Since the turn of the millennium, there has seen an increase in the inclusion of typography, graphics and illustration in fiction. This book engages with visual and multimodal devices in twenty-first century literature, exploring canonical authors like Mark Z. Danielewski and Jonathan Safran Foer alongside experimental fringe writers such as Steve Tomasula, to uncover an embodied textual aesthetics in the information age. Bringing together multimodality and cognition in an innovative study of how readers engage with challenging literature, this book makes a significant contribution to the debates surrounding multimodal design and multimodal reading. Drawing on cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, semiotics, visual perception, visual communication, and multimodal analysis, Gibbons provides a sophisticated set of critical tools for analysing the cognitive impact of multimodal literature.
List of Figures Permissions Acknowledgements 1. Introduction 2. Multimodality 3. Towards a Multimodal Cognitive Poetics 4. Creating Thresholds and the Exploring Reader of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski 5. Embodiment and the Book that Bleeds: VAS: An Opera in Flatland by Steve Tomasula with Stephen Farrell 6. Cowitnessing trauma in reading Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer 7. Cut, Paste, Repair, but Read: Woman’s World by Graham Rawle 8. Conclusion
Biography
Alison Gibbons is Lecturer in English at De Montfort University, Leicester. Alison has published internationally in a number of journals and collections, including New Perspectives on Narrative and Multimodality (Routledge, 2009). She is co-editor of Mark Z. Danielewski (Manchester University Press, 2011) and Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (Routledge 2011).
