From the perspective of literary intermediality, the ludology-narratology debate which unfolded among literary and game scholars around the turn of the millennium culminated in a pivotal conclusion: thinking of other media as texts in an effort to locate narrativity or literariness within them constrains our appreciation of their medium-specific affordances.¹ This insight extends beyond the interplay between digital media and the novel. As John Guillory articulates in Professing Criticism, it aligns with the ongoing scholarly pursuit of a ‘new theoretical account of literature’s place in the system of media’ (2022: 81). While close reading remains a valuable part of its toolkit, literary studies needs to account for how the effects of its objects of interest are embedded in the current media landscape. Astrid Ensslin and Daniel Punday have previously engaged with this discourse. In Writing at the Limit, Punday introduces the genre of the ‘media novel’ and demonstrates how a ‘media ecology’ is something that always needs to be taken into consideration when analysing this genre of fiction. Ensslin’s Literary Gaming, on the other hand, explores the idea of literariness as a continuum applicable to narrative video games, emphasising the necessity of broadening the concept of literature beyond its conventional ties to canonical, linear, analogue, or textual narrative forms. In their more recent publications addressed in this review, they adopt a more transmedial approach, critically examining the notions of literariness and storytelling within the context of twenty-first-century media.

Playing at Narratology: Digital Media as Narrative Theory and The Routledge Companion to Literary Media share concerns of treating their research objects as phenomena which resist rigid categorisation and strict definition. While the former analyses existing definitions of basic narratological terms in relation to video games and other art forms incorporating non-linear forms of storytelling, the edited collection makes more updated and multi-perspectival contributions to challenge generalisations about the literary in the digital age. As Astrid Ensslin, Julia Round, Bronwen Thomas, and their contributors challenge generalisations about the literary, so does Punday scrutinise existing definitions of basic narratological terms. The Routledge Companion to Literary Media approaches ‘literariness’ as part of a media ecology rather than as being present in isolated art forms. The 2023 collection deals with how literature and other (analogue as well as digital) media shape each other and how this affects readers. In doing so, the contributors consider multiple aspects and actors involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of literary media ranging from locative narratives to podcasts, as well as their diverse materialities.

To introduce the discussion, I will outline the principal aspects and arguments connecting these theoretical works through the example of a contemporary novel that examines its own position within this system in a self-reflexive manner: Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022). The narrative revolves around the protagonists Sam and Sadie, young game designers who collaboratively create digital games while navigating the complexities of their personal and professional relationships yet always gravitating back to each other. The novel’s structure, marked by its recurrent returns to the beginning, alongside its direct references, reflects distinctive characteristics of games: ‘Every time I run into you for the rest of our lives, I’ll ask you to make a game with me. There’s some groove in my brain that insists it is a good idea.’ […] ‘That’s a game character’s life, too, […] [t]he world of infinite restarts. Start again at the beginning, this time you might win’ (396–97, emphasis in original). The games they design are deeply influenced by their lived experiences and often relay these narratives through what Henry Jenkins has called ‘environmental storytelling’. For instance, one game includes a virtual space named ‘Mapletown’, which memorialises a loved one’s struggle with cancer and offers a space for her to exist in – yet for Sam, it simultaneously represents ‘the story of his pain, in the present and in the past’ (186). Simultaneously, the titular Shakespearean reference situates Zevin’s work firmly within a broader literary tradition. This intertextual engagement is also explored in an embedded game, Master of the Revels, designed by Sadie as a tribute to Shakespeare’s impact on her creative process. In this way, Zevin invites readers to consider the boundaries between literature and gaming while constructing a synthesis that underscores the semiotic connections between the frame narrative and the embedded games. Additionally, the novel extends its focus beyond the fictional realms of these games, thematising both their creative development and the material realities of their distribution. Notably, it consistently and explicitly situates literature within the context of other media, such as ‘interesting plays and movies to see [and] interesting games to play’ (92). The observations regarding the distinct ways in which various media convey meaning and narrate stories while engaging in continuous interaction with other forms underscore the importance of locating them within wider mediational and material frameworks. These considerations also serve as the unifying thread between the two works analysed in this review.

