In this talk I'm going to induce a theory of medial reading from a range of empirical studies with readers of digital-born fiction. In particular, I will focus on medium-specific reading in VR as an environment that is known for its immersive, experiential qualities yet less for its affordances for literary fiction and verbal art. I consider what participants’ discursive responses to reading Randall Okita’s allofictional VR memoir, The Book of Distance, reveal about the mediality of reading in VR. I derive the concept of ambimediality from data that shows the blending of multi-, inter- and transmedial processing on the one hand and the ambivalent and ambient contingencies of medium-specific reading in VR on the other.

Join us online on Zoom and Facebook, or at the Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Warsaw, room 2.116.

Meeting ID: 955 9604 1022

Passcode: 355443

Digital evolution is largely driven by commercialisation, pushing technology ever forward even as great swathes of the global population are left behind with little access to necessary hardware, infrastructure, and skills. Digital fiction, historically, developed in different ways around the world, influenced by factors such as language, technological access, culture, and government policies. This talk will explore how a “postdigital” world has developed unique digital fiction traditions out of the human responses to barriers and inequalities.

Join us online on Zoom and Facebook, or at the Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Warsaw, room 2.118.

Meeting ID: 954 9528 8390

Digital technology has changed the way we read. We can be consumed by a narrative on our mobile phone or make our way through a network of connections in a web browser. Whether in terms of structure and navigation or in terms of modes and media therefore, digital technologies affect the way we consume texts and, ultimately, language. Profiling my research in stylistics and narratology, I will explore the literary and technological history of digital fiction before focussing on a recent reader-response study of an immersive mobile phone app-fiction, Blast Theory’s Karen (2015). I will show ways in which this digital fiction builds a world that problematises the divide between reality and fiction and profile my new theoretical category of “ontological resonance” (Bell 2021) as a means of theorising that ontological ambiguity.

Join us online on Zoom and Facebook, or at the Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Warsaw, room 2.116.