addition to presenting the story of the three lovers it also takes on the properties of a documentary, specifically a documentary about the making of the film, Chicas y maletas, on which they met. The most distinctive scene in Broken Embraces is then the one in which these fictional filmmakers are shown shooting a scene from that film-within-a-film. It is a key scene in interpreting the film overall because the dialogue and characterisation from the small snippets of Chicas y maletas that are included in Broken Embraces are almost identical to a corresponding scene in Almodóvar’s own earlier film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, 1988). In other words, Broken Embraces portrays fictional filmmakers making a real film. Isabelle Grell has argued that because film is an innately collaborative medium, the coincidence of author, character and narrator in a single person that is a key component of Lejeune’s autobiographical pact is rare and hence a filmic practice of ‘pure’ autofiction in Doubrovsky’s sense is rare too (Grell 2014: 89). On the other hand, the example of Broken Embraces suggests that though rare, film autofiction might nevertheless be possible because it is not merely meta-filmic (like all films about filmmaking), but metatextual in a more specific way. By imagining a character who is making a film Almodóvar himself had already made, Almodóvar in effect sets his fictional director Mateo Blanco up as an avatar of himself. The whole of Broken Embraces can then be considered a ‘self-portrait as other’ (Dix 2017: 70). Although the character has a different name and relationships from the director, he has the same profession and has made the same work. This points to a complex interplay between self-identification of the author with his protagonist and self-distancing from him, as if Almodóvar has created a semi-fictionalised aspect of his personality in order to inject a trace of his own presence into the film. In one of the most important theoretical developments that trailed in the wake of Doubrovsky, Vincent Colonna departed from Doubrovsky’s assumption that there need be strictly real events in a narrative for it to be designated autofiction. Colonna’s main contribution to the field of autofiction research is the greater degree of conceptual clarification he enabled as a result of distinguishing between four different kinds of autofiction, now categorised as autofiction fantastique; autofiction biographique; autofiction spéculaire; and autofiction 88

Autofiction in Words and Images

intrusive (Colonna 2004: 34, 94, 119, 135). According to this schema, autofiction fantastique is a writing practice where the author appears as protagonist but invents a new personality and existence for him/herself; whereas autofiction biographique does almost the opposite, maintaining the verifiable identity of the author as protagonist but developing new scenarios in which the narrative of the life of that protagonist is articulated. Autofiction spéculaire, or speculative autofiction, is then a mode in which the author takes up a meta-reflective stance with regard to the fiction, typically by inserting him-/herself into the narrative as a minor character on the sidelines from which to comment; while autofiction intrusive or introspective autofiction much more explicitly foregrounds the question of how the author explores his or her role in the act of artistic creation. Broken Embraces can be considered a work of filmic autofiction not because it adheres to any verifiable facts of Almodóvar’s biography but because it combines elements of the speculative and the introspective in its depiction of the life and work of the director (real or imagined). But if the written script and spoken dialogue of Chicas y maletas as incorporated within Broken Embraces closely correspond to those of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown the same is not true of any visible correspondence because there is not the same degree of visual identification between the films. That is, the words are the same, but the characters who speak them, the clothes they wear and the sets on which they perform look different. This is, of course, partly because the characters Pepa and Candela in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown are played by Carmen Maura and María Barranco, whereas the characters who speak the same lines as them in the purported excerpts from Chicas y maletas in Broken Embraces, Pina and Chun, are played by the fictional actors Lena and Chon, who are in turn played by the contemporary Spanish actors Penélope Cruz and Carmen Machi. But the point is not merely that Carmen Maura and Penélope Cruz are different people; or that the different locations are different places. It is that no attempt is made to make one look like the other. All of this suggests that although the written script and spoken dialogue of Broken Embraces have the effect of cultivating a connection via the film-within-the-film between Almodóvar’s fictional director and his earlier work in a way that makes it possible to see Broken Embraces as a form of self-portrait, the casting, costumes, props and sets deliberately undercut this tendency and optically instantiate a high degree of differentiation between the earlier film made by Almodóvar (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) and that imagined to have been made by his fictional counterpart Mateo Blanco. As Marcela Garcés puts it, ‘this very resemblance also proves that Mujeres effectively disappears by reappearing, thus becoming hyperreal’ (Garcés 2013: 4). Such differentiation renders the identification of Almodóvar with Blanco problematic and makes it difficult to see Broken Embraces as a work of self-portraiture in any straightforward sense, while retaining the capacity to think about the role of the director as an active element in the creation of both films. In fact, Marsha Kinder has drawn attention to the fact that both verbally and visually quoting his own earlier work has been a common practice throughout Almodóvar’s career so that with each new film, the audience engages in a process of ‘retro-seriality’ that entails a ‘rereading [of] his entire body of work through each new remix’ (Kinder 2009: 33). Almodóvar made his first full-length film in 1978, only three years after the death of Franco, and had already started making shorts that were often shown in the ‘avantgarde and experimental’ cultural milieu of Barcelona as part of its underground subculture during the Fascist era (Mira 2013: 101). Despite the director’s famous assertion that after Franco’s death, he made films as if Franco had ‘never existed’ (Kinder 2013: 285), it has become clear in recent years that his interest in sexual deviance, in lives lived on the margins of society such 89

Hywel Dix

as those of prostitutes, pimps, addicts and drug dealers, and in genres that combine melodrama with camp are a counter-affirmatory ‘reaction to the restrictions of Franco’s dictatorship’ (Saenz 2013: 244). This is perhaps unsurprising of the early stages of his career, when memories of the Falangist period would still have been fresh across Spain, and Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla interprets the film Bad Education (La mala educación, 2004) as one in which ‘subjective memory is aligned with collective memory and history, associated in the film with the aggression and repression that the Franco regime inflicted on the Spanish national body and psyche’ (Gutiérrez-Albilla 2013: 323). But even in Broken Embraces, over thirty years after his first film, Almodóvar still uses Chun, who is a member of a populist political party and who asserts that Franco was a good leader, to satirise authoritarian politics. Moreover, the integration of spectacle and narrative points to a combination of verbal and visual elements in the construction of the whole and to a visual-verbal dialectic on which the creation of a specifically audio-visual form of autofiction such as a film depends. In turn, the deployment of this visual-verbal dialectic in the construction of film autofiction draws on two distinct and different traditions within the longer-term genealogy of autofiction itself, as the following sections will demonstrate.

Visual fragments in Painter to the King Joost de Blois coined the term visual autofiction in 2007, in a discussion of the relationship between conceptual and figurative forms of fine art practice. This distinction between the figurative and the conceptual has been re-coded by Olga Michael as one between truth and lies, or fact and fiction in her analysis of graphic memoirs by Lynda Barry and Phoebe Gloeckner ‘to show how their incorporation of “lies” can function positively in relation to the childhood trauma narratives they tell’ (Michael 2018: 106). Jenn Brandt goes even further, suggesting the term ‘graphic autofiction’ (Brandt 2014: 70) for the graphic novel practice of Art Spiegelman in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America, and in particular for its tendency to use a non-fictional genre such as life writing in a highly creative way that ‘speaks to the discrepancy that Spiegelman sees between the American media’s image of the day’s events versus those that he, himself, witnessed on that day’ (Brandt 2014: 74). Clearly, visual autofiction has numerous significant antecedents in the history of portraiture, most notably via the self-portrait. In the Spanish tradition, for example, Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas (1656) of the Infanta Margaret Theresa and her ladies-inwaiting at the court of King Philip IV considered the role of the artist in relation to his art in a highly reflexive way. In 1957 the modernist artist Pablo Picasso painted fifty-eight different abstract re-imaginings of Las Meninas, some of which recall in mood and composition the tones of his pictorial denunciation of the horror of the Spanish Civil War, Guernica (1937) and in fact the re-working of Las Meninas seems to have been part of Picasso’s continuing political protest against the treatment of Republican prisoners during the Spanish Civil War, many of whom were still in prison in 1957. In several of the images, the artist appears in approximately the same position as does Velázquez in Las Meninas but is reduced almost entirely to the mechanical tools of his trade which recall the machines of warfare depicted in Guernica. Moreover, the artist is somewhat elevated and hovers over the scene in a ghostly, ethereal way as if to haunt the figures of authority with his presence and hint at some symbolic settling of accounts before withdrawing entirely from the scene in disgust. As with Velázquez, therefore, the relationship between the artist and the main authority figure is highly oblique, there by not being there, but relative to Velázquez Picasso converts the 90

Autofiction in Words and Images

metaphysics of absence into a much more eloquent critique of power. It contrasts, for example, with another of Picasso’s celebrated self-portraits, Self-Portrait as Van Gogh, in which the artist consciously reveals his presence as an artist but not as the artist he actually is. In other words, the self-portrait is fictionalised so that the authorial self is presented as Other. Using the field of visual art to represent the self as an artist who is nevertheless not the same artist as the one creating the representation is a useful way of thinking about Amy Sackville’s 2018 book Painter to the King, a novelisation of the life of Diego Velázquez at the court of the Spanish King Philip IV (1621–1665). It portrays the young artist arriving, an upstart from the provinces, and through a combination of artistry and realpolitik working his way into the King’s inner circle so that although the two men cannot precisely be called friends and certainly not equals they are depicted as something like intimates. Over the three decades spanned by the novel Philip’s court shifts from one of opulence and splendour to one of grief and mourning in the face of public pressure to produce an heir, which is thwarted by the deaths of his wife, sister, brothers, daughters and sons. These experiences are witnessed by Velázquez, whose job it is to capture the likenesses of the nobility and hence create forms of public memory to them, so that Painter to the King includes a total of twenty-one reproductions of his works. Yet in a highly unusual break with the regular conventions for viewing visual art, these are excerpted as fragmented details rather than as the entire portraits from which they are taken, thereby directing attention to a specific detail of thematic or critical interest. For example, the portrait of Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas from the 1630s is used to illustrate a section of the narrative where the jester, Pablillos, tells a joke at the king’s expense before pulling back from saying more than a mere courtier could reasonably get away with saying to a king. The joke recounts rumours that the king has been seen admiring the young actress La Calderona from the balconies of a public theatre but then goes on to say that these rumours cannot be trusted because the people who tell them are all short-sighted and need glasses. And at this precise point, the bespectacled glasses from the portrait of Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas appear. Not only does the joke enable Sackville to ascribe to Pablillos the classic function of the fool, that is, of making a critical comment about power while also distancing himself from it, but the person in the portrait that illustrates the joke is unconnected to it so that one picture is used to illustrate a different incident. Since only a detail of the portrait is included, rather than the whole image, meaning arises as context changes. A similar thing happens later in the text after the court has suffered considerable losses. When the widowed King marries his niece Mariana (who had been intended to marry his deceased son Baltasar) he has another son, Felipe Prosper, who is depicted in Velázquez’s portrait Prince Philip Prospero, 1659, of which only a minute detail including a ‘tiny censer to ward off sickness’ (Sackville 2018: 291) is reproduced in the novel. But this boy dies anyway, as does his brother Fernando, so that the censer does not illustrate what it was ostensibly intended to. A story about Pablillos revealing his ankles to curtsey at the end of a dance before the court comes with the warning that artistry is a form of illusion and hence vanity, whereas external economic and political pressures are gradually encroaching on the court, whose key members should therefore not be deluded by mere spectacle. The incident is accompanied by a detail from Velázquez’s Portrait of the Buffoon Pablo de Valladolid, c.1632 showing only the lower left leg and ankle of the courtier. This use of selective detail has the effect that a portrait is re-redeployed as an accompaniment to a separate narrative, thus illustrating something that it does not ostensibly depict. 91

Hywel Dix

This highly original way of utilising snippets of visual imagery reveals that Painter to the King is not merely a portrait of one artist (Velázquez) but of two: Velázquez and Sackville. In fact, perhaps owing to the implicit mediation on the role of the artist in public life, this instance of a court and an artistic culture in decline has the effect of making Sackville think of her own recent artistic reversals: This year the pear tree has died in my garden, and I’m helpless and can’t reverse that, and I’m alarmed by the time that’s passed, that I can’t prevent passing, and I miss the blossom – And then there’s a rose in my garden which, untended, grows fast and alarming in hideous profusion, strangling everything, stretching its thick horny reaches into branches, pulling down trellises, grasping at the sky; one of those in a bower would throttle the memory or ghost of any lovers lingering – No lovers here at the Retiro any longer, no leisure to be taken here, no love. (Sackville 2018: 239) The unweeded garden gone to seed is a conventional renaissance allusion to corruption in the body politic yet here Sackville applies it as much to her life in the twenty-first century as to the Spanish court. Since the Retiro is the summer pleasure palace Philip constructs for himself in the novel (and which exists only in ruins and outline foundations today), imagining his court gives place to a reflection on the narrator’s garden, so that the meditation on the King’s losses calls up an implicit sense of Sackville’s own, which are then re-transformed back into those of the king: the ‘no leisure’ and ‘no love’ seem to apply to each of them equally. Although the obtrusion of the narrating ‘I’ is only muted and occasional in Painter to the King, it is nevertheless frequent enough to be both noticeable and to contribute directly to the narrative by constructing the speaking ‘I’ as an active agent in it. This happens most extensively at the end of the first part, where, following the portrayal of Velázquez’s visit to Rome and the villa of the powerful Medici family, the narrator remembers playing on a swing in a garden in an unspecified location in the West of England, on the border with Wales, and the tone becomes more introspective: I try to get back here sometimes. That’s what I see in your Medici gardens, Diego. I want to somehow simply set down what it looked like to you, the world, what it felt and smelled like; as I pass through the same and different world now and it passes and I try to grasp what’s solid and what’s not solid; as if in attending to it and setting it down I can testify to my passing presence in it; preserving in the observation not the thing observed but the fact that I was here to make it. (Sackville 2018: 112) The meditation is partly about art and artistic ambition, which is both sincere and vain at the same time. When read in conjunction with the lines about the loss of love and leisure quoted above (and at other instances dispersed throughout the narrative) they create a sense of puzzle, almost mystery. Painter to the King is not a confessional narrative but in the opening section, which is called the ‘Frame’, the narrator describes seeing Las Meninas in the Prado museum in Madrid before imagining addressing the painter from the threshold of the work and then confessing: ‘This wasn’t going to be about you, but now – this, it turns out – this is, you are, what I was looking for, in this hot foreign city’ (Sackville 2018: xiii). In other words, quite enigmatically the text of Painter to the King is framed as something other than the text 92

Autofiction in Words and Images

the author intended to write, thus positing a prior intention for a separate book that has not come to fruition. On the other hand, stumbling across the works of Velázquez appears to have mitigated the impact of whatever unspecified loss, frustration or negative experience had made writing that prior work unpalatable and thus to have provided a viable compensatory alternative. One approach to Painter to the King would then be to mine Sackville’s biography for clues as to what traumatic experience had had this effect upon her life yet this would not be in keeping with the spirit of the work, which is better seen as one that emerged like a palimpsest in the place of that other work which is thereby obliterated. Thus although Sarah Perry has rightly pointed out that the narrator ‘may be, though one cannot say for sure, Sackville herself’ (Perry 2018: n.p.) Painter to the King evokes two distinct foci: a biofictional depiction of the historical subject Diego Velázquez, and an autofictional portrayal of the author as both narrator and occasional protagonist. One of the key moments in Painter to the King is the point when the portrait Philip IV (1605–65) of Spain in Brown and Silver, c. 1631–1632, is painted for the occasion of the Lords of Castille swearing an oath of allegiance to the King’s then newly born son, Prince Baltasar. At this point, Sackville puts into the mouth of a character, the King’s Chief Secretary, a conventional stately, public response to the composition: ‘Oh, yes. Father – husband – king, complete’ (Sackville 2018: 132). But only one small section of the whole portrait is excerpted in the novel, a part of the canvas showing sheets of paper in the King’s hand. These naturally are associated with the papers of state and hence with the role of majesty, and provoke the narrator’s reaction: ‘In paper too there’s power’ (Sackville 2018: 133). This comment, which can perhaps be interpreted as an aside from one artist to another, again evinces the double focus of the narrative. The blank paper that Sackville directs her attention towards is the point in the portrait where Velázquez inscribed the words Pictor Regis (‘Painter to the King’) and hence hinted at his own presence. Moreover her consideration of the portrait is immediately followed by the comment: In London I come to see him sometimes – he’s ended up here – Felipe as grand as he’ll ever be, new father to a son in his brand new suit. But it’s more brown than purple now and it seems a shame, that he underwent the portrait, that he wanted that opulence recorded and it faded away. But the paper in his hand is bright and it’s still sharp, the signature on it, your name, you, painter to the King, Diego. (Sackville 2018: 133–134) There may be some satisfaction for Sackville that the image of the artist has weathered better than that of his subject, that art has outlasted majesty. However, after the King has a new daughter, Margarita, she becomes the subject of the painting, Las Meninas, with which Sackville had opened the book and with which she also concludes it. Coming at the end of a long sequence of public reversal and private loss, the narration of the physical assembly and gathering together of all the different figures in the composition, including the artist (obliquely) and the King (even more obliquely), has an air of melancholy. It breaks off with Sackville walking the ground Velázquez walked in Madrid, and looking again at Las Meninas in the Prado with an odd sense of not wanting to let go: ‘I’ll have to leave eventually but you – about to make your mark, the first, the last – here you almost are’ (Sackville 2018: 314). Because the painting is, among other things, a self-portrait (only the detail of the artist’s arm holding a paintbrush is excerpted in the book) a combination of both words and images are used to evoke him, at the precise moment of beginning his most famous painting. In the final 93

Hywel Dix

instance this position and that time appear to resonate with the other artist of the text, the author and artist Amy Sackville positioned also on the verge of her next work.

Self-repositioning in The Blazing World One of the more enigmatic details in Painter to the King is the possibility it raises through a combination of historical research and imaginative speculation that while visiting Rome, Diego Velázquez met the artist Flaminia Triunfi and she bore his child. In the novel, since Velázquez returns to Spain and barely knows this child, this detail contributes to the overall sense of fragility related to an artistic vision and to a life that is fated to be forever unfulfilled. But this is a highly gendered experience because Sackville notes in passing that Triunfi is more or less forgotten today and where she is remembered this is only because she knew Velázquez, thus exemplifying the historical subordination commonly suffered by female artists to male ones. Exploring the role and status of female artists is the overt subject of Siri Hustvedt’s 2014 novel The Blazing World. Hustvedt appears to believe that as artists and intellectuals, women have been marginalised, and sets out to challenge that marginalisation by depicting a fictional female artist, Harriet Burden, in a multi-layered work that draws readers through different levels of textual fragment: interviews, notebooks, exhibition reviews. In the process, she makes occasional recourse to a specific form of autofiction and, like Sackville, uses a combination of words and images to create a sense of interplay between what is communicated in one form and what can be said in another. Although prose fiction is not a visual medium, she employs the category of the visual by creating a portrait of a visual artist on the margins of society in order to achieve a degree of simultaneous connection to and distance from that society. As The Blazing World progresses, the different textual fragments supposedly compiled by the fictional editor I.V. Hess gradually cohere to narrate a hoax played by Burden on the male-dominated art world of New York in the 1990s and 2000s: hosting three different exhibitions, and attributing them to the work of three so-called masks (i.e. other fictional artists invented for this purpose). That is, Hustvedt imagines fictional artists who are created by her own fictional artist, avatars of avatars, and thereby potentially imagines a new set of scenarios for her own artistic self. Because the masks are all men, she launches an experiment to explore if the public reaction to the work varies according to the gender of the artist. The first of these, Anton Tish, is a young naïve who is easily manipulated but who has his own dream of becoming an artist damaged by the encounter with the abrasive Burden and disappears from New York altogether so that Hess cannot verify whether he or she created the installation attributed to him. The second, Phineas Q. Eldridge, is a bi-racial burlesque performance artist who is very happy to concede that the artist was Burden. However, the third, Rune, denies this utterly. He betrays Burden by taking sole credit for a performance piece exploring altered gender and sexual roles that they devised together. Worse, his death in a separate performance piece where he was trying to create a sensation by appearing to die and then be resurrected, makes his claims impossible to either confirm or refute; his very name pointing to the undecipherability of so many different forms of inscription and hence of truth-claims. It is difficult to know which specific artists or artworks Hustvedt took as the inspiration for the fictional work she attributes to Burden, or indeed whether she even had specific models in mind. Nevertheless, Jen Graves sees a connection between the masks behind which she hides her fictional artist and the living female artist Crystal Barbre, who had confessed at an artists’ 94

Autofiction in Words and Images

convention in 2014, the same year the novel was published, that she ‘doesn’t always sign her full name to her works because it’s far more advantageous to be assumed to be a male painter’ (Graves 2014: n.p.). Although it would be wrong to generalise about Barbre’s work (a selection of which can be viewed at Barbre 2022), she often paints contemporary re-imaginings of classical genres such as the still life, the Vanitas, the female nude or human-animal metamorphoses. In these, female subjects are depicted with a wider range of agency and personality than might have been the case in classical art. A second artist compared to Hustvedt by Graves is Camille Patha, whose work spanning fifty years featured in a solo retrospective exhibition at Tacoma Art Museum also in 2014. In the catalogue produced to accompany this exhibition the curator Alison Maurer points out that Patha too ‘signed her work “D.C. Patha” for many years as a way of concealing her gender and thus increasing her chances of receiving awards and critical attention’ (Hushka and Maurer 2014: n.p.). Patha’s works are notable for their vibrant, dynamic colours, their very large scale and their emphasis on the abstract rather than the figurative, although tantalising glimpses of more concrete objects can occasionally be discerned in them. Several of them are reproduced by Graves: the rounded, red, chambers at the centre of ‘Punch’ intermesh like petals of a rose but could as easily evoke the balls of a fist or the valves of a beating heart. ‘Generalife’ speaks to a surrealist tendency in Patha’s work and reveals a clash between riotous disorder and carefully delimited control. ‘Space Game’ consists of two large, irregularly shaped canvases with a curving faultline between them – the gallery wall – which becomes an integral part of the composition. This experiment with the shape and scale of the canvas could be compared with ‘the work of a particular famous male modernist’ (Graves 2014: n.p.), but Graves consciously refrains from doing so in order to challenge the practice whereby ‘many art critics and historians – men and women alike – continue to frame the work of women within the realm of male influence’ (Hushka and Maurer 2014: n.p.). The bright mound the painting depicts, with further white streaks rippling across it, might be layers of flesh or layers of earth. The space-age needle embedded in it through trompe l’oeil illusion looks like a solid object that, when examined, closely vanishes into air – which, in a different context, is what happens to Hustvedt’s masks in The Blazing World, since they too are artists who were never really there. In the case of Hustvedt it is possible to advance the argument to a further stage, not simply emphasising the difficulty of knowing what is true, but drawing attention to a new kind of testimonial practice. In a highly original reading of autofictional works by French-speaking Caribbean writers, Renée Larrier has proposed a powerful idea of ‘témoignage’ (Larrier 2006: 8), of bearing witness to the injustices of colonial history. Although the scale of the injustice suffered by marginalised female artists in the Western canon such as that depicted by Hustvedt pales in comparison to the historical magnitude of colonial slavery, the concept of témoignage is a useful one for interpreting The Blazing World because Hustvedt, too, uses her fictional avatars as a way of bearing witness to the inequality and marginalisation that women artists – including herself – have historically been subjected. The reality that Hustvedt’s fictional artist Harriet Burden wants the art-viewing public to perceive differs from the reality that Rune fixes into the public narratives of the exhibition. Of course, each of these is created by Hustvedt so that neither can be said to be any more ‘real’ than the other. But this does not mean it is impossible to distinguish between different levels of reality. Instead the question ceases to be what is real or not, and becomes much more a matter of what kind of symbolic truth emerges from the text and how this bears witness to the kinds of marginalisation female artists typically have to struggle against. Thus, the multiple kinds of documents which make 95

