Metatextual Print Fiction in the Age of Digital Fiction

<p>This thesis argues that the future envisaged for the novel by the early hypertext theorists, that the digital medium would displace print and open up a variety of new possibilities for novelistic fiction, can now be differently understood by exploring the materiality of the medium in works of print, hypertext and web-fiction composed in the past fifty years. Michael Kaufmann‘s analysis of modernist experimental print fiction in his book Textual Bodies: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Print and his use of the term 'metatextual' to locate the distinguishing feature of novels in this tradition will be extended to the works of hypertext and web-fiction in the new media, demonstrating that works of hypertext and web-fiction can be regarded as continuous with experimental print fiction. This analysis, which is also grounded on the concepts of the graphic surface and the materiality of the text, is further confirmed by considering the use of metatextual features of works composed in digital media in experimental novels published in the digital era which continue the tradition by publishing in print. There are four chapters in this thesis. In the first one, metatextuality of the print novels in the pre-digital era is explored through the theory and practice of William Gass who has insisted on the materiality of language and the medium in almost all of his theoretical works. Moreover, the first chapter establishes a point of reference for the discussion of the shift from print to digital media in novel writing by discussing an experimental print novel, William Gass's Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. Each of the following chapters identify significant issues in the development of hypertext and print for the phase investigated in the chapter, and present two or more case studies of specific texts. The second chapter explores the development of the novel through the electronic textuality of the early computers. This chapter analyses the first hypertext novel, afternoon, written by Michael Joyce, and how and in what ways it took advantage of the capabilities of the computer and in what ways it tried to remediate print. In order to show how the print novel has been becoming more media-conscious, the second chapter ends with an analysis of a print novel, Fax Messages From a Near Future by Jorge Wilheim which highlights the role of medium in its narrative. The third chapter follows the line of argument of the previous chapters by exploring the relationship of the multimedia capabilities of the World Wide Web and analyzing the trends which appear through the way the Internet has been used to write novels. The case study section of this chapter includes two novels; 10.01 by Lance Olsen, and Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales by Edward Falco. The final chapter brings the whole line of inquiry back into print in order to examine what effects the arrival of digital media has had on experimental print fiction and how these novels push the boundaries of the print medium even further. There are three novels in the case study of this chapter, each of which provides a unique insight into the potentials of print and how they bring the materiality of the print to the foreground. The Forgetting Room by Nick Bantock makes the book a multimodal work of art by incorporating the painting and the words. Mark Z. Danielewski‘s The Fifty Year Sword and House of Leaves make us see the book as a physical object which can be read in a variety of different ways.</p>

Metatextual Print Fiction in the Age of Digital Fiction

<p>This thesis argues that the future envisaged for the novel by the early hypertext theorists, that the digital medium would displace print and open up a variety of new possibilities for novelistic fiction, can now be differently understood by exploring the materiality of the medium in works of print, hypertext and web-fiction composed in the past fifty years. Michael Kaufmann‘s analysis of modernist experimental print fiction in his book Textual Bodies: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Print and his use of the term 'metatextual' to locate the distinguishing feature of novels in this tradition will be extended to the works of hypertext and web-fiction in the new media, demonstrating that works of hypertext and web-fiction can be regarded as continuous with experimental print fiction. This analysis, which is also grounded on the concepts of the graphic surface and the materiality of the text, is further confirmed by considering the use of metatextual features of works composed in digital media in experimental novels published in the digital era which continue the tradition by publishing in print. There are four chapters in this thesis. In the first one, metatextuality of the print novels in the pre-digital era is explored through the theory and practice of William Gass who has insisted on the materiality of language and the medium in almost all of his theoretical works. Moreover, the first chapter establishes a point of reference for the discussion of the shift from print to digital media in novel writing by discussing an experimental print novel, William Gass's Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. Each of the following chapters identify significant issues in the development of hypertext and print for the phase investigated in the chapter, and present two or more case studies of specific texts. The second chapter explores the development of the novel through the electronic textuality of the early computers. This chapter analyses the first hypertext novel, afternoon, written by Michael Joyce, and how and in what ways it took advantage of the capabilities of the computer and in what ways it tried to remediate print. In order to show how the print novel has been becoming more media-conscious, the second chapter ends with an analysis of a print novel, Fax Messages From a Near Future by Jorge Wilheim which highlights the role of medium in its narrative. The third chapter follows the line of argument of the previous chapters by exploring the relationship of the multimedia capabilities of the World Wide Web and analyzing the trends which appear through the way the Internet has been used to write novels. The case study section of this chapter includes two novels; 10.01 by Lance Olsen, and Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales by Edward Falco. The final chapter brings the whole line of inquiry back into print in order to examine what effects the arrival of digital media has had on experimental print fiction and how these novels push the boundaries of the print medium even further. There are three novels in the case study of this chapter, each of which provides a unique insight into the potentials of print and how they bring the materiality of the print to the foreground. The Forgetting Room by Nick Bantock makes the book a multimodal work of art by incorporating the painting and the words. Mark Z. Danielewski‘s The Fifty Year Sword and House of Leaves make us see the book as a physical object which can be read in a variety of different ways.</p>

