Program

Symposium -  21.01.2017

10:30     Arrival – Coffee

11:00     Welcome - Bettina Soller 

11:10     Presentation - "Social Media Fiction: Designing Narrativity on Social Media” by Simona Venditti - Ph.D. candidate in Design at Politecnico di Milano.

11:40     Coffee Break

11:50     Interview  with  Christiane Frohmann - Orbanism, Frohmann Verlag

12:30     Lunch

14:00    Experiment - "Authorship and Moral Rights in The Beginner's Guide - A Live Let's Play" by Jens Bonk-Wiltfang - Research Assistant, American Studies

14:40    Coffee Break

15:00  Presentation - "Reading Marisha Pessl's Night Film: A Reconsideration of Intermedial Gaps"   Bogna Kazur - Ph.D. candidate at the University of Göttingen

Please find the link to our flyer below

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9lxS1cWdOqVNHZqak40QWJ4MFE/view?usp=sharing

The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges

The short story The Garden of Forking Paths was written by Jorge Luis Borges. The author was born in Argentina in 1899 and a key figure in Spanish-language literature. Most of his works are rather short and were published in story collections. Reoccurring themes in his works are eternity, time, books, reality and illusion.
     The short story The Garden of Forking Paths was published first in 1941. However, the plot of the story is set in 1916. Doctor Yu Tsun, the main character, is a spy for the German Empire who lives in the United Kingdom during World War I. Tsun is pursued by an MI5 agent called Captain Richard Madden. In order to convey an important message to his German handlers he meets his old friend Doctor Stephen Albert. When walking to his house Tsun reflects on his great ancestor Ts'ui Pên. While his talk with Albert Tsun realizes that the unfinished notes that Ts'ui Pên left before his death are actually the intricate labyrinth that he wanted to create. These notes are his attempt to describe a world where all possible outcomes of an event occur simultaneously. Following this realization Tsun kills Albert in order to pass on his important message to his handlers.
     The vision of the “forking paths” that are described by Borges in his text has been cited as inspiration within the field of hypertext fiction. Further parallels can be drawn to the internet. In this new medium the user has unlimited choices by using links and hyperlinks as described in the text by the example of the story fragments that form a labyrinth. 

     To read the full short story follow this link.

J. Ost

"Inhabiting House of Leaves" by N. Katherine Hayles

N. Katherine Hayles' text "Inhabiting House of Leaves", published in her book Writing Machines in  2002 is an analysis of Danielewski's novel House of Leaves. Hayles interprets the novel with regard to mediation and remediation techniques and the book´s materiality.
     According to Hayles, the novel can be considered a physical artifact which incorporates all kinds of different media (film, video, photography, tattoos, handwriting etc.), as well as various different inscription surfaces. At the same time a constant process of remediation is taking place. The incorporation of all these different kinds of media in one print novel makes the novel unique, opening up questions about the format of the novel being reinvented or leading to something new.
Alongside the remediation techniques, Hayles interprets the novel as a mediation plot which is highly self-aware of its materiality. The subjects in the plot are constantly mediated and mediation brings the characters into being through film, footnotes, critique and various other inscription devices. Hayles henceforth calls the narrator of the novel a remediated narrator making inscription technologies visible and making the reader conscious of their various effects.  
     All these processes of mediation and remediation lead to the effect that the novel takes the shape of a labyrinth mirroring the house in The Navidson Record. The various alternative paths and multiple layers of the novel are mirroring the style of a labyrinth, which are impossible to bring into a coherent order. The materiality of the book is constructed through the interlinking of words, nonverbal marks and physical properties.
     All in all, the novel positions itself through its techniques of remediation in the digital era. Hayles describes the novel as a physical artifact which incorporates messages which are transformed through mediation and remediation and in which technology constructs the novel as a material artifact.    
     Additionally, in her text Hayles mentions a shared performance of Danielewski and his sister, who performs under the name Poe, in which the singer incorporates a reading of her brother into the performance of one of her songs. Indeed, this concept was further realized in a music video of the same song.

