What is a multimodal novel? And why is the genre on its return in our digital age? How should we understand the notion of the embodied reader? And why bother about rhythm and rhyme in the 21st century?
Books are more than just neutral containers of narratives; they are material, palpable objects, often multimodal in nature. In this podcast, Natalia Igl, associate researcher at LCE and Marie Skłodowska-Curie recent postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, discusses how and why the material and multimodal aspects of a book, literary journal, or poem affect our readerly experience perhaps more than we suspect. In a conversation with Stijn Vervaet, she explains how a literary work’s multimodality and materiality operates, and how we read with our bodies.
This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska Curie grant agreement No 794549.
Listen to the episode:
Reading recommendations from Natalia Igl
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves. Pantheon, 2000.
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Penguin, 2005
J.J. Abrams & Dough Dorst, S. [Ship of Theseus]. Mulholland, 2013.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "A Moonrise", 1893 (included in: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland, and Selected Writings. Penguin, 1999).
Vicki Baum, Grand Hotel (transl. by Basil Creighton, with revisions by Margot Bettauer Dembo; German original: Menschen im Hotel, 1929). NYRB, 2016.
Works mentioned, quoted, and recommended during the podcast:
Marco Caracciolo, "The Reader’s Virtual Body: Narrative Space and its Reconstruction." Storyworlds 2, 2011, pp. 117–138.
Karin Kukkonen, Probability Designs. Literature and Predictive Processing. OUP, 2020.
Anne Mangen, Adriaan van der Weel, "The evolution of reading in the age of digitisation: an integrative framework for reading research." Literacy 50.3, 2016, pp. 116–124.
Learn more about multimodality, materiality, and multisensory experiences in literary reading in Natalia’s published and forthcoming articles:
Natalia Igl, "Stylistic design elements of literary texts: Rhythm, metrics etc. and emotion." In Language and Emotion. An International Handbook, ed. by Gesine Lenore Schiewer, Jeanette Altarriba & Bee Chin Ng. De Gruyter Mouton, forthcoming 2022.
Natalia Igl, "Materialität." In Zeitschriftenforschung: Eine Einführung, ed. by Sabina Fazli & Oliver Scheiding. Transcript, forthcoming May 2022.
Natalia Igl, "Multisensorische Lektüren: Zur Rezeption und Meta-Ästhetik multimodaler Gegenwartsromane." In META-Fiktionen. Der experimentelle Roman seit den 1960er Jahren, ed. by Wilhelm Haefs, Stefan Brückl & Max Wimmer. Edition text+kritik, 2021, pp. 331–363.
Natalia Igl, "Poetics of perception. The cognitive linguistic foundation of narrativity and the 'aesthetics of observation' in German avant-garde literature." In Expressive Minds and Artistic Creations: Studies in Cognitive Poetics, ed. by Szilvia Csábi. OUP, 2018, pp. 181–202.