Challenging Narrative Hierarchies: Embedded Narrative Structure in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves

<p>Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas both feature highly complex structures of narrative embedding. This thesis examines the use of narrative levels in these two novels, considering how the purposes and effects of embedding change and how attention to the structure of this literary device transforms readings of these texts. Cloud Atlas features six distinct and seemingly stand-alone embedded narratives. The relationship between them is complicated both by competing structural models and by clashes of continuity between fact and fiction. Mitchell's novel draws attention to the role of storytelling in the creation of history and human identity. House of Leaves embeds an invented film within a novel masquerading as film criticism, with edits and commentary provided by a further narrator. The disparate parts, narratorial unreliability, and multiple acts of remediation serve to undermine the elaborate narrative hierarchy Danielewski creates. This instability foregrounds the subjectivity of the relationship between reader and text and the embedding narrator functions as a model for the active reader who both interprets and recreates. In both novels the differently styled narratives and structures of embedding facilitate an exploration of the permutations of fact and fiction and, by transgressing the norms of this literary device, they bring into focus the assumptions that exist around it.</p>

Challenging Narrative Hierarchies: Embedded Narrative Structure in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves

<p>Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas both feature highly complex structures of narrative embedding. This thesis examines the use of narrative levels in these two novels, considering how the purposes and effects of embedding change and how attention to the structure of this literary device transforms readings of these texts. Cloud Atlas features six distinct and seemingly stand-alone embedded narratives. The relationship between them is complicated both by competing structural models and by clashes of continuity between fact and fiction. Mitchell's novel draws attention to the role of storytelling in the creation of history and human identity. House of Leaves embeds an invented film within a novel masquerading as film criticism, with edits and commentary provided by a further narrator. The disparate parts, narratorial unreliability, and multiple acts of remediation serve to undermine the elaborate narrative hierarchy Danielewski creates. This instability foregrounds the subjectivity of the relationship between reader and text and the embedding narrator functions as a model for the active reader who both interprets and recreates. In both novels the differently styled narratives and structures of embedding facilitate an exploration of the permutations of fact and fiction and, by transgressing the norms of this literary device, they bring into focus the assumptions that exist around it.</p>

Monstrous Interiors: Quasi-Domestic Space As the Ontological Terrorist of Toxic Masculinity

Resonating with these pandemic times, Catherine Spooner has described the Gothic as a ‘malevolent virus’. In my paper, I will propose that the haunted house narrative, so central to American Gothic, has itself mutated in response to a backdrop of post-millenial social, political and financial collapse in a manner quite different to developments in the rest of the Gothic literary world. The narrative strand which has emerged, presents the reader with a new form of the Gothic male protagonist, whom the British psychologist R.D Laing in The Divided Self (1960), would describe as a ‘schizoid’ subject. Fragile, failing and fragmenting, he escapes a failing career, marriage and parenthood by removing his family to a quasi-domestic space which promises repair. House or hotel, these ‘haunted houses’ are different from the earlier ‘hungry houses’ identified by Gothic writer Stephen Graham Jones in his introduction to Robert Marasco’s classic haunted house novel, Burnt Offerings. This new quasi-domestic space, often combining work and home, rises up to meet the male schizoid, not merely as the traditional Gothic setting, but as a sentient being; a monster in its own right. His entrapment in this new Gothic labyrinth that is constantly shifting, expanding and shrinking, provides a performative stage on which the schizoid male is forced into an existential crisis beyond that of the trauma of spousal and parental failure, ultimately forcing him to confront what it is to exist in space and time. A reaction to the rise of neo-liberalism and toxic masculinity, this important strand to American Gothic embraces the multiplicity of the Gothic’s new forms and is evident in texts such as Steve Rasnic Tem’s, Deadfall Hotel, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Thomas Liggotti’s, The Town Manager, Jac Jemc’s, The Grip of It and Shaun Hamill’s A Cosmology of Monsters. Developing from their deeper roots in the Calvinist Gothic tradition of Hawthorne, Brockden Brown and Poe via the mid-century works of Stephen King and Robert Marasco, these new post- millennial narratives provide a space in which notions of masculine subjectivity are fundamentally challenged.

