Abstract
Employing close stylistic analysis, Alison Gibbons demonstrates that Mark Z. Danielewski’s novella The Fifty Year Sword abounds with linguistic, typographical, and narrative devices that remediate folkloristic oral storytelling, as exemplified by the novella’s embedded ghost story. At the same time, however, Danielewski’s fiction also draws the readers’ attention to the material and textual features of the printed book through the use of multimodality, paratextual elements, multiple narrators, and experiments with word choice and phonological patterning. Gibbons’s detailed analysis shows that poetics of bookishness may function in contemporary literature both to address the codex’s shifting position in digital culture and to reconnect present literary practices with older literary traditions, such as oral storytelling around the campfire, that offer communal forms of art and communication.
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Notes
- 1.
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 5.
- 2.
Jessica Pressman, “The Aesthetics Bookishness in Twenty-First Century Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 48, no. 4 (2009): 465–482.
- 3.
Pressman, “Aesthetics,” 465.
- 4.
Cf. N. Katherine Hayles, “Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves,” American Literature 74, no. 4 (2002): 779–806; N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
- 5.
Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 4–5.
- 6.
Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 5.
- 7.
Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 272.
- 8.
Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (London: Corsair, 2010).
- 9.
Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 15.
- 10.
On intermediality studies, cf. Irina O. Rajewsky, “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality,” Intermédialités 6 (2005): 43–64; Werner Wolf, “Intermediality,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (London: Routledge, 2005), 252–256. On “intermedial evocation,” see Wolf’s essay.
- 11.
Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 272.
- 12.
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (London: Doubleday, 2000).
- 13.
See Jessica Pressman, “Reading the Networked Novel,” Studies in American Fiction 34, no. 1 (2006): 107–128; Mel Evans, “This Haunted House: Intertextuality and Interpretation in Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) and Poe’s Haunted (2000),” in Mark Z. Danielewski, ed. Joe Bray and Alison Gibbons (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 68–85; Paul McCormick, “House of Leaves, Cinema and the New Affordances of Old Media,” in Mark Z. Danielewski, ed. Joe Bray and Alison Gibbons (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 52–67; Alison Gibbons, “Narrative Worlds and Multimodal Figures in House of Leaves: ‘-find your own words; I have no more,’” in Intermediality and Storytelling, ed. Marina Grishakova and Marie-Laure Ryan (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 285–311; Brian W. Chanen, “Surfing the Text: The Digital Environment in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves,” European Journal of English Studies 11, no. 2 (2007): 163–176; Mark B.N. Hansen, “The Digital Topography of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.” Contemporary Literature 45, no. 4: 597–636; Hayles, “Saving,” and Writing.
- 14.
Kasey Carpenter, “Allways: An interview with Mark Z. Danielewski,” The Millions, October 15, 2012, accessed March 12, 2014. http://www.themillions.com/2012/10/allways-an-interview-with-mark-z-danielewski.html. On The Familiar in relation to TV serialization, see also Rita Raley, “‘Bookwork’ after Bookwork,” conference paper presented at “Charisma of the Book: Global Perspectives for the 21st Century,” March 14–16, 2016, New York University Abu Dhabi.
- 15.
Danielewski, qtd. in Pantheon and Schocken Books catalogue, Spring 2015, accessed October 2016, http://knopfdoubleday.com/marketing/test/Hosting/Pantheon_Schocken%20Spring%202015%20Catalog.pdf
- 16.
Stavroula Kalogeras, Transmedia Storytelling and the New Era of Media Convergence in Higher Education (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 19.
- 17.
Kalogeras, Transmedia, 28.
- 18.
Monika Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (London: Routledge, 1996), 14.
- 19.
Fludernik, Towards, 58.
- 20.
Fludernik, Towards, 59.
- 21.
Mark Z. Danielewski, The Fifty Year Sword (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2005).
- 22.
Mark Z. Danielewski, The Fifty Year Sword (New York: Pantheon, 2012), 236. Further references in the text.
- 23.
Sylvia Grider, “Children’s Telling of Ghost Stories,” in Traditional Storytelling Today: An International Sourcebook, ed. Margaret Read MacDonald (London: Routledge, 1999), 540.
- 24.
Glyn White, “Reading the Graphic Surface of Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Fifty Year Sword,” in Mark Z. Danielewski, ed. Joe Bray and Alison Gibbons (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 108.
- 25.
Alexander Starre, “Organic Book Design from Dwiggins to Danielewski: The Metamedial Aesthetics of Embodied Literature in American Trade Publishing,” in Publishing as Artistic Practice, ed. Annette Gilbert (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 85.
- 26.
Fludernik, Towards.
- 27.
M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 324.
- 28.
M. Piereete Malcuzynski, “Polyphonic Theory and Contemporary Literary Practices,” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 9, no. 1 (1984): 78.
- 29.
See Mark Z. Danielewski, “The Fifty Year Sword (with shadows),” Performance at REDCAT, Los Angeles, October 31, 2010.
- 30.
Heinrich F. Plett, Literary Rhetoric: Concepts – Structures – Analyses (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 147–150.
- 31.
Plett, Literary, 150.
- 32.
Grider, “Children’s,” 539.
- 33.
White, “Reading.”
- 34.
White, “Reading,” 109.
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———. 2012. The Fifty Year Sword. New York: Pantheon.
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Pantheon and Schocken Books Catalogue. 2015. http://knopfdoubleday.com/marketing/test/Hosting/Pantheon_Schocken%20Spring%220201%20Catalog.pdf. Accessed Oct. 2016.
Plett, Heinrich F. 2010. Literary Rhetoric: Concepts – Structures – Analyses. Leiden: Brill.
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Rajewsky, Irina O. 2005. Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality. Intermédialités (6): 43–64.
Raley, Rita. ‘Bookwork’ After Bookwork. Conference Paper Presented at “Charisma of the Book: Global Perspectives for the 21st Century,” March 14–16, 2016, New York University, Abu Dhabi.
Starre, Alexander. 2016. Organic Book Design from Dwiggins to Danielewski: The Metamedial Aesthetics of Embodied Literature in American Trade Publishing. In Publishing as Artistic Practice, ed. Annette Gilbert, 74–87. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
White, Glyn. 2011. Reading the Graphic Surface of Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Fifty Year Sword. In Mark Z. Danielewski, ed. Joe Bray and Alison Gibbons, 105–120. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Wolf, Werner. 2005. Intermediality. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie Laure Ryan, 252–256. London: Routledge.
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Gibbons, A. (2019). Remediation, Oral Storytelling, and the Printed Book: The Stylistic Strategies of Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Fifty Year Sword. In: Schaefer, H., Starre, A. (eds) The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22545-2_9
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