digital narratology

"Do it" by Serge Bouchardon is an app that encourages the reader to be a more active participant in their lives. Posted in this issue is a sample video of Bouchardon’s app. Upon opening the app, the reader is told they are at a job interview and then is prompted through the various existential anxieties that follow. You can shake, tap, and expand the narrative, but the most important thing asked of you during the experience is: can you adapt?

The work has been presented by "The New River" for the Spring 2018 edition.

The app is avaiable for Ios and Android devices and it can be found here:https://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/18Spring/DoIt/DI.html

Source: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/18Spring/editor.html

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.

[Published under author's previous name, Jennifer Smith]

Since its development, critics of electronic literature have touted all that is "new" about the field, commenting on how these works make revolutionary use of non-linear structure, hyperlinks, and user interaction. Scholars of digital narrative have most often focused their critiques within the paradigms of either the text-centric structuralist model of narrativity or post-structuralist models that implicate the text as fundamentally fluid and dependent upon its reader for meaning. But neither of these approaches can account completely for the unique modes in which digital narratives prompt readerly progression, yet still exist as independent creative artifacts marked by purposive design. I argue that, in both practice and theory, we must approach digital-born narratives as belonging to a third, hybrid paradigm. In contrast to standard critical approaches, I interrogate the presumed "newness" of digital narratives to reveal many aspects of these works that hearken to print predecessors and thus confirm classical narratological theories of structure and authorship. Simultaneously, though, I demonstrate that narrative theory must be revised and expanded to account for some of the innovative techniques inherent to digital-born narrative.

Across media formats, theories of narrative beginnings, endings, and authorship contribute to understanding of readerly progress and comprehension. My analysis of Leishman's electronically animated work Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw shows how digital narratives extend theories of narrative beginnings, confirming theoretical suitability of existing rules of notice, expectations for mouseover actions, and the role of institutional and authorial antetexts. My close study of Jackson's hypertext my body: a Wunderkammer likewise informs scholarship on narrative endings, as my body does not provide a neatly linear plot, and thus does not cleanly correspond to theories of endings that revolve around conceptions of instabilities or tensions. Yet I argue that there is still compelling reason to read for narrative closure, and thus narrative coherence, within this and other digital works. Finally, my inquiry into Pullinger and Joseph's collaboratively written Flight Paths: A Networked Novel firmly justifies the theory of implied authorship in both print and digital environments and confirms the suitability of this construct to a range of texts.

Editors' introduction to a collection of essays on digital narratology. 

An argument for a multimedia narratology that accounts for both relationships between media within a digital work and how work positions itself within a larger media multiplicty. Punday develops his argument in part through a reading of the multimedia aesthetic in Talan Memmott's Lexia to Perplexia.

Just as the explosive growth of digital media has led to ever-expanding narrative possibilities and practices, so these new electronic modes of storytelling have, in their own turn, demanded a rapid and radical rethinking of narrative theory. This timely volume takes up the challenge, deeply and broadly considering the relationship between digital technology and narrative theory in the face of the changing landscape of computer-mediated communication.

New Narratives reflects the diversity of its subject by bringing together some of the foremost practitioners and theorists of digital narratives. It extends the range of digital subgenres examined by narrative theorists to include forms that have become increasingly prominent, new examples of experimental hypertext, and contemporary video games. The collection also explicitly draws connections between the development of narrative theory, technological innovation, and the use of narratives in particular social and cultural contexts.

Finally, New Narratives focuses on how the tools provided by new technologies may be harnessed to provide new ways of both producing and theorizing narrative. Truly interdisciplinary, the book offers broad coverage of contemporary narrative theory, including frameworks that draw from classical and postclassical narratology, linguistics, and media studies.

(Source: University of Nebraska Press catalog page)