As its point of departure, this seminar views the untraditional literary media of digital fiction through the two lenses of traditional narrative theory: narration and focalization.
For its critical reception, digital fiction invites models from literary theory and narrative theory (as primarily language-driven texts that typically employ narrators who tell of fictional worlds); semiotics and film studies (as texts that employ both sound and images, which range from nonrepresentational to photorealistic, and provide varied and variable perspectives on those images); and game studies (as texts that often require ludic participation or simply some form of navigation to achieve certain objectives, even when the objective is simply to continue reading). At the same time, it fits comfortably in none of these critical frameworks alone, its (moving) parts exceeding the sum of any one of them in isolation, and the presence - and primacy - of the textual channel accommodating effects that are invariably layered. Digital fiction thus poses a challenging test case for a transmedial application of narrative theory.
For its example text, this paper considers how the rhythm, musicality, and animation of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries' "The Last Day of Betty Nkomo" (n.d.) guides us in negotiating its play of voices and vantage points. It will aim to demonstrate how a deeper consideration of narration and focalization effects in multimodal digital fictions can yield stronger, more determinate, and indeed richer interpretations of them. It will also foreshadow how new forms of literary media can expand our repertoire of techniques and methods for representing the cognitive activity of fictional minds.
David Ciccoricco is a lecturer in English at the University of Otago, New Zealand and the author of Reading Network Fiction (2007).
