Astrid Ensslin

I know what it was. You know what it was: Second-Person Narration in Hypertext Fiction

Digital fiction is fiction, written for and read on a computer screen, that pursues its verbal, discursive, and/or conceptual complexity through the digital medium and would lose something of its aesthetic and semiotic function if it were removed from that medium (Bell et al.). Hypertext fiction is a specific form of digital fiction in which fragments of electronic text, known as lexias, are connected by hyperlinks. When reading a hypertext, the reader can click the “Enter” key on her keyboard to follow a default path through the text. Alternatively, she can follow hyperlinks that lead him or her to other parts of the text. Since the emergence of Storyspace hypertext fiction1 in the late 1980s, the study of digital fiction has undergone a significant paradigm shift. Recent research has moved from a “first wave” of pure theoretical debate to a “second wave” of narratological, stylistic, and semiotic analysis. While the theoretical intricacies of second-wave digital fiction theory have been well debated (see Ciccoricco; Ensslin; Ensslin and Bell, “Introduction”; Bell, Possible Worlds), the discipline and practice of analyzing digital fiction require a more systematic engagement and understanding than offered by much previous scholarship. With this critical need in mind, the Digital Fiction International Network (DFIN)2 has been exploring new

Reconstructing the deconstructed - hypertext and literary education

In this article I endeavour to connect two major achievements of postmodernism which, at first glance, may appear incompatible: deconstruction in literature and literary criticism on the one hand and constructivism in educational theory and practice on the other. Subverting traditional literary values such as authorial integrity and power, linearity and logic of plot, consistency of character, the distance between the reader and printed text as well as, above all, the death of the author, poststructuralism has long been recognized as a rather embattled concept. This is due to its evasiveness and hence relative inapplicability to literary criticism and pedagogy. Venturing to overcome this dilemma, the article will investigate the implications of educational constructivism. The chief aim is to link some of its concepts with postmodern literature in such a way as to facilitate didactic methodology in the field of poststructuralist literature. Literary hypertext- the so-called incarnation of postmodern literary theory - will be used as a stereotypical example of poststructuralist evasiveness. The article proposes that literary hypertext has considerable educational potential. Not only does the genre invite subjectcentred pedagogy, which allows students to learn according to their own interests and prior knowledge, but, paradoxically, it also defies the unviability of poststructuralist literature by resurrecting the dead author in collectiveness. The proposal will be illustrated by a case study report, describing the implementation of literary hypertext in an undergraduate German creative writing classroom.

Training humanities doctoral students in collaborative and digital multimedia

This study reports on the pedagogic rationale, didactic design and implications of an AHRC-funded doctoral training scheme in collaborative and digital multimedia in the humanities. In the second part of this article we discuss three areas of provision that were identified as particularly significant and/or controversial. These include (1) desktop publishing and information design for academic posters, (2) quantitative, corpus-based approaches to text analysis, and (3) a discussion of the affordances and constraints of ‘collaborative’ Web 2.0 based research as reflected by participants and relevant theory.

Formulaic language and collocations in German essays: from corpus-driven data to corpus-based materials

Whereas there exists a plethora of research on collocations and formulaic language in English, this article contributes towards a somewhat less developed area: the understanding and teaching of formulaic language in German as a foreign language. It analyses formulaic sequences and collocations in German writing (corpus-driven) and provides modern language instructors with a hands-on application of phrases to be used in writing (corpus-based). We report on a corpus-driven analysis of over 300 essays written by native speakers of German (Falko-L1) and British undergraduate students of German (WHiG), which revealed that advanced learners rely more on formulaic language than native speakers, that advanced learners prefer macro-structuring devices over micro-structuring devices used by native speakers, and that the learners in WHiG prefer impersonal and indirect stance expressions over direct ones used by native speakers in Falko-L1. Using corpus-based methods, we then present a didactic methodology for modern language instructors on how to approach five keywords that are particularly characteristic of formulaic language use in German academic writing: Zweck ‘aim’, Beispiel ‘example’, Ansicht ‘opinion’, laut ‘according to’, Fazit ‘conclusion’.

‘I want to say I may have seen my son die this morning’: Unintentional unreliable narration in digital fiction

This article offers comparative close readings of two digital fictions that feature various types and degrees of unintentional unreliable narration. Its prime focus lies on the affordances and restraints provided by hypertextual, multilinear, multimodal, interactive and ludic new media with respect to the aesthetic representation and textual embedding of unreliability. To this end, I have chosen narratives from two ‘generations’ of digital fiction – a hyperfiction par excellence, and a hypermedia narrative, both of which are multilinear by definition yet deal with the ideas of closure and narrative framing in very different ways. In particular, I shall examine how unintentional, psycho-pathological unreliability in the sense of Riggan’s (1981; cf. Heyd, 2006; Jahn, 1998) ‘madman’ are represented in afternoon, a story (Joyce, 1987) and the German hypermedia novel Quadrego (Maskiewicz, 2001). My comparative analysis shows how manifestations of deviant yet not devious, in the sense of quietly deceptive narration, are aesthetically enriched by techniques afforded by the digital medium, such as hypertextual multilinearity, lack of or partial closure, multisensory experience, fluid transitions and boundaries and, most significantly, the play with reader agency, which may – in cases of radical multilinearity – even lead to readerly unreliability.