 

Hey Pretty by Poe 

 

Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. "Inhabiting House of Leaves." 108-132. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.


M. Barbod

"The Right Sort" by David Mitchell

 The short story The Right Sort, written by David Stephen Mitchell - author of the famous novel Cloud Atlas - was posted to Twitter in a course of seven days. The story, which consists of over 280 Tweets, generated some excitement when it first started out. However, later Tweets received fewer and fewer Retweets and Likes. The idea for the project had come from Mitchell's publisher and served as means to generate excitement about Mitchell's forthcoming novel The Bone Clocks. Nevertheless, Mitchell turned the short story into a novel of its own called Slade House, a year after publishing it on Twitter.

     In an interview with The Guardian, Mitchell described reading a story on Twitter as “looking through a narrow window from a train speeding through a landscape full of tunnels and bands of light and dark.“ He refers to the feeling the reader develops when waiting 24 hours for the story to continue. The reader is left in the dark until the next piece of t he story comes online and you finally know what happens next. To read the full interview follow this link. 

     Furthermore, The Guardian published the collection of Tweets that form the short story on their website. Unlike the representation of Black Box on the web page of The New Yorker, the Tweets are marked as such and function as hyperlinks to the Twitter platform. However, the sequence of Tweets is occasionally interrupted by images added by the editor of the site. The captions of these images pose questions like "Could this be Slade Alley?..." and hereby open up another dialogue: one between the editor and the visitor of the page. 

David Mitchell on Twitter: promotion, network, dialogue

Hyperlinks next to the image invite the reader to share, pin or re-post the article, using the image as a cover photo, on platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest or Twitter. Thereby the added photos become showpieces of Mitchell's short story provided by the editor of the page.

     Ian Crouch also addresses the matter of The Right Sort in his article The Great American Twitter Novel. Crouch separates Mitchell's story from other narratives published on Twitter, remarking that the "best way to read the story was, ultimately, to wait until the whole thing was published." The short story was not designed to be published on Twitter, not intended for its format, but means of promotion of another novel. Mitchell has been quite upfront about the matter. Although Mitchell has not designed this short story for Twitter, his Twitter appearance is not limited to the promotion of new works. He engages with other public figures and fans alike. Indeed, the majority of Mitchell's posts are responses to posts by fans. The author uses the platform to be in direct dialogue with his readership although he does not usually publish his works on the page. To read Crouch's full article please follow this link. 

V. Rust and S. Plum

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

House of Leaves, published in 2000, is a critically acclaimed, postmodern novel and bestseller written by Mark Z. Danielewski.
    The novel is unique and famous for its unconventional style and narrative structure. It is a hypertext and belongs to the category of ergodic literature.
     In the novel there are several concurrent narratives and multiple narrators. When the protagonist Johnny Truant discovers a manuscript by the deceased man Zampanò about his research of the documentary film The Navidson Records, he becomes obsessed with finding out more and more details about it. The main part of the novel is composed of this fragmented manuscript, being exposed in different kind of formats and styles, including Johnny´s footnotes, in which his story is also further developed, and the content of the film: the story of the Navidson family and a house which turns into a labyrinth. 
     In fact, the text itself turns out to be a labyrinth with its different styles and formats: changing fonts, colours, pictures, graphics, handwriting, footnotes etc. The pages are arranged differently, sometimes consisting of only a few words, sometimes including crossed out words or words in reversed order or single letters etc. Furthermore, the text is full of allusions and references which make it even harder for the reader to follow the plot line.
      On the one hand the novel can be seen as a horror story, on the other hand many consider it as a love story. However, the novel is much too complex to fit any of those genres. It is a novel about a mystery which will never be solved, the text being a labyrinth itself where the reader gets similarly lost as the characters of the novel.

M. Barbod

Intertextuality by Christian Moraru

Christian Moraru composed an entry on “Intertextuality” for The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (2005) which gives an overview of the history of the concept as well as an overview of different approaches to the concept and their most prominent theorists.