Hywel Dix

up the novel bear testament to how reality is constituted and perceived in an affective and meaningful way that moves beyond the simple question of real versus non-real. The masks, that is, the different avatars of Burden, all function differently in altered social situations, while also contributing equally to the overall experiment. Her experiment then investigates the notion of a vocational personality; that is, the question of how far a personality can be altered and still be considered the same self. In the last instance, this experiment applies not just to Burden but also to Hustvedt. In an extraordinary section that recalls the scene discussed above where Pedro Almodóvar portrays a fictional film crew making one of his own real films, there is a section in The Blazing World which consists of a letter purportedly by an art critic, Richard Brickman (who turns out to be another avatar of Burden’s), to a periodical, The Open Eye, in which Brickman explains that he recently received a letter from Burden explaining her recent experiment with the three masks, and asking him to publicise it more widely while maintaining her anonymity. He says that her letter explores ‘theories of self’ (Hustvedt 2014: 271) from Homer to Vico, Janet, Freud, William James, Edmund Husserl and an ‘obscure novelist and essayist, Siri Hustvedt, whose position Burden calls a “moving target”’ (Hustvedt 2014: 272). Because Brickman is a pseudonym for Burden, this represents her opening a dialogue with herself, and even commenting on her own ideas when Brickman concludes of Burden ‘I cannot say that her wild romp into the more peculiar aspects of philosophy convinced me. The woman flirts with the irrational’ (Hustvedt 2014: 272). At a further level of textual experimentation, by including her own name on a list of writers Burden has supposedly read, Hustvedt engages in a practice that Boel Ulfsdotter has separately referred to as ‘autofictionally repositioning herself’ (Ulfsdotter 2018: 148) with regard to her role as author on the one hand, and to the gender politics she explores on the other. It creates the meta-reflective effect associated with Colonna’s autofiction spéculaire because by inserting herself into the narrative as a minor character – barely a character at all, but rather the name of an author whose work the fictional character has read – she evokes a sense of the position on the side lines from which she speaks, and which in turn emphasises the critical marginalisation to which women artists have been subject. Because The Blazing World is an epistolary novel, consisting of letters, diaries and documents that have been collected together, they also have an imaginary compiler, the editor I.V. Hess. This imaginary editor then appends a brief footnote to the reference to Hustvedt in the letter, stating: ‘Which works by Siri Hustvedt Brickman/Burden has in mind are unclear, although in Notebook H, she notes that the author’s novel The Blindfold is a “textual transvestite” and “a book of the uncanny á la Freud”’ (Hustvedt 2014: 272). The Blindfold (1992) was Hustvedt’s first novel, so that just as Pedro Almodóvar imagined a group of fictional filmmakers working on his own real film, so too Hustvedt creates a fictional reader of her own real work. In this way she semi-fictionalises her status as author and renders her character a further aspect of her vocational personality. Her vocation is then to use the testimonial potential of fiction to shine a light on under-recognised female artists and in the process to critique masculine cultural authority which ultimately also is a form of economic and political power.

Conclusion This chapter has argued that although autofiction is more commonly associated with literature (especially prose fiction) than other media, the examples discussed here mobilise a combination of two different traditions – one in visual art and the other in writing – and hence

96

Autofiction in Words and Images

involve a visual-verbal dialectic in the creation of specifically audio-visual forms of autofiction. As shown by the instances of Almodóvar with regard to Fascism, and Sackville and Hustvedt on female artists, such forms of autofiction have an important testimonial function, bearing witness to important cultural struggles of the past in the present.

References Barbre, C. (2022) “The Art of Crystal Barbre.” Available at https://crystalbarbre.wordpress.com de Bloois, J. (2007) “Introduction: The Artists Previously Known as … or the Loose End of Conceptual Art and the Possibilities of ‘Visual Autofiction’.” Image & Narrative 2:19. Bloom, M. (2019) “An Introduction to the Study of Autofiction in English.” English Studies in Canada Special Issue: Sources of the Self(ie) 45.1–2: 1–18. Brandt, J. (2014) “Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers and the Art of Graphic autofiction.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 5.1: 70–78. Colonna, V. (2004) Autofiction et autres mythomanies littéraires. Auch: Tristram. Dix, H. (2017) The Late-Career Novelist. London: Bloomsbury. Garcés, M. (2013) “The Shortcomings of Simulacra: Fragments of the Past in Pedro Almodóvar’s.” Broken Embraces Oceánide 5: 1–9. Graves, J. (2014) “The Fiction and Nonfiction of The Blazing World: Misogyny, Masks, Camille Patha, Siri Hustvedt, and the Enduringly Stiff Member.” The Stranger, 20 May 2014. Available at https:// www.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2014/05/20/the-fiction-and-nonfiction-of-the-blazing-worldmisogyny-masks-camille-patha-siri-hustvedt-and-the-enduringly-stiff-member Grell, I. (2014) L’Autofiction. Paris: Armand Colin. Gutiérrez-Albilla, J.D. (2013) “Scratching the Past on the Surface of the Skin: Embodied: Intersubjectivity, Prosthetic Memory, and Witnessing in Almodóvar’s La mala educación,” in M. D’Lugo and K.M. Vernon (eds.) A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar. Chichester: Blackwell, 322–42. Hanczakowski, A. (2020) “Uncovering the Unwritten: A Paratextual Analysis of Autofiction.” Life Writing, DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2020.1801132. Hushka, R. and Maurer, A. (2014) A Punch of Color: Fifty Years of Painting by Camille Patha. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Hustvedt, S. (2014) The Blazing World. New York: Sceptre. Kinder, M. (2009) “All About the Brothers. Retroseriality in Almodóvar’s Cinema,” in B. Epps and D. Kakoudaki (eds.) All about Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 267–94. Kinder, M. (2013) “Re-envoicements and Reverberations in Almodóvar’s Macro-Melodrama,” in M. D’Lugo and K.M. Vernon (eds.) A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar. Chichester: Blackwell, 281–303. Larrier, R. (2006) Autofiction and Advocacy in the Francophone Caribbean. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Michael, O. (2018) “Graphic Autofiction and the Visualization of Trauma in Lynda Barry and Phoebe Gloeckner’s Graphic Memoirs,” in H. Dix (ed.) Autofiction in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 105–24. Mira, M. (2013) “A Life, Imagined and Otherwise: The Limits and Uses of Autobiography in Almodóvar’s Films,” in M. D’Lugo and K.M. Vernon (eds.) A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar. Chichester: Blackwell, 88–103. Missinne, L. (2013) Oprecht gelogen. Autobiografische romans en autofictie in de Nederlandse literatuur na 1985. Nijmegen: Vantilt. Nicol, B. (2018) “Eye to I: American Autofiction and Its Contexts from Jerzy Kosinski to Dave Eggers,” in H. Dix (ed.) Autofiction in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 105–24. Perry, S. (2018) “Painter to the King by Amy Sackville review: a virtuoso portrait of Velázquez.” Guardian, 5 April 2018. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/05/painter-to-theking-by-amy-sackville-review-a-virtuoso-portrait-of-velazquez Sackville, A. (2018) Painter to the King. London: Granta. Saenz, N. (2013) “Domesticating Violence in the Films of Pedro Almodóvar,” in M. D’Lugo and K.M. Vernon (eds.) A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar. Chichester: Blackwell, 244–61.

97

Hywel Dix Saunders, M. (2010) “Life-Writing, Cultural Memory and Literary Studies,” in A. Erll and A. Nünning (eds.) A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter, 321–32. Saunders, M. (2012) Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Ulfsdotter, B. (2018) “The Memories of Belleville Baby: Autofiction as Evidence,” in B. Ulfsdotter and A. Backman Rogers (eds.) Female Authorship and the Documentary Image: Theory, Practice and Aesthetics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 144–58. Worthington, M. (2018) The Story of “Me”: Contemporary American Autofiction. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

98

7 IMPORTANT ARTIFACTS AND LITERARY MEDIA IN ARCHIVAL AUTOFICTION Elin Ivansson and Alison Gibbons

In the media ecology of the twenty-first century, acts of self-expression can take both digital and analogue forms; from sharing photos taken on smartphones to collecting Polaroids and hoarding precious objects. These are all ‘archival impulses’ (Foster 2004) and they manifest in contemporary literature in a multimodal manner. In this chapter, we explore literary media as a broad expression for our current media ecosystem where literature is created and circulated in the context of and as a result of digital, visual and material cultures (Collins 2010). We also use the term as a catch-all descriptor for the range of materials incorporated within the pages of the multimodal novel, a literary work composed of multiple modes, including printed language, handwriting, drawings, photographs, etc. Specifically, we address the multimodal and material manifestation of the archive and the act of archiving in contemporary literature, which often also becomes a means of storying the self. In the first section of this chapter, we introduce archival poetics and the genre of autofiction, offering an account of how these two twenty-first-century literary trends come together in works of archival autofiction. We also begin to discuss the role of literary media within such works. The analyses at the heart of our chapter focus on four texts which we have paired according to their formal similarities and generic sympathies: Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry (2009) and Monica Sabolo’s All This has Nothing to Do with Me (2015 [2013]) as inventories; Joanna Walsh’s Break.Up (2018) and Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) as travelogues. All four texts document personal relationships. In doing so, they explore the meaning of the self in relation to others and in relation to the archive and what manifests as the archived self. Ultimately, our chapter establishes the fundamental role that literary media plays within archival poetics and contemporary literature, including autofiction.

Autofiction and Archival Poetics Tom Chadwick and Pieter Vermeulen describe the ‘new archival landscape’ of the twenty-first century where ‘the archive has extended beyond the traditional institutions and users’ (2020: 1) to permeate our everyday lives. Whilst acts of self-documentation, such as keeping a diary, 99

DOI: 10.4324/9781003119739-10

Elin Ivansson and Alison Gibbons

have always been archival, we now pervasively archive our lives online through social media, email inboxes, and the million data traces we leave behind every day. As Chadwick posits, ‘the task of archiving has shifted from that of a trained professional to an amateur responsibility shared by anyone with a smartphone or computer’ (2019: 26). Similarly, Manoff suggests that ‘our current moment reflects the convergence of two phenomena – new technical capacities and an age-old impulse to gather and preserve’ (2010: 386). Indeed, as autobiography scholars Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point out, humans are fundamentally archival beings: Archives are stored not only in boxes, on bookshelves, on social media platforms, and in the cloud, but in the synapses of memory, as our bodies store a reservoir of memories and felt experience from which autobiographical acts can be drawn. (2020: 10) Seen in this way, autobiographical acts have always necessarily been driven by archival impulses. Because of the pervasiveness of the archive today, giving in to what Derrida (1998 [1996]) calls ‘archive fever’ – the urge to archive – has perhaps never been more accessible or tempting. This manifests in twenty-first-century literature in two notable trends: autofiction and archival poetics. Autofiction is, Bloom declares, ‘a type of writing that is everywhere these days but remains notoriously difficult to define’ (2020: 1). As the prefix ‘auto’ suggests, it shares with autobiography an emphasis on the storying of the self: thus, the central – often narrating – character is typically a version of the author. However, whilst autobiography is predominantly considered a referential genre (though, due to the inevitable fallibility of memory and impossibility of ever recounting the real, one containing degrees of fictionality), autofiction openly plays with the boundaries between reality and make-believe. ‘Autofiction’ consequently functions as ‘a broad conceptual rubric’ (Bloom 2020: 2), wherein some works are more autobiographical and others more fictional. For instance, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s renowned My Struggle series (2013–2018) uses novelistic techniques to tell what primarily appears to be an autobiographical narrative in meticulous hyperreal detail. Contrastingly, Delphine de Vigan’s Based on a True Story (2017) features an autobiographical avatar of the author who narrates a predominantly fictional story, blending autofiction with psychological thriller. No text can ever really be monomodal since written language is itself a graphic system and the printed, published codex a form of literary media in its own right. However, autofictions are largely traditional in the sense that the genre is principally composed of verbal narratives, typeset as justified blocks of text on white pages. Autofictions are not, though, divorced from the media culture from which they emerge. For instance, discussing the relationship between autofiction as a writing culture and the media ecology of the digital world, Kiernan focuses on how seemingly monomodal autofictions counter or perform the jittery distractions of online environments (2021: 73–87). Of Knausgaard’s epic series, she writes: “His slow, sonorous narratives reveal a concern with the passing of time by paying attention to the details that constitute our daily lives. Reflective accounts of this kind have a particular currency in this age of distraction” (Kiernan 2021: 79). In a similarly conceptual move, Hywel Dix (this volume) reads autofictions transmedially, showing that an awareness of the visual–verbal dialectic in filmic and televisual autofictions can shed new light on autofiction in prose,

100

Important Artifacts and Literary Media in Archival Autofiction

particularly those which experiment with textual fragments or seek to remediate other media forms. Nevertheless, the new media ecology – that is, the contemporary cultural moment, in which the pervasive media technology of the twenty-first century has impacted human life, activity, and cultural environments – has also infiltrated the pages of contemporary autofiction multimodally: photographs are occasionally included as a means of offering documentary evidence, for instance in Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014) and Kate Zambreno’s Drifts (2020); hand-drawn diagrams and pictures take on explanatory purposes, as in Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s Empty Set (2018); and unusual typographic layouts disrupt linear reading, such as the multiple columns of text in Meena Kandasamy’s Exquisite Cadavers (2019) or the typesetting arrangement of parts of Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be? (2012) designed to resemble a play script. Another key trend in contemporary literature is archival poetics. Scholars of archival art (Spieker 2008; van Alphen 2014) have observed multiple archival turns in aesthetic practices throughout the 1900s; the most recent turn dates from the 1990s, whereby aesthetic texts and objects exhibit an ‘increased appearance of historical and archival photographs and artifacts, and the approximation of archival forms’ (Simon 2002: 101). In literary studies, critics have predominantly analysed thematic and metaphorical engagement with the archive (e.g. Chadwick and Vermeulen 2020; Saunders 2011; Keen 2001; Voss and Werner 1999). However, the current archival turn in contemporary literature is also visual and material: archival poetics manifests in ways that are increasingly multimodal (cf. LecompteChauvin 2014; Macmillan 2017; Davis 2021; Ivansson forthcoming). In her study of multimodal lyric poetry, Macmillan first proposed the term ‘archival poetics’, arguing that it ‘presses us to consider the contents collected and to has since used the term in his discussion of ‘multimodal book-archives, an experimental mode of contemporary writing and bookmaking that constructs narratives and textual sequences through the collection and representation of reproduced texts and other artifacts, in which the book-object is presented as a container for preserving and transmitting textual artifacts’ (2021: 84–85) and their ‘“metareference” targets the medium and mechanics of the book’ (2021: 85). Like Davis, we acknowledge the need to analyse the incorporation of literary media in narrative texts from an archival perspective. Doing so reveals the role of archives and acts of archiving in our current cultural and literary landscape, wherein the book is often self-­consciously utilised as an archival container. Macmillan focuses on how archival poetics foregrounds the act of collecting whilst Davis notes the use of the book as a vehicle for ‘documentation, preservation, curation, and transmission’ (2021: 85). We employ a more expansive conception of archival poetics – as Ivansson (forthcoming) argues elsewhere – by suggesting that archival poetics encompasses a radical evocation of archival organisation, through the inclusion of: lists, inventories, storage, indexes, and methods of cataloguing; typical archival features such as fragmentation, referentiality, order and disorder; and explicit thematisation of the power dynamics connected with selection processes. Our use of the term ‘archival poetics’ signals a range of multimodal archival practices with collecting, organising and curating playing a structural and visual role in literary composition. Furthermore, because the twenty-first-century archive has become increasingly virtual and immaterial (Manoff 2010), archival poetics encompasses both digital and analogue modes of collecting as writers implement both new and old media aesthetics. This is perhaps most evident in novels such as Norman Klein and Margo Bistis’ The Imaginary 20th Century (2016) where the narrative text is split between digital and print media. However,

101

Elin Ivansson and Alison Gibbons

even print novels cannot escape mixing new and old media: for example, Barbara Hodgson’s The Tattooed Map (1995) includes material maps which fold out beyond the pages of the book whilst D.A. Stern’s Shadows in the Asylum (2006) is composed of both handwritten and printed materials that have been put through a Xerox machine. These two contemporary literary tendencies – autofiction and archival poetics – coalesce in what we, along with other critics (Forné 2019; Cho 2020), identify as ‘archival autofictions’. In the context of post-dictatorial Argentinian literature, Forné argues that autofiction and the archival come together with documentary materials used within self-reflexive and semi-autobiographical interrogations of memory and selfhood. Forné defines archival autofiction as ‘an artistic expression in which the authorial subject – identical to the protagonist – exhibits the creative processes of archival recycling and reflects on notions of authorship as a way of engaging the reader’ (2019: 2). In contrast, Cho perceives the use of archival techniques in autofiction as a means of creating ‘imagined archival records’ (2020: 271). Cho argues that autofiction – as a genre with the potential to bridge autobiography, history, and fiction – is able to raise awareness of ‘sociohistorical traumas, to incite action, and to generate affect in readers and allow them to encounter what has not yet been recorded’ (284). Although in Cho’s analysis, this imagined archive is a sociohistorical one, we explore how autofiction also creates a space for the public and private archive to merge, a space where the personal and political are intimately intertwined. Moreover, although both Forné and Cho see archival autofictions as multimodal, their focus is somewhat more restricted than ours. Forné focuses exclusively on photographs (either visually presented or described in the text) and their function as archival traces enabling the unearthing of memories and the retrieval of the past. Cho considers three characteristics of archival autofiction: the use of photographic images and detailed prose, wherein the photograph primarily provides referential and authenticating power; the disappearing narrator who becomes a conduit for the (archival) stories of others; and the fictionalisation of events to create readerly affect in order to raise awareness of sociohistorical traumas and fill an archival silence. In our case studies, we show that fictionalised author figures actively construct a personal archive from a range of different literary media (text, photographs, drawings, facsimile reproductions, typographical layouts) and archival modes of documentation  and  organisation (journal entries, lists, transcripts, metadata tags, and intertextual cross-references).

Archival Inventories: Shapton and Sabolo Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts (2009) and Monica Sabolo’s All This has Nothing to Do with Me (2015 [2013]) offer a form of archival poetics that can be described as literary inventories or dossier novels. McHale describes the dossier novel as ‘a collection of heterogeneous documents distributed over several narrative levels’ (2006: 179). Herein, we discuss two novels in which the dossier format is implemented to explore romantic relationships with the literary inventory acting as a way of taking stock of past love affairs. While Shapton’s novel offers a fictional primer for archival poetics in inventories/dossier novels, Sabolo’s text employs similar strategies as part of an autofictional project. Shapton’s Important Artifacts uses archival poetics as part of an ‘ontological hoax’, a narrative form which Gibbons describes as using multimodality to disguise its fictional status (2012: 432). Important Artifacts is designed to look like an auction catalogue, through which it presents the love story of a New York couple: Lenore Doolan, a 26-year-old Canadian food 102

Important Artifacts and Literary Media in Archival Autofiction

writer for the New York Times, and Harold ‘Hal’ Morris, a 39-year-old Irish freelance photographer. The book is a record of Doolan and Morris’s relationship through 332 auction lots presenting their personal and shared belongings: letters, books, treasured artefacts, clothes, jewellery and other gifts. Most of the objects are depicted in black-and-white photographs, often staged in front of a white backdrop, which accompany the listings. Many items are themselves archival repositories; the most obvious being Doolan’s journals as well as the couple’s saved correspondence. Furthermore, Doolan keeps notes and writes journal entries in the books she is reading, and Morris jots song lyrics in the covers of his books. This not only constructs a network of intertextuality; the cited books themselves are presented as archival containers mirroring the auction catalogue of Important Artifacts itself, which is the print archive of Morris and Doolan’s relationship. On the one hand, the listed structure of the multimodal catalogue upholds the literary hoax that the novel is a factual, non-narrative text; on the other hand, Shapton implements the list – ‘the simplest form of archival organisation’ (van Alphen 2014: 18) – to construct the narrative. The protagonists’ artefacts are listed in the chronological order in which items were supposedly acquired or when they became relevant in the relationship. For example, lots 1079 and 1080 document the contents of Doolan’s cosmetic case and Morris’ travelling case shortly after the listing of a book containing two plane tickets to Venice, which alludes to the couple’s first holiday together (Shapton 2009: 30–31). Through this chronological listing, the catalogue format adheres to a fundamental organising principle of archives – respect des fonds or The Principle of Provenance: this dictates that material should be grouped based on place of origin and arranged in the same order as accumulated (Jimerson 2009; Spieker 2008). Whilst the novel continues an organisational principle of the print archive, the multimodal list also allows the reader to engage with the catalogue – in a manner connected to new media aesthetics – more like a database. Whereas Lev Manovich views database and narrative as ‘natural enemies’ (225), Collins suggests: ‘Databases may be nonnarrative, but they can instantly become narratives’ (2013: 209). The multimodality of Important Artifacts brings these two cultural forms together, presenting the catalogue as an analogue database that the reader can peruse in whatever order they wish; simultaneously, the verbal list creates the chronological structure that allows the reader to follow a narrative with cause-and-effects between lots. Shapton’s novel evokes two archival motifs explored by Derrida: archive fever and the archival death drive, the latter of which Derrida describes as ‘a silent vocation’ (12) with the aim to ‘incite amnesia’ (12). The auction catalogue brings the couple’s important artefacts together, displays their personal collection, and provides the perfect medium to disperse them. Thus, whilst archive fever manifests in the structural logic of the book, the auction catalogue hoax presents the destruction of the archive because the couple’s personal property is placed under the hammer. Furthermore, critics have unanimously viewed the couple’s break up as the reason for the auction (e.g. Jakubowski 2013; van Alphen; Fjellestad 2018). However, the auction catalogue opens with a postcard sent from Morris to Doolan in 2008 which offers a second reason for the destruction of the couple’s personal archive: Dear Lenore, I’ll be in town for a few days next month on assignment. It would be good to see you. I’ve written letters to you, but they are still in my drawer. Remember we ran into each other at the Oyster Bar a year ago, and walking home that night you asked: Is there a relationship you ever had that you regretted ending? I didn’t say anything, but I wish I had, Yes, you. That would be my answer. 103