The Interlocutor in Print and Digital Fiction: Dialogicity, Agency, (De-)Conventionalization

Digital fiction typically puts the reader/player in a cybernetic dialogue with various narrative functions, such as characters, narrative voices, or prompts emanating from the storytelling environment. Readers enact their responses either verbally, through typed keyboard input, or haptically, through various types of physical interactions with the interface (mouseclick; controller moves; touch). The sense of agency evoked through these dialogic interactions has been fully conventionalized as part of digital narrativity. Yet there are instances of enacted dialogicity in digital fiction that merit more in-depth investigation under the broad labels of anti-mimeticism and intrinsic unnaturalness (Richardson, 2016), such as when readers enact pre-scripted narratees without, however, being able to take agency over the (canonical) narrative as a whole (Dave Morris’s Frankenstein), or when they hear or read a “protean,” “disembodied questioning voice” (Richardson, 2006: 79) that oscillates between system feedback, interior character monologue and supernatural interaction (Dreaming Methods’ WALLPAPER). I shall examine various intrinsically unnatural examples of the media-specific interlocutor in print and digital fiction and evaluate the extent to which unconventional interlocutors in digital fiction may have anti-mimetic, or defamiliarizing effects.

Transmediating Bildung: Video Games as Life Formation Narratives

This article examines the transmedial theme and narrative genre of Bildung (life formation) in relation to video games. It revisits key tenets of life formation theory insofar as they can be applied to a small but growing corpus of games that emphasize spiritual and philosophical maturation and advancement. We argue that Joseph Campbell’s monomyth is an oversimplified and ultimately unsuitable lens through which to analyze character development in games, which restrains rather than stimulates the kind of complexities, diversity, and fluidity of character psychology needed in contemporary video game ecology. The main part of this study is dedicated to a comparative analysis of three indie games that address the life formation theme through allegories of space-in-time. The main focal areas will be character and story patterns; chronotopic mappings onto developmental trajectories; the treatment of mastery, mentorship, and choice; and the spiritual and metacognitive alignment of extra and intradiegetic education.

Exploring digital fiction as a tool for teenage body image bibliotherapy

ABSTRACT This article reflects on the findings of the interdisciplinary ‘TransForm’ project, which ran between 2012 and 2014 and aimed to explore how reading and writing digital fictions (DFs) might support young women in developing frameworks for more positive thinking regarding their body image. The project comprised the following stages: (1) a review and compilation of DFs thematising and/or problematising female corporeality; (2) a series of cooperative inquiries with 3 groups of young women (aged 16–19 years) over a period of 5 weeks, examining participants’ responses to a selection of the previously compiled DFs, as well as the challenges these young women face in relation to body image and (3) an interventionist summer school in which participants aged 16–19 explored body image issues via writing DFs. This article reports on the main observations and findings of each stage, and draws conclusions for future research needs in this area.

Book review: Theresa Heyd, Email Hoaxes: Form, Function, Genre Ecology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008, vii + 239 pp. 95.00/US

As a Brazilian researcher living and working in Catalonia, whose grandmother’s greatest dream was to learn how to read and write, I have felt moved by these mostly first-person accounts of how power, identity and agency intermingle. Reading this volume has certainly been a transactional experience and I hope this review will signal that. The authors not only sympathize with the historically disadvantaged, but cannot help but reconstruct themselves and their contexts of intervention. The volume will leave no reader indifferent, though methodological issues and dominant academic (writing) styles represent important challenges for the theory it proposes. It is recommended reading for humans doing research with humans and for humans.

143.00 (hbk)

The following two chapters move specifically to Chinese-language psychoeducational literature as discourse. Adopting ‘Rhetorical Structure Theory’, in Chapter 4 Ramsay analyses the discursive form and content of relevant texts collected from the above-mentioned three Chinese communities. The analytical findings are then utilized in Chapter 5 to investigate how the psychoeductional message that is underpinned by the biomedical explanatory model, or the medical-professional voice, of mental illness ‘is discursively represented and how this representation intersects with the salient cultural understandings’ (p. 110) of Chinese people in the three communities. The concluding chapter summarizes the major contributions the author has made in the volume. In addition, he describes limitations of his research and potential implications for further studies. Ramsay suggests that his study values and calls for an experiential explanatory model of mental health/illness and criticizes the hegemonic dominance of the biomedical explanatory model among health professionals. However, it should not ‘le[a]d to silencing of the processional voice of medicine in psychoeducational and other public health endeavours’ (pp. 134–5). A reflexive conclusion of this kind can be regarded as being in line with the traditional Chinese wisdom of ‘zhong’ (中) and ‘he’ (和), which may be valuable to discourse analysis in general, and critical discourse analysis in particular. It must not be forgotten that the result of discourse analysis is the production of further discourse, which is also subject to critical scrutiny (see e.g. Discourse & Society, 2008, vol. 19(6) for an interesting debate concerning nominalization between Michael Billig, J.R. Martin and Norman Fairclough). More fundamentally, the theoretical and epistemological underpinnings that sustain research and its resulting discourses are neither necessarily the only correct ones nor unconditionally appropriate in any spatiotemporal/sociocultural circumstances. A reflexive consideration of research findings and attendant arguments and the way in which they are presented in publications is, therefore, rather desirable.