     First of all, Moraru differentiates between four different approaches which can be divided further into two different categories. If a text A is incorporated in any way in a text B, A, the ‘pretext’, can be seen as the ‘intertext’ as it is the text that is worked into another text (1). Contrary, text B can be regarded as the intertext, as it is the text incorporating another, and, therefore, is the active agent in this intertextuality (2). A third approach regards both, text A and B, to be ‘intertextually bound’ to each other which makes both texts intertexts (3). The fourth and last approach mentioned by Moraru regards all texts as intertexts (4). Approaches 1-3 describe an “interplay of identifiable (Genette) or ‘traceable’ texts (Doležel)”, while the fourth approach indicates a universality of intertextuality in literature.

     The subsection “Bakhtin’s legacy: cultural and ideological analyses of narrative intertextuality” of the article takes reference to hypertext: “Once society, history, and culture are seen as ‘texts’, intertextuality becomes central to new Historicism, cultural studies and identity studies, post-colonial scholarship, debates around globalised ‘network society’, the Internet, and hypertext”.  Moraru adds to this aspect of intertextuality in the following subsection “Poststructualism and telling as retelling”. Here, he focuses on the aspects of interactivity, remodelling and referentiality. Oral literature, as in folktales or anecdotes, become a narrative labyrinth and ultimately a linguistic maze in the course of telling and retelling.

     Moraru’s oral literature resembles Jorge Luis Borges’s notion of an infinitive novel in his short story The Garden of Forking Paths. Both characterise hypertext as a kind of labyrinth or maze which poses the opposite of a linear text.

Moraru, Christian. “Intertextuality”. In: Routledge Encyclopaedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. Herman, Davis, Manfred Jahn, and Ryan. London New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.

S. Plum

Hypertext by Marie-Laure Ryan

The seventh chapter of Marie-Laure Ryan's book Narrative as Virtual Reality deals with selective interactivity, or the hypertexts to be more exact. A hypertextual system is composed of fragments of texts that are electronicly linked to each other. Each fragment contains multiple links to several other fragments that will be displayed if the reader chooses to click on the respective link.

     In the seventh chapter, Hypertext: The Functions and Effects of Selective Interactivity, Ryan Displays an x-ray image of the theories that circulate the academic field. She initially catalogues types of interactivity, lists the effects of such texts, offers a text typology with detailed explanations and finally names the properties of electronic medium and its relevance to hypertexts. It is conveyed that there are different interpretive scenarios for the readers as they deal with hypertexts; each casting a tailoring a different role for the reader. One might consider such a reading experience like navigating through the landscape of text; solving a puzzle by trying to put pieces together or like walking in a supermarket with a shopping cart and putting the desired fragments of text in the cart. She observes that while the there are different approaches to the mode of creating a story out of the aforementioned fragments of hypertexts, the central goal on the part of the reader is to overcome the fragmented structure and achieve a coherent story.

     Furthermore, Ryan defines terms such as 'reactive interaction', 'random selection', 'selective interactivity', 'hypertext' and 'ergodic literature' in order to support her cluster of categories for forms of literature. Similarly, she lists variations of interactivity, atractive aspects of interactivity to the consumer, elements of the electronic medium and conceptualisations of interactivity.

     In the part which she calls an interlude, Ryan focuses on the hypertext Twelve Blue by Michael Joyce in order to practice these theories as well as to convey her conclusions. Ryan Points out the inconsistent and uncertain aspect of hypertexts: the reader of a hypertext is left uncertain whether he has read the full text after he seemingly finished reading. Additionally, the Reader is alone in his reading experience as communicating the individual reading experience is complex and complicated. However, every hypertext has a fixed entry Point, although the course of the reading experience is an individual one.

S. Ketenci & S. Plum

Video Games and Interactive Fiction

In her article The first great works of digital literature are already being written Naomi Alderman makes a strong case for video games being a prominent form of digital literature. Nowadays, literature which originated from oral storytelling has many faces and voices. Alderman focuses on the story telling aspect of narration and there are many video games on the marked that make a point of telling a story. Some offer a 'free play' and a 'story mode'. While 'free play' does not necessarily have a set goal, the 'story mode' usually does. Follow this link to read Alderman's full article.

