- Narrative, Narrative Theory, Narratology, American Literature, 21st Century American Literature, Twenty-first Century Literature, and 42 moreParatexts, Genre, Authorship, Jennifer Egan, New Sincerity, 9/11 Literature, Contemporary Literature, Contemporary American Literature, Literary Theory, Dave Eggers, Narrative Ethics, American Novel, New Media Studies, Digital Media, Digital Ethics, Jonathan Safran Foer, Genre Theory, Memoir and Autobiography, Appropriation, Intermediality, Materiality, Geocriticism, Ecocriticism, Multimodality, Rhetorical Criticism, Dystopian Literature, New Materialism, Contemporary Women's Writing, feminism and feminist literary theory, Contemporary Women's Writing, Theory of the Novel, Empathy (Psychology), Empathy (Philosophy), Post-postmodernism, Comparative Literature, Hermeneutics and Narrative, Literary Criticism, Philosophy of Literature, Feminist Theory, Gender Studies, New Media, Critical Posthumanism, and Social Mediaedit
- Post Doc. University of Zaragoza, Spain.
Narrative Theory; Contemporary Literature; American Literatureedit
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... more
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.
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This essay aims to explore the interrelation of the widespread use of digital epitextual material and the common practice, in post-postmodern U.S. fiction, to employ characters and character-narrators that share some biographical details... more
This essay aims to explore the interrelation of the widespread use of digital epitextual material and the common practice, in post-postmodern U.S. fiction, to employ characters and character-narrators that share some biographical details with their authors. Specifically, this essay attends to narrative communication when an autobiographical connection between authors and characters is established not textually, but paratextually, through digital epitexts to be found, for instance, on authors' social media profiles. Through the analysis of Raven Leilani's Luster (2020), I will show how digital epitexts acquire a central role in contemporary narrative dynamics: it is through them that many novels realize the author-character connection providing fiction with a layer of alleged authenticity meant to reinforce the post-postmodern tendency to earnestly engage with ethical and political issues.
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This article presents an analysis of Michael Chabon’s Moonglow (2016) inclusive of the digital epitexts the author shared on his account on social media Instagram (2015-2018). Following a (rhetorical) co-constructive approach, the... more
This article presents an analysis of Michael Chabon’s Moonglow (2016) inclusive of the digital epitexts the author shared on his account on social media Instagram (2015-2018). Following a (rhetorical) co-constructive approach, the analysis shows Chabon’s combined use of digital epitexts and genre ambiguity and highlights the relevance of both narrative resources for the co-construction of Moonglow. In particular, I claim that the onomastic connections providing trauma autofictions like Moonglow with authenticity (cf. Worthington 2018) are realized through the digital epitexts on Instagram. These digital epitexts, in turn, come into being in the context of an ephemeral personal narrative, while Chabon’s use of mixed framing clues is linked with the current interest in sincerity and relationality of twenty-first-century American fiction.
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This essay explores the reframing of the fiction/nonfiction distinction in light of the changing cultural dominant in the literary period succeeding postmodernism. It investigates the connection between sincerity, intersubjectivity and... more
This essay explores the reframing of the fiction/nonfiction distinction in light of the changing cultural dominant in the literary period succeeding postmodernism. It investigates the connection between sincerity, intersubjectivity and the breaking down of the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction in hybrid-genre narratives such as memoirs and autofictional novels. It then focuses on the link between these literary narratives and digital media presenting a study of social media platform Instagram as a (possible) prolific area of an emergent post-postmodernism. This exploration is further illustrated through the rhetorical analysis of Michael Chabon’s Instagram feed. Finally, this essay calls attention to how the blurring of the fiction/nonfiction distinction is becoming a technique employed to foreground issues of sincerity and intersubjective author-audience communication rather than of postmodern ontology.
Research Interests: Creative Nonfiction, Narrative, Digital Media, Social Media, Postmodernism, and 11 moreContemporary American Literature, Contemporary Literature, Narrative Analysis, Narrative Theory, Postmodern Literature, Michael Chabon, Autofiction, Fiction, 21st Century American Literature, 20th- and 21st-century literature in English, and Instagram
Considering narrative as a communicative act implies that all interlocutors in this act take an active role. From this rhetorical stance, reading has always been a co-constructed world-building exercise: the audience, as much as the... more
Considering narrative as a communicative act implies that all interlocutors
in this act take an active role. From this rhetorical stance, reading has always been a co-constructed world-building exercise: the audience, as much as the author, builds a storyworld as conveyed by the narrative. Tis article employs critical apparatuses that foreground this collaborative nature of narrative communication to illuminate its collaborative world-building processes. Tus, by focusing on these aspects of narrative
communication, we here begin responding to Paul Dawson’s and James Phelan’s invitations toward a multi-directional narrative communication model approach. To illustrate this approach’s utility, we explicate readers’ co-constructions of the storyworlds and the actual world in John Green’s Te Fault in Our Stars (2012). Attending to world-building processes in, about, and around the novel of our case study, we call attention to how the rhetorical resources used to construct the storyworld are not limited
to the physical space of the book and, in fact, ofen cross into the actual world.
