Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives

Torsa Ghosal is an assistant professor of English at California State University, Sacramento. She is the author of Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation, and Cognition in Twenty-First-Century Narrative. Alison Gibbons is a reader in contemporary stylistics at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. She is the author of Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature and the coeditor of several books, including Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism.

“We live in unbelievable times. Fake news and virtual reality as well as deep-seated disagreements about foundational facts (climate change, the outcome of the American presidential election, and more) make distinguishing fact from fiction nearly impossible. The positive spin is that this situation provides an opportunity for literature and literary criticism to intervene in a big way, teaching us to take seriously the form and formats of multimodal narrative and fictionality. This volume participates in that vital endeavor. Offering smart chapters by scholars and artists who approach the topic from diverse perspectives and through fascinating case studies, this book helps to realign the questions and methods through which we experience and understand ‘the real.’”-Jessica Pressman, author of Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media “An impressive and important anthology, both timely and fascinating, that breaks new ground in narrative theory and analysis. Essential for understanding fictionality, multimodality, and the evolving relations between them. This volume offers a precognition of the future of narratology.”-Brian Richardson, author of Essays on Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts “A valuable and thought-provoking work that treats timely and important issues in a stimulating fashion. I particularly appreciate inclusion of the perspective of practicing writers and artists, some of whom are also theorists and/or critics. This serves further to break down oppositional categories.”-Fiona Doloughan, author of Contemporary Narrative: Textual Production, Multimodality and Multiliteracies “An elegantly constructed collection of essays exploring the somewhat surprising link between contemporary multimodal storytelling and a reflection on the fictionality of those stories. The essays range across a wide variety of contemporary narrative forms, and the sample texts are well chosen. In addition, having Marie-Laure Ryan summarize and respond to some of the essays in the book’s postscript creates a very effective dialogue.”-Daniel Punday, author of Five Strands of Fictionality: The Institutional Construction of Contemporary American Fiction