Search results for "demediation"

Narrating Selves amid Library Shelves : Literary Mediation and Demediation in S. by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst

2019

This essay focuses on the various forms of narrating, mediating, and interpreting selves within and around a book object, the novel S. (2013) by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. The novel S. is an experiment in producing a deceivingly realistic replica of a maltreated library book object, but its discursive practices also rely on familiar literary forms, harking back to epistolary commonplaces, as well as to marginalia, both ancient and modern. The book object S., which carries the text of the novel-within-a-novel, the readers' multilayered markings, and paraphernalia, forms an archive dramatizing the workings of memory, thought, and emotion. That archive also demonstrates how the characters co…

Blocks to, and building blocks of, narrativity : fragments, anecdotes, and narrative lines in David Markson’s Reader’s block

2017

David Markson’s Reader’s block (1996) consists of 193 pages of quotations, anecdotes, names, and fragments. The book bears the paratext “A novel,” and the work has indeed been read as a narrative whole, in which “an aging author [...] contemplates the writing of a novel.” By being out of ordinary and therefore worth of telling, the anecdotes or curiosities seemingly fulfill the requirements of a “natural” narrative as defined by Monika Fludernik (1996). However, a mass of such mini-narratives, mixed with even more fragmentary texts, seems to defy narrativity (and tellability). In my reading, the ostensive block to narrativity also functions as its very building block. Thanks to polysemy, bl…

Carving Out Other Narratives : Textual Treatment in Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes

2017