Authored Books by Alison Gibbons
Co-Authored Books by Alison Gibbons
Edited Books by Alison Gibbons
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Readers, literary critics, and theorists alike have long demonstrated an abiding fascination with the author, both as a real person—an artist and creator—and as a theoretical concept that shapes the way we read literary works. Whether anonymous, pseudonymous, or trending on social media, authors continue to be an object of critical and readerly interest. Yet theories surrounding authorship have yet to be satisfactorily updated to register the changes wrought on the literary sphere by the advent of the digital age, the recent turn to autofiction, and the current literary climate more generally. In Reading the Contemporary Author the contributors look back on the long history of theorizing the author and offer innovative new approaches for understanding this elusive figure.
Mapping the contours of the vast territory that is contemporary authorship, this collection investigates authorship in the context of narrative genres ranging from memoir and autobiographically informed texts to biofiction and novels featuring novelist narrators and characters. Bringing together the perspectives of leading scholars in narratology, cultural theory, literary criticism, stylistics, comparative literature, and autobiography studies, Reading the Contemporary Author demonstrates that a variety of interdisciplinary viewpoints and critical stances are necessary to capture the multifaceted nature of contemporary authorship.
[Title Page and Contents provided as preview only.]
[40% discount form also attached under 'file... more [Title Page and Contents provided as preview only.]
[40% discount form also attached under 'files']
In recent years many attempts have been made to theorize “fictionality,” distinguished from fiction, as both a critical concept and a textual feature. The contemporary interest in theorizing fictionality in academia coincides with an increase in anxiety regarding “facts” and “fiction” in popular culture and global media. Indeed, the current media-saturated historical moment and political climate give a sense of urgency to the concept of “fictionality,” specifically in relation to modes and media of discourse. Each chapter of this book interrogates that relationship—the relationship of fictionality with multimodal strategies of narrative construction in the present media ecology. In the twenty-first century, literary narratives increasingly use multiple semiotic modes (writing, images, maps) to compose narrative worlds at the edge of fiction. Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives, edited by Torsa Ghosal and Alison Gibbons, is the first book to explicitly put the ongoing conversations about multimodality and fictionality in dialogue. By accounting for the relationship of multimodal composition with the ontological complexity of narrative worlds, this book fills a critical gap in contemporary narratology—the discipline that has, to-date, contributed most to the conceptualization of fictionality.
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Journal Articles by Alison Gibbons
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When Paul Werth invented the concept of ‘text-worlds’ (1999... more [First page preview provided only]
When Paul Werth invented the concept of ‘text-worlds’ (1999), he drew on existing psychological accounts of how the mind processes stimuli, such as the idea of the ‘situation model’ (van Dijk and Kintsch 1983). Yet despite the important advancements to Werth’s approach that have been made in stylistics over the years, situation-model research is rarely, if ever, referenced in what is now called Text World Theory (Gavins 2007). In this article, I consult empirical research on situation models, consequently making two significant contributions: I show how empirical situation-model research bolsters the validity of Text World Theory; I propose a new concept for Text World Theory—‘world-retrieval’—to account for how readers trace the interconnections between text-worlds and attempt to resolve processing difficulties. An analysis of the opening to Ray Loriga’s (2003) novel Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us Anymore demonstrates the value of the ‘world-retrieval’ concept.
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Autofiction is a genre in which t... more [pdf of first page as preview only; open access link provided]
Autofiction is a genre in which the author appears as a character, the nonfiction of their autobiographical life combining with the fiction of invention and fabrication. Critical discussions of autofiction are dominated by arguments concerning their dual narrative structure evoking a duet of imaginative visions which, in turn, requires reading strategies that shift between fact and fiction. These critical intuitions are perceptive, yet they remain unfounded since they make claims about reading and interpretation that can only be explained by recourse to cognitive frameworks and substantiated by empirical research. To rectify this, I propose a cognitive model of the processes involved in reading autofiction, combining the storyworld, Text World Theory, conceptual blending, and the person model. My cognitive model includes two new concepts: the ‘author model’ and ‘ontological dissonance’. Analysis of Michelle Tea’s autofiction Black Wave alongside reader responses tests my proposed model and ultimately validates it.