Elin Ivansson and Alison Gibbons

I don’t know what your situation is now. Jaclyn and I are taking a break. Alone again! Your Hal The postcard opens up the possibility that the couple might reconnect when Morris is in town. Hence, the auction and the destruction of the couple’s archive can additionally be read as a drive for a tabula rasa, a clean slate to start again. In this reading, the auction date, 14 February – Valentine’s Day – becomes less ironic (which is how most critics interpret it) and more romantic. Shapton’s auction catalogue hoax thus combines literary media and archival poetics in a manner that both represent archive fever – the couple’s desire to document and inventory their relationship – and an archival death drive – their need to incite amnesia in order to love, perhaps each other, again. Unlike Important Artifacts, Monica Sabolo’s All This has Nothing to Do with Me does not initially appear as an ontological hoax. Instead, a quotation on its cover from Stylist magazine describes it as ‘one of the coolest novels’. Even so – and despite the novel’s title seeming to negate an autobiographical reading – the naming of the main character as ‘MS’ and ‘Monica’ strongly encourages an interpretation of the protagonist as the author due to the correspondence of initials and name. The resulting autofictional narrative is divided into three parts: Part One, titled ‘Blinded’, documents the beginnings of MS’s precarious romance with a colleague whom she labels ‘XX’; Part Two, ‘Past History’, chronicles Monica’s early life and teen romances; in Part Three, ‘Falling Apart’, MS’s fledgling relationship with XX painfully runs its course and readers learn distressing truths about Monica’s mother and stepfather. The narrative ordering of All This has Nothing to Do with Me does not therefore conform to a chronological archival organisational principle. However, its heterochrony is important in capturing Monica’s own (re)discovery of traumatic personal events and memories. Part One begins: The first section of our analysis will focus upon the pathological phenomenon “blind love”. We will see how an individual can be unexpectedly struck down by this tenacious illness, even though that same person has so far been progressing artlessly so confidently through life. Scientifically speaking it is noteworthy, even poignant, to identify some of the early indicators of the disaster ahead. (Sabolo 2015: 3) Metatextual reference to ‘The first section’ foregrounds the work as an artefact and lexis like ‘analysis’, ‘scientifically speaking’, and ‘noteworthy’ engender an academic register. This immediately compromises the fictionality of All This has Nothing to Do with Me by suggesting that the book might not be a novel but an act of intellectual inquiry. This first page also includes a black-and-white photograph of a cruise ship, captioned: ‘The Titanic leaving Southampton, 10 April 1912’ (3; original italics). The opening might initially appear to function as what Cho sees as an imagined archival record, enabling readers to experience through fiction the sociocultural trauma of the historic sinking. However, the Titanic photograph works not to reference a historical event; rather, the archival photograph operates as a metaphor for the ensuing narrative, which imparts a series of doomed personal relationships. This becomes clear on the next page, featuring an email from MS disclosing to her friend that she has ‘found our new editor for the film section’ (4) on whom she appears to have a crush. 104

Important Artifacts and Literary Media in Archival Autofiction

Interpreting MS as the author is further encouraged here because MS’s job at a press creates a biographical similarity with the author’s bio, given at the start of the book, in which Monica Sabolo is described as ‘a journalist and writer, and was until recently the Editor-in Chief for the cultural pages of Grazia in France’. MS’s hopeless relationship with ‘XX’ is archived in a series of emails, text messages, letters, notes to self, conversational transcripts and data entries throughout the book. These are often, though not always, preceded by the sort of (italicised) metadata that might accompany a catalogue entry in an archive (e.g. date, document type) and readers must narrativise the documents by ‘filling the gaps’ in the archive, much like in Important Artifacts, where readers make assumptions about the progressions between the auction lots. For instance, readers of All This has Nothing to Do with Me deduce that XX begins work at the press from MS’s second email: Email sent by MS to Alexandra M. 10:28am, 14 February 2011. Extract. PS. He’s been given the desk right opposite mine. If I stretch my legs out I can touch his feet. (6) On the following page an ‘Open Plan’, a blueprint of the office set-up, maps MS’s and XX’s desks and ‘Regular trips made by XX’ around the office (7). The implication is that MS scrutinises XX’s habits, fuelled by her infatuation with him. Later, Part Three starts with a ‘Transcript of text messages’ between MS and XX wherein he describes the break up as ‘Just sad but necessary and reasonable’ (91). The subsequent pages present images of dictionary entries, attributed to The Petit Robert dictionary, for ‘necessary’ and ‘reasonable’ (92–93). Here, MS appears engaged in research – using the dictionary as a source text – to understand XX’s motivations and feelings. All This has Nothing to Do with Me features over 100 photos of people and objects discussed in the entries, with the objects depicted laid on a plain white surface. They thus visually resemble many of the images of Important Artifacts. For instance, MS records her early dates with XX: their alcohol intake, poignant snippets of XX’s conversation, level of physical contact (always ‘none’). In the first of these entries, MS discloses ‘I stole his lighter…’ (10) and the next four entries include black-and-white photos of lighters, each presumably stolen from XX. The lighters thus seem to offer physical verification of XX’s existence. In Parts Two and Three, family photographs also appear, such as: Monica as a baby (67); Monica as a young child (116); and Monica’s mother Ambra and second husband Yves (128). When readers learn about Monica’s mother’s unhappy second marriage, they are shown four double spreads from ‘the wedding album, 1973’ (112–13), the photo album itself being a book-bound archival repository. The preceding narrative entry explained: ‘Ambra came to the conclusion that the photos were disastrous and drew flowers and multicoloured balloons on every page of the wedding album. On the photo taken at the Town Hall, she stuck a picture of a gun pointing at Yves S’s head’ (111). This collaging and drawing can be clearly seen on the album pages and thus indexes the mother’s archival intervention, revisioning the meaning of the album and rewriting her personal history. Taken together as inventories, Important Artifacts and All This has Nothing to Do with Me use archival poetics to narrativise relationships, romantic and familial, and invite the reader to story them and infer interpersonal connections. The multimodality of both works is not 105

Elin Ivansson and Alison Gibbons

merely ornamental; it highlights the role that literary media plays both in affective memory and the stories we tell about our lives.

Archival Travelogues: Walsh and Luiselli Joanna Walsh’s Break.Up (2018) and Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) function as travelogues. This literary genre is an archival form, often associated with autobiographical writing (Anderson 2001: 117–119; Hallet forthcoming). As Anderson explains: ‘Travel undermines the possibility of locatedness, producing temporary points of stasis or stations of observation for the writing subject’ (2001: 119). In Walsh’s Break.Up, the narrator takes a round trip from London through Europe; in Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, the initial narrator and her family drive from New York to Arizona. In both texts, literary media are included as a means of archiving the characters’ physical and emotional journeys. Break.Up begins with an epigraph, providing a two-part definition – attributed to Webster’s Dictionary – of ‘Break up’: ‘1) To cease to exist as a unified whole’; ‘2) To end a romance’ (Walsh 2018: 7). This sets up the premise of the novel, documenting the after-effects of a relationship. Just as MS in All This has Nothing to Do with Me consulted dictionary definitions to make sense of XX’s justification for breaking up with her, the definition in Break.Up implies a need to come to terms with splitting up. In both, dictionary entries act as source texts incorporated within the books’ archival poetics, reminding readers that the dictionary is a form of linguistic database and language a communicative mode. Break.Up is divided into fourteen chapters, each featuring a black-and-white photograph, with additional photographs appearing across the book (27 in total). Chapters (and any subentries) are titled with a location and often also a date and gerund verb providing a sense of what happened in that place (e.g. ‘Leaving’ (9); ‘Speaking’ (120)). Consequently, like the lot descriptions in Shapton’s Important Artifacts and the entry headings and photo captions in Sabolo’s All This has Nothing to Do with Me, the chapter and sub-entry titles provide archival metadata for the material that follows. They also frame the book as a diary and/or travelogue, grounded in times and places on route. Chapter 1 is titled ‘London/Leaving’. The text begins: All love stories begin with the letter I. So where am I? I’m here in the bathroom at Eurostar Departures, St Pancras Station, London. I’m looking into the long bank of mirrors above the basins, making myself up. Not that I usually wear makeup, that’s not me. I made myself up each time we met, it’s true… (9) The reference to the letter ‘I’ not only signals the subjectivity of love as an experience (which seems particularly idiosyncratic when it becomes unrequited); the writing also plays on the double meaning of ‘making myself up’, a phrase that might equally mean putting on makeup, as the narrator explains, as much as inventing the self. It therefore intimates that the anonymous first-person narrator may be an author avatar. Indeed, critics often interpret Break.Up in this autofictional way. Reviewing the book in British newspaper The Guardian, Ditum notes of the female narrator: ‘As she travels, she writes. What she writes is this book, and the “I” who writes and the “I” who is written are both Joanna Walsh’ (2018). The black-and-white photograph opening Chapter 1 is largely of the night sky, with a silhouetted fence and a streetlamp below. It is out of focus as though the photograph is taken 106

Important Artifacts and Literary Media in Archival Autofiction

from a moving vehicle. It therefore has what Hallet, speaking of distorted photographs of place in multimodal autobiographies, describes as a ‘blurred, impressionistic style’, suggesting that the narrating subject ‘is constantly on the move’ (forthcoming). Subsequent photos in Break.Up are not blurry, yet this first image symbolises the journey’s commencement. The narrator directly invokes the photograph a few pages later: Before dawn I took a bus to the Eurostar terminal. […] I lean against a cold window to photograph an empty sky through a triple screen: eye, camera, pane. At my photo’s baseline, a few unlit streetlights to show perspective, orientation, to give a clue to where I am. I thought I might send it to you. Even if I’m leaving, I want you to know I’m here, still. I look down at the picture my phone has saved for me. Between the two lamp posts, a smudge of red: a light, lone star awake. (11) The fuzzy image is explained by the narrator’s account of taking it using a mobile phone – perhaps the most pervasive archival device of the twenty-first century – while travelling on a bus. Additionally, the narrator’s use of the second person to whom she might send the photo feels deeply personal, implying that this ‘you’ is the ex-lover. The narrator continues, ‘I don’t know why I’m beginning here, when it’s all over – or am I still in the middle? It’s difficult to tell, but I will write down what happened because it is barely a story yet’ (11). The metatextual comment, frequent in autofiction (see Gibbons 2018), consequently frames Break.Up as the finished artefact of the narrator’s travelogue-cum-missive. The typographical arrangement of the chapters is also non-standard, with quotations from other writers punctuating the central blocks of narrative text intermittently. In the first chapter, the narrator provides an inventory, including the books she has packed: ‘I have brought: one laptop, one pair of headphones, one smartphone, notebooks, pens, a few books – one copy of Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love one copy of Søren Kierkegaard’s Repetition one copy of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse a copy of Mad Love by André Breton…’ (21). These listed books are quoted in the first chapter’s intrusive textboxes, becoming – like the books listed in Shapton’s auction catalogue – intertextual references that connect Break. Up to a larger archive of books about love. Thus, Walsh’s autofictional ‘I’ is akin to Cho’s ‘disappearing narrator’; by embedding citations outside of the narrative prose, these sources are archived and ‘presented for readers to read directly (and not relayed through the main narrator)’ (Cho 2020: 286). Ultimately, Break.Up is a composite archival fiction, functioning as a pained love letter, travel diary, and reading journal, all in one. Just as the narrator of Break.Up appears to be the author, Lost Children Archive can be read as a fictional reimagining of Luiselli’s own family road trip across the USA in 2014, at the high point of the U.S.–Mexico children refugee crisis. As Cho points out, Luiselli’s novel is ‘a fictional twin to her nonfiction work’ (2020: 276), Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (2017). The two texts share similarities beyond the road trip, such as the family constellation of two parents, a big brother, and a little sister. Because none of the family members are referred to by name in Lost Children Archive – except for their Apache Warrior names – the indeterminacy enables readers to interpret the female narrator as a version of the author. This reading is encouraged by corresponding narrative details between the two texts such as how, in Tell Me How It Ends, Luiselli’s husband also tells their children about the Apache warriors and the 1830 Removal Act (2017: 17; cf. Luiselli 2019: 133), or the way in which the two sisters 107

Elin Ivansson and Alison Gibbons

interviewed by Luiselli during her volunteering in immigration court might map onto the character Manuela’s missing daughters in the novel. Nevertheless, Lost Children Archive is foremost a fictional text and this autofictional reading is only possible with inter- and extratextual knowledge. Indeed, readers’ inter-, para-, and extratextual knowledge about authors is often crucial for recognising the autobiographical dimensions of autofictions. Lost Children Archive is divided into four parts: Part I, ‘Family Soundscape’, narrated by the unnamed wife and mother; Part II, ‘Reenactment’, narrated by the husband’s son; Part III, ‘Apacheria’, told through a mixture of narrative voices; and Part IV, ‘Lost Children Archive’, consisting completely of archival material in the form of two inventories and a transcribed recording purportedly by the boy. The parts are further divided into chapters, with paragraph sections of varied length, each with a capitalised subheading, such as: ‘DEPARTURE’ (5), ‘INVENTORY’ (7) and repeatedly, ‘ARCHIVE’ and ‘DOCUMENT’. These subheadings add a structure to the otherwise chronologically told narrative. They function – similarly to the headings in Shapton’s, Sabolo’s and Walsh’s novels – like archival metadata. The sub-headings in Lost Children Archive also formally reiterate the novel’s thematic concern with archival echoes since the sub-headings in Part I are repeated in Part II. For example, both begin with ‘DEPARTURE’: the mother narrates the moment of the family leaving New York City by car (8), and the boy describes watching the deportation of refugee children from America by plane (191). These are, of course, different types of departures, one a chosen adventure and the other an enforced expulsion. Nevertheless, the echoes encourage readers to draw similarities between them; for instance, to consider how the refugees’ plight might feel on a personal level. The deportation of the children also foreshadows the family’s own separation and relocation at the end of the road trip. Moreover, it is as the boy watches the deportation plane take off that he decides to document the family’s last time together to make sure that his step-sister remembers him. Lost Children Archive initially appears like a conventional novel, composed solely of verbal text. However, the reader soon visually encounters the ‘seven bankers boxes’ (8), stored in the family car, as stand-alone chapters scattered throughout the narrative and composed of the listed contents of each box. Whilst the parents’ boxes are packed before the trip, the children’s are filled along the way: the girl’s box with audial echoes sounded out in verbal text, and the boy’s with visual echoes in the form of 24 Polaroid pictures, supposedly taken during the journey. In contrast to the digital, mobile phone photography in Break.Up, the son uses an analogue Polaroid camera. His photographs, reproduced in the pages that make up Box VII, are often blurry too but due to overexposure rather than movement. To prevent such overexposure, the boy learns to protect the developing Polaroids by placing them between the pages of one of the mother’s books. Her book – as with the books in Shapton’s novel – becomes an archival container, mirroring Lost Children’s Archive’s own function as a store for the family’s 7 bankers boxes. Whereas the reader only encounters the photographs visually near the end of the novel, descriptions of the boy taking photographs occur throughout, given from both the mother’s and boy’s perspectives. The mother describes how his first picture ‘comes out entirely creamy white, as if he’d documented our future instead of the present’ (38). The white traces in the photographs become representative of archival gaps and silences in relation to both family and American history. In the photograph of Chief Cochise’s tombstone ‘the name engraved on it is erased somehow’ (142: 359). The mother connects the erased names with other themes of the novel: ‘Everything that was there between Arkansas and Oklahoma was not there: Geronimo, Hrabal, Stanford, names on tombstones, our future, the lost children, the two missing girls’ (146). The white overexposed area on the photograph, then, represents not only 108

Important Artifacts and Literary Media in Archival Autofiction

an excess of light but also historical erasure. For the mother, this erasure represents how history repeats itself when not remembered and ‘in the middle of it all, tribes, families, people, all beautiful things fall apart, debris, dust, erasure’ (146). Hence, acts of archiving have both sociohistorical and personal functions. The mother documents the U.S.–Mexico children refugee crisis, the boy collects to save his sister’s memories in the face of the erasure of their dispersing family. Whereas Shapton’s Important Artifacts and Sabolo’s All This has Nothing to Do with Me ultimately demonstrate the personal affective value of media documents, Joanna Walsh’s Break.Up and Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive incorporate literary media into journey narratives to suggest that archival sources of knowledge construct the world around us, our experiences and understanding of it. Thus, the characters’ acts of documenting their journeys demonstrate their mental transformations during their physical transportations.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have analysed four multimodal novels all characterised by archival poetics and most also driven by autofictional tendencies. In doing so, we have shown that the inclusion of various archival documents, as forms of literary media, are fundamental to each work’s narrative, from functioning as sources in identity projects or romantic relationships to ways of documenting personal development and sociohistorical injustices. In various ways and through different media expressions, the characters in these novels navigate our new archival landscape where the impulse to archive materialises in both digital and analogue forms. Whereas the archive is often regarded as a place where we access the past, these writers archive in order to understand their twenty-first-century present, whether filled with personal or political turmoil. As Luiselli’s autofictional avatar says in Lost Children Archive, ‘Perhaps if we found a new way to document it, we might begin to understand this new way we experience space and time’ (2019: 103).

References van Alphen, E. (2014) Staging the Archive, Art and Photography in the Age of New Media. London: Reaktion Books. Anderson, L. (2001) Autobiography. London; New York: Routledge. Bloom, M. (2020) “Sources of the Self(ie): An Introduction to the Study of Autofiction in English.” ESC: English Studies in Canada 45(1): 1–18. Chadwick, T. and Vermeulen, P. (2020) “Literature in the New Archival Landscape.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 3(1): 1–7, DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2020.1712793 Chadwick, T. (2019) The Archive Novel. Doctoral dissertation. KU Leuven. Online: https://lirias.kuleuven. be/2798217?limo=0 (accessed 24 August 2020). Cho, R. M. (2020) “Becoming an Imagined Record: Archival Intervention in Autofiction.” The American Archivist 83(2): 268–288. Collins, J. (2010) Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. Collins, J. (2013) “Reading in a Digital Archive of One’s Own.” PMLA 128(1): 207–212. Davis, B. (2021) “Instrumentalizing the Book: Anne Carson’s Nox and Books as Archives.” Frontiers of Narrative Studies 7(1): 84–109. Derrida, J. (1998 [1996]) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ditum, S. (2018) “Break.Up by Joanna Walsh Review - The End of a Virtual Affair.” The Guardian, 17 May 2018. Online: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/17/breakup-by-joanna-walsh-review (accessed 2 September 2021).

109

Elin Ivansson and Alison Gibbons Forné, Anne (2019) “Archival Autofiction in Post-Dictatorship Argentina.” Life Writing, DOI: 10.2080/14484528.2019.1642174. Foster, H. (2004) “An Archival Impulse.” October 110: 3–22. Fjellestad, D. (2018) “Testing the Limits: Leanne Shapton’s Ekphrastic Assemblage.” Poetics Today 39(2): 337–357. DOI: 10.1215/03335372-4324493. Gibbons, A. (2012) “Multimodal Literature and Experimentation.” In Bray, J., Gibbons, A., and McHale, B. (eds) The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, Abingdon; New York: Routledge, pp. 420–434. Gibbons, A. (2018) “Autonarration, ‘I’, and Odd Address in Ben Lerner’s Autofictional Novel 10.04.” In Gibbons, A. and Macrae, A. (eds) Pronouns in Literature: Positions and Perspectives in Language, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 75–96. Hallet, W. (forthcoming) “Multimodal Autobiographies.” In Ghosal, T. and Gibbons, A. (eds) Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. Ivansson, E. (forthcoming) Archival Fiction: Archival Poetics in American Multimodal Literature. (PhD thesis to be submitted to Sheffield Hallam University, UK). Jakubowski, Z. (2013) “Exhibiting Lost Love: The Relational Realism of Things in Orhan Pamuk’s the Museum of Innocence and Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts. Realisms.” In Birke, D. and Butter, S. (eds) Contemporary Culture: Theories, Politics, and Medial Configurations, Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, pp. 124–145. Jimerson, R. C. (2009) Archives Power; Memory, Accountability, and Social Justice. Chicago: Society of American Archivists. Keen, S. (2001) Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kiernan, A. (2021) Writing Cultures and Literary Media: Publishing and Reception in the Digital Age. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Lecompte-Chauvin, Annie (2014) “Comment les archives entrent dans nos vies par le biais de la littérature.” In Lemay, Y. and Klein, A. (eds.) Archives et création: nouvelles perspectives sur l’archivistique. Book 1. Montreal: University of Montreal, School of Library and Information Science (EBSI). Luiselli, V. (2017) Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. London: 4th Estate. Luiselli, V. (2019) Lost Children Archive. London: 4th Estate. Macmillan, R. (2017) “The Archival Poetics of Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.” Contemporary Literature 58(2): 173–203. DOI: 10.3368/cl.58.2.173. Manoff, M. (2010) “Archive and Database as Metaphor: Theorizing the Historical Record.” Portal: Libraries and the Academy 10(4): 385–398. McHale, B. (2006) “Cognition En Abyme: Models, Manuals, Maps.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 4(2): 175–189. Sabolo, M. (2015 [2013]) All this Has Nothing to Do With Me. Trans. Georgina Collins. London: Picador. Saunders, M. (2011) “Archive Fiction.” Comparative Critical Studies 8(2): 169–188. Shapton, L. (2009) Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. New York: Sarah Crichton Books. Simon, C. (2002) “Introduction: Following the archival turn.” Visual Resources 18(2): 101–107. Smith, S. and Watson, J. (2020) “The Afterlives of Those Who Write Themselves: Rethinking Autobiographical Archives.” The European Journal of Life Writing IX: 9–32. Spieker, S. (2008) The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Voss, J. and Werner, M. L. (1999) “Towards a Poetics of the Archive: Introduction.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32(1): i–viii. Walsh, J. (2018) Break Up. London: Tuskar Rock Press.

