narratology

This essay compares two novel forms that are separated by more than 250 years: Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, published in 1742, and Philippa Burne's hypertext fiction "24 Hours with Someone You Know," copyrighted in 1996. Using narratological, pragmatic, and cognitive tools and theories, the confrontation of the two distant texts aims to highlight that while "the ethics of the telling" is congruent with the "ethics of the told" in both stories (), the texts differ in the pragmatic positioning of their audiences and the freedom that they seem to grant readers, thereby emphasizing the evolution of the author-reader relationship across centuries and media. The article shows to what extent digital fiction can be said to invite the active participation of the reader via the computer mouse/cursor. Meanwhile it exposes a paradox: although Joseph Andrews is a highly author-controlled narrative, guiding the reader's ethical interpretation of what is told, it seems to leave more "space" for the actual reader, while Burne's participatory framework, conveyed through a second-person pronoun that blurs the line between implied and actual audience, requires some "forced participation" () via the "virtual performatives" that hyperlinks represent. Finally, the specificity of "you" digital fiction as opposed to its print counterpart is theorized in two contrasted models of audience.

The Narratological Affordances and Constraints of Mobile Locative Media was a presentation held by Jeff Ritchie at the ELO 2012 conference under the category: Storytelling With Mobile Media: Locative Tehcnologies and Narrative Practices.

This paper explores the concept of narrativity in the city by analyzing the project Queering the City of Literature (#QtCoL), a distributed narrative inspired by Implementation (Rettberg and Montfort). Distributed narratives are literary texts that are distributed across different spaces and times to create divergence rather than unity (Walker 1). Implementation and #QtCoL build on several modern-day practices: both of the works consist of text fragments that participants were invited to put up in places of their choice on public surfaces. The texts were photographed and posted online.  



This paper analyses the work by means of a "diffractive reading" (Barad and Haraway) between the narrative and its urban context. Central to my analysis is my observation during the of #QtCoL event, which I co-organized, to understand the choices and experiences of people while choosing locations for text fragments.

The practice of putting up the texts highly influences the way in which the actor views the city, looking for an appropriate place for the narrative. The actor is invited to connect elements in the text fragment to elements in their surroundings. The actor who places the text might not have noticed certain elements if it hadn't been for the text fragment. Once the text fragment is placed in its context, the opposite occurs: the context influences how the narrative is read. Once the text fragment is placed, the surroundings influences the reading of the narrative.

This diffraction between narrative and context is highlighted by the act of photography, which shows the immediate context of the text but makes the city as a whole invisible. For the 'analog' reader, however, the context of the whole city is highly visible as the text has to be found inside the city. The combination of analog and digital practices thus highlights the representation of the city as a visual practice. In addition, the invitation to post images of the project on social media furthers the experience of ‘taking up space’ and having a presence, not only in the city but online as well. 

(source: ELO 2018 website)

My paper explores the genre of visual novels, a form of digital interactive fiction popularized in Japan. As very little academic work has been undertaken on visual novels thus far, I explore several different methods for analyzing them, and consider what other scholars may find useful and interesting about them in the future. One of the few detailed English-language essays on visual novels is Patrick W. Galbraith’s “Bishōjo Games: ‘Techno-Intimacy’ and the Virtually Human in Japan.” While Galbraith does make some insightful points about visual novels’ representations of romance and sexuality, he also misrepresents the medium as primarily a form of romance simulation for lonely heterosexual men. I challenge Galbraith’s assumptions through my first method of analysis: using a java program to distant-read the data aggregated by the website The Visual Novel Database. The results of my study demonstrate not only that visual novels encompass a variety of genres, but also that trends in recent releases point toward an increase in stories featuring female protagonists. Scholars interested in positive representation of women in digital interactive fiction may therefore find visual novels relevant to their work. I also consider the debate between narratology and ludology regarding analysis of video games, and explore how both approaches could be useful in the study of visual novels. I first close-read some scenes from the short visual novel Once on a Windswept Night, applying the narratological theories of interactive fiction scholars Daniel Punday, Veli-Matti Karhulahti, and Espen Aarseth. I argue that through unique strategies such as taking a minimalist approach to orienting spaces, using metanarrative to situate itself within a long history of interactive literature, and taking advantage of the medium’s conventions to subvert readers’ expectations, Once on a Windswept Night demonstrates the potential for visual novels to be narratologically complex and interesting. Finally, while the core component of visual novels is similar to hypertext stories and choose-your-own-adventure books, many also include elements of other video game genres. Visual novels which engage in this blurring of genres, such as Aviary Attorney, lend themselves to analysis from ludological perspectives as well. I compare Aviary Attorney’s gameplay elements to those that Noah Wardrip-Fruin analyzes in the role-playing game Knights of the Old Republic, considering how they can make the narrative more immersive, yet also open the door to flaws and inconsistencies in the story. I argue that games like Aviary Attorney, which integrate simulation elements into detailed and branching stories, could pave the way for new and exciting forms of game fiction in the future. I hope that my paper can provide a good introduction to some of the merits and values of visual novels as a subject of academic study. Exploring visual novels may expand the viewpoints of scholars of interactive fiction and video games, and in bringing more recognition to the medium, these scholars have the potential to help provide visual novel developers with the opportunities to try even more new and experimental methods of expressing their stories.

