Post-Postmodernist Fiction and the Rise of Digital Epitexts: Theory and Interpretation of Narrative
Autor Virginia Pignagnolien Limba Engleză Hardback – 20 apr 2023
Post-Postmodernist Fiction and the Rise of Digital Epitexts explores new dynamics created by the intersection of digital media and contemporary fiction, arguing that these synergies are part of the cultural context in which the post-postmodernist novel emerges. Virginia Pignagnoli introduces a rhetorical theory of paratexts meant to reshape traditional views of paratextuality, providing categories, functions, and properties able to accommodate new digital practices, such as those of digital epitexts (authors’ social media posts and novels’ websites, for example), that widen the space for authorial creation and narrative exchange beyond the print novel. Focusing on the effects digital epitexts have on audiences, Pignagnoli presents an analysis of contemporary novels—by Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, Catherine Lacey, Meg Wolitzer, and Dave Eggers—that display a post-postmodern sensitivity in dialogue with some of the ways digital epitexts are currently employed. Ultimately, in showing how twenty-first-century novels and digital epitexts are co-constitutive, Pignagnoli offers a vision of a new post-postmodernism interested in sincerity, relationality, and intersubjectivity.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814215425
ISBN-10: 0814215424
Pagini: 158
Ilustrații: 3 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.34 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Theory and Interpretation of Narrative
ISBN-10: 0814215424
Pagini: 158
Ilustrații: 3 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.34 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Theory and Interpretation of Narrative
Recenzii
"Pignagnoli’s monograph fulfills a vital need of linking trends in the digital literary sphere with formal and thematic obsessions of today’s literary fictions … A valuable starting point for a future study." - Torsa Ghosal, DIEGESIS
“The study of the paratext has become a typical feature of nearly any literary analysis, but as so many other aspects and dimensions of literary and rhetorical analysis, the digital turn has made it in need of a solid update. Pignagnoli’s study of the digital epitext fills in such a crucial gap, and it does so in a sound and useful way. … Pignagnoli is a good reader, a good writer, a good teacher.” —Jan Baetens, Leonardo
“Pignagnoli addresses an important facet of contemporary narratology—the changing role of paratextual information for the communicative model of narrative—providing rich and compelling examples of the evolving condition of author/reader communication during the current digital age.” —Daniel Punday, author of Playing at Narratology: Digital Media as Narrative Theory
"A phenomenal contribution to the field of paratextuality." —Souhardya Chatterjee and Ujjwal Jana, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
"Post-Postmodernist Fiction and the Rise of Digital Epitexts feels like a new tool to help with a tricky problem. … Pignagnoli’s work will be helpful in any classroom revolving around post-postmodern narratives, but it will also be helpful to any reader wondering how social media might influence the process of reading. … Though the text purports to delve only into a certain vein of fiction, understanding the popularity of these epitexts in this genre helps to understand wider effects of social media on literature today." - Jacob Welcker, Rocky Mountain Review
Notă biografică
Virginia Pignagnoli is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English and German Philology at the University of Zaragoza.
Extras
While recognizing these medial specificities, the aim of this study is not to provide a systematic classification of all the possible new forms of author-audience interactions in the digital world. Rather, its focus is on the relation between these interactions and the poetics of contemporary literary narratives. Other scholars foreground the relevance of this connection for inquiries into contemporary narratives and their techniques. Liesbeth Korthals Altes, for instance, mentions a “pervasive demand for [authorial] presence and concreteness, a longing for the real” within a context in which “public media, talk shows, photo shoots, interviews, blogs, Facebook, and live performances all have become sites for the fabrication of a work’s meaning and literary or other value (such as its ethical, historical, or informative value)”. The present book, more specifically, explores the connection of twenty-first-century fiction with epitextual material in the digital world to investigate the relationship between the current widespread practice of digital author-audience interactions and the emerging poetics succeeding postmodernism.