In this article, I explore the experiential texture of literary fictionality and ontological blur... more In this article, I explore the experiential texture of literary fictionality and ontological blurrings, using Lance Olsen’s multimodal works Theories of Forgetting and there’s no place like time as case study texts. In doing so, I argue that whilst tropes such as recursive narrative structure and the intrusion of the author into fiction are typically postmodernist, Olsen repurposes them as part of a contemporary pursuit of the real. Contra to postmodernist sensibilities, the ontological distortions and metaleptic transgressions of Olsen’s texts are primarily deployed as a means of reinvigorating our human sense of lived experience and the place of narratives within it. My analysis adopts a cognitive approach to fictionality, using Text World Theory and the metalanguage of the narrative interrelation framework. Such an approach is ideal for tracking ontological slippages and readers’ resultant experiences, particularly in relation to the kind of blurred fictionality found in autofiction.
This article examines direct address, or ‘breaking the fourth wall’, in the BBC TV series Fleabag... more This article examines direct address, or ‘breaking the fourth wall’, in the BBC TV series Fleabag. It applies Text World Theory to telecinematic discourse for the first time and, in doing so, contributes to developing cognitive approaches in the field of telecinematic stylistics. Text World Theory, originally a cognitive linguistic discourse processing framework, is used to examine how multimodal cues contribute to the creation of imagined worlds. We examine three examples of direct address in Fleabag, featuring actor gaze alongside use of the second person you or actor gaze alone. Our analysis highlights the need to account for the different deictic referents of you, with the pronoun able to refer intra- and extra-diegetically. We also explore viewers’ ontological positioning because ‘breaking the fourth wall’ in telecinematic discourse evokes an addressee who is not spatio-temporally co-present with the text-world character. We therefore propose the concept of the split text-world, which assists in accounting for the deictic pull that viewers may feel during direct address and its experiential impact. Our analysis suggests that telecinematic direct address is necessarily world-forming, but can ontologically position the viewer differently in different narrative contexts. While some instances of direct address in Fleabag position the viewer as Fleabag’s narratee and confidant, there is increasing play with direct address in the show’s second series and a destabilization of this narratee role, achieved through the suggestion that Fleabag’s addressee may be more psychologically interior than it first appears.
Using Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels as case study, this article presents a cognitive approac... more Using Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels as case study, this article presents a cognitive approach to fictionality and authorial intention using Text World Theory and Mind-Modelling. It investigates two forms of ontological distortion: readers’ (mis)classification of the novels’ genre (as autofiction or autobiography) and the problem posed by the author’s pseudonymic identity. The analysis has three parts: first, I conduct a Text World analysis of the novels’ syntactic/stylistic similarities to autobiography and, in doing so, reveal its ontological structure; second, I consider the ontological liminality of narration and the ways in which readers build an authorial mind-model of Ferrante; thirdly, I explore the assessment of critics and/as readers of the text’s fictionality and the impact of Ferrante’s pseudonym on perceptions of authorial intentionality and the authorial mind-model. Ultimately, I argue that a cognitive approach offers greatest insight into readers’ interpretations of authors and of fictionality.
It is often argued that postmodernism has been succeeded by a new dominant cultural logic. We con... more It is often argued that postmodernism has been succeeded by a new dominant cultural logic. We conceive of this new logic as metamodernism. Whilst some twenty-first century texts still engage with and utilise postmodernist practices, they put these practices to new use. In this article, we investigate the metamodern usage of the typically postmodernist devices of metatextuality and ontological slippage in two genres: autofiction and true crime documentary. Specifically, we analyse Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being and the Netflix mini-series The Keepers, demonstrating that forms of fictionalisation, metafictionality, and ontological blurring between fiction and reality have been repurposed. We argue that, rather than expand the scope of fiction, overriding reality, the metamodernist repurposing of postmodernist textual strategies generates a kind of ‘reality-effect’.