Playing at Narratology treats narrativity as a phenomenon that resists rigid medial classification. Punday revisits narrativity in a broader sense as a transmedial phenomenon, and he revises concepts from traditional narratology aided by intermedial artefacts such as digital narratives and games. This review focuses on the author’s use of non-fictional storytelling techniques to challenge established narratives in media history and to contribute to the meta-discourse of shifting scholarly approaches to the relationship between literary texts and other media. While the scope of Punday’s analysis is restricted to ludic media, both volumes emphasise the importance of studying phenomena through a transmedial lens as this approach can reveal unexplored connections in underrepresented areas of humanities research, such as the effect of publishing contexts on literature or the role of materialities and hardware in narrative experiences.

Published four years later, The Routledge Companion to Literary Media seeks to fill a theoretical gap by extending the endeavour of tracing medial border crossings to the widest possible array of literary media in one volume. The contributions expand the notion of literariness onto forms of expression such as comics, podcasts, and computer games. This approach illustrates how we can grasp literariness as it gleams through the surface of different media without necessarily reducing them to texts. The contributions include topics often viewed as only tangentially connected to literature, such as intermediaries involved in its circulation or literature’s diverse reading communities. The ‘Literary Media Tales’ section of the introduction sets the tone for the novel perspectives of the forty-one contributions with personal accounts from the editors about the formative influences shaping their views on literature and its relation to the surrounding media ecology. Bronwen Thomas recounts the way the interplay between television and literature, especially adaptations of classics, had shaped her media consumption habits and, later, her research. Julia Round details how the visuality and tactility of comics led her to study the materiality and circulation of literary works. Ensslin shares that her life has been structured around a succession of different types of play, from musical to video game. A common element in these recollections is that all three editors acknowledge their early (and, at times, more restrictive) theoretical influences which they intend to move beyond in expanding the existing notion of literariness to a more diverse range of media. Ultimately, the collection successfully reiterates the claim that reserving the term for analogue, textual, or linear forms would significantly limit our understanding of the system of relations between these intertwined forms. The emphasis on media materialities expounded in these stories is echoed by the subsequent essays which, as the introduction outlines, generally ‘consider texts as inseparable from their contexts of production’ (7).

A recurring motif among the contributions is viewing digital media objects as ephemeral, artefactual, and event-like in nature to provide an alternative to their frequent treatment as infrastructure. For instance, Marina Grishakova proposes an alternative to existing approaches to intermediality: a focus on its material and performative qualities. To illuminate this perspective, Grishakova cites the examples of typographical experiments in print literature, the second generation of hypertext, as well as literary walks, locative technologies, and the sonic poetics of eco-artists. Building on two case studies, the article concludes that intermediality increases the artistic expressive power of various media artefacts. On a corresponding note, Simone Murray’s contribution deals with the emerging genre of ambient literature. The analysis covers locative narratives and distinguishes two subgenres, the exploratory type (with greater authorial control) and the constructive one which provides a higher level of agency to users. After discussing the limitations of locative digital narratives, Murray too suggests that we embrace its event-like nature as a response to issues with the preservation of locative artefacts. This thread of artefactuality runs through both publications and is also a key element in Punday’s handling of his case studies. This attribute not only distinguishes digital media from analogue texts in the sense that they are more susceptible to hardware obsolescence but simultaneously connects the two forms in an experiential sense as works brought to life through reader/user interaction.

The collection’s attempt to include multiple, often conflicting perspectives manifests itself in Lisa Gee’s chapter. Through its appearance side by side with Grishakova and Murray’s considerations, its more traditional focus of the digital humanities on the technical aspects of the quest to preserve digital editions for future audiences forcefully showcases the collection’s own relationship to the struggle between mechanical and system-based approaches versus interpretational ones. Through the examples of two projects revolving around the digitalisation of eighteenth-century letters, the article underlines the challenges common to the efforts of digital humanities such as the issues of findability and preserving metadata. Thus, the two trajectories tell fundamentally different stories of the evolution of digital literary projects and offer two distinct solutions to obstacles discovered in the course of these developments. Although the practical importance of preserving texts is of continued relevance, Murray’s perspective seems much more in keeping with the experience of working with digital media in a philological context: the aforementioned event-like qualities in these forms encapsulate the uniqueness of this at times unstable and, to borrow N. Katherine Hayles’ well-known term, ‘flickering’ (1999: 25) type of relationship between content and user. Nonetheless, the two chapters’ exploration of the mediality of digitalised texts highlights a distinguishing feature of digital editions: the way they are organically bound to the media infrastructures used to preserve them.

