Abstract

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.

Bio

Alice Bell is Professor of English Language and Literature at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. Her research specialisms are stylistics, narratology, and digital fiction. She was Principal Investigator for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded “Reading Digital Fiction” project which used empirical methods to investigate the way that readers cognitively process digital fiction. Her publications include The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction (Palgrave 2010), Digital Fiction and the Unnatural (OSUP 2021), and Reading Digital Fiction: Narrative, Cognition, Mediality (with Astrid Ensslin, forthcoming Routledge 2023). Her new project, funded by the AHRC, is entitled “Post Postmodern Fictions of the Digital: Narrative, Cognition, and Technology in the Twenty-First Century” and will focus on print and transmedial fiction that utilises, represents, and/or thematises digital technology.

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