     Games, such as Dear Esther, stress the importance of the story in the game by reducing the player's possibilities in the sectors of making decisions and taking action. Other games, such as Little Big Planet or Tearaway, combine aspects of hit-and-run, mini-game and riddle or task solving with a narrative voice that reminds of a classical night time story telling situation. Both games encouraged the player to build an own story line or mini game. Furthermore, they promote their online community in which players can share their creations. The interactivity between the game and the player as well as between player and other players bears characteristics of a hypertext.

     Tearaway includes the player not only in the usual way of letting him control the protagonist of the game, it also includes the player as a separate character in the game. The cameras and the microphones of the PlayStation Vita enable the game to add video sequences, photos of the player and his surroundings and his voice to the story line. As the sun, the player looks over the letter on his journey. Video sequences add to the story telling aspect of the game.

     The player has less of an impact on the story in Little Big Planet; however, it stresses its story telling character. The main narrator of the game is Stephen Fry who is a popular narrator of audio-books, television series, films, documentaries and video games. The familiarity of his voice, his story and character introductions, and his extradiegetic quality add to the narrative quality of the game. Hugh Laurie who took on the role of Newton in Little Big Planet 3 points out that story telling remains story telling whether it is a book, a film or a video game. As and old friend and colleague of Stephen Fry, he also indicates Fry's adequate casting as the narrator of the series.

     Incidentally, Stephen Fry is the narrator of the of the film adaption of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005). The story, which has been picked up in several television-, radio, and book series, has also been depicted in an interactive fiction. An interactive fiction relinquishes any kind of visual features and only consists of written words. The platform reminds of the layout of a chatroom or online forum and the action is conveyed solely through words. The inter-textual experience of the game is build on the phenomenon of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; however, a solid knowledge of Douglas Adams' works do not ensure a successful gaming experience. The player still has to take the game as an individual work in order to solve it. Familiarity with the conventions of interactive fiction and trial & error runs added to the knowledge about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are necessary to solve the puzzle. The simplicity of the game make this form of literature accessible to a broad reader-/player-ship.

     To play the game and to find other interactive fictions follow this link.

S. Plum

Literature in the Digital Age

In Adam Hammond’s book Literature in the Digital Age, he examines a number of questions, which pertain to the survival of print literature in an era, where everything is becoming digital. Hammond begins by employing McLuhan’s famously confusing theory “the medium is the message”, which only began to “come into focus in 1993 with the birth of the internet” (3). The theory does not imply the content of the message to be the medium, but the new medium, which “creates a new situation for human associations and human perceptions” (3). 

      Hammond continues to discuss the intrinsic swing from literary reading, noting “No group is more sensitive to the changes inherent in the shift to digital forms than readers of literature” (4). In part one of Hammond’s text, he goes further to include Nicholas Carr’s 2008 Atlantic article, “Is Good Making Us Stupid”, in which Hammond examines changes in Carr’s “slackening in his ability to focus” (5). The digital era is causing an inevitable shift in literature as it has been known for centuries; Hammond notes “it is a specific type of reading – literary reading…is most threatened in the digital age” (5). 

     In response to Carr’s argument that the internet initiated the death of literary reading, Clay Shirky disagrees noting television initially casted the first stone, which led to literature’s downfall, however where television didn’t completely destroy literature, stating it “retained some cultural statues”, the digital era finished the job. This new era does, for better or for worse, “bring back literature as an activity”, it, nevertheless, failed to pull literary reading back into the scope of popularity (8). This new form of “digital textuality”, according to Shirky, delineates a new form of democracy, which “expands our ability to create and share written material” (8). 

     Overall, Hammond goes into the history of writing and literature to highlight the shift and popularity of literary reading and its downfall. Hammond demarcates different notions of digitalized writing, and eventually concludes that “the fate of print is by no means sealed” (20). Literature’s embracing of digitalization will call for a literary digital renaissance, according to Hammond, but of course, that remains to be seen.

