Multimodal Poetics in Contemporary Fiction: Design and Experimentation in North and Central American Texts

This book explores the growing body of multimodal literary texts: books that creatively experiment with the potential of design to represent narrative content. Examining five North and Central American novels from the first two decades of the twenty-first century, this study draws attention to texts that combine verbal text (writing) with non-verbal elements (photographic images, varied typography, maps, color, etc.) as integral parts of their narratives. Their experimentation both reconfigures the potential for print-based (and born-digital) fiction in the future, and holds a mirror to past practices of design and typography that were rendered invisible, or which received limited attention by authors, publishers, and readers. By placing the five case studies and related texts within a broader history of experimentation in literature, this book demonstrates how multimodal novels have changed the conceptualization of narrative content in literary texts and ushered in a new era for fiction. Acknowledgments Contents List of Figures Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1 Methodology and Project Structure 1.2 Toward a Mapping of Features in Multimodal Novels 1.3 The Enduring Legacies of Print 1.4 Multimodality Studies and the Novel References Chapter 2: Relaunching the Print Novel: Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves 2.1 Remodeling the House 2.2 The Functional (In)Visibility of Space 2.3 A World Undisclosed 2.4 Concluding Remarks References Chapter 3: Enhancing the Print Novel: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close 3.1 Textual Borders and Narrative Content 3.2 The Manipulation of Photography 3.3 Representing Surfaces 3.4 Into the Cover 3.5 Concluding Remarks References Chapter 4: Layering the Print Novel: Handwriting and Material Artifacts in J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S. 4.1 Infested with Handwriting 4.2 Material Artifacts and Narrative Space 4.3 The Changing Novel, Allegorized 4.4 Concluding Remarks References Chapter 5: Crafting the Print Novel: Book Design and Narrative Content in Zachary Thomas Dodson’s Bats of the Republic: An Illuminated Novel 5.1 The Resource of Color in Literary Writing 5.2 Coloring the Medium 5.3 The Total Page 5.4 Concluding Remarks References Chapter 6: Archiving the Print Novel: Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive 6.1 Building the Archive 6.2 Redemptive Storytelling 6.3 Polaroid Echoes 6.4 Concluding Remarks References Chapter 7: Epilogue Index