Alison Gibbons

Fictionality and Ontology

‘The struggle to define fictionality’, Punday (2010: 55) claims, ‘is an inherent part of the institutional construction of contemporary writing’. What he means by this is that the proliferation of the fictive in contemporary society, including ways in which the real itself is narrativised, makes the distinction between reality and fiction rather fluid. In his words, ‘the traditional institutional and disciplinary boundaries separating news and entertainment, fiction and politics have become blurred’ (2010: 11). Such enhanced permeation between actuality and virtuality in literature and culture makes fictionality a central issue for contemporary stylistics and narratology. The focus of this chapter is a Text World Theory analysis of Ulrike and Eamon Compliant by Blast Theory, a group of artists who create stories using interactive media. Ulrike and Eamon Compliant is a mobile narrative, a genre hitherto unexplored in stylistics. Since participants engage with the story through mobile technology, the boundary between fiction and reality becomes increasingly convoluted.

Positions and Perspectives on Pronouns in Literature: The State of the Subject

This chapter serves as an introduction to the volume and an up-to-date review of the study of pronouns in literature. Firstly, we discuss the kinds of effects to which pronouns contribute in literary contexts, illustrating their interpretative significance and revealing their complex network of functions. This complexity leads us into the necessarily diverse array of scholarship which has to engaged with and analysed this functioning over the last 100 years. The next section of the introduction provides a historical overview of this scholarship, and outlines the latest developments and innovations in research into pronouns across a range of disciplines. Finally, the chapter introduces the structural logic of the volume, providing a summary of each contribution and highlighting the themes arching through the chapters.

Autonarration, I, and Odd Address in Ben Lerner’s Autofictional Novel 10:04

Focusing on Ben Lerner’s 10:04, this chapter investigates the stylistic composition of autofiction, with particular emphasis on pronoun usage. The novel is contextualised in relation to Genette’s judgement of autofiction and Lejeune’s tabular mapping of fiction and autobiography, leading to the development of a cognitive-stylistic model of autofiction. Following this, the analysis of 10:04 considers, in turn, first-person and third-person (auto-)narration, second-person address, and the impact of intertextuality on the referential value of pronouns. Ultimately, this chapter breaks new ground for the study of autofiction in English by providing a replicable, text-driven account of the linguistic style and narrative voice of autofiction. My account is grounded in cognitive stylistics and consequently, the chapter also advances knowledge about readerly interpretation of autofiction and autonarrational devices.

Reading S. across Media: Transmedia Storyworlds, Multimodal Fiction, and Real Readers

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

Multimodality, Cognitive Poetics, and Genre: Reading Grady Hendrix’s novel Horrorstör

Abstract Quirk Books, the publisher of Grady Hendrix’s (2014, Horrorstör. Philadelphia: Quirk Books) Horrorstör, portray the novel on their website as “a traditional haunted house story” but also mention that it “comes conveniently packaged in the form of a retail catalog”. Such description points to two generic foundations: the horror novel, which is manifested primarily through the novel’s literary themes and linguistic style, and the retail catalogue, signalled chiefly through the novel’s multimodal design features. In this paper I argue that in order to account for Horrorstör both as literary experience and as “sly social commentary” (as Quirk books claim), consideration and analysis of genre is vital. The paper subsequently offers a cognitive stylistic approach to multimodal literary genre analysis. In doing so, it presents a reading of the novel as a literary artefact: as fiction and as commodity.

I haven’t seen you since (a specific date, a time, the weather): Global Identity and the Reinscription of Subjectivity in Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing

Abstract:Globalization provides an important means of understanding the new linguistic composition of the contemporary world, which is itself grounded in shifts in social reality and social relations. Such shifts impact models of selfhood and otherness as well as constructions of identity. This article considers how Brian Castro’s award-winning fictional autobiography Shanghai Dancing represents identity by concentrating on perceptual deixis and the text’s narration—that is, on pronouns of address and focalization. I use stylistic analysis to demonstrate that Castro uses language, particularly the referential positioning(s) of pronouns, to articulate an experimental poetics of subjectivity in the globalizing world. In doing so, he not only tests autobiographical boundaries but represents the contemporary formation of identity in the globalizing world as reflexive, variable, and relationally constructed.

Profit over History

There is no denying the deep, complex, and changing symbolism of the Berlin Wall. For me, the life of the Berlin Wall provides a remarkable, perhaps even disquieting metaphor for the evolution of the contemporary world, in terms both of international political economy and of our relational (individual and social) identities. Erected in 1961 by the German Democratic Republic, the Berlin Wall marked the repression of peoples living in the Eastern Bloc while its subsequent fall in 1989 signified the opposite: personal freedom. The fall of the wall wasn’t simply personal, though, but profitable too. The failure of the communist agenda that the wall stood for aided the global dominance of capitalism, the rise of free market economy, and the changing topography of commerce, culture, and ideology. This new topography was international or even supranational. It was not limited by borders, but governed a world stage. Surviving fragments of the wall have been shipped all across the world: from its home in Germany to England, Poland, South Africa, Bangladesh, Canada, and across the U.S. In these contexts, it has been globally standardised as a commercial piece of living history in museums, universities, hotels, corporation lobbies, casinos, court houses, and government buildings. In March of this year, 2013, the Berlin Wall was torn down. Again. This time, its destruction was not the material upshot of human liberty but property development. And one met by fierce protests. There was public outrage that profit was being prioritized over history, and a sense that this monument was intimately entwined with the personal and national identity of its supporters. It is this sense of a contemporary recommitment to national belonging that Philip Leonard unearths in Literature After Globalization (2013). In doing so, Leonard engages with debates in contemporary theory (from thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Paul Virilio, and McKenzie Wark) as a lens through which to consider the ways in which fictional offerings from the 1990s and early twentieth century reflect upon the conditions of unprecedented technological advancement in parallel to the decline of the nationstate in the global world. Ultimately, the fictional works Leonard critiques point, in his words, to