Another significant way in which the volume aims to shed light on under-researched and contested areas of literary media research is the inclusion of previously marginalised non-Western perspectives in the history of the field. In ‘What is the Historiography of the E-Book?’, Simon Rowberry points out overlooked details about technologies related to e-readers, such as early Japanese models, calling on historiographers to not just consider one established narrative but help create a more inclusive corpus of e-book history. In a similar vein, Stephanie Burt and Emmy Waldman ponder how Western-centric scholarly tradition can frame media in restrictive ways. Contesting Scott McCloud’s influential work on comics as a medium through exploring the art of New Zealand graphic novel artist Dylan Horrocks, Burt and Waldman argue that McCloud’s conception of comics as ‘juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence’ (Ensslin et al. 2023: 268) is unable to address the ‘transmedial’ (Ensslin et al. 2023: 271) expressions in Horrocks’s work, afforded by his unique integration of influences from Māori culture. While Burt and Waldman’s essay does not tackle digital media specifically, it highlights the issue of theoretical limitations in the way literary scholarship treats the notions of literariness, transmediality, and cultural exchange. Some of these shortcomings reflected in McCloud’s treatment of the comic which does not go beyond the two-dimensionality of the page, such as overlooking the importance of accounting for the effects of multimodality as well as medial and cultural border crossings, are similarly observable in the dominant narratives surrounding other phenomena that the volume categorises under literary media. This echoes the emergent perspective that restrictive medial classifications cannot fully account for the experience of the audience or the embeddedness of comics into the surrounding media landscape.

The chapters by James O’Sullivan and Federico Pianzola foreground the interplay of literature and different digital formats. The former explores the allowances and literary potential of walking simulator games. In doing so, O’Sullivan emphasises the significance of web-based literary experiments as a forerunner of this genre and differentiates between three distinct waves of digital fiction as an alternative to Leonardo Flores’ (2021) classification. Both O’Sullivan and Flores conclude that the experiments with early text processing systems and hypertext constitute the first generation and web-based forms can be considered as the second main wave. However, while Flores suggests that the most notable recent development lies in literary expression on social media, O’Sullivan postulates that literary video games, walking simulators in particular, are even more innovative (Ensslin et al. 2023: 257). This approach to simulators challenges the reinforcement of medial boundaries between literature and digital games in previous scholarship, viewing the art form instead as a continuation of a literary media practice in a broader sense. Not just literature’s appearance in games but also writers’ artistic reappropriation of various online networks and platforms have broadened our understanding of ways in which media can be literary, with the latter calling for increased attention to the social aspects of reading and writing. In this vein, Pianzola’s contribution supplements author Italo Calvino’s list of six proposed literary values for the twenty-first century laid out in his 1985 book Six Memos for the Next Millennium, ‘lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and consistency’ with the additions of ‘sociality’ and ‘seriality’ (Ensslin et al. 2023: 479) and demonstrates the connection between these two factors in readers’ interaction with literature, both of which have been given new meaning through digitalisation. On the related topic of literary networks, Isabell Klaiber’s reflections on collaborative fiction writing (CFW), along with Emanuela Patti’s essay on the Platform karenina.it by Italian poet Caterina Davinio, highlight how online platforms have the capacity to make visible the ‘story behind the story’ (Klaiber: 222), that is, the cooperative writing process. Literary movements on social media platforms such as ‘Booktok’, ‘Bookstagram’, and ‘Booktube’ are discussed by Dorothee Birke, who traces the shift from the traditional book review format to more interactive practices such as ‘bookshelf tours’ (469) and ‘read-a-thons’ (474) online. We also learn that being a human is no longer a prerequisite to being part of literary cooperations or audiences. Malthe Stavning Erslev’s contribution on human-machine cooperation in David ‘Jhave’ Johnston’s project ReRites illuminates this. While the manner in which bots mimicking a certain author’s style are able to promote their poetry among wider audiences is a relatively straightforward concept, bots’ ability to inspire each other and cater to ‘human and non-human’ audiences alike, as discussed by Martin P. Sheehan and William Wright (195), raises a number of fascinating questions about the connection between literature and artificial intelligence (a theme Punday’s study also touches upon in a narratological context in the chapter ‘UI Time and the Digital Event’).