This article undertakes a cognitive stylistic investigation of the trial of Egyptian writer Ahmed... more This article undertakes a cognitive stylistic investigation of the trial of Egyptian writer Ahmed Naji, who was prosecuted – and subsequently imprisoned – for ‘disturbing public morals’ by depicting sexual content in his novel Istikhdam al- Hayat [Using Life] (2014). The article presents a schematic model of the narrative roles, across narrative levels and text-world ontologies, mind-modelled by readers in literary experiences. This model forms the foundation of the analysis which is consequently able to map the interrelationships between the roles on enunciation and reception and to account for the complex array of ethical positions – relative to each narrative role – taken up by readers. The article offers a nuanced account of the ethics of reading which, by pioneering the application of stylistics to explore an Arabic cultural context, can also capture cultural difference. Ultimately, through situated analysis, this article uncovers the ideological forces involved in Ahmed Naji’s trial and the discriminatory practices therein.
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Authored Books by Alison Gibbons
Co-Authored Books by Alison Gibbons
Edited Books by Alison Gibbons
[30% Discount Form also attached under 'files']
Readers, literary critics, and theorists alike have long demonstrated an abiding fascination with the author, both as a real person—an artist and creator—and as a theoretical concept that shapes the way we read literary works. Whether anonymous, pseudonymous, or trending on social media, authors continue to be an object of critical and readerly interest. Yet theories surrounding authorship have yet to be satisfactorily updated to register the changes wrought on the literary sphere by the advent of the digital age, the recent turn to autofiction, and the current literary climate more generally. In Reading the Contemporary Author the contributors look back on the long history of theorizing the author and offer innovative new approaches for understanding this elusive figure.
Mapping the contours of the vast territory that is contemporary authorship, this collection investigates authorship in the context of narrative genres ranging from memoir and autobiographically informed texts to biofiction and novels featuring novelist narrators and characters. Bringing together the perspectives of leading scholars in narratology, cultural theory, literary criticism, stylistics, comparative literature, and autobiography studies, Reading the Contemporary Author demonstrates that a variety of interdisciplinary viewpoints and critical stances are necessary to capture the multifaceted nature of contemporary authorship.
[40% discount form also attached under 'files']
In recent years many attempts have been made to theorize “fictionality,” distinguished from fiction, as both a critical concept and a textual feature. The contemporary interest in theorizing fictionality in academia coincides with an increase in anxiety regarding “facts” and “fiction” in popular culture and global media. Indeed, the current media-saturated historical moment and political climate give a sense of urgency to the concept of “fictionality,” specifically in relation to modes and media of discourse. Each chapter of this book interrogates that relationship—the relationship of fictionality with multimodal strategies of narrative construction in the present media ecology. In the twenty-first century, literary narratives increasingly use multiple semiotic modes (writing, images, maps) to compose narrative worlds at the edge of fiction. Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives, edited by Torsa Ghosal and Alison Gibbons, is the first book to explicitly put the ongoing conversations about multimodality and fictionality in dialogue. By accounting for the relationship of multimodal composition with the ontological complexity of narrative worlds, this book fills a critical gap in contemporary narratology—the discipline that has, to-date, contributed most to the conceptualization of fictionality.
Journal Articles by Alison Gibbons
When Paul Werth invented the concept of ‘text-worlds’ (1999), he drew on existing psychological accounts of how the mind processes stimuli, such as the idea of the ‘situation model’ (van Dijk and Kintsch 1983). Yet despite the important advancements to Werth’s approach that have been made in stylistics over the years, situation-model research is rarely, if ever, referenced in what is now called Text World Theory (Gavins 2007). In this article, I consult empirical research on situation models, consequently making two significant contributions: I show how empirical situation-model research bolsters the validity of Text World Theory; I propose a new concept for Text World Theory—‘world-retrieval’—to account for how readers trace the interconnections between text-worlds and attempt to resolve processing difficulties. An analysis of the opening to Ray Loriga’s (2003) novel Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us Anymore demonstrates the value of the ‘world-retrieval’ concept.
