Night Film by Marisha Pessl

Marisha Pessl (*October 26, 1977) is an American novelist, who started working as a financial consultant and just wrote in her free time. Her first novel “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, published in 2006, almost exclusively got good reviews and criticism (especially in US-American literature criticism). Her second novel “Night Film” (2013) features some interesting structural peculiarities.
     The novel is a mystery thriller and as well as her first novel, a New York Times bestseller. It is about the young Ashley Cordover (24), who was found dead in a not working elevator in Manhattan warehouse. Her dead was ruled a suicide. Her father is the cult-horror-film director Stanislas Cordova, who hasn’t been seen in public for 30 years. He is a mysterious man who is despised by many people because of his harrowing movies. The Journalist Scott McGrath wants to investigate the death of Ashley Cordova with the help of two acquaintances of Ashley, Nora and Hopper, because he beliefs that there is lying more behind her death and Stanislas Cordova. McGrath’s life took a turn for the worse during his first researches about Cordova, this time he could lose his mind.
     The structural peculiarities of this book are its connections to the material McGrath is researching in and its interactivity with the reader. On one hand this book offers next to the normal text some experts and details of the things the figures in the book are looking at. These are excerpts of telephone books, letters, text message-chats, photos or magazines. By these little images, the reader can have a look at the material by his- or herself. Moreover, Pessl included some screenshots of author created web pages. There are many pages of this book which just contain web pages, belonging to the story (for example online blogs or a web page of Cordova votaries), which Pessl invented all by herself. On the other hand, Pessl published an app, the “Night Film Decoder” app belonging to this book  On some pages the reader can find an image of a bird, which Pessl calls Ester eggs. If the reader scans these images with the Night Film Decoder app, it unlocks additional texts, PDFs, videos and audio files by which the reader can get deeper insights into the story.
     Some reviews of the connection of this book and the app claim the interactivity as a distraction. They state that the reading experience would be interrupted too often and that the app and the technical device, the mobile telephone, lead the reader to lacking of concentration. Supporter however state that the huge amount of information keeps the reader interested, that the search of these Easter eggs is entertaining and that this interactivity intensifies the reading experience instead of distracting it. Pessl explained, that she mentioned the app at the end of the novel, because she wants the reader to read though the novel without getting interrupted and use the app afterwards to have a closer look at some details. 

S. Lamouchi

Further Reading to 'A Visit From the Goon Squad' and 'Black Box'

Ewald, Morgan. "Dirtied Hands: A Look at Time and Change in A Visit From the Goon Squad." (2013).
     In this article Ewald investigates the time and change in the novel ‚A Visit From the Goon Squad‘ by Jennifer Egan. The author aims to outline how the passing of time is depicted in the work of Egan and how this connects to the changes in the American society. The paper focuses on the meaning of technology in the novel and how the characters view the advancing of technology. The article is useful to gain further insights into the many connections of Egan’s novel to the ongoing changes concerning time and technology that have happened in America during the recent years and those that might be still to come.

Kedaitis, Kirstyn. "Somewhere Over the Rainbow: The Significance of Color in A Visit From the Goon Squad." Performance. millikin. edu.
     In her article Kedaitis outlines the meaning and importance of the color yellow in Jennifer Egan’s novel ‘Visit From a Goon Squad”. According to the author Egan uses colors to document the maturity of her characters. The paper suggests that yellow represents youth and nostalgia and darker colors symbolize the accepting of the past and moving on. Additionally, Kedaitis proposes the idea that some of the characters are indirectly characterized by their hair color. The article offers new ways of reading and interpreting certain descriptions and encourages the reader to read between the lines for a deeper meaning.

Bao-yu, N. I. E. "Exploring image culture through narrative: A study on Jennifer Egan’s Twitter fiction black box." Journal of Literature and Art Studies 5.10 (2015): 820-829.
     This article discusses the possibilities of the narrative in Jennifer Egan’s Twitter novel ‘Black Box’. The author classifies the novel as a serial “new media narrative”. However, he points out that Egan did not compose ‘Black Box’ as a real time Twitter narrative. Bao-yo stresses that the novel achieves an immediate reading experience by allowing the reader to sense the same feelings as the protagonist. In the article the different functions and possibilities of Twitter are laid out in detail what enables the reader an in depth understanding of the novel ‘Black Box’.

J. Ost

Adam Hammond - Literature in the Digital Age: an Introduction

Hammond, Adam. Literature in the Digital Age: an Introduction. New York, NY: Cambridge U Press, 2016.

Adam Hammonds Literature in the Digital Age is, as the title of the work already states, an introduction to the topic of digital literature. Beginning with a discussion of Marshall McLuhan’s argument that the medium is the message as well as Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic cover story Is Google Making Us Stupid?, the book provides the reader with two arguments which provide a good basis for discussion. McLuhan argues that the way in which something is presented is more important than the actual information being delivered, indicating that an e-book carries a very different message to a print book. Carr uses this statement as a basis for his article, arguing that the digital medium is distracting us from reading itself. He indicates that text presented in a digital format can often be distracting and is influencing the concentration we have on texts, to a negative standard. This chapter is a great example of digital reading itself as Hammond presents a continuous string of information without ever fully analysing one thought. He moves from McLuhan, to Carr and then quickly moves onto Clay Shirky, a reader of the Atlantic who disagrees with Carr’s arguments. Through this the reader is subjected to a large range of initial arguments and thoughts while indirectly being presented with what Carr refers to as superficial reading. 

     The second part of the book, titled Digitalization, continues thoughts from Part I, talking about the shift from print medium to digital literature and the advantages as well as disadvantages that come with it. Hammond argues that while the transfer from print to digital makes the text lose all the physical properties of a book, such as the feel of the pages or the smell of paper, turning a book into a digital medium means greater availability, as the text can be spread more easily and more cheaply than it could be in a physical format. Adding to this he lists a big social issue that arises with the print medium, stating that the physical book or text is always limited to certain social groups. Where a digital text can be accessed by nearly anyone for free, a library will often be limited to certain groups of people such as university students or members.

     The reader is then introduced to one of the issues that come with the transfer of text to the digital medium with the discussion of the digital libraries Project Gutenberg, JSTOR and Google Books.  Legal issues arose due to the copyright laws in certain countries, as these often would not allow the digitalization and free publication of texts. Once again this allows the reader to see both arguments for and against the digital text. Hammond then gives further tools for analysis introducing elements such as the “Type-Token Ration” which is the number of unique words in a text divided by the total number of words. This is used in order to measure lexical diversity and is presented here as one of the tools used in order to better understand texts, the way they appeal to the reader and possibly even in order to indicate their complexity.

     The final part of the book, Born Digital, returns to social analysis as well as discussing the impact digital literature and hypertexts have on the print medium and the way literature is understood. This final chapter serves as a springboard for the reader as Hammond introduces the reader to a large amount of ideas or discussion points which are extremely useful when digital literature is analysed. For example, a large discussion on video games is featured, including presentations of The Stanley Parable or Gone Home and a discussion if video games can be considered as literature. While Hammond provides his own conclusion, stating that while carrying literary elements, video games still have large differences to other forms of literature, he is very brief, allowing the readers to form their own thoughts and come up with their own conclusion. In summary Literature in the Digital Age is essential when studying digital literature and hypertexts as it provides not only an introduction to the subject but presents the reader with food for thought, giving inspiration and asking important questions which are left partially open in order for the reader to be able to answer for themselves. 

J. Petri