in this act take an active role. From this rhetorical stance, reading has always been a co-constructed world-building exercise: the audience, as much as the author, builds a storyworld as conveyed by the narrative. Tis article employs critical apparatuses that foreground this collaborative nature of narrative communication to illuminate its collaborative world-building processes. Tus, by focusing on these aspects of narrative
communication, we here begin responding to Paul Dawson’s and James Phelan’s invitations toward a multi-directional narrative communication model approach. To illustrate this approach’s utility, we explicate readers’ co-constructions of the storyworlds and the actual world in John Green’s Te Fault in Our Stars (2012). Attending to world-building processes in, about, and around the novel of our case study, we call attention to how the rhetorical resources used to construct the storyworld are not limited
to the physical space of the book and, in fact, ofen cross into the actual world.
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This essay explores mothering and family life in three contemporary narratives: Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Sarah Manguso's Ongoingness, and Heidi Julavits's The Folded Clock. These texts, through an autofictional account of their... more
This essay explores mothering and family life in three contemporary narratives: Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Sarah Manguso's Ongoingness, and Heidi Julavits's The Folded Clock. These
texts, through an autofictional account of their authors’ experiences with family making, call attention to the challenges contemporary American families face vis à vis gender and maternal roles and mainstream assumptions such as heteronormativity. The narratives’ combined interest in self- and family-making is reflected in their fluid generic status. In our post-postmodern literary period, these authors’ life writing is not only an attempt at postirony. Rather, these narratives respond to the affective logic of contemporary autofiction, portraying relational identities of the self. Nelson, Manguso and Julavits represent motherhood as a transformative, all-encompassing and bodily experience and choose to rely on “unfinished” genres (half-memoirs, half-essays, half-fiction) to reflect the idea of incompleteness around today’s motherhood and family matters.
texts, through an autofictional account of their authors’ experiences with family making, call attention to the challenges contemporary American families face vis à vis gender and maternal roles and mainstream assumptions such as heteronormativity. The narratives’ combined interest in self- and family-making is reflected in their fluid generic status. In our post-postmodern literary period, these authors’ life writing is not only an attempt at postirony. Rather, these narratives respond to the affective logic of contemporary autofiction, portraying relational identities of the self. Nelson, Manguso and Julavits represent motherhood as a transformative, all-encompassing and bodily experience and choose to rely on “unfinished” genres (half-memoirs, half-essays, half-fiction) to reflect the idea of incompleteness around today’s motherhood and family matters.
Research Interests: Gender Studies, Narrative, Family, Contemporary American Literature, Contemporary Literature, and 10 moreNarrative Theory, Memoir and Autobiography, Feminist Literary Theory and Gender Studies, Twenty-first Century Literature, Life Writing (Literature), Autofiction, Motherhood, Maggie Nelson, Sarah Manguso, and Heidi Julavits
As we enter a new literary period succeeding postmodernism, the models and methods of our theories are called into question visa `-vis their ability to effectively frame the formal features describing contemporary literary narratives. The... more
As we enter a new literary period succeeding postmodernism, the models and methods of our theories are called into question visa `-vis their ability to effectively frame the formal features describing contemporary literary narratives. The article surveys current discussions of contemporary fiction and explores some of its emerging features, such as the shift from an ironic to a sincere mode and the drawing of attention to the materiality of the novel. As the context of the new digital media ecology in which the post-postmodern novel appears becomes more and more interrelated with its emerging features, the present essay argues that to better define this interrelation we can rely on the rhetorical approach to narrative and, in particular, on James Phelan's (2011, 2014) model of narrative communication. On the other hand, for this model to provide a fruitful analytic tool, we need to consider digital epitexts among the resources at an author's disposal to generate certain responses in readers. The article concludes with some considerations on the synergetic use of textual and digital resources to show how the rhetorical choice not to use a certain resource sometimes can be more revealing than using one.
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• This essay explores the literature/digital nexus from a narratological perspective and asks: how does the digital enter the traditional printed novel? The concept of the paratext – with the new categories of material peritexts and... more
• This essay explores the literature/digital nexus from a narratological perspective and asks: how does the digital enter the traditional printed novel? The concept of the paratext – with the new categories of material peritexts and digital epitexts – serves as a theoretical frame to be discussed along with Paul Dawson's proposal for a discursive narratology and James Phelan's rhetorical approach to narrative in the attempt to fruitfully combine the two for a contextualized and cultural-aware narrative analysis.