110

8 COUNTERFACTUALITY AND DISNARRATION IN NEWS STORIES Reimagining Real Events Marina Lambrou

Introduction Consider the following online article published in the American lifestyle magazine Town & Country (17 October 2017) with the headline, ‘JFK Jr. would have run for President’. JFK Jr. or John John, was the son of President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy who died at the age of 38 in a tragic accident when the plane he was flying crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, also killing his wife Carolyn and sister-in-law Lauren Bessette. The article begins with the following paragraphs: Lost potential is a common theme of Kennedy-family lore. It’s hard not to imagine what Bobby, President Kennedy, and JFK Jr. might have accomplished, had they not died so young. John Jr. would be making a run for the White House right now, if he were still alive. At least, that’s what Jackie Kennedy’s former personal assistant thinks. If her brother wasn’t gone, he’d probably be running for president, Kathy McKeon said in a new, wide-ranging profile of Caroline Kennedy in Avenue magazine. Similar searches on JFK Jr. and imagined scenarios had he survived the plane crash suggest he would have pursued a political career path to become president, as friends, family and the public counterfactualise an alternative narrative for JFK Jr. Characterised by modal verbs might and would and if-clauses to speculate on an alternative what might have been scenario, this news report is an example of human counterfactualising of events that are impossible or improbable. Counterfactual thinking, an area of study associated with social psychology, can be defined as ‘a hypothetical alteration in a past sequence of events that changes the events in a factual sequence in order to create a different, counterfactual outcome’ (Dannenberg 2008: 119). The above headline can be seen as an example of historical counterfactual thinking as the alternative scenario imagines a ‘consciously virtual alternate version[s] of the past world’ (Dannenberg 2008). By asking what would have happened if? a hypothetical deviation from

111

DOI: 10.4324/9781003119739-11

Marina Lambrou

real-world history is suggested with the conditions that would make this alternative version of the world exist. One way to visualise this concept is to compare the actual with the counterfactual in terms of factual and fictional scenarios: Actual = factual: the events in the past Counterfactual = fictional: the imagined alternative outcome set in the present Counterfactual scenarios often offer a more optimistic outcome, or what Dannenberg calls an upward counterfactual to express positive (satisfaction) experiences compared to a downward counterfactual expressing negative (regret) experiences.1 Another example of counterfactual thinking was reported in the Daily Mail (10 September 2021) under the headline ‘What if 9/11 never happened? No Afghan or Iraq wars, no Brexit or Boris and no loss of the West’s moral authority, says DOMINIC SANDBROOK’. The news article begins: The morning of September 11, 2001, dawned clear and bright. On the east coast of the United States, it was a lovely autumn day with not a cloud in the sky. Just before 8 am, American Airlines Flight 11 lifted off from the runway at Logan Airport, Boston. Climbing into the heavens, the plane turned west towards the great American prairies – and kept going. Six hours later, Flight 11 touched down on the tarmac at Los Angeles International Airport. The passengers disembarked, collected their bags and walked away into the rest of their lives. The article goes on to report ‘the attacks never happened. For whatever reason, the operation was cancelled and September 11, 2001, remains just another date’. Planes including Flight 11 reach and land safely at their final destination and no lives are lost. Counterfactual thinking, and the many positive consequences that transpire from events that do not happen, are easily imagined and is, according to Roese and Olson (1995a, 1995b), part of human consciousness that is able to create alternative versions of past or present outcomes. Unfortunately, it is not possible to turn back the clock to undo events that have already taken place, and nor is it realistic to state so authoritatively how different September 11, 2001 might have been. Tulving describes this capacity as ‘mental time travel’ (Tulving 2002, 2001), that is, the ability to cast one’s mind back in time to re-experience or recollect events in the past. He explains this is possible because humans have episodic memory and that evidence of episodic memory is reflected in our grammatical structures (e.g. the presence of modals and the subjunctive) that enable us to imagine actions with different consequences by asking: ‘what would have happened if…?’ In this way, we are able to reflect on events and imagine different outcomes, including happier endings. As well as casting our minds back to re-imagine past events, we also have the ability to cast our minds forward to imagine a future that has not yet happened with the purpose of visualising a positive outcome, for example, a job interview or the result of a Presidential election. In the above examples of JFK Jr. having survived and 9/11 never happening, the mention of these events and then their dismissal can be described as disnarration, ‘the events that do not happen but, nonetheless, are referred to’ (Prince 1988), which is the trigger for counterfactual thinking. Essentially, to be able to counterfactualise

112

Counterfactuality and Disnarration in News Stories

means to be able to tell stories with an imagined plot and resolution, as the examples of nearmiss news stories presented in this chapter, exemplify. The ability to tell stories2 is widely agreed to be a characteristic of human activity experienced by all cultures (Bruner 1990; Lambrou 2019a; Miller and Moore 1989) and cognitive approaches to the study of stories have explored their development and transformation from the oral to the literary and written forms and formats as a way to organise human experience. News reports are one way of organising a series of factual events to tell a story and in so doing, create a historical record of local, national and world events.

Journalists and News Stories In the opening lines of his chapter ‘News Stories as Narratives’, Bell (1998: 236) states that ‘Journalists do not write articles. They write stories’. He reasons that ‘Journalists are storytellers of our age’ (p. 236). In later work Bell (1998: 64) adds that the stories are written ‘with structure, order, viewpoint and values. So the daily happenings in our societies are expressed in the stories we are told in the media’. He goes on to outline the form and function of Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) and Labov’s (1972) narrative schema model developed from spoken personal experiences as one model of structuring news stories. This well-known model is composed of different structural components or schemas that make up a fully formed narrative, including an abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, resolution and coda. Labov and Waletzky developed their model of narratives based on the natural narratives of real personal experiences to provide ‘one method of recapitulating past experience by matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events which … actually occurred’ (1972: 359–360). In other words, these narratives must be based on real events to foreground the concept of human experientiality. A characteristic of news stories is that they also report real, factual events to fulfil the requirement of newsworthiness. Bell goes on to compare news stories against Labov and Waletzky’s model to explain the features of news stories and the role of the storyteller. Central to all stories, whether news stories, literary fiction or personal experiences, is the presence of a complicating action, which provides the sequence of temporally ordered events or the ‘what happened’ element of the story as stories are expected to have a high point that convey what the story is about. As Prince (1982: 147) explains, ‘depicting a conflict of some kind should function better narratively than one depicting no conflict at all’, since to be defined as a narrative, there needs to be a sequence of causal events. Other theorists describe the high point as providing the pivotal crisis, or chaos, that leads to a transformation in the plot of the story that shows a marked before and after, or what Todorov (1977) describes as disequilibrium and Bruner (1997) as Trouble with a capital ‘T’. In news media, the more problematic the event, the more reportable and newsworthy, as it fulfils the important news value of NEGATIVITY (Bell 1991). News stories, then, are about both what happened and the importance of ‘what we are told’ (Bell 1998: 65) and adhere to a specific register and event structure. As Lule points out, ‘news comes to us as a story’ that looks to ‘archetypal figures and forms to offer exemplary models for human life’ (2001: 3). Audiences narrativise their own experiences into a recognisable story structure (Bruner 1991; Lambrou 2014, 2019a, 2021) so it seems only natural that news stories are presented in a coherent structure readily understood by audiences. However, Bell (1991: 236) points out that a ‘Journalist’s work is focused on the getting and writing of

113

Marina Lambrou

stories’, when compared to the temporal order of events making up the complicating action of personal stories (Labov and Waletzky 1967), events in news stories are not always told in a sequential, chronological order. Bell (1995: 305) explains: A feature of all kinds of stories is their chronological time structure: events tend to be told in the order in which they happened. Although when is one of the journalist’s basic facts, news stories follow a radically different ordering. They begin generally with the most recent event and cycle back through earlier events, giving information in instalments. This makes news discourse incohesive and difficult to understand. Modern news discourse has developed this time structure through a combination of the news values of recency and novelty, the journalistic practices of the deadline and the scoop, and technology which increasingly enables live coverage in ‘real’ time. One result is that news neglects the why and how because of its concept of when. To understand the structure and rhetorical goals of news stories, it is necessary to first be familiar with a conventional story structure. News conventionally conforms to a structure commonly called the inverted pyramid or triangle where key points are summarised at the beginning with details of who, where, why and what at the start of a story, and the when mentioned last. This is, Bell explains, to emphasise the outcome (seen as the most important information), rather than the events or process leading to it, allowing the story to be updated and the outcome revised as and when there are changes, as news by its nature is time-bound. (Readers will understand that the when is recent because the events are likely to be new and fulfil the RECENCY news value.) In Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) model of narrative, the who, what, where and when all form part of the orientation section that appears at the beginning of the narrative to provide the narrative’s important contextual information. While there is an inversion of the linear structure of events in news stories, with additional shifts in the story timeline, like factually based personal experiences, news events must also be based on facts, i.e. events that occurred, as journalists are expected to be trustworthy, impartial and objective (Harcup 2009). This chapter focuses on near-miss news stories that appear to undermine the core complicating action or what happened? component in real events because the events described are disnarrated. Why, then, are they deemed to be newsworthy?

News Values and Newsworthiness For news stories to be considered worthy of reporting, they must fulfil a number of criteria or news values. News values can be perceived as a set of guidelines or rules, ‘by which one “fact” is judged more newsworthy than another’ (Bell 1991: 155). So what is it that makes one news story more reportable than another? Harold Evans (1972: 56), a former editor of the Times and Sunday Times, identifies several conditions for news stories and their worth. He asserts they should be: i. about necessary information and unusual events ii. based on observable facts iii. an unbiased account iv. free from the reporter’s opinion and the more news values a story has, the more likely it will be reported. 114

Counterfactuality and Disnarration in News Stories

One of the most influential lists of news values was compiled by Galtung and Ruge (1965), who based their criteria on analysing international news stories to identify the factors they had in common creating qualities that make a story not simply informative but eligible for coverage as material suited to news and feature genres. They identified 12 news values, organised under three subheadings: Impact, Audience Identification and Pragmatics of Media: Impact FREQUENCY THRESHOLD REFERENCE TO SOMETHING NEGATIVE UNEXPECTEDNESS UNAMBIGUITY Audience identification REFERENCE TO PERSONS MEANINGFULNESS REFERENCE TO ELITE NATIONS REFERENCE TO ELITE PEOPLE Pragmatics of media coverage CONSONANCE CONTINUITY COMPOSITION There have been various revisions of Galtung and Ruge’s list of news values, including the influential list offered by Bell (1991: 156–158) (see Table 8.1). Other lists of news values include those produced by Harcup and O’Neill, who revisit Galtung and Ruge’s original criteria to add power elite, celebrity and entertainment; and Table 8.1  News values News Value

Description

NEGATIVITY RECENCY PROXIMITY CONSONANCE

bad or negative has only just happened took place geographically close to the reader or viewer fits readers’ or viewers’ preconceptions or stereotypes about how the world is is relatively clear-cut and unambiguous is rare, unexpected or unpredictable is outstanding or superlative in some respect can be presented as relevant to the audience’s own lives or experience can be pictured in personal terms involves news actors who are socially prominent in some respect comes from news sources who carry some kind of socially validated authority consists of or can be supported by facts and figures

UNAMBIGUITY UNEXPECTEDNESS SUPERLATIVENESS RELEVANCE PERSONALISATION ELITENESS ATTRIBUTION FACTICITY Adapted from Bell 1991.

115

Marina Lambrou

Niblock (2005), who identifies in-built characteristics of an event, which are either intrinsic news values that ‘appeal to the consensus views and values of the culture readers inhabit’ or extrinsic news values that ‘relate closely to journalists’ experience of the process of selection’ (pp. 76–79). Bednarek and Caple (2014) take a discourse-analytic perspective to argue that that newsworthiness is constructed and emphasised through linguistic means, as outlined in the following section.

The Discourse of News Values News values, according to Bednarek and Caple (2014: 135), ‘exist in and are constructed through discourse’ and news is sold to its readers through linguistic choices rather than on the process and selection of news. Specifically, they propose a ‘constructivist approach’ that considers both multimodal and corpus-assisted discourse analysis for a framework of news discourse that adapts earlier work by Galtung and Ruge (1965) and Bell (1991). Using corpus linguistic methods, Bednarek and Caple identified the top 100-word frequency based on a 70,000-word corpus of British news discourse for a fresher understanding of national news values and how they are constructed, stating: We should emphasise here that our discursive approach is to be regarded as complementary to practice-based (ethnographic newsroom research) or cognitive approaches (news values as socially-shared cognitive representations), and does not see the discursive as the only perspective of newsworthiness. Thus our aims is not to reduce values to discourse or to assume they are only constructed through discourse. (2014: 139) Their findings were categorised into a list of nine news values with headings focusing on the linguistic features of news (see Table 8.2). Table 8.2  The language of news discourse for the construction of news values News value

Description of linguistic devices

NEGATIVITY TIMELINESS PROXIMITY SUPERLATIVENESS

Negative evaluative language; negative emotions; negative lexis Explicit reference to present, recent past, future, season; verb tense/aspect Reference to place, nation, community; inclusive we and our pronouns Quantifiers; intensifiers/intensified lexis; comparative and superlatives; repetition; metaphors and similes that intensify or quantify Labels/descriptions denoting high status/importance of individuals, organisations, nations involved Evaluative language relating to impact of event; significant/relevant consequences (hypotheses, speculations, consequences, cause and effect relations) Evaluative language expressing newness, unexpectedness, unusual, comparison with other events in past; surprise Specific reference to emotions; quotes from ordinary people and references to ordinary individuals; eye-witness reports Language conveying expectedness; comparison with other past events; conventionalised metaphors; stereotypes; archetypes

ELITENESS IMPACT

NOVELTY PERSONALISATION CONSONANCE

Adapted from Bednarek and Caple 2014.

116

Counterfactuality and Disnarration in News Stories

There are several main differences from Bell’s (1991) list in Table 8.1. There are fewer news criteria in Bednarek and Caple’s framework, as NOVELTY appears to replace both UNEXPECTEDNESS and SUPERLATIVENESS, while TIMELINESS replaces RECENCY with greater emphasis on time references, and RELEVANCE merges RELEVANCE and PERSONALISATION. My own research on the stylistic analysis of disnarrated news stories (Lambrou 2019a) reveals that disnarrated news is another factor or value that influences the production of news, and is explained below with reference to examples of near-miss news stories. The presence of news stories where the central crisis or high point in the complicating action is averted is a persuasive argument for the importance of this genre of news reporting.

Disnarration Defined The term disnarrated (from the French ‘dénarré) was proposed by the narratologist Gerald Prince (1988: 2) to describe what does not happen, that is, what is not represented, in narrative fiction as a category within the following list: i. events that cannot be narrated or are not worth narrating (the unnarratable) ii. intentional gaps or ellipses, rhythm, characterisation or for invoking surprise or suspense etc. (the nonnarratable) iii. events that do not happen but nonetheless are referred to in a negative or hypothetical way in the narrative (the disnarrated) The first and second categories have intentional gaps in the narrative i.e. omitting mundane details, or to create suspense, whereas the third category ‘covers all the events that do not happen’. As I explain: The distinction between the first two categories and the third is that the unnarratable describes events that cannot be narrated or are not worth narrating and so express something that is marked as explicitly not there. Disnarration, on the other hand, is when a narrator explicitly states that something did not happen. (Lambrou 2019a: 19–20) Usually applied to literary fiction as a dimension of narrative storytelling, disnarration can be expressed by the narration, narrator or character and is constructed through: alethic expressions of impossibility or unrealized possibility, deontic expressions of observed prohibition, epistemic expressions of ignorance, ontologic expressions of nonexistence, purely imagined worlds, desired worlds, or intended worlds, unfulfilled expectations, unwarranted beliefs, failed attempts, crushed hopes, suppositions and false calculations, errors and lies, and so forth. (Prince 1988: 2) Recent work on disnarration as a dimension of storytelling has been applied more broadly to a range of story modes and genres, including personal experiences, media news stories, film as well as literature (Lambrou 2018, 2019a, 2019b) where the focus is on examining story structure through a narratological framework and disnarration to understand how a counterfactual 117

Marina Lambrou

alternative is triggered to prompt an imagined what if? scenario. Findings show that stylistically, disnarration is expressed lexico-grammatically through the use of comparators such as negation, modality and hypothetical clauses, as seen in the JFK and 9/11 news headlines in the opening section of this chapter. In later work, Prince (2003: 22) expanded his definition, adding that disnarration is ‘The elements in a narrative that explicitly consider and refer to what does not take place (“X didn’t happen”; “Y could have happened but didn’t”)’. This raises the question of why hypothetical events are newsworthy when the facticity of news stories presupposes not only that the details are accurate and based on the truth but that the events occurred. Readers expect a narrative to follow a sequence of events that lead to an acceptable conclusion, as explained by Ricoeur (1980: 174): Following a story, […] we are pushed ahead by this development and that we reply to its impetus with expectations concerning the outcome and the completion of the entire process. In this sense, the story’s conclusion is the pole of attraction, of the entire development. But a narrative conclusion can be neither deduced nor predicted. There is no story if our attention is not moved along by a thousand contingencies. That is why a story has to be followed to its conclusion. So rather than being predictable, a conclusion must be acceptable. From a narratological perspective, anything that undermines a conventional story structure and expectation would be challenging for readers, and diminish its narrativity, a quality that can be likened to the reportability and newsworthiness of news stories. Yet news stories with disnarrated events that appear to undermine the quality of narrativity still function as news. Why is this?

Disnarration in News Stories Returning to the opening example of the death of JFK Jr. and the imagined scenario where had he lived he would mostly likely have become President of the United States, the emphatic use of modal verbs (1–3, shown in bold) and the if-clause (a-b shown underlined) conditional statement, foreground counterfactual thinking and an impossible scenario; Lost potential is a common theme of Kennedy-family lore. It’s hard not to imagine what Bobby, President Kennedy, and JFK Jr. might (1) have accomplished, had they not died so young. John Jr. would (2) be making a run for the White House right now, if he were still alive (a). At least, that’s what Jackie Kennedy’s former personal assistant thinks. “If her brother wasn’t gone (b), he’d (3) probably be running for president,” Kathy McKeon said in a new, wide-ranging profile of Caroline Kennedy in Avenue magazine. The disnarrated events are newsworthy because rather than find meaning on the page, they ‘rely on audiences to speculate on what might have been to comprehend alternative scenarios if the events occurred and news editors are aware of this fact’ (Lambrou 2019a: 66). Readers

118

Counterfactuality and Disnarration in News Stories

engage in co-constructing the alternative outcome along a different conceptual path, similar to a path forking but where only one path can be followed (see Lambrou 2019b).

Disnarration and near-misses The following news reports on near-miss incidents in Extracts 1–3 are further examples of disnarrated events. Where ‘The elements in a narrative that explicitly consider and refer to what does not take place (“X didn’t happen”; “Y could have happened but didn’t”)’ (Prince 2003: 22). In these examples, the what if is not as clearly stated but imagined through the news values of PERSONALISATION and NEGATIVITY as will be explained.

Extract 1  MailOnline, a digital version of the tabloid Daily Mail newspaper (20 July 2021) United Airlines jet was seconds from head-on collision with easyJet plane after air traffic controller’s slip of the tongue at Charles de Gaulle airport • A United jet carrying 73 people was cleared to land on runway 09 right in Paris • An easyJet pilot preparing for takeoff saw the plane bearing down on them • The pilot intervened and the United flight aborted landing seconds before crash A United Airlines jet landing at Charles de Gaulle airport with 73 people on board was just seconds away from a head-on collision with an easyJet Airbus after a slip of the tongue by an air traffic controller […] The near-disaster on July 20 last year occurred after the tower controller mistakenly told the United flight from Newark, New Jersey, that it was cleared to land on runway ‘09 right’ […]

The headline functions in a similar way to the abstract of Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) narrative model by signalling what the story is about while also providing a summary of the events to draw in and engage the reader. The report that follows provide the important ‘Five Ws’ found in the orientation section of a narrative to provide the important contextual details of the story using the pyramid structure of news stories: who? United Airlines jet air traffic controller what? seconds from head-on collision with easyJet plane where? at Charles de Gaulle airport when? 20 July 2021 why? air traffic controller’s slip of the tongue This news report was placed on the front page as a major headline: the news agency and its editor decided it was the most newsworthy of all events. In a similar news report on another near-miss incident, more deaths were avoided and this was also headline news.

119

Marina Lambrou

Extract 2  MailOnline, a digital version of the tabloid Daily Mail newspaper (16 February 2014) Near miss! Motorised paraglider narrow avoids crashing into packed EasyJet passenger plane by only 150ft… and air traffic control failed to spot it • • • •

The Airbus A319 missed the flying-machine by only 150ft Pilot relayed the incident to air traffic control Kits to build the flying machines can be purchased online for around £1,500 Aspiring pilots can start taking to the skies without any training

An airliner that was coming in to land had a near miss in mid-air with a motorised parachutist at 2,000ft about the ground. The Airbus A319 missed the flying-machine by only 150ft, causing the pilot to see the parachute canopy flash by the cockpit of the plane. […]

Again, in Extract 2 the ‘Five Ws’ are clearly understood and readers can only imagine what the outcome might have been with the ‘packed EasyJet passenger plane’. The journalist’s impartiality is breached with the use of punctuation to communicate shock, surprise or relief at this near-miss (although it could be argued that the informal style is one associated with tabloid news reporting). In previous work (2019: 71) I offer an explanation for this reporting style by explaining: It also uses evaluative punctuation such as the exclamation mark to convey the reporter and newspaper’s stance. Ellipsis, the omission of words and clauses, is shown with the three full stops between clauses to signal a gap but still conveys information by its very absence. Readers are left to fill in the missing details in the headlines to imagine what might have been. Further factual information is summarised in a bullet point layout under the headlines and emphasised in bold. Even though the paraglider and ‘packed’ passenger plane didn’t collide and no-one was killed, counterfactual thinking lets readers imagine a possible and devastating outcome of a collision and it is this that resonates with readers as the news values of PERSONALISATION (can be pictured in personal terms) and NEGATIVITY (bad or negative news) are emphasised. The news is disnarrated but an understanding of what might have been still remains in the audience’s imagination.3 Internet searches of near misses provide numerous results including the following report in Extract 3 of another near collision.

Extract 3  from the Guardian online guardian.com website (19 March 2016) Lufthansa jumbo reports near miss with drone over Los Angeles The passenger jet was close to landing when a drone flew 200ft overhead, fuelling concerns about the safety of the craft.

