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i Reading Today ii COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND CULTURE Series Editors TIMOTHY MATHEWS AND FLORIAN MUSSGNUG Comparative Literature and Culture explores new creative and critical perspectives on literature, art and culture. Contributions offer a comparative, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary focus, showcasing exploratory research in literary and cultural theory and history, material and visual cultures, and reception studies. The series is also interested in language-based research, particularly the changing role of national and minority languages and cultures, and includes within its publications the annual proceedings of the ‘Hermes Consortium for Literary and Cultural Studies’. Timothy Mathews is Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Criticism, UCL. Florian Mussgnug is Reader in Italian and Comparative Literature, UCL. iii Reading Today Edited by Heta Pyrhönen and Janna Kantola iv First published in 2018 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ ucl- press Text © Contributors, 2018 Images © Contributors and copyright holders named in captions, 2018 Excerpt(s) from HOUSE OF LEAVES: THE REMASTERED, FULL-COLOR EDITION by Mark Z. Danielewski, copyright © 2000 by Mark Z. Danielewski. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. The authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work; and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Pyrhönen H. & Kantola J. (eds.). 2018. Reading Today. London: UCL Press. DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.14324/ 111.9781787351950 Further details about CC BY licenses are available at creativecommons.org/licenses/ ISBN: 978- 1- 78735- 197- 4 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978- 1- 78735- 196- 7 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978- 1- 78735- 195- 0 (PDF) ISBN: 978- 1- 78735- 198- 1 (epub) ISBN: 978- 1- 78735- 199- 8 (mobi) ISBN: 978- 1- 78735- 200- 1 (html) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787351950 v Contents List of figures vii List of contributors viii New perspectives on reading: an introduction 1 Heta PyrHönen Part I Reading challenges 13 1 Reading experimental literature: unreadability, discomfort and reading strategies 15 natalya BekHta 2 Information and the illusion of totality: reading the contemporary encyclopedic novel 31 Vesa kyllönen 3 The brain in our hands: the materiality of reading Neuromaani 45 laura PiiPPo 4 Explorative exposure: media in and of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves 57 JuHa- Pekka kilPiö Part II New strategies of reading 71 5 New reading strategies in the twenty- first century: transmedia storytelling via app in Marisha Pessl’s Night Film 73 anna Weigel 6 New reading strategies in print and on digital platforms: Stephanie Strickland’s V 87 Matti kangaskoski v vi Part III Reading affectively 103 7 Rethinking reading through the novelistic discourses of Don Quixote and Madame Bovary 105 stefano rossoni 8 ‘Emily equals childhood and youth and first love’: Finnish readers and L. M. Montgomery’s Anne and Emily books 118 VaPPu kannas 9 ‘The miraculous secret of a good book’: representations of the reading experience in Dutch middlebrow criticism 132 ryanne keltJens 10 The healing power of books: The Novel Cure as a culturally tailored literary experiment 145 serena Cacchioli Part IV Reading in context 157 11 Context in film adaptations 159 MarJo Vallittu Notes 173 Works cited and additional reading 177 Index 196 vi CONTENTS vii List of figures 6.1 The opening screen of the V: Vniverse Shockwave application. Reproduced with permission from Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson-Jaramillo. 93 6.2 The Dragon Fly constellation. Reproduced with permission from Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson-Jaramillo. 94 6.3 A pattern drawn in ‘draw’ mode, where some words have already faded. Vniverse iPad application. Reproduced with permission from Stephanie Strickland and Ian Hatcher. 95 11.1 The circle of reception and interpretation. 166 vii viii List of contributors Natalya Bekhta is Postdoctoral Researcher at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture in Giessen (Germany) and a visiting scholar at Helsinki University (Finland), where she works on a project called ‘Spectres and Saviours in Post- Soviet Literature: Imagining Alternative Worlds’ and on the manuscript of her book We- Narratives: Plural Narrators and Untypical Narrative Situations in Contemporary Fiction. Serena Cacchioli holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Lisbon (Portugal). Her main research is in translation studies, and her thesis focuses on a comparative study of poetry transa- lation during dictatorships (Estado Novo in Portugal and Fascism in Italy). She also holds a master’s degree in literary translation from the University of Pisa (Italy) and a degree in translation studies from the University of Trieste (SSLMIT) (Italy). Matti Kangaskoski is a Finnish writer. He gained his PhD at the University of Helsinki in connection with Justus Liebig University Giessen (Germany) through the international doctoral studies network PhDNet for Literary and Cultural Studies. His doctoral dissertation deals with the strategies of reading and interpreting digital poetry. He is the author of two volumes of poetry and a novel. Vappu Kannas is a Finnish writer and literary scholar. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Helsinki. Her dissertation examines the journals of L. M. Montgomery and the depictions of romance in them. Her articles have been published in the journals Avain and The Looking Glass as well as in the collection of essays Keltaisia esseitä (2016). Her poems have appeared in the journals Lumooja and CV2. She has also written a poetry chapbook, As an Eel through the Body (2016) with Shannon Maguire. Janna Kantola is University Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Helsinki. She has published monographs and articles on viii ix Pentti Saarikoski’s poetry, modern and postmodern poetry, animal studies, imagology and translation studies. Ryanne Keltjens completed a BA in Modern Dutch Literature and a research master’s in Literary and Cultural Studies (cum laude) at the University of Groningen (the Netherlands). She is now working on a dis- sertation on Dutch middlebrow criticism in the interwar period, focusing on literary reviewing in periodicals with an aim of cultural mediation. Her PhD is part of the research project Dutch Middlebrow Literature 1930– 1940: Production, Distribution, Reception, which is subsidized by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (see middlebrow.nl). Her research interests include popular literature, (literary) periodicals, the functions of literature for readers, author representations, literary hierarchies and canon formation. Juha- Pekka Kilpiö is a doctoral student in literature at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. His thesis deals with intermediality and the representation of cinema in US postmodernist fiction and poetry. Vesa Kyllönen, PhL, is a doctoral student in comparative literature at the University of Helsinki. His dissertation deals with the fundamental role of the metaphysical detective story in the contemporary encyclo- pedic novel. He has published articles and essays, and given papers on both topics. His licentiate thesis dealt with Umberto Eco’s theory of interpretation and its relation to the metaphysical detective story. Laura Piippo, MA, University of Jyväskylä (Finland), is writing her doctoral thesis on the experimentalist poetics of a prominent Finnish novel of ‘excess’, Neuromaani (2012) by Jaakko Yli- Juonikas, through the concepts of repetition, assemblage and affect. The main goal is to formulate a reading strategy for such excessive, complex and intermedial literary works. Her articles and essays on these subjects have been published or are forthcoming in journals and edited volumes. She has also taken part in the Academy of Finland consortium project, The Literary in Life: Exploring the Boundaries between Literature and the Everyday. Heta Pyrhönen is Professor of Comparative Literature and Head of the Doctoral Programme in Philosophy, Arts and Society at the University of Helsinki. She has published monographs and articles on detective fiction, adaptation, genre, fairy tales, British women’s literature, young adults’ literature, and literature and the emotions. Stefano Rossoni is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at University College London (UCL); a postgraduate representative of LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS ix xnewgenprepdf the British Comparative Literature Association; and a member of the editorial team of Tropos, the journal of UCL’s Society for Comparative Cultural Inquiry. Rossoni’s dissertation explores the representations of masculinities in the narratives of J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, Philip Roth and Mario Vargas Llosa. His focus is on the Quixotic tension their novels establish between heterosexual masculinity and literary texts. His article published by the European Journal of English Studies in 2016 examines the