App Fiction. A New Genre of Digital Literature? (May 2021)

Описание: This is a talk I gave at the 2021 International Conference on Narrative (online conference, May 19-23).

The Digital Fiction panel (May 21).

Abstract of my presentation:

The last decade has seen a number of exciting innovations in digital fiction. One of the most significant trends is the use of applications for mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) as a dominant (or exclusive) delivery technology for text. In the following paper, I lay out the groundwork for the poetics of what I and my colleague, Magdalena Rembowska-Płuciennik, have christened "app fiction" in our latest collaborative research. In the course of comparative analyses of The Pickle Index by Eli Horowitz (2015), Arcadia by Iain Pears (2018), and Belgravia by Julian Fellowes (2018) I will explore the fundamental properties of the new genre: multimodality, multimediality, game mechanics, interface. In the second part of my talk, I will tackle the variety of reception roles demanded by app fiction along with three types of immersion generated. Finally, I will contextualize the poetics of app fiction against the backdrop of digital fiction and its evolution since the 1980s by drawing from scholars such as Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin, and Marie-Laure Ryan.

Keywords: app fiction; digital fiction; genre; reception