Autofiction is a genre in which the author appears as a character, the nonfiction of their autobiographical life combining with the fiction of invention and fabrication. Critical discussions of autofiction are dominated by arguments concerning their dual narrative structure evoking a duet of imaginative visions which, in turn, requires reading strategies that shift between fact and fiction. These critical intuitions are perceptive, yet they remain unfounded since they make claims about reading and interpretation that can only be explained by recourse to cognitive frameworks and substantiated by empirical research. To rectify this, I propose a cognitive model of the processes involved in reading autofiction, combining the storyworld, Text World Theory, conceptual blending, and the person model. My cognitive model includes two new concepts: the ‘author model’ and ‘ontological dissonance’. Analysis of Michelle Tea’s autofiction Black Wave alongside reader responses tests my proposed model and ultimately validates it.
[30% Discount Form also attached under 'files']
Readers, literary critics, and theorists alike have long demonstrated an abiding fascination with the author, both as a real person—an artist and creator—and as a theoretical concept that shapes the way we read literary works. Whether anonymous, pseudonymous, or trending on social media, authors continue to be an object of critical and readerly interest. Yet theories surrounding authorship have yet to be satisfactorily updated to register the changes wrought on the literary sphere by the advent of the digital age, the recent turn to autofiction, and the current literary climate more generally. In Reading the Contemporary Author the contributors look back on the long history of theorizing the author and offer innovative new approaches for understanding this elusive figure.
Mapping the contours of the vast territory that is contemporary authorship, this collection investigates authorship in the context of narrative genres ranging from memoir and autobiographically informed texts to biofiction and novels featuring novelist narrators and characters. Bringing together the perspectives of leading scholars in narratology, cultural theory, literary criticism, stylistics, comparative literature, and autobiography studies, Reading the Contemporary Author demonstrates that a variety of interdisciplinary viewpoints and critical stances are necessary to capture the multifaceted nature of contemporary authorship.
[40% discount form also attached under 'files']
In recent years many attempts have been made to theorize “fictionality,” distinguished from fiction, as both a critical concept and a textual feature. The contemporary interest in theorizing fictionality in academia coincides with an increase in anxiety regarding “facts” and “fiction” in popular culture and global media. Indeed, the current media-saturated historical moment and political climate give a sense of urgency to the concept of “fictionality,” specifically in relation to modes and media of discourse. Each chapter of this book interrogates that relationship—the relationship of fictionality with multimodal strategies of narrative construction in the present media ecology. In the twenty-first century, literary narratives increasingly use multiple semiotic modes (writing, images, maps) to compose narrative worlds at the edge of fiction. Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives, edited by Torsa Ghosal and Alison Gibbons, is the first book to explicitly put the ongoing conversations about multimodality and fictionality in dialogue. By accounting for the relationship of multimodal composition with the ontological complexity of narrative worlds, this book fills a critical gap in contemporary narratology—the discipline that has, to-date, contributed most to the conceptualization of fictionality.
When Paul Werth invented the concept of ‘text-worlds’ (1999), he drew on existing psychological accounts of how the mind processes stimuli, such as the idea of the ‘situation model’ (van Dijk and Kintsch 1983). Yet despite the important advancements to Werth’s approach that have been made in stylistics over the years, situation-model research is rarely, if ever, referenced in what is now called Text World Theory (Gavins 2007). In this article, I consult empirical research on situation models, consequently making two significant contributions: I show how empirical situation-model research bolsters the validity of Text World Theory; I propose a new concept for Text World Theory—‘world-retrieval’—to account for how readers trace the interconnections between text-worlds and attempt to resolve processing difficulties. An analysis of the opening to Ray Loriga’s (2003) novel Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us Anymore demonstrates the value of the ‘world-retrieval’ concept.
Autofiction is a genre in which the author appears as a character, the nonfiction of their autobiographical life combining with the fiction of invention and fabrication. Critical discussions of autofiction are dominated by arguments concerning their dual narrative structure evoking a duet of imaginative visions which, in turn, requires reading strategies that shift between fact and fiction. These critical intuitions are perceptive, yet they remain unfounded since they make claims about reading and interpretation that can only be explained by recourse to cognitive frameworks and substantiated by empirical research. To rectify this, I propose a cognitive model of the processes involved in reading autofiction, combining the storyworld, Text World Theory, conceptual blending, and the person model. My cognitive model includes two new concepts: the ‘author model’ and ‘ontological dissonance’. Analysis of Michelle Tea’s autofiction Black Wave alongside reader responses tests my proposed model and ultimately validates it.
