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IPP WORKSHOP SERIES | Anna Klishevich: “Multimodal Fiction: What is it and how to read it?”

When

Feb 13, 2025 from 02:00 to 04:00 (Europe/Berlin / UTC100)

Where

SR 109

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Almost thirty years ago, W.T.H. Mitchell, the author of the “Picture Theory”, wrote that “all media are mixed media” (Mitchell 1995, 94-95), meaning that all means of communication have, to some degree, the elements of other means of communication, i.e., other media, within them. Literature is, thus, to be viewed as a ‘composite’ art or a medium which has different arts, media, or forms of representation within it. As one of the responses to such ideas, a new literary genre was introduced – multimodal fiction – and the multimodal novel was defined as a novel that integrates nonverbal modes of meaning-making into its narrative discourse (Hallet 2018, 26).

In this workshop, we will discuss what multimodal fiction is and what one needs to be aware of when reading it. We will focus on multimodal novels by American and British authors as examples of multimodal fiction and distinguish them from graphic novels and illustrated novels, teasing out characteristics specific for multimodal novels. We will draw on works by such novelists as David Mitchell, Mark Haddon, Nick Hornby, Jonathan Safran Foer, Steven Hall, and others., as examples to understand the challenges of reading multimodal fiction and will try to suggest possible solutions to overcome them.

The workshop’s target audience comprises Bachelor, Master, and PhD students of literary and cultural studies or any other disciplines who are interested in but have no specific background knowledge in multimodality or multimodal fiction.

 

To register: Winter Term 2024/25 — The Graduate Centre (uni-giessen.de)