120

Counterfactuality and Disnarration in News Stories

The pilot of a Lufthansa passenger jumbo jet has reported that a drone aircraft nearly collided with his airliner on its landing approach to Los Angeles, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The close encounter between the wide-body, four-engine Airbus A380 and the drone occurred at about 1.30pm at an altitude of 5,000ft (1,500 metres) as the unmanned aircraft passed about 200ft (61 meters) over the Lufthansa flight 14 miles (22.5 km) east of the city’s international airport, the FAA said […]

Table 8.3  DISNARRATED as a news value News Value

Description

DISNARRATED

What could have happened

In all three extracts the expectation of bad news is disnarrated with the mention of near miss or something similar in the headlines to prime the reader and, for this reason, I argue that there is a place for the dimension of disnarrated storytelling in the news to be added as a news value (see Table 8.3). Extracts 1–3 exemplify disnarrated news stories, constituted by terms, phrases and passages that consider what does not happen. Prince (1988: 4) adds that that disnarration ‘has no role in news stories’ because narratives are about ‘assurance’ and are expected to report that something happened rather than something did not, but the examples shown here emphasise otherwise. As noted earlier in the chapter, disnarrated news stories function to highlight some kind of breach as the reporting of these events does not conclude with tragedy. There is no collision and no one dies or suffers as a result. Because they draw attention to what did not happen, it could be argued that these types of stories stand out or are foregrounded (Mukařovsky 1964 [1932]) because they undermine expectations. Unlike tragic events that occur, audiences are required to interpret the underlying message and infer the importance of the story through counterfactual thinking by imagining alternative and dangerous scenarios of what might have happened if: the two planes had collided on take-off and landing; there was a collision between the paraglider and the EasyJet passenger plane; and the serious consequences of a drone colliding with the Jumbo jet full of passengers. News agencies report these stories with the knowledge that audiences understand the counterfactual, which explains why disnarrated news stories are newsworthy. Specifically, newsworthiness is manifested in the interaction between the text and the audience, and through audience identification because readers understand ‘an alternative, a set of possible directions’ (Prince 1988: 4). While the more news values a story can be mapped onto suggests it is more newsworthy, the main agenda for audience identification would appear to rely on three key criteria: NEGATIVITY (where bad or negative events are reported), RELEVANCE (where the story is relevant to the audience’s own lives or experiences), and PERSONALISATION (where events in the story can be pictured in personal terms).

The Discourse of News Values and Disnarration The news values of NEGATIVITY, RELEVANCE and PERSONALISATION can be understood through Bednarek and Caple’s (2014: 135) discourse-based framework in Table 8.2 121

Marina Lambrou Table 8.4  The news values of NEGATIVITY, SUPERLATIVENESS and IMPACT and their linguistic expression in Extracts 1–3. NEGATIVITY Negative evaluative language; negative ­emotions; negative lexis

SUPERLATIVENESS Quantifiers; intensifiers/intensified lexis; comparative and superlatives; repetition; metaphors and similes that intensify or quantify

• near-disaster • mistakenly told • narrow avoids crashing • failed to spot it • concerns about the safety

• just seconds away (from a head-on collision)/seconds before crash • less than (300ft) • slip of the tongue • bearing down on them • (by) only (150ft)

IMPACT Evaluative language relating to impact of event; significant/ relevant consequences (hypotheses, speculations, consequences, cause and effect relations) • head-on collision • flight aborted landing • narrowly avoids crashing • near-disaster • near miss/missed • close encounter

where they claim that news values ‘exist in and are constructed through discourse’ as news is sold to its readers through linguistic choices rather than the process and selection of news. Their corpus linguistic study offers a systematic analysis of the language of news discourse that builds on earlier work developed by Galtung and Ruge (1965) and Bell (1991). An analysis of the news headlines and opening paragraphs in Extracts 1–3 against Bednarek and Caple’s list shows that disnarrated events tend to be constructed through similar news values (see Table 8.4). A discourse-analytic approach to disnarrated news texts foregrounds NEGATIVITY (negative evaluative language; negative emotions; negative lexis); SUPERLATIVENESS (quantifiers; intensifiers/intensified lexis; comparative and superlatives; repetition; metaphors and similes that intensify or quantify); and IMPACT (evaluative language relating to impact of event; significant/relevant consequences, e.g. hypotheses, speculations, consequences, cause and effect relations), which reflects the modal language of disnarration, confirming there is a discourse of disnarration and that these types of stories are newsworthy in media news reporting.

Conclusion The reporting of news events allows for the unconventional dimension of disnarration as a type of storytelling, revealing that disnarrated news in near-miss stories prompts counterfactual thinking when an alternative outcome or what might have happened is triggered. Disnarration, signalled by the use of specific lexico-grammatical markers, appears to undermine the criteria of ‘Trouble with a capital “T”’ because the expected sequence of events leading to what should be a high point, crisis or conflict is disrupted and averted. However, the news values of NEGATIVITY, SUPERLATIVENESS and IMPACT implicitly suggest trouble because readers are able to imagine and construct alternative scenarios through counterfactual thinking. Negative events guarantee reports that are newsworthy and disnarrated events have a valid place in media news because they are not only extraordinary but allow journalists to tell stories. As Prince (1982: 34–35) explains, ‘the insistence with which the disnarrated appears in countless “natural” narratives […] as well as in historical and fictional discourse points to its narrative pertinence and significance’. The analysis and discussion of 122

Counterfactuality and Disnarration in News Stories

news stories in this chapter shows a prevalence and significance of disnarrated events in news stories where counterfactual thinking is just as important a news value because of readers’ ability to think counterfactually and imagine the ‘what if?’.

Notes 1 Throughout this chapter key terms are presented in italics and Bell’s news values in capitals as he presented them. 2 The terms story and narrative are used interchangeably here to denote events told in a temporal sequence. 3 PERSONALISATION also reflects the panic and fear individuals may have of events that could easily have been experienced by them. Schmid (2006: 7) describes this with reference to terror attacks and the ‘it could have been me’ identification with victims.

References Bednarek, M., and Caple, H. (2014) Why Do News Values Matter? Towards a New Methodological Framework for Analysing News Discourse in Critical Discourse Analysis and Beyond. Discourse and Society, 25(2), 135–158. Bell, A. (1991) The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell. Bell, A. (1995) News Time. Time & Society, 4(3), 305–328. Bell, A. (1998) The Discourse Structure of News Stories. In A. Bell and P. Garrett (Eds.), Approaches to Media Discourse (pp. 64–104). Oxford: Blackwell. Bruner, J. (1990) Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. (1991) The Narrative Construction of ‘Reality’. Critical Inquiry, 18, 1–21. Bruner, J. (1997) Labov and Waletzky Thirty Years On. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7(1–4), 61–68. Dannenberg, H. P. (2008) Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction. Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press. Evans, H. (1972) Editing and Design: A Five-Volume Manual of English, Typography and Layout. Book One. Newsman’s English. London: Heinemann. Galtung, J., and Ruge, M. H. (1965) The Structure of Foreign News: The Presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus in Four Norwegian Newspapers. Journal of Peace Research, 2(1), 64–90. Harcup, T. (2009) Journalism, Principles and Practice (2nd ed.). London: Sage. Labov, W. (1972) Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Labov, W., and Waletzky, J. (1967) Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience. In J. Holm (Ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts (pp. 12–44). Seattle: University of Washington Press. Lambrou, M. (2014) Narrative, Text and Time: telling the same story twice in the oral narrative reporting of 7/7. ‘Narrative’ Special issue. Language and Literature, 23(1), 32–48. Lambrou, M. (2018) “La La Land”: Counterfactuality, Disnarration and the forked (motorway) path. In R. Page, B. Busse, and N. Nørgaard (Eds.), Rethinking Language, Text and Context: Interdisciplinary Research in Stylistics in Honour of Michael Toolan (pp. 29–42). London: Routledge. Lambrou, M. (2019a) Disnarration and the Unmentioned in Fact and Fiction. London: Palgrave. Lambrou, M. (2019b) Metalepsis, counterfactuality and the forked path in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. In S. Sorline (Ed.), Stylistic Manipulation of the Reader in Contemporary Fiction (pp. 31– 49). London: Bloomsbury. Lambrou, M. (2021) Narrative Retellings: stylistic approaches. London: Bloomsbury. Lule, J. (2001) Daily News, Eternal Stories: The Mythological Role of Journalism. New York: The Guilford Press. Miller, P., and Moore, B. B. (1989) ‘Narrative Conjunctions of Caregiver and Child: A Comparative Perspective on Socialization through Stories’. Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, 17(4), 428–449. Mukařovsky, J. (1964[1932]) Standard Language and Poetic Language. In P. Garvin (Ed.), A Prague School Reader on Aesthetics, Literary Structure and Style (pp. 17–30). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

123

Marina Lambrou Niblock, S. (2005) Practice and Theory: What Is News? In R. Keeble (Ed.), Print Journalism, A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge. Prince, G. (1982) Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative. Berlin: Mouton. Prince, G. (1988) The ‘Disnarrated’. Style, 22(1), 1–8. Prince, G. (2003) Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press. Ricoeur, P. (1980) Narrative Time. In W. J. T. Mitchell (Ed.), On Narrative (pp. 165–186). Chicago: Chicago University Press. Roese, N. J., and Olson, J. M. (eds) (1995a) What Might Have Been: The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Roese, N. J., and Olson, J. M. (eds) (1995b) Counterfactual thinking: a critical overview. In What Might Have Been: The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Schmid, A. (2006) Magnitudes and Focus of Terrorist Victimization. In Uwe Ewald, and Ksenija Turković (Eds.), Large-Scale Victimisation as a Potential Source of Terrorist Activities. Amsterdam: IOS Press. Todorov, T. (1977) The Poetics of Prose. Oxford: Blackwell. Tulving, E. (2001) Episodic Memory and Common Sense: How Far Apart? Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 356, 1505–1515. Tulving, E. (2002) Episodic Memory: From Mind to Brain. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 1–25.

Weblinks https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9805501/United-jet-seconds-collision-easyJet-plane-controllersslip-tongue.html (accessed 16 August 2021) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-9978943/What-9-11-never-happened-No-loss-Wests-moralauthority-says-DOMINIC-SANDBROOK.html (accessed 19 September 2021) https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/a12824767/john-f-kennedy-jr-run-forpresident/ (accessed 26 February 2021)

124

9 THE EVOLUTION OF LITERARY JOURNALISM IN THE DIGITAL AGE Jaron Murphy

In this chapter we will explore what has become, in the digital age, of the centuries-old p ­ ractice of literary journalism. We will trace its relatively rapid development from an enduring, printbased tradition into a revamped yet recognisably continuing phenomenon across print and online media in the twenty-first century. In doing so, we will concern ourselves mainly with what contemporary literary journalism looks like and how it represents, fundamentally, the perpetuation of innovative practice. For readers who might wish to explore further, literary journalism resources and examples referred to can be accessed via the information and/or URLs included in the References list at the end. The aim of this chapter is twofold: to help academics, students and practitioners (1) gain an understanding of the extraordinary transformation over the past 25 years in how literary journalism is produced and consumed; and (2) gain knowledge to start to navigate and evaluate literary journalism scholarship and practice in the digital age. To this end, it is instructive to initially foreground some of Tom Wolfe’s key claims and points in The New Journalism (1973) before juxtaposing two notable publications – one scholarly and the other an example of pioneering professional practice – on which Wolfe’s conception of effective literary techniques can be seen to have a significant bearing: Kerrane and Yagoda’s The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism (copyrighted in 1997, published in 1998) and Mark Bowden’s ‘Black Hawk Down’ (1997). These two publications emerged at the intersection of literary journalism’s long and illustrious print history and what was then the beginnings of revolutionary innovation online. They serve as a gateway not just to pinpointing the expansion from print to digital outputs at that time but to a wider appreciation of how Wolfe and the New Journalism continue to shape both literary journalism scholarship and practice. Wolfe’s importance is flagged upfront because it will become increasingly clear that he exerts an enormous influence, both productively and problematically, on how literary journalism is perceived, analysed and produced. Famously, in his provocative and often amusing proclamation of the New Journalism, Wolfe described how a new style of journalism, supposedly out of the blue, had ‘caused a status panic in the literary community’ (1996 [1973]: 39). In the mid-1960s, journalists exhibiting this new style were creating impactful narratives through their innovative use of literary

125

DOI: 10.4324/9781003119739-12

Jaron Murphy

techniques. The upshot, according to Wolfe, was that they were displacing the longstanding, supreme status of the novelists. At the end of the decade, he crowed, ‘no one in the literary world could simply dismiss this new journalism as an inferior genre’ (42) for these journalists, not least Wolfe himself, had managed to ‘wipe out the novel as literature’s main event’ (22). Although its premier status was not yet secured, he declared that ‘the most important literature in America today is in nonfiction, in the form that has been tagged, however ungracefully, the New Journalism’ (11). His championing of the New Journalism drew much of its humour and force from challenging what he called the journalistic and literary ‘old guards’ (35) or, as he also put it, ‘the kentucky colonels of both Journalism and Literature’ who denounced those working in this ‘damnable’ new hybrid form (38). At the heart of Wolfe’s account of the New Journalism was his recurring discussion of the use of four literary devices to achieve the power of realism: ‘scene-by-scene construction, dialogue, point of view and the detailing of status life’ (64). A basic understanding of Wolfe’s identification and description of these four devices is helpful, as we shall see, in starting to navigate and evaluate literary journalism scholarship and practice in the digital age. Wolfe explained that: 1 Scene-by-scene construction entailed ‘telling the story by moving from scene to scene and resorting as little as possible to sheer historical narrative’, which could involve drawing upon actual witnessing of scenes and events unfolding; 2 Closely related to this was the effort to ‘record the dialogue in full’ which could assist in rapidly and convincingly establishing and defining character; 3 Third-person point of view, informed by interviewing, could serve to present ‘every scene to the reader through the eyes of a particular character, giving the reader the feeling of being inside the character’s mind and experiencing the emotional reality of the scene’; 4 Recording everyday details symbolic of people’s status life could facilitate access to the interiority of character, with status life viewed broadly as ‘the entire pattern of behaviour and possessions through which people express their position in the world or what they think it is or what they hope it to be’. (46-7) Wolfe’s elucidation of these techniques of realism, which he claimed the New Journalists discovered intuitively rather than through theory, was peppered with comparative references to renowned literary-historical figures. Moreover, he proceeded to retrieve from literary history, in a somewhat patchy manner in the Appendix, various examples of nonfiction written by reporters which were ‘showing many of the characteristics of the New Journalism’ (60). In this context, Kerrane and Yagoda’s selection of examples for their anthology constitutes a helpful ‘101’ crash course for the uninitiated – significantly, in traditional print literary journalism even as this recognised form, at the time of the anthology’s release, had in fact begun to move online. Compiled to address the problem that, despite a multitude of material, there was no suitable one-stop textbook to prescribe to their students, their anthology expressly reverses Wolfe’s treatment of predecessors like Charles Dickens, George Orwell and John Hersey as an ‘afterthought’ by instead ‘giving prominence to such pioneers, and by connecting their work to the [new] journalism of the 1960s and ’70s – and beyond’ (1998: 17). 126

The Evolution of Literary Journalism in the Digital Age

Kerrane and Yagoda’s editorial approach, which resulted in a categorised historical sweep from Daniel Defoe and James Boswell to Svetlana Alexievich and Michael Winerip, is also notable for acknowledging that literary journalism is ‘a profoundly fuzzy term’ (1998: 13) and applying some defining criteria for the selection of examples. Prioritising the second component of the hybrid term, the writing had to be factual or ‘animated by the central journalistic commitment to the truth’; entail ‘a process of active fact-gathering’ and ‘doing what reporters call reporting’ (13); and have currency, with the writer getting ‘on the story soon after it happened’ (14). To live up to the first component, the writing had to satisfy their premium on innovation (15). Journalism that is literary was, in their estimation, ‘thoughtfully, artfully, and valuably innovative’. This kind of journalism liberatingly cast aside one or more conventions of mass-produced journalism, such as the basic inverted pyramid structure of mainstream news stories. Evidence of innovation was important for selection in light of high-level literary journalism constituting ‘a tradition, with each practitioner standing on the shoulders of his or her predecessors’ (14). Given their consciousness of ingenuity and historical influence, Kerrane and Yagoda were bound to admit an array of works exhibiting a variety of writing approaches and skills which make such journalism stand out – including use of the four literary devices expounded by Wolfe. Unsurprisingly, Wolfe is included in the anthology. He appears in the ‘Telling Tales’ and ‘Style As Substance’ sections, by way of an excerpt from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) and ‘The Girl of the Year’ (1964) respectively. Evidently influencing their selection here, both works are touched upon by Wolfe in The New Journalism: the former in relation to the device of point of view such as shifting ‘from the narrator’s omniscient voice to someone else’s stream of consciousness’ (Wolfe 1996 [1973]: 48); and the latter to illustrate his skilled use of three points of view within a short passage (33). Wolfe’s presence is also supportive of Kerrane and Yagoda’s overall endeavour to present the case that literary journalism does exist and ‘is not an oxymoron’ (1998: 16) – an allusion to historical perceptions of incompatibility subverted by the hybrid term. The second key publication and a game-changer in the history of the professional practice of literary journalism is Bowden’s ‘Black Hawk Down’ which appeared around the same time as Kerrane and Yagoda’s print anthology and has been hailed as ‘the advent of literary journalism in the digital age’ (Dowling 2020: 529). First published in 29 daily instalments in the Philadelphia Inquirer’s print edition, Bowden would later credit the ‘pioneering way it was presented on the Internet’ as a major reason for the story’s international reach and impact (Bowden 2000). Originally ‘Blackhawk Down’, the dual publication was followed by the best-selling book and the feature film directed by Ridley Scott. Readers who access the archived site material online (see Bowden 1997 for the URL) can directly appreciate the trailblazing effort of combining text, photos, infographics (including maps), video and audio in Bowden’s dramatic and distressing account of the US military raid in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993. Clearly, the online version went beyond simply ‘mounting the text of the series’ on the Inquirer’s website, which was Bowden’s initial assumption. It capitalised instead on the opportunity to provide more novelty and material to delve into than was possible in print. As Bowden reflected, the audio-visuals helped to give ‘the account weight it might not have had, had it run only in the newspaper’. The Inquirer website’s readers could also ‘inspect the building blocks’ which not only added to the interactive experience of reading the story but ‘grounded it more firmly in reality’ (Bowden 2000). However, it should also readily strike contemporary readers how cumbersome and lacking in visual impact the presentation is compared to, say, the bold and continuous scroll-down 127

Jaron Murphy

design most of us are familiar with via mainstream news coverage online. The considerable effort to enhance the main text with audio-visuals as well as supplementary text resulted in a high volume of clicks required to access material and progress through the multiple pages. The consequence is a painstaking, stop-start reading experience. The slabs of text are hyperlink-heavy and frequently dotted with audio-visuals, with items mirrored in the sidebar which includes sections for the video, audio, photos, maps, graphics, who’s who and glossary. Generally, images within the chapters are too small and poorly positioned (although the arrangement of the photo galleries is better). While supportive of readers’ contextual understanding and active engagement, which the Q&As with Bowden are a testament to, the ‘busy’ site content tends to get in the way of sustained focus on the central narrative progression of the lengthy story. Plenty of time is required to consult the extensive material – or rather, what is left of it. Ageing has taken its toll on the site: many hyperlinks within this ‘relic of the earliest days of Web 2.0’ have fallen prey ‘to internet ephemerality known as link rot’ (Dowling 2020: 529). Encapsulating the quite spectacular extent of technological advancements since then, Dowling comments that although ‘an unprecedented achievement in 1997, decades later the visually disjointed transition-less design now feels more like a Wikipedia page or a database of raw information in sharp contrast to the latest immersive multimedia narratives designed for mobile audiences’ (2020: 529). Nevertheless, we should not lose sight of how the online version of ‘Black Hawk Down’ significantly altered yet perpetuated the innovative tradition of literary journalism described by Kerrane and Yagoda. The curation and presentation of the material by Online Editor Jennifer Musser and her team was, at that time, cutting-edge work and the site attracted tens of thousands of readers daily. Bowden admitted that, as an old-fashioned newspaper reporter, he could not have envisioned such an outcome even as he augmented his write-up by providing copious source material. He had in mind only ‘a newspaper series for the benefit of readers in the Philadelphia area and then a book that might reach a broader audience’ (Bowden 2000). The online version, then, emerged as a new form of literary journalism built upon what, up till then, had been a time-honoured preoccupation with print outputs. Components of Bowden’s groundwork as an experienced print journalist – interviews, documents, transmission clips, etc. – were made accessible online to both ‘deconstruct’ and elaborate upon his original storytelling. Underpinning the success of the innovative online version was the usage of literary journalism techniques hitherto deployed in print tradition – including the four devices extolled by Wolfe. The connection was illustrated by Royal and Tankard Jr who investigated the ways in which ‘Black Hawk Down’ adhered to the techniques and facilitated the goals of literary journalism. They utilised the work of Wolfe and other well-known experts like Sims and Kramer to establish the defining characteristics of literary journalism and applied these to the site, discovering that techniques of traditional literary journalism in evidence included ‘Dramatic Story Form’ (2004: 85) as well as, frequently, Wolfe’s ‘Dialogue in Full’ and, for many of the chapters, ‘Cliffhanger Endings’ (86). Furthermore, they found that evidence of the use of web techniques to enhance attributes of literary journalism covered Wolfe’s ‘Scene-by-Scene Construction’, ‘Dialogue in Full’ and ‘Third-Person Point of View’ (86); Sims’s ‘Accuracy’, ‘Voice’ and ‘Structure’ (87); and Kramer’s ‘Digressions’ (87) to amplify and reframe events, in this case encompassing ‘the glossary, a Who’s Who section, the multimedia components and an “Ask the Author” bulletin board’ (87). They argued that, ultimately, the unique power of the online version derived from the ‘combination of all of these elements into one package’ (87); and based on their findings, they predicted that a ‘future version of the World Wide Web will probably do a better job of 128

The Evolution of Literary Journalism in the Digital Age

integrating text, images, audio, video and bulletin boards – leading to still more effective online storytelling’ (88). Their prediction of improvement online is not only comparable to Kerrane and Yagoda’s notion of an innovative print tradition but also, in fact, dovetails with a dominant theme within wider literary journalism scholarship since the turn of the century: that of ‘evolution’, the word used explicitly by some of the leading experts in the field. We will register several examples of this word cropping up, in examining the continuation of literary journalism’s innovative tradition into the twenty-first century and its remarkable transformation by becoming, indeed, a more integrated and effective form of online storytelling. In 2005, for instance, Boynton referred explicitly to an ‘evolution’ in hailing a substantial group of practitioners of what he called ‘the New New Journalism’ (2005: xxx) which appeared to be at the forefront of a print renaissance of literary journalism. As the tag ‘New New Journalism’ indicates, Boynton was effectively announcing another turning point in the history of literary journalism: ‘But as Wolfe celebrated the triumph of New Journalism, evidence of an even more formidable next stage in American literary evolution was already taking shape. In the thirty years since Wolfe’s manifesto, a group of writers has been quietly securing a place at the very centre of contemporary American literature for reportorially based, narrative-driven long-form nonfiction’ (xi). Boynton portrayed this next phase of evolution as deeply indebted to but distinguished from Wolfe’s New Journalism. Explaining that the New New Journalists synthesised the best of two traditions – the New Journalism of the ’60s and an earlier generation of ‘New Journalists’ of the nineteenth century – Boynton judged the New New Journalism to be possibly ‘the most popular and influential development in the history of American literary nonfiction’ (xi). The New New Journalists embraced their freedom to experiment with form as well as focus on particular cultural and social concerns (2005: xi). They were less burdened by ‘debates over “journalism” and “literature” – between “subjective” and “objective” reporting’ (xxx) – and wrote about topical issues such as immigration, poverty, race, the clash of faiths, and big business (xxix). Pointing out that it was widely accepted the New Journalism was over by the ’80s, Boynton argued that the New New Journalists (among them, notably, Gay Talese who was repeatedly referred to by Wolfe) were representative of the continued development and maturation of American literary journalism (xi). They could be credited with elevating it ‘to a more popular and commercial level than either its nineteenth- or late-twentieth-century predecessors ever imagined’ (xxx). His central message was, then, that Wolfe’s New Journalism had been surpassed. Affirming that ‘nonfiction today is as prestigious – if not more so – than the novel’, he declared the New New Journalism had, without fanfare, secured ‘a premier place in American literature’ (xxx). Writing soon after the turn of the century, Boynton’s chosen examples from the ’90s and early 2000s served to support his portrayal of a cultural and commercial ‘age of nonfiction’: ‘There is nothing quaint or marginal about works of literary journalism like Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone, Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action, and Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation – all of which have been enormous bestsellers’ (2005: xxx). However, a print resurgence of literary journalism which the New New Journalists had appeared to be spearheading was abruptly curtailed in the 2000s owing to media organisations rapidly shifting to converged newsrooms with reduced staff. As Jacobson, Marino and Gutsche Jr point out in ‘The Digital Animation of Literary Journalism’ (2015), the ‘2000s’ brief literary journalism movement was perhaps marked by the discontinuation in 2010 of Harvard’s Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, which had once hosted winners of Pulitzers and others considered the prized 129

