stylistics

Analyzing Digital Fiction offers a collection of pioneering analyses based on replicable methodological frameworks. It offers analyses of digital works that have so far received little or no analytical attention and profiles replicable methodologies which can be used in the analyses of other digital fictions. Chapters include analyses of hypertext fiction, Flash fiction, Twitter fiction and videogames with approaches taken from narratology, stylistics, semiotics and ludology. Essays propose ways in which digital environments can expand, challenge and test the limits of literary theories which have, until recently, predominantly been based on models and analyses of print texts.

Chapters:

1.Introduction: From Theorizing to Analyzing Digital Fiction Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin and Hans Kristian Rustad

Section 1: Narratological Approaches

2. Media-Specific Metalepsis in 10:01 Alice Bell

3.Digital Fiction and Worlds of Perspective David Ciccoricco

4. Seeing into the Worlds of Digital Fiction Daniel Punday

Section 2: Social Media and Ludological Approaches

5. Playing with rather than by the Rules: Metaludicity, Allusive Fallacy and Illusory Agency in The Path. Astrid Ensslin

6. 140 Characters in Search of a Story: Twitterfiction as an Emerging Narrative Form Bronwen Thomas

7. Amnesia, the Dark Descent: The Player's Very Own Purgatory Susana Tosca

8. Wreading Together: The Double Plot of Collaborative Digital Fiction Isabell Klaiber

Section 3: Semiotic-Rhetorical Approaches

9. (In-)Between Word, Image and Sound: Cultural Encounter in Flight Paths. Hans Kristian Rustad

10. Figures of Gestural Manipulation in Digital Fictions Serge Bouchardon

11. Hyperfiction as a Medium for Drifting Times: A Close Reading of the German Hyperfiction Zeit für die Bombe Alexandra Saemmer

Afterword Roberto Simanowski.

Since the demise of the 'Golden Age' of literary hypertext (Coover 1999) and the theoretical debates surrounding online and offline electronic literature that followed in its wake, the study of digital fiction in particular has undergone a significant paradigm shift. Recent research has moved from a 'first-wave' of pure theoretical debate to a 'second-wave' of close stylistic and semiotic analysis. While the theoretical intricacies of second-wave digital fiction theory have been well debated (e.g. Ciccoricco 2007, Ensslin 2007, Ensslin and Bell 2007, Bell 2010 forthcoming), the discipline and practice of close-reading digital fiction require a more systematic engagement and understanding than offered by previous scholarship. With this in mind, the Digital Fiction International Network ('DFIN', funded by The Leverhulme Trust since January 2009) has been exploring new avenues of defining and implementing approaches to close-reading, with the tripartite trajectory of developing a range of tools and associated terminology for digital fiction analysis; of providing a body of analyses based on the close-reading of texts, which are substantiated by robust theoretical and terminological conclusions; and of fostering a collaborative network of academics working on inter-related projects.

In following this agenda, this paper offers a comparative approach to second person narration in two exemplary digital fictions: geniwate and Deena Larsen’s satirical flash fiction, The Princess Murderer (2003), and Jon Ingold's interactive fiction mystery, All Roads (2006 [2001]). We aim to explore the extent to which print-oriented narratological approaches to the textual 'You' (e.g. Herman 1994) apply to the texts under investigation and suggest theoretical tenets arising from their distinct (inter-)medial and ludic qualities (cf. Ryan 1999). Of particular interest will be the ways in which the reader and his/her role in the cybernetic feedback loop are constructed textually and interactionally.

(Source: Authors' abstract for ELO_AI)

This article offers an analysis of two Storyspace hypertexts, Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden and Richard Holeton's Figurski at Findhorn on Acid. The article has a specific focus on how the text implements second-person narration and other forms of the textual "you" (Herman, Story Logic) in juxtaposition with other narrative perspectives. We aim to explore the extent to which print-based narratological theories of the textual "you" apply to the texts under investigation and suggest theoretical tenets and taxonomic modifications arising from the way in which the reader is involved in textual construction. More specifically we will show first how second-person narration can be used in digital fiction to endow the reader with certain properties so that she is maneuvered into the position of "you." We will then show how second-person narration can be used to presuppose knowledge about the reader so as to predict her relationship to "you." In both cases we will show that some instances of second-person narration in digital fiction require additional theoretical categories for their analysis. Of particular interest is the way in which the reader and her role in the "cybernetic feedback loop" (Aarseth) are constructed textually and interactionally.

According to the French author and theoretician Jean-Pierre Balpe, “all digital art works are first conceived outside the framework of a pragmatic relation to materiality. Any manifestation of digital art is but a simulated moment of an absent matter.”

However, I wish to show that there is at least as much materiality in the digital media as in other media. Of course, as a formal description, digital and material can be distinguished. Digital media correspond to formalization, insofar as formalization is understood as the modelling of a given reality through the use of a formal code. But because digital media refers to the effectiveness of digital calculation, it can be considered as “material”, at least on two levels:

on the level of what occurs in the machine, calculation being a material process,
on the level of what occurs in the interaction with the user, a symbolic and behavioral interaction, in which the system acts on the user and is acted by the user.
The question of materiality is indeed related to that of the media. Yves Jeanneret insists upon this materiality, when he says that “the power of writing is primarily related to the materiality of its media.” Unlike those who present digital writing as deprived of any materiality, Yves Jeanneret points out the materiality of this form of writing : “In addition to its own materiality (network, memory, screen, keyboard, etc), computerized writing is a repeat, a quotation, a mise en abyme of all the materialities of the documentary culture. Digital writing does not amount to a loss of materiality. In fact, materiality is not absent from digital writing. On the contrary it is doubly there, it is materiality squared : the materiality of the media, and that quoted by the media.”

In electronic literature, this materiality is often used for aesthetic purposes. The Trésor de la Langue Française gives a definition of literature as « the aesthetic use of the written language ». This definition may seem very narrow, especially because it doesn’t take into account the oral literature. However, what we can observe in many digital literary works is a displacement of the “aesthetic use of the written language” to the aesthetics of materiality : materiality of the text, of the interface and of the media. That is what I shall show on the basis of a corpus of digital literary works.