T. E. Stroud

Twelve Blue by Michael Joyce

Reading a text in a classical print version or a hypertext in a digital version is a main aspect tackled in this text. Michael Joyce claims that reading hypertexts is a highly individual experience that is difficult to share. When a reader clicks on a certain word, one might reach a different description no one else has reached before. By knowing this, a discourse can be established between readers exchanging their different reception and understanding of the text. These different interpretations lead the readers to build up a cultural knowledge and makes reading an interesting experience. It is the dynamic of  the text and not the plot that makes reading an experience.

     In his short story Twelve Blue Michael Joyce tries to derive some cognitive lessons about the knots and  bolts of the reading process. Normally every hypertext starts with an entry address so that the reader knows what to expect or where the journey is going. In Twelve Blue this this is not the case, the entry is presented as a hallway with twelve corridors in different colors. It is the reader´s role to define the way of entering the story. It is a platform with twelve lines divide the picture into eight vertical bars. It is the reader´s role to click on any space he chooses to open a link to a short story, so the sequence of the story is determined by the reader and not the writer hence the adventure.

Screenshot: Twelve Blue

L. Chihabi

Dear Esther

     Dear Esther (2012) is a video game developed by Dan Pinchbeck for the Chinese Room an independent production company. The game does not follow the traditional conventions of a video game, because it imposes a minimum interaction of the player and does not require many decisions to be made or tasks to be accomplished. Instead, the focus is put on the story line which is narrated by an epistolary narrator. It is a piece of interactive visual storytelling.

      Dear Esther offers two hours that will leave you feeling edified, contemplative, and possibly even emotionally moved. It is a story of a shipwrecked castaway on a Hebridean island, delivered through spoken lines of sumptuous, disconnected prose as you walk around detailed landscape. The text written in the game is florid, flitting all the time in an unsettling way between past and present. At the beginning of the game, the narrator will talk about the history of the island. Later on his commentary becomes stranger and more impassioned. The mystery the story poses is supported by the picturesque landscape which becomes increasingly gloomy through the setting sun. The subtle music adds an uncanny feeling to the journey over the island.

     The aspect of immersion in Dear Esther differs from experiences of reading a linear narration as well as from the experience of playing other video games. As a player your focus is shifted to reading instead of experiencing the story line of the game by being a deciding factor of the action. The experience becomes a much more passive one than in role play- or hit and run games. As a reader the experience is altered through the games visibility. Instead of creating the image in his head the reader is presented with the world he immerse to.

     Four years after its original publication, Dear Esther is still an ongoing project. To find out more about the original game as well as updated versions follow this link.

  M. Hamouda & S. Plum

Twitter Narratives

The Right Sort by David Mitchell 

Having already published his many intricate novels, in 2014 David Mitchell decided to use Twitter as the means for publishing his new short story The Right Sort. The short story was published as a series of more than two hundred and eighty tweets in the course of one week.

     Although Twitter made it possible for a vast audience to access the short story in the making, read it and follow the events, it sounded a bit difficult to follow the tweets published randomly by Mitchell in the morning or at night. In the end, the story was published as a reorganized set of tweets, which made it easier to follow and enjoy.

     Using Twitter as a means of creation might seem impossible, however, David Mitchell proved it wrong by this project and had a great reception by his readers.

Black Box by Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan, award winning novelist, took over the twitter account of the New Yorker and published Black Box, a novel published sentence by sentence on the social media platform.

     The story appears as a female spy’s handbook: the female intelligence officer, posing as a ‘beauty’, infiltrated the realm of the violent and most dangerous target. The handbook-style of the narration displays what happens to the agent, what her choices are, which choices she makes and ultimately what the consequences of her actions are. Furthermore, this form of interior monologue shows a coping mechanism of a woman who is caught between the role she has to play to fulfill her mission and the emotional self that is violated and endangered by an aggressor.

     Egan’s portray of this spy is thrilling and engaging. Similar to a John Le Carré novel, the reader fears for the protagonist to be exposed and at the same time hopes for more daring moves by the protagonist that lead to greater knowledge. Egan’s protagonist, however, is not fully entangled in her professional life. She has a life away from her job, the wish to come back to a husband after a successful mission, which opposes the notion of the ‘Black Box’. Upon losing her cover the agent’s basic aim is to ensure her body to reach her agency as a black box, a record of her actions and discoveries.

