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Project Narrative Visiting Scholars Talk

November 15, 2012
All Day
Suzanne M. Scharer Room, Ohio Union

Margarida McMurry (University of Oslo), "Assumptions about Assumptions, Or How to Re-structure your Thesis in Three Months"

Communicative acts such as narrative imply that both addresser and addressee make assumptions about each other in order to be able to communicate. My thesis inquires into the making and usage of assumptions in the creation and interpretation of narrative fictions in four reflexive narrative fictions. In this paper I will tell the story of the project: how it came into being and how it has changed during my visit to OSU.

Virginia Pignagnoli (Ca' Foscari University), "Paratext 2.0: The Case of Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad"

My research explores early twenty-first-century literary texts that foreground the use of paratextual devices. Building on Genette's spatial categorization of peritext and epitext, I will suggest how these devices affect the narrative communication between the author and the readers at a twofold level of interaction. The intersection of these two levels is becoming a privileged space of analysis. To illustrate this dynamic I will focus on Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011). Here, the seventy-five pages reproducing PowerPoint slides are a peritextual resource guiding the readers towards an external level of communication. Through intermedial references, the narrative connects the audience with its digital support: a website, a blog, and an application software with interactive features. My approach aims at providing a theoretical framework for the author-reader relationships in contemporary literature experimenting with mode and medium. I will conclude with some suggestions for further applications of this "Paratext 2.0" framework to other relevant case studies.