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