multisensory reading

This paper argues that attending to the tropes of circularity featuring in print-based literature proves to be a useful foil for an analysis of electronic literature. Based on the idea that digital literary mechanisms do not obliviate previous circularity-inducing structuring motifs in analog literature, such as labyrinths, chess, rivers, and clockwork, this argument arrives at a crucial time for literature, which is currently the object of intensified debates on beginnings and ends, especially in the context of digitality and multisensory perception becoming central to some aspects of its processes. Accordingly, circular motion is here analysed in its depiction and actuation across several kinds of literary / literal machines, in reflection also on how sensory perception both mediate and is mediated. If literature is conditional upon a series of unique, though interconnected, mechanisms, it seems reasonable not to discard a certain circularity of the senses that is brought into play there and, indeed, given both thematic and formal substance in analog and digital works. In other words, representations generated at the confluence of both biological and technological bodies cannot but instigate a circularity on which they are dependent: an idea which this article examines and critiques with reference to canonical and electronic literature, particularly Borges, Beckett, and Joyce.

Reading is a multi-sensory activity, entailing perceptual, cognitive and motor interactions with whatever is being read. With digital technology, reading manifests itself as being extensively multi-sensory – both in more explicit and more complex ways than ever before. In different ways from traditional reading technologies such as the codex, digital technology illustrates how the act of reading is intimately connected with and intricately dependent on the fact that we are both body and mind – a fact carrying important implications for even such an apparently intellectual activity as reading, whether recreational, educational or occupational. This article addresses some important and hitherto neglected issues concerning digital reading, with special emphasis on the vital role of our bodies, and in particular our fingers and hands, for the immersive fiction reading experience.

This international collective monograph brings an understanding of the problematic of changes in artistic communication in the context of the cultural practices of the post-digital era and simultaneously asks new questions about it. This book presents the keystones of electronic literature research that are based, among others, on the digital character of the text, on multisensory reading, playfulness, hypermediality, experimentation and Internet communication. Its aim is also to map digital literature in the cultural environment of Central Europe. Researchers from Slovakia, The Czech Republic, Poland, Slovenia and Croatia collaborated on the publication. The monograph is a printed textual tapestry of various approaches, theories and perspectives that communicate among themselves, react to each other and together clarify the structure that literature personifies in the new media realm.

Contributions by Zuzana Husárová, Jana Kuzmíková, Gabriela Magová, Mira Nabělková, Andrzej Pająk, Katarina Peović Vuković, Mariusz Pisarski, Michal Rehúš a Jaroslav Šrank, Janez Strehovec, Bogumiła Suwara, Jaroslav Švelch

Source: publisher's information

Since modernism, the experimental art has been filled with the flow of “intermedial turn“, projected in/through all its forms and has found one of its ”stations“ in the form of digital fictions. The subject of my attention lies in the research and analysis of the multimedial fictions on internet through the junction of image, text and sound into the communicative unit. I implement the narratological point of view, and perceive these works of art also from the prism of their reception and subsequent reader’s projection of the fictional world, which could result in her immersion in it.

After the initial “insight” into the theories concerning receptivity of net-fictions (focusing mainly on the reader’s emotional response – D. S. Miall, K. Walton, V. Zuska, N. Carroll), theory of fictional worlds (mostly Marie-Laure Ryan´s understanding of fictional worlds and her concept of immersion), and the notion of multisensory reading (M. Back, A. Mangen), I proceed to hermeneutical practice, and thus the analysis of net-fiction Playground from the Dreaming Methods project of Andy Campbell. The interpretation processes the already mentioned theoretical approaches, and follows through with G. Genette´s narrative discourse and P. Ricoeur’s concept of time in narrative.

Playground is built on the combination of textual fragmented narration of autodiegetic heterodiegetic narrator, and the internal focalization of the young boy. The focalization functions on two levels, the first one is the focalization in the text, the other one is the focalization displayed by the audio-visual part. The audio-visual unit functions as the “reification” of boy’s perspective on the scale of sensory inputs and the motives of his ideas. The fiction’s multimedial element thus cannot be regarded only in the terms of the aesthetic complementation of the textual narration. Fiction’s multimediality is a possible means of presenting character’s world, considering both - his perception and his cognition.