Truth in Fiction: Storytelling and Architecture

<p>Current discourse on architectural narrative suggests that a series of events or impressions of space can be ‘read’ through a sequencing of spaces and views within a building. It is presumed that a building is read in the same way as a sequence of shots in a film. In this model, architects set up a narrative which is played out through a careful construction of viewpoints and events. In practice this can lead to the manipulation of spatial experience at the sacrifice of individual interpretation, as maintaining the narrative compromises spatial experience. This stems from the fundamental difference between how we experience architecture as opposed to more traditional narratives in printed or pictorial media. The experience of space is not a linear one, nor is it bound by a strict timeline which follows from cause to effect. Unlike a novel, where the author has complete control over the pacing and focus of each scene, the architect cannot rely on others to interpret his exact intentions, or on his architecture remaining true to a single narrative over time. This research is about storytelling in architecture. Specifically, how we might better use narratives to play to the strengths of our medium. From examining current practices in publicly establishing narratives, to investigating the work of John Hejduk, this work examines how architectural narratives have been constructed in the past, and whether this has been successful. Using an analysis of three works of fiction: The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges, The Castle by Franz Kafka and The House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski; I analyse the various uses of the architectural metaphor in fiction and how these fictional spaces have been used as characters within their individual narratives. I use design to develop a process which takes a basic house plan and applies a non-linear narrative to it. This narrative is not concerned with a single interpretation. This process creates spaces imbued with the stories of the novels studied, and of my role as designer. Yet they may also be reinterpreted again by a new viewer to give a kind of immortality to the story. The architecture continually adapts itself to new experiences and understandings. Finally, I argue that we do have the ability to use storytelling within architecture to enrich our spaces without resorting to the manipulation of the user. If we return to the cyclic and layered model of storytelling, as opposed to the linear structure of narrative, then our buildings will not only tell our stories more clearly, but also for longer as they appeal to the changing fashions, experiences and applied narratives of the people who use them, remaining relevant to the world of experience.</p>

Truth in Fiction: Storytelling and Architecture

<p>Current discourse on architectural narrative suggests that a series of events or impressions of space can be ‘read’ through a sequencing of spaces and views within a building. It is presumed that a building is read in the same way as a sequence of shots in a film. In this model, architects set up a narrative which is played out through a careful construction of viewpoints and events. In practice this can lead to the manipulation of spatial experience at the sacrifice of individual interpretation, as maintaining the narrative compromises spatial experience. This stems from the fundamental difference between how we experience architecture as opposed to more traditional narratives in printed or pictorial media. The experience of space is not a linear one, nor is it bound by a strict timeline which follows from cause to effect. Unlike a novel, where the author has complete control over the pacing and focus of each scene, the architect cannot rely on others to interpret his exact intentions, or on his architecture remaining true to a single narrative over time. This research is about storytelling in architecture. Specifically, how we might better use narratives to play to the strengths of our medium. From examining current practices in publicly establishing narratives, to investigating the work of John Hejduk, this work examines how architectural narratives have been constructed in the past, and whether this has been successful. Using an analysis of three works of fiction: The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges, The Castle by Franz Kafka and The House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski; I analyse the various uses of the architectural metaphor in fiction and how these fictional spaces have been used as characters within their individual narratives. I use design to develop a process which takes a basic house plan and applies a non-linear narrative to it. This narrative is not concerned with a single interpretation. This process creates spaces imbued with the stories of the novels studied, and of my role as designer. Yet they may also be reinterpreted again by a new viewer to give a kind of immortality to the story. The architecture continually adapts itself to new experiences and understandings. Finally, I argue that we do have the ability to use storytelling within architecture to enrich our spaces without resorting to the manipulation of the user. If we return to the cyclic and layered model of storytelling, as opposed to the linear structure of narrative, then our buildings will not only tell our stories more clearly, but also for longer as they appeal to the changing fashions, experiences and applied narratives of the people who use them, remaining relevant to the world of experience.</p>

The War That Never Happened

This article examines Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), a gothic novel that augments its postmodernist credentials by preemptively imagining and representing the theoretical gaze that would otherwise have been directed on itself. The article suggests that despite the novel’s intense performance of self-reflexivity, it demonstrates a traumatic suppression of its own immediate historical conditions, particularly its temporal proximity to the events of the First Gulf War. This article thus reads the text’s telling silences and its thematization of uncanny spatial violations as indexing a minimally acknowledged guilt over the war in Iraq. The novel’s slippages in self-awareness not only point to an avoidance of its own scotomized history but also foreground the shifting boundaries and dispersed locations of textual self-consciousness.

The Supernatural Media Virus

Since the 1990s, the virus and the network metaphors have become increasingly popular, finding application in a broad range of everyday discourses, academic disciplines, and fiction genres. In this book, Rahel Sixta Schmitz defines and discusses a trope recurring in Gothic fiction: the supernatural media virus. This trope comprises the confluence of the virus, the network, and a deep, underlying media anxiety. This study shows how Gothic narratives such as House of Leaves or The Ring feature the supernatural media virus to negotiate as well as actively shape imaginations of the network society and the dangers of a globalized, technologized world.