Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives

Torsa Ghosal, Alison Gibbons

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781496222879
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496236722
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives interrogates the multimodal relationship between fictionality and factuality. The contemporary discussion about fictionality coincides with an increase in anxiety regarding the categories of fact and fiction in popular culture and global media. Today's media-saturated historical moment and political climate give a sense of urgency to the concept of fictionality, distinct from fiction, specifically in relation to modes and media of discourse. Torsa Ghosal and Alison Gibbons explicitly interrogate the relationship of fictionality with multimodal strategies of narrative construction in the present media ecology. Contributors consider the ways narrative structures, their reception, and their theoretical frameworks in narratology are influenced and changed by media composition—particularly new media. By accounting for the relationship of multimodal composition with the ontological complexity of narrative worlds, Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives fills a critical gap in contemporary narratology—the discipline that has, to date, contributed most to the conceptualization of fictionality.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part 1
• 1. There’s No Place Like Time and Maze Reading
• 2. Multimodal Fantasies of Getting Lost
• 3. Possible Worlds Theory and the Fictionality of Images in Counterfactual Narratives
• 4. Fictionality and Multimodal Anthropocene Fiction
• Part 2
• 5. The New-Materialism Novel
• 6. Multimodality and Meaning-Making across Lines, Columns, and Genres in Brigid Brophy’s In Transit
• 7. Fictionality and the Multimodal Positioning of the Reader in Christian Jungersen’s You Disappear
• 8. Do-It-Yourself Multimodality
• Part 3
• 9. The Line and I
• 10. Building Familiarity in Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar
• 11. Fictionality in Theory Fiction and Autotheory
• 12. Multimodal Autobiographies
• 13. Postscript
• Contributors
• Index
• About Torsa Ghosal
• About Alison Gibbons
• Series List