(Source: Author's description from ELO 2018 site: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/1224/Ludo…)

This essay describes the way that digital narratives (both commercial video games and electronic literature) create two kinds of space: a primary storytelling space in which gameplay or reading occurs, and an orientating space through which those primary spaces are encountered. This orienting space might include a larger narrative world, a menu from which game options can be chosen, or some expressive frame for our reading and play. This essay examines space in narrative theory—especially the work of Ruth Ronen, Gabriel Zoran, David Herman, and Mikhail Bakhtin—in search of a theory able to accommodate this orienting space. After an analysis of the challenges of accounting for intentionally bounded or limited narrative space in these theories, this essay turns to Bakhtin’s under-appreciated distinction between the view from inside and outside of the chronotope, which offers an account of what it would mean to occupy such an orienting space. This essay concludes by arguing that the methodology adopted here can have a wider application. By treating a new medium as offering possibilities that reveal unrecognized tensions and limitations within older theories, this essay describes a kind of narratological archeology similar to recent work on media archeology.

(source: abstract from project MUSE website)

This doctoral thesis is dedicated to a form of storytelling which was added to the literary horizon
almost three decades ago. Digital fiction began by defining itself against the printed book. The
transgression of linearity, a feature which is often related to print or, more precisely, to the novel, and the attempts to reduce authorial presence in the text, were soon turned into defining
characteristics of this literary form. These works were first described as fragmented objects
comprised of “text chunks” interconnected by hyperlinks, which offered the reader freedom of
choice and a participative role in the construction of the text. This text was read by selecting several links and by assembling its lexias. However, the expansion of the World Wide Web and the emergence of new software and new devices, suggested new reading and writing experiences. Technology offered new ways to tell a story, and with it, additional paradigms. Hyperlinks were replaced with new navigation tools and lexias gave way to new kinds of textual organization. The computer became a multimedia environment where several forms of representation could thrive and prosper. As digital fiction became multimodal, words began to share the screen with image, video, music or icons. Sound was also included as part of digital fiction.
In electronic literature, the emergence of new software is often followed by the creation of new
types of texts. Virtual reality or augmented reality are presently being used to produce new textual responses. These demand an analysis of the relation between interactivity and immersion. While interactivity is often described as a set of physical activities that can interfere with attention, immersion is frequently seen as an uncritical and passive response to the text. Interactivity was used to offer freedom of choice to the reader and to give the
reader the opportunity of co-authoring the text. Immersion was, by contrast, considered as the
result of a reading experience constrained by authorial intention. In so doing, interactivity was
mostly viewed as an antidote of reader’s immersion in the text. However, in this thesis, I will focus on a cooperation rather than a conflict between both. By describing electronic literature as part of a long self-generating process known as literature, I will demonstrate that immersion and interactivity cannot survive separately. In fact, they represent intrinsic characteristics which can be identified in any kind of literary text. In order to better understand the relation between immersion and interactivity, the alleged transparency of the medium and its apparent immateriality will be discussed in this thesis. The hybridity and interactivity of digital fiction will be considered as aesthetic features that must be covered by literary analysis. This thesis aims to address the relationship between immersion and interactivity by taking into account the text’s multimodality and transiency, as well as the ergodic and cognitive work done by the reader.

In Gerard Genette’s (1993; 1997) narratology, “rheme” is contrasted with “theme.” While themes are symbolic indications of what texts mean, rhemes are super-formal indications of texts themselves. The title of this article is highly thematic because it indicates much of that what is being discussed; a title like “Only an Article” would be highly rhematic due to its lack of indication of the subject matter at the expense of non-reflective form.

