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Multimodal Print Fiction, Postmodernism, and Digital Literacies Beyond the Textual: Multimodal Print Fiction, Postmodernism, and Digital Literacies A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature by Daniel Dale M.A. Wright State University June 2010 B.A. University of Dayton May 2008 Committee Chair: Jennifer Glaser, Ph.D Abstract This manuscript brings together three strings of contemporary American fiction. First, the influence of digital culture on both readers and the texts they consume. Second, the increasing use of multiple kinds of media and technology (including things like the internet, social media, video, sound, and image) within a certain group of American fiction. Third, the move away from postmodernist narrative techniques seen in American fiction. The goal is to pinpoint the intersection of these three strings and the way the impact one another. Readers develop different reading skills through their interactions with digital technology. As a result, they bring these skills to bear on print fiction. At the same time, contemporary American print fiction is incorporating a variety of media in different ways. These readers, who honed their skills in digital environments, are always-already used to interacting with narratives that combine multiple kinds of media. In essence, readers who have reading skills developed in digital environments are well positioned to make sense of this kind of literature. Finally, this has an impact on the current movement in contemporary fiction away from postmodernism. Eschewing the pervasive irony found in many postmodern texts, many works of contemporary fiction work to bridge the gap between reader and writer encouraged by postmodern irony. By incorporating the textual alongside a host of other media, these contemporary texts attempt to avoid many of the problems associated with textual representation raised by postmodernism. ii iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Reading in the Narrative Archive: 22 Archival Fiction and Digital Literacy Graphic Literature: Using Comics 64 Theory as a Lens to Investigate Multimodal Print Narratives Finding Your Way Around the House 104 of Leaves: Literature and the Interface Wired for a Different Kind of Reading: 141 Children’s Literature and Multimedia Narratives Bibliography 177 iv Introduction In a recent Washington Post article, an ominous warning was sounded: “There is concern that young children’s affinity and often mastery of their parents’ [digital] devices could stunt the development of deep reading skills. The brain is the innocent bystander in this new world. It just reflects how we live.” Digital technology, the story goes, is changing the way we read, shifting us from a deeper, more in-depth kind of reading to a kind of reading where skimming and distraction are the norm. Michael Rosenwald, the author of the piece, portrays the situation as one “of great fascination and growing alarm.” He is worried that readers “seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia.” Over the past few years, there has been an increasing debate on the effects of digital technology on reading and thinking. On January 17th, 2018, for example, The New York Times published a piece called “How Technology Is (and Isn’t) Changing Our Reading Habits.” Likewise, The Telegraph published a piece in 2016 entitled, “Reading on Computer Screens Changes How Your Brain Works, Scientists Say.” This echoes a 2015 article in The Guardian with the headline “Ebooks Are Changing the Way We Read, and the Way Novelists Write.” In 2013, Scientific American published a long-form article on the subject, “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper Versus Screens.” The trend goes all the way back to 2010 (and probably before), with a Smithsonian Magazine article titled “Reading in a Whole New Way.” All these articles, and the many others that undoubtedly exist, have one thing in common: the anxiety about changes in reading brought about by digital technology. Shorter attention 1 spans, poorer reading comprehension, fewer hours spent with books, are all common red flags raised again and again by these articles. I am not interested in taking a position on the good or bad of these changes in reading. In many cases, these articles have a “Socrates warns Phaedrus of the dangers of writing” feel. Nevertheless, it is hard to deny that reading is changing in some fundamental way. If reading is changing, what does that mean for the production of written fiction? Likewise, how are readers, who now predominately absorb text through digital technology, approaching text-based fiction? This manuscript brings together three strings of contemporary American fiction. First, the influence of digital culture on both readers and the texts they consume. Second, the increasing use of multiple kinds of media and technology (including things like the internet, social media, video, sound, and image) within a certain group of American fiction. While visual elements have been used in textual narratives going all the way back to Tristram Shandy, I will argue that there is something different about the incorporation of multiple modalities seen in fiction written over the last twenty years. Finally, I will tie these two ideas together with a third, the move away from postmodernist narrative techniques seen in American fiction. My goal is to pinpoint the intersection of these three strings and the way the impact one another. Readers develop different reading skills through their interactions with digital technology. As a result, they bring these skills to bear on print fiction. At the same time, contemporary American print fiction is incorporating a variety of media in different ways. These readers, who honed their skills in digital environments, are always-already used to interacting with narratives that combine multiple kinds of media. In essence, readers who have reading skills developed in digital environments are well positioned to make sense of this kind of literature. 2 Finally, this has an impact on the current movement in contemporary fiction away from postmodernism. Eschewing the pervasive irony found in many postmodern texts, many works of contemporary fiction work to bridge the gap between reader and writer encouraged by postmodern irony. By incorporating the textual alongside a host of other media, these contemporary texts attempt to avoid many of the problems associated with textual representation raised by postmodernism. Throughout this book, I will be using terms that are often contested because they signify multiple genres, media, and fields of inquiry. In order to discuss these ideas with any kind of specificity, it is necessary to take some time to narrow down these terms into something usable. The concept of “multimodality” is often used within rhetoric and composition, but rarely in literary studies. Nevertheless, I find the term useful to describe a kind of contemporary American literature that incorporates non-textual elements in their narrative. Terms like “visual literature,” which are more common in literary studies, don’t seem to fit because the literature I will be examining often uses things such as sound and interactivity, which don’t seem to be included in the term “visual literature.” Furthermore, I will often jump between texts that use a combination of just the visual and verbal to texts that take advantage of sound, digital technology, the internet, and video. In order to unify these varying kinds of texts, I want to use a term that signifies not a specific combination of modalities, but encompasses anything that uses multiple modalities, no matter what they might be. While some, such as WJT Mitchell, might argue that literature is always-already visual and verbal, I believe a distinction lies in the way certain kinds of novels intentionally mobilize multiple modalities in the production of meaning. Another term that I will be using extensively is “digital literacies.” Essentially, I see digital literacies as the kinds of reading skills that one develops through their interactions with 3 digital technology. Like any learned skill, our literacies are influenced by what and how we read. A culture in which most reading is done on scrolls encourages readers to develop skills that help them navigate and make use of that technology. Likewise, the skills that one develops reading print books are somewhat specific to that medium. Of course, some general skills exist. However, at the same time, various kinds of reading technology use different navigational and information presentation strategies, which readers need to adapt to if they are going to use that medium effectively. However, these skills, while learned via certain media, are transferable. The skills we develop through our interactions with digital technology don’t stay there. Rather, they are brought to bear on other kinds of media, such as print fiction. While this is usually boiled down to fears of more skimming, shorter attention spans, and less close reading, I believe that some of these digital reading skills actually compliment print reading skills. That is to say, while the reading skills developed in digital environments might lead to a different kind of reading, that reading isn’t inherently worse than the kind of reading that was honed in a predominately print culture. Rather, when readers with digital reading skills use them on print fiction, interesting kinds of reading arise. This is especially true when those reading skills meet multimodal print fiction, since readers with digital literacies are well equipped to tackle narratives that make use of multiple kinds of media. Since the terms “postmodernism” and the debate about what, if anything, is happening in the wake of postmodernism (if postmodernism is even receding) will take some time to unpack, I plan to devote more time to it.
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