Jaron Murphy

literary journalists of the times’ (2015: 3–4). Amid such challenges, it was recognised that literary journalism needed to adapt. In ‘The Evolutionary Future of American and International Literary Journalism’ (2011), Sims affirmed the continuing importance of literary journalism but wondered ‘how – and where – it’s going to survive’ (2011: 85). A striking aspect of Sims’s essay, if we recall Kerrane and Yagoda’s description of an innovative print tradition, is his faith in the prospect of the evolution of literary journalism in the digital age based on its successful track record of innovation in print. ‘History is on our side’, he declared (2011: 85). Among the turning points in the American context, where the craft was advanced by a few vanguard writers, he highlighted ‘the rise of mass circulation urban newspapers in the 1890s’; ‘reporting on World War I’; ‘the traveling of expatriates in Europe after the war’; ‘writing about the Great Depression of the 1930s … and the documentary photography of that era’; and ‘the New Journalism of the 1960s’. Those innovators, he pointed out, were never a majority in journalism. In comparison to ‘the meat-and-potatoes dinner of standard objective journalism’ which held sway as the dominant form by the 1920s, literary journalism had ‘always been nothing more than a salad or dessert’ (85). Yet, as he proceeded to highlight, reviewing American journalism ‘of the past century or more – journalism that remains informative and viable and influential on the world stage – we discover that the leading texts were literary journalism’ (89). A New York University study which compiled a list of the top 100 texts of twentieth-century American journalism across all main forms (including standard journalism and investigative reporting) found ‘at least forty-one were works of literary journalism’ (89), among them a range of the New Journalism celebrated by Wolfe. Sims understandably trumpeted: ‘On this list of the twentieth century’s best, literary journalism was the main course rather than a side dish’ (90). In this light, Sims was optimistic. He sensed that ‘we are at another turning point, at least in American literary journalism, which … will likely affect the practice of literary journalism throughout the world’ (2011: 85–86). In his view, the time was favourable for innovation. He argued that the form flourished on new beginnings and at the margins of the marketplace, and therefore the time could be right for it to successfully transition to new media and markets outside North America (87–88). While writing books was still the aspiration for literary journalists (87), the journalism industry viewed the Internet as a transformative medium (88) and there were endless opportunities for creative growth through experimentation (89). The bigger challenge, Sims believed, would be formulating an economic model for literary journalism on the Internet (88) following the promising release of large-screen portable reading devices like Amazon’s Kindle in 2007 and Apple’s iPad in 2010. Although, as we have seen, the lengthy online version of ‘Black Hawk Down’ had been tremendously popular with readers in 1997, scholars have also pointed to notoriously short attention spans (Dowling 2020: 529) among audiences on the early web. In this vein, Sims identified online reader engagement as a problem that would need to be overcome if literary journalism’s evolution was to continue: It may come to pass that we will figure out how to read long pieces of literary journalism on the computer screen. Right now, we don’t. People typically won’t read anything longer than three computer screens on the Web, and it really should be only one screen in length … In the future – who can predict? – we might find a way to read literary journalism on the Web…. (2011: 88) 130

The Evolution of Literary Journalism in the Digital Age

Soon enough, however, proof of online storytelling innovation – indeed, evolution – was to materialise; and mounting research evidence would also soon allay the concern that readers’ attention spans were not up to the task of reading lengthy literary journalism online. In December 2012, ‘Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek’ by John Branch was published by The New York Times and quickly became widely regarded as having set a new benchmark for digital longform design. The harrowing six-part story, about a group of skiers who got caught in an avalanche on a mountain pass through the Cascade Mountains of Washington in February 2012, attracted around 3.5 million views and won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. Similarly, bearing the online version of ‘Black Hawk Down’ in mind, readers can access ‘Snow Fall’ on the NYT site (see Branch 2012 for the URL) to directly appreciate, in comparison, just how much more visually impactful it is and, fulfilling Royal and Tankard Jr’s prediction, how seamlessly the multimedia components have been integrated into an easy-to-navigate, flowing and highly effective narrative. However, the online version of ‘Black Hawk Down’ has not been completely overshadowed. It should also strike the reader how ‘Snow Fall’ is reminiscent, for instance, of the original effort to provide forensic detail and embed audio-visuals in sync with the narrative progression. Unquestionably, though, ‘Snow Fall’ has the ‘wow’ factor in its stunning combination of text and audio-visual elements on a grand scale. This includes the soaring aerial shots and mapping of mountainscapes as well as the contrast between the peaceful banner scene of snow falling and the computer-generated simulation of the avalanche, along with parallax scrolling and smooth transitions within single pages to keep readers immersed in a moving – in more ways than one – reading experience. Little wonder, then, that the question ‘Can we “Snow Fall” this?’ rapidly entered journalistic parlance and that many stories similarly enhanced through multimedia integration have since appeared. Jacobson, Marino and Gutsche Jr, in their content analysis of 50 longform packages (including ‘Snow Fall’) across four countries (the US, the UK, Australia and Canada) between August 2012 and December 2013, found that a ‘new wave’ of literary journalism had clearly emerged which was characterised by implementing literary techniques through multiple media and represented a portal to linear storytelling in the hypertextual environment of the web (2015: 1). Drawing a parallel with the New Journalism, the researchers argued that ‘just as the literary journalists of the 1960s attempted to write the nonfiction equivalent of the great American novel, journalists of the 2010s are using digital tools to animate literary journalism techniques’ (2015: 1). Underlining Wolfe’s continuing relevance to the theory and practice of literary journalism in the digital age, their explanation of the coding for their content analysis explicitly referred to the New Journalism in relation to core elements of literary journalism such as ‘Scene’ and ‘Dialogue’, with ‘point of view’ (6) also among the elements coded. Tellingly, it was found that literary techniques appeared throughout the packages’ multiple means of delivering narrative structures to immerse the reader in the story and that packages’ literary elements could ‘be identified as operating within Wolfe’s four devices of literary journalism’ (10). The success of ‘Snow Fall’, and the resultant proliferation of ‘Snow Falled’ stories, confirmed there was, indeed, a large online readership or market for digital longform nonfiction produced in this innovative manner. Further reassuring data on reader engagement was presented by Boynton in his keynote address in 2013 for the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies (IALJS) where his continued projection of an evolutionary trajectory was apparent in the title, ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Nonfiction: Teaching Literary Reportage in the Twenty-first Century’. 131

Jaron Murphy

Although he did not explicitly apply the term ‘New New Journalism’, the successful transition of New New Journalists to the online environment was evident in his provision of data in relation to Jon Krakauer and Martin Lewis. The former’s Three Cups of Deceit was the first release, famously selling more than ‘200,000 copies, with the first 90,000 given away for free’ (2013: 130), by digital publisher Byliner which had collaborated with the NYT on ‘Snow Fall’. The latter was among the writers on aggregator Longform, which launched in the same month Apple released the iPad (April 2010), whose reputations were a key predictor of attracting higher numbers of readers (131). However, it was in Boynton’s quite detailed examination of Longform’s data, encompassing the website and mobile app, that the matter of reader engagement online came most sharply into focus. Boynton discovered the website averaged 400,000 unique visitors per month and the mobile app had sold 35,000 copies, with the website posting four 2000-plusword stories each day, drawing from thousands of magazines and websites. Boynton also found that a strong majority of readers were engaging with longform stories online to completion. With nearly every story receiving at least 1000 reads and averaging 4000, Boynton reflected on how these long pieces required commitment and were not ‘the kinds of things you read while talking on the phone and pecking at your computer’ (2013: 130). He also learnt that certain times were being utilised for extended reading: usage was heaviest between 7pm and 2am, peaking at 9pm, and the number of visitors doubled during weekends. Strikingly, a full 65% of visitors finished every story they read (130). A few years later, in 2016, a Pew Research Center study of online reader behaviour confirmed that mobile users were consuming lengthy news content, and thus longform journalism ‘does have a place in today’s mobile-centric society’. In fact, despite the small screen space and multitasking often associated with cell phones, users’ total engaged time with articles 1000 words or longer averaged ‘about twice that of the engaged time with short-form stories’ (Mitchell et al. 2016). Such was the boom that, the same year, Allison Eck wrote a piece headlined ‘The Washington Post crosses a storytelling frontier with “A New Age of Walls”’ in which she explained that digital longform was ‘a relatively new species undergoing a gradual but fierce evolution – and everyone’s trying to figure out how it works’. Duly referring to ‘Snow Fall’, she highlighted several recent examples that had followed suit: Atavist’s ‘Love For My Enemies’ (see Augustin and Schenck 2014), The New York Times’s ‘Greenland is Melting Away’ (see Davenport et al. 2015), The Washington Post’s ‘The Waypoint’ (see Washington Post 2016) and, as her article title indicated, The Washington Post’s ‘A New Age of Walls’ (see Granados et al. 2016). The latter, she argued, had pushed ‘this species a step further, taking cues from audience behavior and using those lessons to the story’s advantage’ so that ‘even though the entire story is scrollable, its tempo varies depending on where you are in the story and how much time you take’ (Eck 2016). We are living, then, in what Dowling has called the ‘current golden age of digital literary journalism’ following its ‘brief but fierce evolution’ (2020: 529–30) inaugurated by ‘Snow Fall’ and which he has also likened to Boynton’s evolutionary projection of ‘supreme nonfiction’. Target audiences are more engaged than ever in the online environment through mobile devices, availing of the interactive elements, immersive qualities and shareability of digital longform. Clearly, as the parallax scrolling and smooth transitions within single pages in ‘Snow Fall’ illustrate, a hallmark of this golden age is the expert calibration of the reading experience to minimise distraction and drive focus on the central narrative. The emergence of a second wave of improved digital longform design is exemplified by the stories highlighted by Eck. The design approaches are leaner, uncluttered and careful to avoid jettisoning the 132

The Evolution of Literary Journalism in the Digital Age

reader elsewhere online via hyperlinks and supplemental elements in favour of interactive containment and navigability within these stories. They have proved effective at holding the attention, bolstering the autonomy and inducing the empathy of mobile audiences. The multimedia elements, such as photos, infographics, video and audio, are not merely extratextual ornamentation, displaying technological wizardry, but key parts of a concentrated narrative structure and therefore of a streamlined, meticulously co-ordinated online reading experience. Another hallmark, as these expertly calibrated stories also show, is their cinematic appeal. Superb audio-visuals abound – for example, the drone footage of the melting ice sheet in Greenland (Davenport et al. 2015) or the panning shots of laundry on a barbed-wire fence in the Idomeni refugee camp in Greece (Granados et al. 2016) – which reflects the fast-growing importance of film production techniques to literary journalism. In shifting towards the collaborative model of film production, the traditional professional identity of literary journalism as the work of a single bylined writer has been destabilised in recognition of key co-creators like screenwriters and directors (Dowling 2020: 539). According to Dowling, the contemporary approach to digital longform production is necessarily from the vantage point of both a literary artist and filmmaker. Storyboards, which were ‘formerly the building blocks of screenwriters and directors in cinema production’, have become ‘the bastion of mobile news producers’ (537–8). In the context of the convergence of print media and digital storytelling, film or video elements have been harnessed in service of what Hartsock has defined as literary journalism’s ‘distinctive narra-descriptive aesthetic, particularly its chronotopic capacity to transport the reader to a specific time and place’ (Dowling 2020: 530). Film or video elements have also been utilised to help the reader see the world from others’ perspectives, whether via journalistic interviews or by creatively seeking to immerse the reader through point of view. The ‘Snow Fall’ skier video is a prime example of the latter approach. As Dowling has described it, the skier’s ‘camera lens functions as his eyes’ so that the reader enters ‘both the scene and – in the most direct manner possible given this film technology – the skier’s subjectivity’. He adds: ‘Never before in literary journalism have we been able to enter into a figure’s subjectivity through this medium that enables such depth and intimacy. The emotion is overwhelming…’ (537). There is, however, a conundrum at the heart of literary journalism practice and scholarship in the digital age which relates to film and is yet to be expressly reckoned with. It was Wolfe who raised the thorny issue of cognition which he defined in terms of the unique and powerful relationship ‘between written language and the memory’ (1996 [1973]: 65). Speculating on creativity and offering a prediction of what would be discovered ‘about the powers of the written word’, he argued that print as opposed to film or theatre was ‘an indirect medium that does not so much “create” images or emotions as jog the reader’s memories’ and thus it had ‘some unique and rather marvellous advantages’ in absorbing the reader (63). Wolfe believed in the ‘Identikit principle’ whereby merely suggesting the outline of a face invited the reader to ‘fill in the rest’, stirring emotions and therefore powerful reader engagement (64). Returning to the four literary devices which, he posited, could ‘jog or trigger the memory in such a rich fashion’ (1996 [1973]: 64) – i.e. scene-by-scene construction, dialogue, point of view and the detailing of status life – he claimed the first two could be better handled on film than in print whereas the latter two worked much better in print than on film. ‘No film maker’, he argued, ‘has ever successfully brought the audience inside the mind or central nervous 133

Jaron Murphy

system of a character – something that even bad novelists are able to accomplish as a matter of routine’ (64). According to Wolfe, nothing that filmmakers had tried, including ‘making the camera the “eyes” of the protagonist’, had successfully put viewers ‘inside the skull of a character on film’. He was pessimistic that this could ever be achieved: ‘The first movie maker to deal successfully with point of view and status life will be the first giant in that field. Sad to say, the students of cognition may discover that technically and physiologically it is an impossible problem for film’ (65). Although Kerrane and Yagoda challenged Wolfe’s treatment of literary antecedents of the New Journalism as an ‘afterthought’, they evidently concurred with his stance on print versus film. Pointing out that third-person film documentaries emulated the stylistic exuberance and wide range of subject matter of literary journalism, and highlighting how both nonfiction film and print literary journalism offered the ‘double pleasure of true stories artfully told’, Kerrane concluded that the print journalist still enjoyed ‘one great advantage over the film-maker’: Despite continuous improvements in equipment – ever more lightweight and portable, with less need for special lighting – the camera’s presence subtly alters the very reality it would show. By contrast, the eye of the writer is an omnipresent lens, no more and no less intrusive than the mind behind it. The literary journalist enjoys greater freedom in researching a story and greater flexibility in telling it, often refocusing in an instant to take us beneath the surface and into the psyche, either a character’s or the writer’s own. (1998: 20) This perceived difference gives rise, in the digital age, to an as-yet unresolved tension concerning print versus online literary journalism, specifically about which (multi)media elements are best suited to achieving ‘cognitively’ the literary effect of realism. The issue of what might work best, for particular storytelling situations, therefore has potential ramifications for the wider field of literary media. Key questions to be debated are whether Wolfe has been proved wrong, in the digital age, about what he saw as the limitations of film; or whether print remains ‘cognitively’ more impactful than cinematic online storytelling; and whether there is cognitive dissonance or congruity in encountering both text and film within online storytelling. Multimedia journalism did not exist then so anachronism should be avoided; but insofar as multimedia elements can be combined, and although he did not explicitly challenge Wolfe’s print bias, Dowling appears to think such a bias is mistaken and outdated. ‘Far from profaning the textual sacrosanct bond between journalist and reader’, he wrote, ‘digital longform is now recognized among the world’s most acclaimed literary journalism’ (2020: 539). Even so, Dowling’s portrayal of a digital golden age gained impetus from the recent rejuvenation of the New Journalism online. For instance, under the subheading ‘Renewing the New Journalism Revolution Online’, Dowling argued that digital longform was ‘now hardly so arduous to consume in terms of the cognitive processing of multimedia and written text’. To support his stance, he added: ‘Certainly Michael Shapiro, founder of the digital magazine the Big Roundtable [an outgrowth of which has since appeared in the form of the Delacorte Review], saw the internet as no detriment to his audience’s attention span when he disclosed the platform’s “mission to renew the promise of the New Journalism that started and then

134

The Evolution of Literary Journalism in the Digital Age

sputtered a few decades ago, connecting techniques of great fiction with the discipline and thrill of serious reporting”’ (2020: 533). Dowling’s account, then, could not have been more relevant to Wolfe’s cognitive theory yet never tackled Wolfe head-on, as it were. Nor was Wolfe’s theory expressly addressed by Dowling and Vogan in an article which described digital longform as a ‘cognitive container’ (2015: 211) and also drew a parallel between the innovativeness of the New Journalism and digital longform as exemplified by ‘Snow Fall’. Given that Dowling’s account closed the ‘New Directions for Scholarly Inquiry’ section which concluded The Routledge Companion to American Literary Journalism (2020), contemporary literary journalism and literary media scholars could proceed directly and overtly towards a revaluation of Wolfe’s theory in the digital age. Two more factors could also serve as motivation for doing so. Firstly, print is far from dead and remains, in fact, a pinnacle to which literary prestige is firmly attached. Registering the prominence of print in the digital industry ‘as a method of brand franchising with literary audiences in mind’, Dowling explained that Grantland Quarterly was ‘an early entrant into the print literary journal market by way of its website run under the auspices of ESPN by Bill Simmons, who had a vested interest in revitalising literary journalism for sports through contemporary and classical pieces, including works by Hunter S. Thompson’ (2020: 538) – the Gonzo journalist who appeared in The New Journalism and has many poor imitators online (Marino 2018). New digital-to-print production models reflect how the aspirations of digital longform writers and editors have ‘gravitated towards book publishing’. Digital-to-print book examples include Shane Bauer’s ‘My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard’ (2016) and James Verini’s Love and Ruin: Tales of Obsession, Danger, and Heartbreak (2016) which resulted from a national award for feature writing and a contract with Norton – ‘a telling sign’, Dowling observed, ‘of the new recognition of the literary stature of digital longform’ (2020: 538). Notably, beyond the US context, the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Ukraine-born Belarusian literary journalist Svetlana Alexievich, a long-time print practitioner who appeared in Kerrane and Yagoda’s anthology. Secondly, Dowling also pointed to a 2016 report by Marino et al. on eye-tracking of millennials’ mobile longform interaction which found: (1) total fixation was relatively even between text and video; (2) there were greater levels of enjoyment of text and photos than videos which were considered too long and boring; (3) well-edited photos, followed closely by text, induced the most pleasure of all the multimedia elements; and (4) readers preferred autonomous navigation rather than locked-in progression (Dowling 2020: 537). Interestingly, one can draw from Dowling’s account a sense of ‘old-school’ page design elements of print journalism, like the combination of text and photos, working effectively online. Wolfe’s prioritisation of print (or text) therefore haunts such findings which, according to Dowling, affirmed Hiippala’s view that ‘longform prefers shallow formatted videos that function to establish the “cognitive container”’ and suggested that ‘autonomous navigability, a vestige of print reading, and crisp editing of video and photographs hold sway with readers’ (537). The overall picture that emerges of literary journalism in the digital age is of radical transformation online while remaining steeped, nevertheless, in long-established print tradition. What contemporary readers are encountering, fundamentally, is the perpetuation of innovative practice. This augurs well for the continued evolution of literary journalism – and indeed its contribution to the development, more broadly, of literary media – into the twenty-first century.

135

Jaron Murphy

References Augustin, L. and Schenck, N. 2014 [online]. ‘Love for My Enemies’, Atavist Magazine, Number 38. Available from: https://magazine.atavist.com/love-for-my-enemies/, accessed 18 October 2021. Bowden, M. 1997. ‘Blackhawk Down’ [online version], Philadelphia Inquirer. Available from: http:// inquirer.philly.com/packages/somalia/nov16/default16.asp, accessed 18 October 2021. Bowden, M. 2000. ‘Narrative Journalism Goes Multimedia’, Nieman Reports, Fall (15 September). Available from: https://niemanreports.org/articles/narrative-journalism-goes-multimedia/, accessed 18 October 2021. Boynton, R.S. 2005. The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft. New York: Vintage Books. Boynton, R.S. 2013. ‘Notes toward a Supreme Nonfiction: Teaching Literary Reportage in the Twentyfirst Century’, pp. 125–131. Literary Journalism Studies, Volume 5, Number 2, Fall. Branch, J. 2012. ‘Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek’, The New York Times [online], 20 December. Available from: https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/index.html#/?part=tunnel-creek, accessed 18 October 2021. Davenport, C., Haner, J., Buchanan, L. and Watkins, D. 2015 [online]. ‘Greenland is Melting Away’, The New York Times, 27 October. Available from: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/27/ world/greenland-is-melting-away.html, accessed 19 October 2021. Dowling, D.O. 2020. ‘Literary Journalism in the Digital Age’, pp. 529–542. In Dow, W. E. and Maguire, R.S. (eds), The Routledge Companion to American Literary Journalism, New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Eck, A. 2016 [online]. ‘The Washington Post crosses a storytelling frontier with “A New Age of Walls”’, Nieman Foundation, 20 December. Available from: https://niemanreports.org/stories/the-washingtonpost-crosses-a-storytelling-frontier-with-a-new-age-of-walls/, accessed 19 October 2021. Granados, S., Murphy, Z., Schaul, K. and Faiola, A. 2016 [online]. ‘A New Age of Walls’, The Washington Post, 12 October. Available from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/world/border-barriers/ global-illegal-immigration-prevention/, accessed 19 October 2021. Jacobson, S., Marino, J. and Gutsche Jr, R.E. 2015 [online]. ‘The digital animation of literary journalism’, Sage Journals. Available from: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1464884914568079, accessed 20 October 2021. Kerrane, K. and Yagoda, B. (eds). 1998. The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism. New York: Touchstone (Simon & Schuster). Marino, J. 2018. ‘The hijacking of “Gonzo”: in name only, Hunter S. Thompson’s style is everywhere on the internet’, pp. 285–299. In: Alexander, R. and Isager, C. (eds), Fear and Loathing Worldwide: Gonzo Journalism Beyond Hunter S. Thompson. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Mitchell, A., Stocking, G., and Matsa, K.E. 2016. ‘Long-Form Reading Shows Signs of Life in Our Mobile News World’, Pew Research Center, 5 May. Available from: https://www.pewresearch.org/ journalism/2016/05/05/long-form-reading-shows-signs-of-life-in-our-mobile-news-world/, accessed 20 October 2021. Royal, C. and Tankard Jr, J.W. 2004 [online]. ‘Literary Journalism Techniques Create Compelling Blackhawk Down Web Site’, Newspaper Research Journal, Volume 25, Number 4, Fall. Available from: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/073953290402500408, accessed 20 October 2021. Sims, N. 2011. ‘The Evolutionary Future of American and International Literary Journalism’, pp. 85– 91. In: Bak, J.S. and Reynolds, B. (eds), Literary Journalism Across the Globe: Journalistic Traditions and Transnational Influences. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Washington Post. 2016 [online]. ‘The Waypoint’, 27 January. Available from: https://www.washington post.com/graphics/world/lesbos/, accessed 19 October 2021. Wolfe, T. and Johnson, E.W. (eds). 1996 [1973]. The New Journalism. London: Picador.