Postmodernism, as it is generally agreed, ended sometime between the late 1980s and September 11, 2001. But literary historical change, as Brian McHale emphasizes, “rarely involves the wholesale replacement of outmoded features and values by new ones”; more typically, in fact, it “involves a reshuffling of existing features in the light of a new dominant function”. Among the current “reshuffling” is, for example, the blurring of boundaries between fiction and nonfiction in light of an interest in sincerity, relationality, intersubjectivity. Following this principle, in this book I approach digital epitextual material as an exemplary reshuffling of an existing feature—paratexts—in light of a changing dominant function.
In post-postmodernist fiction, I argue, the paratext, that is, the “additional” material a book contains “around” its text, both within the (printed/electronic) book and outside of it, interacts with—and at times intensifies—the changes happening at the textual level: the reshuffling of existing features and the concern with a new dominant. This means that the digital world is assuring paratexts, and epitexts in particular, a key position in the communicative exchange between author and audiences. Other narrative theorists already argued for the necessity of recognizing the new centrality of the multiplicity of extratextual discourses entering today’s author-audience relationship. Paul Dawson, for instance, presented a bidirectional model of narrative communication that includes the totality of exchanges between author and readers at a textual, peritextual, and epitextual level. Unlike epitexts, peritexts are the paratextual elements situated in proximity of the text. According to Dawson, the totality of these communicative exchanges (textual, extrafictional, extratextual) must be part of the narrative analysis, not so much to anchor a biographical reading of a book, but because the narrative communication produces meaning precisely thanks to these ongoing transactions. Working from similar premises, my contention here is that while epitextual material itself is not a novelty, the current digital era is facilitating an increased interaction that reinforces the current changing of dominant function interested in sincerity, relationality, and intersubjectivity.
Postmodernism, as it is generally agreed, ended sometime between the late 1980s and September 11, 2001. But literary historical change, as Brian McHale emphasizes, “rarely involves the wholesale replacement of outmoded features and values by new ones”; more typically, in fact, it “involves a reshuffling of existing features in the light of a new dominant function”. Among the current “reshuffling” is, for example, the blurring of boundaries between fiction and nonfiction in light of an interest in sincerity, relationality, intersubjectivity. Following this principle, in this book I approach digital epitextual material as an exemplary reshuffling of an existing feature—paratexts—in light of a changing dominant function.
In post-postmodernist fiction, I argue, the paratext, that is, the “additional” material a book contains “around” its text, both within the (printed/electronic) book and outside of it, interacts with—and at times intensifies—the changes happening at the textual level: the reshuffling of existing features and the concern with a new dominant. This means that the digital world is assuring paratexts, and epitexts in particular, a key position in the communicative exchange between author and audiences. Other narrative theorists already argued for the necessity of recognizing the new centrality of the multiplicity of extratextual discourses entering today’s author-audience relationship. Paul Dawson, for instance, presented a bidirectional model of narrative communication that includes the totality of exchanges between author and readers at a textual, peritextual, and epitextual level. Unlike epitexts, peritexts are the paratextual elements situated in proximity of the text. According to Dawson, the totality of these communicative exchanges (textual, extrafictional, extratextual) must be part of the narrative analysis, not so much to anchor a biographical reading of a book, but because the narrative communication produces meaning precisely thanks to these ongoing transactions. Working from similar premises, my contention here is that while epitextual material itself is not a novelty, the current digital era is facilitating an increased interaction that reinforces the current changing of dominant function interested in sincerity, relationality, and intersubjectivity.
Cuprins
Introduction Chapter 1 A Rhetorical Theory of Paratexts Chapter 2 Earnestness Chapter 3 Materiality Chapter 4 Intersubjectivity Chapter 5 Instances of Co-Construction Coda
Descriere
Explores how digital epitexts surrounding contemporary novels by Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, Catherine Lacey, Meg Wolitzer, and Dave Eggers influence audience understanding and response.