     The limitations of a twitter post create a sequence of short to medium length sentences which add up to 47 short chapters. The jumps from post to post, from sentence to sentence, play along with the flow of the actions. The reading speed increases through jumps but also through repeated beginnings of sentences. The text has a list like character in chapters such as chapter 43. The handbook that is mostly directed at the narrator herself, consists of short commands, observations and choices that match the length of a tweet. 

Z. Lessan & S. Plum

Ghost Texts and Hyper Texts

On the Birthday of a Stranger by Michael Joyce initially presents as a collection of several short textual elements which could potentially bare a connection, creating a continuous plot. While progressing through the 26 texts which are all accompanied by a single black and white image each, the reader soon notices that even though some stories share a similar topic, none have an actual connection that could be seen as a classical “story line”. The reader more or less creates his own story while reading the next. Apart from the 26 initial texts, each page also shows one phrase at the bottom, which is used in order to navigate through the story. As well as this the text also includes 7 “ghost texts” with coloured images, which the text can skip to randomly, during any point of the story.

     These “ghost texts” also create one of two major similarities between On the Birthday of a Stranger and Twelve Blue. Both texts change throughout the reading process. While Twelve Blue has certain textual elements which disappear after being clicked for the first time, On the Birthday of a Stranger presents with magically appearing stories, making the two works ergodic texts. The second similarity that can be found is that both texts present with a central “hub” or menu. While Twelve Blue presents with a piece of abstract art on almost every page, On the Birthday of a Stranger has a map, which can be accessed through almost every page by clicking on the “coordinates” highlighted in red. This means that in both cases the reader is given a guideline, something to orientate himself while trying to understand the concept of the text itself.

    The Brain Drawing the Bullet  is a fictional hypertext based on a real event, the murder case of W. S. Burroughs’ wife, Joan Vollmer, in Mexico, written by Alan Trotter. The story is told using the Cut-Up method, established by W. S. Burroughs, meaning that the element of “chance” is added to a text.  The hypertext presents with 10 editorial and 10 story related texts while the author’s own views of the events are constantly interrupting the reading.

         Another element which can be traced back to the Cut-Up method, is the ergodic nature of the text. Certain textual passages have the chance to change after, before or during reading, creating yet again a similarity to Twelve Blue. This might be the only similarity between the two texts that can be found. While both have certain story lines, The Brain Drawing the Bullet focuses on one character yet does not allow you to follow him due to the disruptive nature of the texts. There is a lot of repetition due to the fact that you are witnessing the constant retelling of an event. Additionally Alan Trotters text presents which a much simpler structure, with the complete text being visible on one page. The reader uncovers more and more text but does not actually skip from page to page. This also makes a menu, as presented in both On the Birthday of a Stranger and Twelve Blue, obsolete.

 J. Petri & K. Freeman

The Decisions In Reading

A seemingly new aspect of digital literature is its interactivity – the possibility for the reader to be a deciding factor on the course of a story. However, there is a long tradition of interactivity in narration, namely in face-to-face storytelling, in live performances as well as in books that offer different options in continuing a story. Nevertheless, digital literature and the possibilities the Internet offers widen the scope of interactivity of the reader.

     Jorge Luis Borges picked up on the phenomenon that is interactivity in literature in his short story The Garden of Forking Paths. The narration deals with the concept of unlimited choices in a story line. The ‘labyrinth of words’ the novel of unlimited possibility poses appears as a riddle to the ones who try to make sense of it in the story. Borges’s idea of the unlimited novel, his ‘labyrinth’, is closely related to the Internet.

     The ‘labyrinth’ has become an established aspect of online reading. Search engines do not only provide the reader with texts but also with countless follow-up options or parallel reading opportunities. Knowledge is as accessible as never before; however, it has to be found in the maze of the internet. Borges unlimited novel is a printed version of an internet search.

     In an article the Yale University of Art picks up on this relation of the short story and the Internet. To read the full article follow this link.

S. Plum