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To acknowledge that the beginning of the twenty-first century has witnessed the rise of literary narratives that make extensive use of visual or graphic elements such as photographs, typographical experimentations, unusual page layouts,... more
To acknowledge that the beginning of the twenty-first century has witnessed the rise of literary narratives that make extensive use of visual or graphic elements such as photographs, typographical experimentations, unusual page layouts, drawings, illustrations, etc., is not a novelty per se. Neither is it, in recent years, to explore digital narratives and their affordances. Rather, these explorations have received much attention in narrative theory and in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Since the digital turn, new studies have approached both subjects. However, while most of these studies are either inquiries into new digital devices and digital narratives (e.g., digital narratology) or focus on experimentations with the materiality of the book (e.g., multimodal narrative), this article will consider the two issues as part of the same phenomenon. On the one hand, literary experimentations with the materiality of the book have been especially flourishing since the emergence of new digital technologies. On the other hand, contemporary fictional writers, who are becoming more and more aware of the affordances offered by digital media, have started exploiting the properties of these new technologies to supplement their print narratives. These new but recurrent practices are thus both historically grounded in the socio-cultural context of the twenty-first century and consistent with a knowledge-sharing mode embedded in web 2.0 technologies.
As I will show, the correlation between (a) the materiality of the book and (b) the digital supplementary material to be found on writers’ personal websites and blogs and in social media finds its origins in Gérard Genette’s concept of paratext and, in particular, in his subdivision into (a) peritext, i.e. the paratextual elements situated in proximity of the text, and (b) epitext, i.e. the paratextual elements “not materially appended to the text within the same volume, but circulating [...] in a virtually limitless physical and social space” (Genette [1987] 1997: 344). In the first section of this article, I highlight how the concept of paratext, despite some lacks and ambivalences, is still able to offer a valuable perspective on contemporary practices. I will introduce recent investigations on issues of media, mode, and materiality in order to contextualize my study in a wider cultural and theoretical discourse. The second section analyzes how paratextual elements are employed in a contemporary novel, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010). This analysis sheds new light on the way visual and digital elements may be used in a literary narrative. Drawing on this paradigmatic case, the third section puts forth my proposal of “paratext 2.0.” Formed by the categories of material peritext and digital epitext, the conceptualization of paratexts 2.0 allows for the identification of several functions. Far from containing a definitive reconfiguration of paratext for literary narrative in the digital age, this article provides new a vocabulary and, more significantly, new insights to answer some of the urgent questions twenty-first century literary practices are posing to narrative theory.
As I will show, the correlation between (a) the materiality of the book and (b) the digital supplementary material to be found on writers’ personal websites and blogs and in social media finds its origins in Gérard Genette’s concept of paratext and, in particular, in his subdivision into (a) peritext, i.e. the paratextual elements situated in proximity of the text, and (b) epitext, i.e. the paratextual elements “not materially appended to the text within the same volume, but circulating [...] in a virtually limitless physical and social space” (Genette [1987] 1997: 344). In the first section of this article, I highlight how the concept of paratext, despite some lacks and ambivalences, is still able to offer a valuable perspective on contemporary practices. I will introduce recent investigations on issues of media, mode, and materiality in order to contextualize my study in a wider cultural and theoretical discourse. The second section analyzes how paratextual elements are employed in a contemporary novel, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010). This analysis sheds new light on the way visual and digital elements may be used in a literary narrative. Drawing on this paradigmatic case, the third section puts forth my proposal of “paratext 2.0.” Formed by the categories of material peritext and digital epitext, the conceptualization of paratexts 2.0 allows for the identification of several functions. Far from containing a definitive reconfiguration of paratext for literary narrative in the digital age, this article provides new a vocabulary and, more significantly, new insights to answer some of the urgent questions twenty-first century literary practices are posing to narrative theory.
Research Interests: American Literature, Narrative, Literary Criticism, Narratology, Literary Theory, and 11 morePostmodernism, Contemporary Literature, Narrative Theory, Postmodernism (Literature), Postmodern Literature, Authorship, Twenty-first Century Literature, Gerard Genette, Paratexts, Jennifer Egan, and A Visit From the Goon Squad
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In this study, I argue for the need to extend Genette’s typology of the paratext to analyze twenty-first century literary narratives. “Paratexts 2.0” are formalized in a model that presents the new categories of material peritexts and... more
In this study, I argue for the need to extend Genette’s typology of the paratext to analyze twenty-first century literary narratives. “Paratexts 2.0” are formalized in a model that presents the new categories of material peritexts and digital epitexts and their main functions. The new model provides a heuristic for contemporary narratives whose authors exploit various semiotic modes in their printed books, and the affordances of Web 2.0 technologies in the digital world. My dissertation is therefore also an attempt to complement the rhetorical approach to narrative with investigations on mediality and modality, and a discussion on the extra-textual dimension of authorial agency. Finally, according to a diachronic perspective, this study explores the ethical values embedded in the choice of using paratexts 2.0 as resources of narrative communication in relation to post-postmodern American literature.