We explore literary media in terms of the variety and range of materials that are incorporated within the pages of the multimodal novel, a literary work composed of a multitude of modes including printed language, handwriting, drawings, photographs, etc. In doing so, we focus on two twenty-first century literary trends, archival poetics and autofiction, which come together in what we—along with other critics (Forné 2019; Cho 2020)—identify as “archival autofictions”. We focus on four texts which we have paired according to their formal similarities: Leanne Shapton’s (2009) Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry and Monica Sabolo’s (2015) All This has Nothing to Do with Me as inventories; Joanna Walsh’s (2018) Break.Up and Valeria Luiselli’s (2019) Lost Children Archive as travelogues. In these case study texts, fictionalized author figures actively construct a personal archive from a range of different literary media (text, photographs, drawings, facsimile reproductions, typographical layouts) and archival modes of documentation and organisation (journal entries, lists, transcripts, metadata tags, and intertextual cross-references). Ultimately, this chapter demonstrates the fundamental role that literary media plays within archival poetics and contemporary literature, including autofiction.
Taking Re-Run the Fun: My Life as Pat Sharp (Sharp, Richman, and Catterson 2020) and Memoirs and Misinformation (Carrey and Vachon 2020) as case study texts, this chapter explores celebrity autofiction. Research in narratology tends to inadvertently focus on authorial intent or explore the reading experience intuitively, based on a scholar’s own interpretive reflections. In contrast, this chapter combines text analysis with qualitative reader response data, gathered from the social reading site Goodreads. The data is thus brought to bear on key concerns for narrative theory, namely fictionality, authorship attribution, and how readers conceive of authors.
‘I decided to replace the book I’d proposed with the book you’re reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them’ (Lerner 2014, p. 194); so reflects the narrator of Ben Lerner’s acclaimed second novel 10:04. This highly metatextual, self-referential statement is indicative of the recurring tropes and preoccupations that resonate across Lerner’s oeuvre to-date. Ben Lerner (b. 1979) is the author of three novels: Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), 10:04 (2014), and The Topeka School (2019). All three novels involve a ‘flickering’ between fictional and nonfictional forms of writing, the latter primarily including autobiography, poetry, and literary and art criticism. It is this flickering, this tension, that has come to characterize Ben Lerner’s contemporary American Fiction. Herein, I explore Lerner’s novels through the lens of autofiction and consider the thematic and biographical interconnections that allow them to be read together as a trilogy.
This chapter argues for the necessity of a cognitive and holistic approach to autofiction—an approach that considers textual signposts in combination with the cognitive-affective dynamics of a text’s production and reception. On the basis of empirical data in the form of writers’ self-reports and psychological studies into the differences between fictional and factual reading modes, the chapter argues for and offers definitions of autofictional writing and autofictional reading modes. Their potential affordances and effects both for authors and readers are illustrated in relation to three works, which exhibit different degrees of fictionality: Philip Roth’s The Facts (1988), Olivia Laing’s Crudo (2018), and Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014).
After introducing the concept of remediation, the chapter’s exploration is contextualized in relation to Mark Z. Danielewski’s oeuvre, which he conceives as a remediation project. Through close stylistic analysis, the chapter demonstrates that The Fifty Year Sword simultaneously remediates oral storytelling whilst foregrounding the unique textual properties of the printed book through four central strategies: (1) the use of embedded stories, told by multiple characters; (2) the distribution of sentences across character’s speech turns; (3) the creation of deviant words; (4) phonological word play (particularly, onomatopoeia and homophonic puns). The chapter ultimately provides three valuable insights for the literary study of remediation and bookishness. Firstly, building on existing literary investigations of remediation (cf. Hayles 2002a, 2002b), the analysis demonstrates that literary remediation occurs through multimodal means (linguistic as well as visual). Secondly, it shows that remediation in the novel is a process that can represent both older and newer text-types. Finally, it demonstrates that whilst an aesthetic of bookishness is evident in twenty-first century literature, such an aesthetic uses remediation not only in response to the threat of digital communication. In remediating an old media form, the oral narrative, The Fifty Year Sword also foregrounds the diachronic ubiquity of storytelling.