Post-Postmodernist Fiction and the Rise of Digital Epitexts (Theory and Interpretation of Narrative) - Softcover

Pignagnoli, Virginia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814258719 ISBN 13: 9780814258712

Verlag: Ohio State University Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

Post-Postmodernist Fiction and the Rise of Digital Epitexts explores new dynamics created by the intersection of digital media and contemporary fiction, arguing that these synergies are part of the cultural context in which the post-postmodernist novel emerges. Virginia Pignagnoli introduces a rhetorical theory of paratexts meant to reshape traditional views of paratextuality, providing categories, functions, and properties able to accommodate new digital practices, such as those of digital epitexts (authors’ social media posts and novels’ websites, for example), that widen the space for authorial creation and narrative exchange beyond the print novel. Focusing on the effects digital epitexts have on audiences, Pignagnoli presents an analysis of contemporary novels—by Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, Catherine Lacey, Meg Wolitzer, and Dave Eggers—that display a post-postmodern sensitivity in dialogue with some of the ways digital epitexts are currently employed. Ultimately, in showing how twenty-first-century novels and digital epitexts are co-constitutive, Pignagnoli offers a vision of a new post-postmodernism interested in sincerity, relationality, and intersubjectivity.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Virginia Pignagnoli is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and German Studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is the author of Post-Postmodernist Fiction and the Rise of Digital Epitexts and coeditor, with Malcah Effron and Margarida McMurry, of Narrative Co-Construction: Author-Audience Interactions and Their Contexts.

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While recognizing these medial specificities, the aim of this study is not to provide a systematic classification of all the possible new forms of author-audience interactions in the digital world. Rather, its focus is on the relation between these interactions and the poetics of contemporary literary narratives. Other scholars foreground the relevance of this connection for inquiries into contemporary narratives and their techniques. Liesbeth Korthals Altes, for instance, mentions a “pervasive demand for [authorial] presence and concreteness, a longing for the real” within a context in which “public media, talk shows, photo shoots, interviews, blogs, Facebook, and live performances all have become sites for the fabrication of a work’s meaning and literary or other value (such as its ethical, historical, or informative value)”. The present book, more specifically, explores the connection of twenty-first-century fiction with epitextual material in the digital world to investigate the relationship between the current widespread practice of digital author-audience interactions and the emerging poetics succeeding postmodernism.

Postmodernism, as it is generally agreed, ended sometime between the late 1980s and September 11, 2001. But literary historical change, as Brian McHale emphasizes, “rarely involves the wholesale replacement of outmoded features and values by new ones”; more typically, in fact, it “involves a reshuffling of existing features in the light of a new dominant function”. Among the current “reshuffling” is, for example, the blurring of boundaries between fiction and nonfiction in light of an interest in sincerity, relationality, intersubjectivity. Following this principle, in this book I approach digital epitextual material as an exemplary reshuffling of an existing feature—paratexts—in light of a changing dominant function.

In post-postmodernist fiction, I argue, the paratext, that is, the “additional” material a book contains “around” its text, both within the (printed/electronic) book and outside of it, interacts with—and at times intensifies—the changes happening at the textual level: the reshuffling of existing features and the concern with a new dominant. This means that the digital world is assuring paratexts, and epitexts in particular, a key position in the communicative exchange between author and audiences. Other narrative theorists already argued for the necessity of recognizing the new centrality of the multiplicity of extratextual discourses entering today’s author-audience relationship. Paul Dawson, for instance, presented a bidirectional model of narrative communication that includes the totality of exchanges between author and readers at a textual, peritextual, and epitextual level. Unlike epitexts, peritexts are the paratextual elements situated in proximity of the text. According to Dawson, the totality of these communicative exchanges (textual, extrafictional, extratextual) must be part of the narrative analysis, not so much to anchor a biographical reading of a book, but because the narrative communication produces meaning precisely thanks to these ongoing transactions. Working from similar premises, my contention here is that while epitextual material itself is not a novelty, the current digital era is facilitating an increased interaction that reinforces the current changing of dominant function interested in sincerity, relationality, and intersubjectivity.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Ohio State University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0814258719
• ISBN 13: 9780814258712
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 152
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland