"You've never experienced a novel like this"

About two and a half years ago, I wrote an essay on Steve Tomasula's award-winning new media novel TOC for a special festschrift on Tomasula's work for Electronic Book Review.

The collection of essays is now live on EBR's pages here, including my own piece ' "You've never experienced a novel like this": Time and interaction when reading TOC'.

Hope you enjoy!

Multimodal Printed Literature

What is Multimodality?

Multimodality, in its most fundamental sense, is the coexistence of more than one semiotic mode within a given context. More generally, multimodality is an everyday reality. It is the experience of living; we experience everyday life in multimodal terms through sight, sound, movement. Even the simplest conversation entails languae, intonation, gesture and so forth.


What is Multimodal Printed Literature?

Multimodal novels are typified by their inclusion of graphic elements. Thus, they feature a synthesis of word and image, with word and image arranged on the page not is a distinct or separate fashion, but in such a way that they constantly interact in the production of narrative meaning. Additionally, such novels often exploit the tactile and material dimensions of the book itself.

Some of the formal features that consistently appear in multimodal novels are:

• The Inclusion of Images.
• Unusual textual layouts and page design.
• Varied typography.
• Use of colour in both type and imagistic content.
• Concrete realisation of text to create images, as in concrete poetry.
• Devices that draw attention to the text’s materiality, including metafictive writing.
• Footnotes and self-interrogative critical voices.
• Flip book sections.
• Mixing of genres, both in literary terms, such as horror, and in terms of visual effect, such as newspaper clippings and play dialogue.

An early, canonical example of what can be considered a multimodal novel is, of course, Laurence Sterne’s (1967 [1759-67]) much celebrated and sometimes berated The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

In my own writing, I've explored works by Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves):

Steve Tomasula (VAS: An Opera In Flatland):

Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close):

and Graham Rawle (Woman's World):

The images above show the varied nature of multimodal printed novels. Indeed, one of the things that make mulitmodal literature as a genre so exciting is its diversity.

I'm always on the look-out for new books, so suggestions welcome!