136

10 THE LITERARY IN NARRATING DRAMATIC LIFE EXPERIENCE Mari Hatavara, Matti Hyvärinen and Jarmila Mildorf

Introduction Literature shapes the ways in which people express their selves and make sense of their lives in narrative form. As Brian McHale (2021: 135–140, 153) puts it, literature both maintains and innovates culture and reality and therefore provides models of and for the world. In this chapter, we use an oral history interview to study what medium-specific ways literature offers for making sense and communicating real events. We analyse how narrative voices are mixed and artistic allusions are used to make sense of and to communicate past experience in the interview. Our analysis demonstrates how narrative features characteristic of fictional literature also occur in everyday storytelling practices. Hatavara and Mildorf (2017) have coined the term ‘cross-fictionality’ as a framework to extend the narratological study of representing other minds outside of the realms of fiction. Studies so far have demonstrated the portrayal of vicarious experience through the mixing of discursive voices in such materials as oral history interviews, museum exhibitions and political journalism (Mildorf 2019; Hatavara and Mildorf 2017; Browse and Hatavara 2019). This chapter extends the analysis of cross-­fictional mind representations to also include intermedial allusions, where the ability to portray otherness in a literary way is enriched with shifts between media.

Life, Literature and Intermediality Literature is verbal art, and therefore the study of its affordances involves both the relation between written language and other media as well as the relation between art and the everyday. We understand boundaries between media and narrative environments to be porous but analytically relevant. The analysis in this chapter concentrates on the use of literary means to narrate a historical event in an oral history interview. Our main point of departure is that ‘fictional’ and ‘everyday’ means of storytelling are not categorically different. The first step in our analysis, therefore, is to locate overlapping forms of narration. A far more difficult issue is to argue for the direction of the influences between fiction and non-fiction. Mink (1987: 60), famously, maintains that ‘it seems truer to say that narrative qualities are transferred from art to life’. In this chapter, we resist the temptation to

137

DOI: 10.4324/9781003119739-13

Mari Hatavara et al.

determine any such causal-cum-temporal order between fictional and non-fictional, everyday ways of narration, and rather rely on the idea of continual cross-fertilisation and interdependence of these formats. In this vein, the oral history account we analyse can be understood not only in the historical contexts of the related events and of their telling but also in the context of journalistic and artistic representations from the same era by authors such as Norman Mailer, thereby invoking a larger cultural and artistic frame. The focus of our analysis is both on resources such as cross-fictional mind representation, and on the use of artistic works as explanatory frames and ideational backgrounds for relating one’s personal life course. More specifically, this chapter explores linguistic voices and intermedial references as occurrences of the literary in the oral history autobiographical interview. Our methodology rests on the specific feature of literature as a system of embedded discourses. As Yacobi (2000: 713–718) crystallises, literary fiction is a system of quotations both within a work as well as between several works. The text incorporates several voices of narrators and characters often quoting and describing other characters and the storyworld. Yacobi (2000: 713– 714) extends this embeddedness characteristic of fiction’s narrative levels by also including intertextual and intermedial references. For Yacobi (2000: 717), allusions to other art forms are crucial in bringing to the fore the embedded nature of fiction. This is because allusions to non-verbal art involve a change in code, which emphasises the differences between the two representations. If literature is a system of embedded discourses, we need to ask about the specificity of this characteristic feature. Linguist Tannen (1989, 98–133) considers all ‘direct quotations’ in oral dialogue indirect and, in this sense, fictional, since no quotation carries with it the original situation or speech plan. As she shows, quotes seldom reiterate the original wording, but are articulations of the teller. Therefore, quoting can be seen as a method of using fictionality in ordinary dialogue. In contrast, the communication theorist Cooren studies the use of quoted narrative voices in communication in terms of ventriloquation, defining the term as ‘our capacity to make other beings say or do things while we speak, write, or more generally, conduct ourselves’ and considers this capacity to be ‘one of the key elements of communication’ (2012, 4–5, italics original). Cooren seems to downplay, in comparison with Tannen, the active and creative role of the speaker, who uses possibly fictional quotes within his or her current speech. As we pointed out above, one further aim in this chapter is to consider the intermedial nature of literature on how this nexus bears on everyday storytelling. While some argue that the recent computational and social media changes in the media landscape have impacted on literature, its production and reception (see Roine 2019: 314; Thomas 2020: 1–2 and in passim.), others have foregrounded the special affordances and functions of literature (Wolf 2012: 70–80; Ryan 2012: 25–28, 52). Wolf (2012: 74) argues that language with its conceptual nature forms the basis for literature’s ability to contribute to general sense-making of experience and existence. Literature generates discursive means to portray the mind and its workings both externally and internally and thus provides an observable discourse of the mind (Hyvärinen 2019: 37, 44). It affords us with linguistic resources and story patterns which can be used as narrative resources employable in understanding and communicating personal experience as well as cultural and social meanings (Hatavara & Toikkanen 2019: 132–133, 144). It is particularly the fictional nature of literature that allows for and generates modes of representing other minds that are characteristic of fiction but not exclusively bound to the fictional realm, e.g. instances of free indirect or direct thought presentation (Hatavara & Mildorf 2017; Mildorf 2023). 138

The Literary in Narrating Dramatic Life Experience

Literary studies have developed methodologies to analyse literary minds at least since the study of the novel began (Lubbock 1921; Watt 1957; Hamburger 1957; Cohn 1978). Whereas earlier theories of literary minds emphasised the distinctive modes for literary fiction to represent minds (see Cohn 1978, 1999), more recent accounts have emphasised the orally transmitted, spontaneous conversational story as the prototypical case of narrative (Fludernik 1996: 13–15; cf. Herman 2011: 10). What is specific to literary minds, however, is that the reader encounters them as verbally portrayed in the text, not observable in those multiple other ways in which other people’s minds in everyday life may be inferred through visually perceived gestures or auditively heard tones of voices (see Hatavara 2013: 166). This does not mean that the analytical or interpretative procedures for approaching literary minds do not also include cognitive and rhetorical aspects, but that the analysis needs to start with the semiotic sign or verbal representation to avoid purely speculative readings (Hatavara & Toikkanen 2019: 135; McHale 1994: 60–65; Ryan 2010: 465–467). This emphasis on the literary also allows us to analyse the oral history interview as a transcribed text to locate the characteristically literary narrative means used in the telling of a story that is based on real events.

Chuck Ayers’ Artistic Oral History Interview The case study for this chapter is an interview with Chuck Ayers from the Kent State University May 4 Collection. The interview was chosen because of its abundant use of dialogue, thick descriptions and allusions to the arts. It illustrates nicely the way in which the literary intersects with non-fictional storytelling. The interview was conducted on 16 August 2007, and it focuses on the events of 4 May 1970, when National Guardsmen, after trying to disperse an anti-Vietnam War demonstration, shot four students dead, including two onlookers, and wounded several students. At first sight, the interview with Chuck Ayers is emphatically factual. It is framed as an oral history interview, indicating that the main interest is in the 4 May events at Kent State University. Chuck Ayers, a graphic artist, editorial cartoonist, journalist and university teacher and a student at the time, is interviewed in his role as eyewitness. Ayers recurrently uses the factualising expression ‘I remember’, to render his account credible and to position himself as a witness. As Norrick (2005) points out, ‘the negotiation of the oral history interview on the part of both the interviewer and the narrator as a search for dates and facts from the past creates an atmosphere conducive to talk about remembering and forgetfulness’ (20). Ayers also occasionally resorts to qualifying expressions such as ‘I believe’ or ‘I think’ to modify the degree of certainty he attaches to his account, accentuating its non-fictional quality. At the time of the shootings, Ayers was contributing to the Akron Beacon Journal as a cartoonist and went to the editorial office right after the event. Ayers was asked, as a graphic artist, to draw some pictures of the event. For a couple of days, he was interviewed repeatedly by journalists from different media: I was being interviewed over and over and over again, by reporters and editors: ‘What did you see here? What did you see there?’ So it may be one of the reasons why I’ve memorized so much of this; I had to do it for a couple of days. I recall it was just getting to me. Ayers’ comment suggests how multiple retellings of personal experiences can help a core narrative to crystallise over time, while each retelling, of course, needs to be considered in the context of the current or actual storytelling situation. Ayers had a small camera along with 139

Mari Hatavara et al.

him that day and he took photos of the approaching Guard troops, thereby also having a means to record his own whereabouts. The fact that Ayers already was a visual artist at the time cannot escape the reader’s attention, considering how vividly visual the account is (as we show below). Yet the details do not stop with views and locations, since the portrayal of voices and smells equally enliven the story throughout. Ayers’ account corresponds very closely to what biographical researchers have captured with the concept of thick description. According to Denzin, A thick description […] presents detail, context, emotion, and the webs of social relationships that join persons to one another. […] It inserts history into experience. […] In thick description, the voices, feelings, actions, and meanings of interacting individuals are heard. (Denzin 1989: 83, italics added) Possibly Denzin exaggerates the prevalence of such thick descriptions (versus various kinds of glosses) in ordinary oral history storytelling, yet this only accentuates their relevance on the occasions they do happen and the multiplicity of voices in the portrayed events they carry. In narratology, the issue has been approached in terms of the contrast between summary (telling) and scenic narrative (Löschnigg 2005: 576). On the surface, the extensive and prolonged use of scenic narratives seems to be a genre-defining feature but the rough distinction between literary and conversational (or non-fiction) stories on these grounds alone remains inadequate. News stories, ordinary conversational storytelling or Facebook updates (Page 2010) can be said to focus more on the reporting of recent events and on eventfulness than on scenic, thickly descriptive narratives. However, conversational stories that foreground personal experience may also and often do contain aspects of thick description. An oral history narrative about a nationally, personally and politically exceptional event may, in fact, be a prime site for scenic narratives. So, the very term ‘everyday narrative’ becomes, in this context, exceedingly problematic. Ayers’ account incorporates an unmistakable moral and political mission to bear witness to and recount the events accurately. He expresses his disappointment with the official cover-up and accusations against the protesters. Nevertheless, he does not hide the preceding burning of the ROTC1 building and his thoughts about it; he even remembers and recounts the smell. He positions himself as a bystander – he was not, most of the time, among the protesters – and as a student who shared the anti-Vietnam War attitudes of the time, and who had previously participated in the infamous ‘conscription lottery’ and knew of the fear of and hate towards the approaching conscription. However, he does not content himself with being passive, but rather emphasises his background as a journalist and his commitment to go exploring and witnessing events he heard rumours about, whether this turned out to be reasonable or not with hindsight. As a result, his interview is highly informative, rich in detail, passionate but not openly partisan, and as such an excellent oral history account. This is the backdrop against which we seek to show how the means of fictionality and fictional storytelling intermingle with means of everyday storytelling.

Storying Vicarious Experience and Discursive Mixes Ayers is particularly inclined to incorporate past voices and dialogues in his interview. As Cooren points out, the relationship between the ventriloquist and the dummy is not stable but 140

The Literary in Narrating Dramatic Life Experience

oscillating. Therefore, if ‘I ventriloquize a language or an accent, it is also this language or accent that ventriloquizes me. If I invoke a policy or a principle, it is also (my attachment to) this policy or principle that enjoins me to act in a specific way’ (Cooren 2012: 6). Voicing other people, institutions and principles thus performs important communicative and constitutive functions in conversational and life story narratives. This quoting or ventriloquising does not need to stop with the real past voices of a particular time; instead it has the full capacity to bring in artistic and fictional influences as well. When Ayers is talking about events prior to the shooting incident he includes the presumed feelings of the guards, who would later take up arms against the demonstrators. This portrayal of the guards’ minds mixes the points of view of several agents – Ayers and the guards – and many time points, as Ayers explains the guards’ anger at the moment through information he learned only later. [He said,] ‘I don’t care who you are, you can’t walk here.’ And they were very angry, and with some reason. One of the guys I worked with at the Beacon Journal was in the National Guard at the time. He had been on campus that day. I didn’t know it at the time, but he had been called up a few days earlier for that Teamster strike; and working at the newspaper, I was hearing some of the inside stories – that there was shooting at these truck convoys that were being escorted by National Guard from overpasses. So these guys had already been in a very awful situation. They were probably fearing for their lives working on the Teamster strike, and then they’re pulled away from that and they’re on a college campus where they’re the same age as everybody that’s there, but they’re the guys in the uniforms with the guns and it’s their job to yell at people, keep them from going here and going there. So I thought, Okay, okay. This excerpt portrays two points of time in Ayers’ past: the first two sentences as well as the last sentence tell of the events during the days leading up to the shooting incident. In between those sentences, Ayers offers possible reasons for the guards’ anger at that point of time, based on something he learned days later. The embedded explanation for the guards’ feelings contains Ayers’ knowledge, which he acquired later. From his retrospective position as the teller, Ayers may not only use hindsight to interpret the events from a later point of time, but also to juxtapose this explanation textually with the temporal sequence of the story’s events to serve the purpose of explaining them to the interviewer. In the passage conveying the information acquired later, Ayers states that the guards had already been in a situation where he assumes they had feared for their lives. After describing that, Ayers partially assumes the voice of the guards in the repeated clauses starting with ‘they’re’. These sentences present the guards as very self-conscious of the situation where they are ‘on a college campus’ among young people their own age, but in a role where they stand out in their uniforms and are made to give orders and to control others. The form used comes close to free indirect discourse, where the voice of the narrator and that of a person portrayed are mixed, typically in a way where deictic markers follow the character’s discourse but the personal pronouns and verb tenses follow the narrator’s discourse (Fludernik 1993; McHale 1978: 251, 269–270; Tammi 2006: 160–163). According to Tannen (1989), the voices are always mixed, and no discourse is direct in everyday narration, even though it may be presented as direct speech. In Ayers’ story the personal pronouns betray his narrating voice (the guards are ‘they’), but the verb tenses point to the characters’ discourse (‘are’). This highlights the guards’ point of view within the discursive mix, where the voices of Ayers and the 141

Mari Hatavara et al.

appropriated voice of the guards are conflated. The form implies collective thoughts in the minds of the guards, along the lines of *we’re the guys in the uniforms with the guns and it’s our job to yell at people, keep them from going here and going there*. Discursive mixes like this one accentuate the embeddedness of minds and voices and make emphatic or ironic relations between the two voices possible (Cohn 1978: 116–117). In this case, Ayers is sympathetically assuming the voice and hence also the position of the guards, expressing his understanding for their troubled position. What is more, free indirect discourse does not need to be understood in terms of some original speech or thought of a character modified in the narrator’s voice, but it may also portray preverbal states of mind (Cohn 1978: 103; McHale 1978: 277). In the above case, the discursive mix is Ayers’ appropriation of what was in the guards’ mind on the day he is portraying. It is unclear, though, if Ayers’ conclusion already took place a little after the incident or is produced at the time of the interview. In either case, the embedded section includes information that was only made known at a later point in time and thus involves assuming the stance of others. Still, the narrative logic in Ayers’ presentation flows uninterruptedly through the whole excerpt. From his narrative position at the time of the interview, Ayers can mix both points of time and intentions of several people to explain his own thought and action at the end of the events portrayed (‘So I thought, Okay, okay.’), his giving in to the demands that seemed excessive at the time when they were made. At the same time, the repeated ‘Okay, okay’ once again underlines his understanding and empathy for the young soldiers’ seemingly rude behaviour. This kind of moving between several agents’ minds also at different points of time is characteristic of fiction and literary representation, but in this historical account it is used to represent a coherent narrative of past events and to give the interviewer a flavour of what that situation was like both for the narrator and the other ‘characters’ involved. It is also remarkable how careful Ayers is in his ‘source-monitoring’ (Zunshine 2006, 47–79) while representing other minds. He reports that he had a National Guard colleague in the Beacon Journal and he had heard ‘some of the inside stories’ about the Teamster strike and the emotional state of the Guardsmen.

Experiencing and Telling With/Through Art Besides mixing points of view and temporal layers, Ayers’ narrative of the events is at times dramatised with the use of present tense and deictic markers that anchor the narrative in the related situation. Ayers, who was a graphic design major at the time of the events, both took photographs and made drawings of the happenings. He also portrays how his reception of the events was affected by media representations at the time. An intermedial allusion to seeing recent events on television is used to explain how and when he realised the true nature of the events: But then they said, ‘We’ve got some footage here,’ and it was a TV shot from down on the Commons looking up over the hill to the Pagoda, and you could see the line of Guardsmen, and all of a sudden there’s the shooting. And it was the first time that I had heard the shots. And I just shivered. I just didn’t realize, even until that point, even with being at the newspaper and talking to the photographers that were standing in the middle of the Guardsmen as they were shooting, quite how long it lasted and what it sounded like. So finally the day ended. I went to bed thinking, I’d better get some sleep because I’m going in early in the morning again, and I’ll be working on this some more with them. 142

The Literary in Narrating Dramatic Life Experience

Ayers himself was not present at the shooting incident but describes perceiving the events for the first time in TV footage. Medially, this description is a verbal account of an audio-visual presentation. Ayers’ portrayal begins with an observation on the television medium, conveying the angle from which the camera was filming. After that, his portrayal moves to medial sensations, e.g. that the shooting ‘is’ there for Ayers to see and hear. The dramatic present tense used at the moment of telling – ‘there’s the shooting’ – highlights Ayers’ witnessing of the events as they take place even if that technically only happened through video footage at a later point of time. The ‘nowness’ of television news (Fiske 1987, 281) is reproduced in Ayers’ present-tense narration. This is amplified by Ayers emphasising that it was the first time he heard the shots, as well as by his use of simple past instead of past perfect in the description of his thoughts and understanding at the time: ‘I just didn’t realize’. Even though Ayers says he did not realise things ‘even until that point’, the verb tense used suggests that the realisation did not occur at that point either. Ayers’ original feeling of hearing the shots is further emphasised through his detailed description of the duration and quality of the sound heard, thus enlivening it at the time of the telling. This verbal description of TV footage presenting the event can be analysed as an ekphrasis of an audio-visual, not solely visual presentation. Although long defined as a verbal representation of a visual representation and originally understood mostly as poetry describing a painting (Heffernan 1993; Mitchell 1994: 152), ekphrasis has been extended to mean ‘the verbal representation of a real or fictitious text composed in a non-verbal sign-system’ (Clüver 1997: 26; cf. Toikkanen 2020: 72–73). Ekphrasis highlights the ability of verbal art to portray temporality and dynamic happenings and incorporates spatial aspects of the visual (cf. Mitchell 1994: 160–161; Yacobi 1995, 617−622). The portrayal of what Ayers witnessed in the TV footage narratively moves between several points of time, alludes to several senses and incorporates the representational medium of TV within its representation. This allows Ayers to show in the current retelling of the events how he observed things from his witnessing position back then and to dramatise these events and their effects on observers at the time. The effects of witnessing some of the events is also thematised in a reference to the lyrics of a song Ayers happened to hear on his car radio while driving home. And this is nothing earth-shaking, but it’s just one of those little things I remember. I’m driving down 261 into Tallmadge, which is the way I always went, through Tallmadge Circle then down into downtown Akron. And part-way there, I had the radio on because I was listening to some of the news reports, and [they] said, ‘Okay, we’ll be right back after some music and we’ll tell you some more about what’s going on on the campus at Kent State’. And it was that song, ‘Everything is Beautiful,’ by Ray Stevens. And I’d just come off campus with everything that I had seen. I saw a dead student in the street, I saw other people being carted away into ambulances, I saw the blood and the gore, and I’m sitting in the car hearing this song [singing], ‘Everything is beautiful….’ [I thought], God, what a joke. I’ve never forgotten that image and that contrast of what I was feeling and what that song was saying at the time. Ayers introduces his story by downplaying its importance but then still goes on to recount his feelings. The story begins in the present tense, describing Ayers carrying on in a routine manner, driving home in his car. The many concrete details can be interpreted as building a reality effect as described by Barthes (1989 [1969]: 147–148): history proper does not need details or notation, since it is the real, but realistic literature produces referential illusion of the real 143

Mari Hatavara et al.

with concrete detail. Fludernik (1996: 160) includes spatio-temporal coordinates such as street names in this reality effect. Norrick (2020) also discusses the significance of seemingly unimportant details in conversational storytelling to support tellers’ storytelling rights. After giving information on his situation, Ayers describes how the radio host announced that they would soon inform the audience further about the events at Kent State University but would first play a song. In the story, the cheerful lyrics make Ayers remember what he had just witnessed. Ayers starts with past perfect (‘everything I had seen’) and moves closer to reporting something in the past simple, repeating emphatically what he saw (‘I saw’ three times, as if building a rhyme), thus emphasising his evaluation (Tannen 1993: 42) before moving back to present tense, thereby immersing himself in his experience of listening to the song in his car (‘I’m sitting in the car hearing this song’). Ayers himself describes the feeling of contrast he had. He both adds to the ‘reality’ of his portrayal by inserting the rather secondary details about the road he was taking, and later reflects on the cognitive durability and thus, by implication, credibility of the image (‘I’ve never forgotten that image’). The description Ayers gives of the situation juxtaposes the song lyrics with his description of what he saw, including some graphic elements (‘the blood and the gore’). He contrasts references to two instances, the song lyrics and the images of dead and wounded people. As Yacobi (1997: 35) has argued, ekphrasis does not require that the non-verbal representation be verbally represented in its entirety, but instances that represent even just a single element in another work constitute ekphrasis. This is particularly accurate in the case of the song lyrics, where Ayers’ audience may augment the reference with their own knowledge of the lyrics. By the time of the interview, images and reports from the shooting incident were also available. With the dramatic present tense describing himself in the car experiencing the two representations – lyrics he was hearing and images he had just seen – Ayers invites his audience to share his feelings of alienation and absurdity on hearing this song after what had happened on campus.

Art Representing Art and Reality Ayers himself reflects on the importance of artistic representations of events when he describes his own drawings of the event: So I got to work on it and did a series of drawings. And they’re important to me in two respects. Not that it’s some honor that you race to be the first artist to draw something about a tragedy, but I’m sure these were the first drawings, at least that would have been published, of any type of artwork, any type of an artistic impression, of May 4th that was published. And just the fact that I was able to help, was able to contribute that to the community, is important. Plus the fact that when I drew these I had not seen a single photograph from May 4th yet. This thematises the importance of presentations of events as well as the semiotic chains that several subsequent representations of the same events constitute. He also describes a scene and some events by including a reference to a photograph. Whether the following is more a description of what he recollects from the happenings or from his photos is unclear. And as I’m standing there, obviously the students are moving off over the hill to my right, the Guard is coming up the hill from my left. And a guy in an olive drab army 144

The Literary in Narrating Dramatic Life Experience

jacket, kind of long hair, I think he had a beard, and a suitca–er, a briefcase in his hand, started yelling at the Guardsmen as they were walking by. I have no idea what he was yelling, it was pretty loud at that time. But I saw at least two Guardsmen confront him. I think it’s in one of the photos. And they’re standing there facing him. One of the Guardsmen has this club-like thing in his hand. It looks like one of these wiffle golf clubs, with a big plastic head on the golf clubs, but this thing looks like it’s wood or something. It’s got a big head on it. And this guy continued to yell at them, and through the gas masks I could hear this muffled yelling back at the guy. And I’m only a few feet away from them, just behind this. With ekphrasis, pictorial presentations gain a temporal dynamic and may become part of the action. Broadly understood, ekphrasis refers not only to a verbal representation of a non-­ verbal representation but also to descriptions aimed at producing a vivid visual image of a person or a place (Mitchell 1994: 153–154). This way of understanding ekphrasis dilutes its function as a change in code – usually from visual to verbal – but it also enables one to interpret a description like this similarly to an instance of ekphrasis. Here it is important to note Yacobi’s (2000: 712–713, 720) emphasis on the ekphrastic speaker, who portrays the visual object in line with his or her perceptions and rhetorical purposes. In this description, Ayers again moves between tenses using a dramatic present at times. This description is limited to Ayers’ perceptions, though, as he is unable to know or understand why the others were yelling and what they were about to do next. This not knowing but keenly observing in the present tense emphasises Ayers’ role as a witness at the moment the events took place. At the same time, the moment is dramatised and brought closer to the interviewer by means of the historical present. Ayers also uses several references to spatial positioning with him in the middle of the action, very close to one of the incidents that added to the tension between the students and the guards. Ayers himself does not draw this conclusion on the succession of the events, but this vivid spatial description foreshadows the unravelling of the violence to come. The photograph of what Ayers calls ‘confrontation’ reminds him of the events having really taken place. Still, we can also see here how an actual memory of an event blends with a ‘memory’ captured in pictures and how, over the course of time, these two forms of remembering may become indistinguishable.

Conclusions Our analysis of Chuck Ayers’ oral history interview reveals several narrative means that have previously been ascribed to literary and fictional genres. As a result, this oral history account seems to be situated between conversational, everyday narratives and literary genres. A clear distinction between literary and everyday narration or between fiction and nonfiction therefore appears unsatisfactory and invites a closer, genre-sensitive examination. The interviewee uses a rich array of narrative modes characteristic of the literary and the fictional, such as presenting other minds, mixing discursive voices and including intermedial references to arts as well as frequent shifts in tense and person to dramatise some of the anecdotes and to move between experiencing and telling. Arguably, his interest in the pictorial may stem from his work as a graphic artist. Still, it is not uncommon even for non-artistic people to refer to cultural artefacts such as films, novels or music, for example, when telling others about their life experiences. However, given the nature of an oral history interview, the function of which is to offer an ‘accurate’ account of what happened in the past, one can also 145

Mari Hatavara et al.

find a strong tendency on the part of the narrator to create a ‘credible’ story. Compared to the storyworlds created in fiction, those created in oral history narratives can be said to have a different ontological status as they are generally understood to refer to the actual world out there. However, when it comes to the means by which those storyworlds are rendered, the verisimilitude achieved in oral history stories is no longer so different from what we find in realist fiction, for example. The example has shown how storytellers do not solely resort to narrative means of making sense of the past that resemble narrative techniques in fictional storytelling. They also use literature and art as intermedial and intertextual reference points in their stories to verbalise their own experiences. Art, life and literature thus do not constitute separate realms; they rather merge and mutually influence one another in ways that require further exploration.

Citation to the material ‘Chuck Ayers Oral History’, Kent State University Libraries. Special Collections and Archives, accessed November 23, 2020, https://omeka.library.kent.edu/special-collections/items/show/ 1579.

Note 1 ROTC – Reserve Officers’ Training Corps – is a group of college- and university-based officer training programs for training commissioned officers of the army. During the Vietnam War, its presence within the campuses made it a permanent target of protests.

References Barthes, R. (1989 [1969]) The Reality Effect, in F. Wahl (ed.) The Rustle of Language, translated by Richard Howard, pp. 141–148, Berkeley: University of California Press. Browse, S. & Hatavara, M. (2019) I Can Tell the Difference between Fiction and Reality. CrossFictionality and Mind-Style in Political Rhetoric, Narrative Inquiry 29 (2), 245–267. Clüver, C. (1997) Ekphrasis Reconsidered: On Verbal Representations of Non-Verbal Texts, in U.-B. Lagerroth, H. Lund & E. Hedling (eds.) Interart Poetics: Essays on the Interrelations of the Arts and Media, pp. 19–33, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Cohn, D. (1978) Transparent Minds, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cohn, D. (1999) The Distinction of Fiction, Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Cooren, F. (2012) Communication Theory at the Center: Ventriloquism and the Communicative Constitution of Reality, Journal of Communication 62, 1–20. Denzin, N.K. (1989) Interactive Interactionism, Newbury Park, London & New Delhi: Sage. Fiske, J. (1987) Television Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Fludernik, M. (1993) The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction. London: Routledge. Fludernik, M. (1996) Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, New York: Routledge. Hamburger, K. (1957) Die Logik der Dichtung, Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag. Hatavara, M. (2013) Making Sense in Autobiography, in M. Hyvärinen, M. Hatavara & L.-C. Hydén (eds.) The Travelling Concepts of Narrative, pp. 164–178, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hatavara, M. & Mildorf, J. (2017) Fictionality, Narrative Modes, and Vicarious Storytelling, Style 51 (3), 391–408. Hatavara, M. & Toikkanen, J. (2019) Sameness and Difference in Narrative Modes and Narrative Sense Making: The case of Ramsey Campbell’s ‘The Scar’, Frontiers of Narrative Studies 5 (1), 130–146. Heffernan, J.A.W. (1993) Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herman, D. (2011) Introduction, in D. Herman (ed.) The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English, pp. 1–40. Lincoln: Nebraska University Press.

146

The Literary in Narrating Dramatic Life Experience Hyvärinen, M. (2019) The Impossible Mind of Sociology, in O. Pyyhtinen (coord.) ‘Fictioning Social Theory: The Use of Fiction to Enrich, Inform, and Challenge the Theoretical Imagination’, Digithum 24, 36–47, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and Universidad de Antioquia. Lubbock, P. (1921) The Craft of Fiction, London: Jonathan Cape. Löschnigg, M. (2005) Summary and scene, in D. Herman, J. Manfred & M.-L. Ryan (eds.) Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, pp. 576–577, London: Routledge. Mildorf, J. (2019) Narratives of Vicarious Experience in Oral History Interviews with Craft Artists, Journal of Pragmatics 152, 103–112. Mildorf, J. (2023). Life Storying in Oral History: Fictional Contamination and Literary Complexity. Berlin: De Gruyter. Mink, L.O. (1987) Historical Understanding, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. (1994) Picture Theory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McHale, B. (1978) Free Indirect Discourse: A Survey of Recent Accounts, Poetics and Theory of Literature (3), 249–287. McHale, B. (1994) Whatever Happened to Descriptive Poetics? in M. Bal & I. E. Boer (eds.) The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural Analysis, pp. 56–65, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. McHale, B. (2021) Models and Thought Experiments, in J. Alber, R. Andersen Kraglund, S. Iversen, L. Brix Jacobsen, C. Mohring Reestorff & H. Skov Nielsen (eds.) Why Study Literature, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Norrick, N. (2005) Talking about Remembering and Forgetfulness in Oral History Interviews, The Oral History Review 32 (2), 1–20. Norrick, N. (2020) The Epistemics of Narrative Performance in Conversation, Narrative Inquiry 30 (2), 211–235. Page, R. (2010) Re-examining Narrativity: Small Stories in Status Updates, Text & Talk, 30(4), 423–444. doi: 10.1515/TEXT.2010.021 Roine, H.-R. (2019) Computational Media and the Core Concepts of Narrative Theory, Narrative 27 (3), 313–331. Ryan, M.-L. (2010) Narratology and Cognitive Science: A Problematic Relation, Style 44 (4), 469–495. Ryan, M.-L. (2012) Meaning as Spectacle: Verbal Art in the Digital Age, in J. Alber, R. Andersen Kraglund, S. Iversen, L. Brix Jacobsen, C. Mohring Reestorff & H. Skov Nielsen (eds.) Why Study Literature, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Tammi, P. (2006) Exploring terra incognita, in P. Tammi & H. Tommola (eds) FREE Language INDIRECT Translation DISCOURSE Narratology. Linguistic, Translatological and LiteraryTheoretical Encounters. Tampere Studies in Language, Translation and Culture A 2, pp. 159–173, Tampere: Tampere University Press. Tannen, D. (1989) Talking Voices. Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tannen, D. (1993) What’s in a Frame? Surface evidence for underlying expectations, in D. Tannen (ed.), Framing in Discourse, pp. 14–56, New York: Oxford University Press. Thomas, B. (2020) Literature and Social Media, London: Routledge. Toikkanen, J. (2020) Feeling the Unseen: Imagined Touch Perceptions in Paranormal Reality Television. The Senses and Society 15 (1), 70–84. Watt, I. (1957) The Rise of the Novel, London: Chatto & Windus. Wolf, W. (2012) A Defence of (the Study of) Literature. Or: Why (the Study of) Literature cannot be Replaced by Cultural Studies and Film (Studies), in J. Alber, R. Andersen Kraglund, S. Iversen, L. Brix Jacobsen, C. Mohring Reestorff & H. Skov Nielsen (eds.) Why Study Literature, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Yacobi, T. (1995) Pictorial Models and Narrative Ekphrasis, Poetics Today 16 (4), 599–649. Yacobi, T. (1997) Verbal Frames and Ekphrastic Figuration, in U.-B. Lagerroth, H. Lund & E. Hedling (eds.) Interart Poetics: Essays on the Interrelations of the Arts and Media, pp. 19–33, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Yacobi, T. (2000) Interart Narrative: (Un)reliability and Ekphrasis, Poetics Today 21 (4), 711–749. Zunshine, L. (2006) Why We Read Fiction. Theory of Mind and the Novel, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.

147

11 POETICITY AND PARODY The Literary Interview on Radio and Podcast Jarmila Mildorf

Defining the Literary Interview The literary interview, in which writers typically talk about their lives and literary works, is a subcategory of the journalistic life interview – more specifically, the personality interview (Hilliard 2015: 267) – and, within that, of the author interview, which may involve authors of any kind of published works. The literary interview can be presented to audiences in different media, for example, in print media such as magazines or books, on radio and television, in (video) blogs and in podcast form or live as part of literature readings. The main aim of a literary interview is to elucidate the work(s) of an author by having him- or herself reflect and comment on it. This topic is usually combined with human interest stories about the author’s life experiences. For writers, the literary interview can be one important way to build what Meizoz (2007) called their ‘postures’, that is, public images of themselves that, ideally, evoke interest and enhance their popularity (see also Roach 2018: 5). In fact, requests for interviews already mark an author’s standing in the literary world (Hansen 1998: 462). Audiences appreciate literary interviews as means of learning from the authors themselves about their methods and motivations, the sources for their ideas and their literary lives more generally, as Roach (2020) shows in her study of the role and function of author interviews based on surveys of reader and reviewer comments. The etymology of the word ‘interview’ from French ‘entrevue’, the verbal noun derived from ‘s’entrevoir’, meaning to see each other (Walzer 2020: 211), already foregrounds the importance of personal contact and immediacy. In a sense, literary interviews create ‘a paradoxical dream of face-to-face communication for a mass mediated culture’ (Roach 2020: 336). Literary interviews are situated at the interface of authors’ life stories, literary criticism, journalistic interview practices and the literary market, and they cross media and genre boundaries. They are therefore often considered a ‘hybrid’ textual genre (Masschelein et al. 2014; Yanoshevsky 2014: 2). The literary interview was long neglected and considered a ‘minor’ genre inferior to authors’ actual literary works (Hoffmann and Pabst 2016: 1). However, it crosses the boundaries between literary and non-literary texts not only because talk about literary texts is one of its integral elements but also because authors themselves sometimes playfully engage with this textual format and even fictionalise or parody it (see also Martens and Meurée 2015).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003119739-14 148

Poeticity and Parody

In such instances, the term ‘literary’ assumes a double meaning as it relates both to the specific kind of interview, namely one conducted with authors, as well as its rendition in literary, that is, fictionalised, form. Examples of fictional literary interviews are Cynthia Ozick’s (2006) imaginary interview with Henry James, conducted by an unnamed and outspoken feminist, or the tongue-in-cheek fictionalised self-interview – a further subset of the literary interview – by Joyce Carol Oates (2013), which appeared in the Washington Post. Philip Roth included parts of an interview he conducted with Aharon Appelfeld (Roth 2001: 18–39) in his novel Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993: 112–113), thus blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. Even ‘serious’ or non-fictional literary interviews can be said to assume literary qualities because they foreground authors’ voices and speech patterns and often display linguistic idiosyncrasies similar to those found in these authors’ writings. I will return to this point below. After a brief historical outline of the literary interview, I will reflect on the literariness of this hybrid textual genre by first looking at the artfulness of non-fictional literary interviews and then by exploring the playfulness of parodies of the genre. My examples are drawn from radio, a magazine and the internet. They include radio interviews with Gertrude Stein and Gore Vidal, fictional interviews by Edmund Wilson and Vidal published in the New York Review of Books, and a video podcast in which contemporary English author Will Self interviews himself to talk about his novel Shark and about his ‘obscure’ writing style. I analyse these examples in more detail to illustrate how rhetorical density and vocal expressivity give the literary interview a degree of poeticity, and how it comes even closer to the literary through humour and meta-referentiality.

Historical Outline As with other textual genres, it is difficult to trace the literary interview back to a precise historical moment. The starting point is hard to determine not least because the genre builds on and echoes other dialogical traditions that go far back in time. Given that in an interview someone seeks a conversation with someone else for a specific purpose such as gaining knowledge or insight, Plato’s Socratic dialogues may already be considered interviews of sorts. Philosophical dialogues and disputation literature have had a long tradition not only in the Western world (Jiménez and Mittermayer 2020), and the elicitation of information through interviews already goes back to population censuses in Egypt and elsewhere (Fontana and Prokos 2007: 13). In Germany, Martin Luther’s table talk – recorded from memory by his friends and dinner guests – can be considered a more immediate predecessor of the literary interview (Hansen 1998: 466). The conversations that German author Wolfgang von Goethe had with Johann Peter Eckermann and which the latter subsequently published in book form (Eckermann 1986 [1836]) are generally referred to as one early example in scholarly work on the genre (Masschelein et al. 2014: 6). Hansen (1998: 470) names German author and journalist Karl Gutzkow as the first person to have conducted literary interviews proper. Gutzkow travelled to Paris in 1842 and interviewed, among other authors, Alfred de Vigny and George Sand. In England, Sir James Mackintosh’s exceptional conversational skills were reported and commented on in London’s Gentleman’s Magazine (Allibone 1870: 1185–1186). James Boswell’s (1791) famous biography of Samuel Johnson already contained Johnson’s conversations with other ‘eminent persons’, as is stated in the full title of the book. According to this title, one of the biography’s aims was also to offer a glimpse into ‘literature and literary men 149

Jarmila Mildorf

in Great-Britain’ at the time. These examples show that the positive valuation of polite and erudite conversation, which had already predominated in upper-class circles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Craveri 2006; Halsey and Slinn 2008), continued into the nineteenth, and was coupled with an interest in socially and culturally influential persons. At the same time, the Enlightenment’s focus on individual life experience and incisive historical events such as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, together with an expansion in print media and an increased circulation of texts, led to an explosion of life writing in the eighteenth century (Smith and Watson 2010: 115). However, it has to be noted that the practice of documenting one’s own or other people’s lives can already be traced back to the earliest literary manifestations and even to performances prior to literacy in Indigenous cultures (Smith and Watson 2010: 103). Against the background of this general cultural climate in the eighteenth century, early forms of the literary interview began to emerge mainly because this was also the time when a modern literary market developed. As Trilcke (2014: 109) points out, writers no longer merely wrote for patrons or a small coterie of friends; they did so increasingly for an unknown and potentially much larger audience. The demands of being able to financially subsist on one’s writing also meant that writers had to consider their readers and what public image of themselves was conveyed to them. This is arguably why, for example, German author Christoph Martin Wieland, who had come under attack from younger writers, wrote one of the first fictional literary interviews for his magazine Der Merkur in 1775. The interview is between himself and an unnamed clergyman, who allegedly came to visit and quizzed the author about his life, works and views in a lengthy conversation. Trilcke (2014: 122) argues that Wieland’s aim in writing this fictional interview was to create a more favourable image of himself by explaining his works and displaying his family life to a broad audience. The history of the literary interview is bound up with the development of different media and forms of dissemination over time. The beginnings of journalistic interviewing more generally are associated with the rise of newspapers, especially the boulevard press, in the early nineteenth century (Masschelein et al. 2014: 6). When radio started in the 1920s, the possibility to literally make people’s voices heard gave the interview new impetus, and the institution of special cultural channels and programmes secured literary interviews a regular spot on radio (Héron and Martens 2018) and later also on television, especially in talk shows (Bawer 1988). The arrival of the internet and social media has further continued to influence how literary interviews are disseminated to audiences, not least by publishing houses, who use the genre as one marketing strategy (Roach 2020).

The Artfulness of Literary Interviews In interviews, speech is dynamically and interactively distributed between two participants. These participants not only negotiate the respective topic of the interview, but also co-construct images of self and others. Unlike in everyday talk, conversation in interviews is slightly more constricted because it has a specific purpose and often follows a predetermined set of questions. Still, since literary interviews touch on writers’ poetics and help them convey ideas about their works as well as images of themselves, these speech situations are special and therefore also interesting objects for discourse analysis (Yanoshevsky 2014: 2). Authors’ voices and the fact that they themselves comment on their works lend literary interviews a heightened degree of perceived authenticity and authority (Walzer 2020: 210). At the same time, voice qualities, the prosody and rhythms of spoken language, and paraverbal features 150

Poeticity and Parody

such as sighing, laughter and so forth contribute significantly to the ‘texture’ of literary interviews and thus deserve closer attention (Mildorf 2017; see also Yanoshevsky 2016: 184). A good example is Gertrude Stein’s famous radio interview from 1934, where the author’s penchant for repetition and rhythm creates interview talk that is not unlike Stein’s writing. Looking at the transcript of this interview (Stein 1999 [1934]: 90–97), we can also see how the writer repeatedly slips into quoting her work – either because she was asked to read from a piece or because she herself wants to illustrate a text she is talking about with the interviewer – thus embedding her literary output into her interview conversation. For example, the interviewer asks her at some point to comment on a passage about pigeons in the grass from her play Four Saints in Three Acts (1934). Stein mentions a walk in the gardens of the Luxembourg in Paris as the source for this passage and, having explained that her observation of pigeons on the grass started the words in her head, she begins to recite those very words from this text. Afterwards, she explains through an extended simile how authors drain themselves of their emotions: ‘If a mother is full of her emotion toward a child in the bath the mother will talk and talk and talk until the emotion is over and that’s the way a writer is about an emotion’ (Stein 1999 [1934]: 96). A number of rhetorical and linguistic features give this sentence poetic qualities characteristic of Stein’s work: the repetition of ‘talk’, combined through the connector ‘and’ (polysyndeton); the threefold repetition of ‘emotion’ and the recurrence of ‘mother’ as an indefinite and then definite noun phrase; and the specificity of the comparison (‘emotion toward a child in the bath’, my emphasis), which creates a more concrete image in listeners’ minds. Unfortunately, there is no recording of the original interview, but snippets from it were re-recorded with Gertrude Stein and are made available as a sound file at the University of Pennsylvania’s sound archives.1 They give at least a flavour of how Stein could possibly have sounded in the interview and how she adopted a clearly oppositional stance in reaction to critical remarks made by the original interviewer (see also Schubert 2014), although it is noticeable from the speakers’ intonation contours and general manner of talking in the recording that both Stein and her surrogate interviewer back then must have read the words from a script rather than engaging in a spontaneous conversation. In this connection, it is important to remember that early radio interviews were commonly scripted (McDonald 2020), which predetermined the trajectory of the ‘conversation’ even more and gave interviewees the opportunity to think up their answers beforehand. However, even when interviewees use more spontaneous forms of talk, this talk can still have literary qualities because of the creative potential of everyday language. Linguists have long noted the fact that even conversational discourse can display a degree of creativity that is usually associated with literature (Carter 2004; Tannen 2007). Presumably, people whose bread-andbutter job is to work with language and who are in the habit of reflecting on how to word things are even more prone to using their language creatively in interviews. At least this is the impression one has when listening to literary interviews on radio and television. I want to illustrate this point by analysing excerpts from an interview American journalist Studs Terkel conducted with Gore Vidal.2

Studs Terkel in Conversation with Gore Vidal This interview was broadcast by WFMT radio in Chicago on 11 November 1961. As is typical for literary interviews, topics of discussion include not only Vidal’s writing, but also his personal life and the influences that turned him into a writer. After having briefly discussed 151

Jarmila Mildorf

Vidal’s career, both as a writer and a politician, Terkel turns the interview towards family storytelling by explicitly mentioning Vidal’s grandfather. In the excerpts below, which I transcribed using discourse-analytical conventions explained further in my analysis, Vidal relates anecdotes about his life with his grandfather and a moment in his grandfather’s earlier life. The time stamps mark the moments in the interview (in minutes) where these excerpts are taken from. Interview Transcript 1

T:

V:

T: V:

((09:26–10:37)) As you speak, Gore Vidal, I’m-, I know a great many listeners and I (.) am curious as to ↑what makes you the (.) thoughtful writer you are and (.) as ar↑ticulate as you are, >we think of ↑backgroundswhich was very powerful there