Veli-Matti Karhulahti has recently argued that the aesthetics of the videogame phenomenon are better understood through “rhematics” than the rhetoric of “meaning” that has so far dominated the analysis of cultural products, especially within literary studies:

While [videogame play] is essentially meaningless – there is no decipherable message to be understood – it is not senseless: there is a sensation to be understood. What exchanges (or more correctly, comes into being) is data that cannot be made known by signs. This sensible nonsense gives shape to an aporetic rhematic [that] cannot be understood by means of any conventional interpretative discipline, a new discipline is needed; a rhematic discipline. (Karhulahti 2013)

This paper introduces rhematics as an analytic tool that facilitates comprehending the multiplicity of aesthetic ends in electronic literature. It is suggested that the rhematics of electronic literature operate on two levels, the conceptual and the material. As the former has already been mapped out extensively by literary theorists through “poetic” functions (e.g. Burke 1941; Jakobson 1960; Eco 1989), the present focus is on the latter and its “configurative” functions (see Aarseth 1997; Eskelinen 2012). The material manipulation of electronic literary works is thus examined as an intrinsically rewarding mode of interaction that is not guided solely by hermeneutic methods of interpretation but also by cybernetic engagement (see Iser 2003).

The configurative competency of the e-reader, it is argued, must hence be taken as a serious contextual factor in electronic literary analysis. This also calls for an ontological problematization: if reading and literature are identified as noematic or hermeneutic entities, do extranoematic configurative aspects not conflict with the ‘literariness’ (cf. Randall 1988) of electronic literature?

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

The talk reflects on the theoretical and practical aspects of collaboration in e-literature. Firstly a model of digitally enhanced collaboration that could encompass both its past and future instances is proposed. Matching several groups of categories (for example “production / negotiation / creation” against “material / story / discourse”) the model demonstrates that e-literature – even if we are really witnessing the end of it now – maintains its status of an important laboratory for any collaboration in digital environment.

Alongside acclaimed collaborative works (Forward Anywhere, The Unknown, A Million Penguins) several less known examples from Poland will be presented: Digital Green Eye (2012) and Bałwochwał (2013) – collaborative adaptations of Polish avant-garde classics – as well as Piksel Zdrój – a hypertext project by 8 authors published in 2015. The aim of the first part is to introduce both a universal analytical model and some rather unknown examples of e-literature to the international audience.

The second part, in which I draw from my own experience as an author and producer of several collaborative e-lit efforts, reflects on available tools. I will demonstrate that popular collaboration tools hardly match the complexity of teamwork fiction writing aimed at delivering not only a product, a perfect “text”, but also a cohesive world with events and characters that start “living” their own lives

As it turns out, even in the world of ubiquitous computing the ultimate, working models for collegial writing are to be found in the universal social activities that had long proved to be storytelling friendly. These archetypes of literary communication (for example the road trip, the campfire chant, the round table debate) might be as much important for setting up a good collaborative environment, as technological affordances of software and hardware. Lastly, I will try to shortly predict possible directions in digital collaborative writing.

(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This paper will discuss how picturebook applications place themselves within the tradition of children’s literature. In the discussion the various ends of hypermediacy will be emphasized.
Children’s literature is characterized through a child perspective, which is a narratological means developed within literary modernism. It reflects a consideration for the child reader’s cognitive capacity. Even though the narrator may have an adult voice, the story’s point of view reflects the point of view of a child, in order that the reader may be able to recognize—or at least imagine—the story’s universe, characters, milieu and plot. In picturebooks for children the child perspective is equally dominant through the pictures and the verbal text. And in picturebook applications environmental sounds duplicates the effect. One might therefore ask whether the child perspective is highlighted in multimodal children’s literature with hypermediacy as a result.
Picturebook applications seem to combine a cognitive consideration with performative aesthetics. Interactive elements increase the possibility of play. Thus, the applications can be characterized as playgrounds, which is a common way to define postmodern picturebooks (Meerbergen 2012, Sipe and Pantaleo 2008). The interactive elements might also increase the reader’s involvement in the storytelling, which is a common ambition in contemporary picturebooks (Ørjasæter 2014a). Schwebs 2014 argues that the affordances of an app is to bring a story to life in a multi-sensous way, and that the story-telling is embodied in the reader through the finger gestures. My point is that even hypermediated picturebooks such as Stian Hole’s trilogy on Garman have developed means for embodied sensuous experience (Ørjasæter 2014b). But when the picturebook Garmann’s summer is adapted to a picturebook application the multi-sensous story-telling becomes redundant. The story is told out loud as well as presented as scripture. The environment becomes audible as well as visible. The effect of this seemingly redundancy in the storytelling might be regarded as hypermediacy. The question is how it affects the work’s capacity to make embodied sensuous impression.
Apart from Remediation. Understanding New Media (1999) where Bolter and Grusin introduce their hypermediacy concept, the discussion in this paper will be influenced by Software takes command (2013) where Lev Manovich points out that ”computers and software are not just ’technology’ but rather the new medium in which we can think and imagine differently” (13). Thus, the research question in this paper will be: What does hypermediacy do to the way one thinks about children’s literature? Does it in any way alter what one thinks children’s literature is?

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)