In the afterword, Julie Rak reflects on the nebulous nature of the term ‘literary media’ and cites Rita Felski whose seminal book The Uses of Literature does not include an explanation of literariness and instead ‘assumes that her audience knows [the meaning of the word]’ (cf. 538). Implied in the term are all of the contexts unveiled in the Companion: medialities, genres, materialities, production, circulation, reception, and paratexts; however, this volume also does not attempt to synthesise these into a unified definition. While this choice might be seen as a limitation by some readers, it corresponds to the organising principle of the collection and reiterates that the literary is ‘bound up’ (543) with a number of media, a relationship contributors might have had greater freedom in untangling without such terminological constraints. In this vein, most of the chapters not only recapture the history and shifting cultural roles of the media they examine but invite readers to rethink established narratives, taxonomies, timelines, and canons.

Punday’s Playing at Narratology uses the mechanics of digital media including video games, interactive narratives, and hypertext novels to foreground and reframe narrative concepts often taken for granted. Whereas Ensslin et al. concentrate on how non-literary media can inform literary studies, Punday traces the parallel histories of narratological breakthroughs and early experiments with digital storytelling. The analysis uncovers uncharted links between the inception of narrative theory and the advent of computers, both connected by a central element of play. Digital media, Punday argues, are located at the intersection of theory and practice and can thus challenge earlier assumptions about the workings of narrative, making visible aspects which often go unnoticed in print literature. The study builds on five basic narratological concepts: narrator, setting event, character, and world, which also determine the structure of the text.

Punday’s introduction reminds us that the exploration of play and narratology unfolded side by side in the second half of the twentieth century, asserting that ‘narrative theory provided part of the background against which even relatively ludological digital media emerged’ (12). To do so, Punday provides a detailed historical overview of the inception of computing technologies and narratology going back to the mid-twentieth century and argues that the role of digital media in developing narrative theories was to encourage theorisation, while many early game ideas was driven by an interest in new narrative possibilities. It is in this narrative of the parallel development of the two fields that Punday roots his argument while simultaneously acknowledging the serendipitous nature of some of these temporal overlaps (cf. 9). These considerations of the production and development context of games and narrative theories provide a parallel to Ensslin et al.’s emphasis on corresponding features of literary media. Additionally, this section prefaces the main chapters by reminding the reader that the emphasis of this book is not on the place of digital media in broader ecologies or the ‘new kinds of stories’ they allow us to create but how these represent and illustrate existing notions (cf. 16). For this purpose, the argumentation adopts perspectives from media archaeology which enable a ‘nonlinear and nonteleological’ (16) approach to media history.

The first chapter, ‘Narration, Intrigue, and Reader Positioning in Digital Narrative’ introduces the category of intrigant (a term coined by Aarseth) as an agent distinct from the narrator who is also part of the narrative process. Punday proposes that the role of the intrigant is to govern the meta-discourse of digital (and, in some cases, analogue) narratives and highlight the mechanics, logic, and rules of the narrative, i.e., the ‘interface’ at hand. In one of the examples, Morrowind’s introductory sequence, a non-playable character comments on the player’s identity being unclear, immediately followed by the appearance of the character creation screen. Such ‘playful movement[s]’ (cf. 46) between character and intrigant are, according to Punday, much more apparent in digital media than in print fiction, with a few exceptions from the realm of ergodic and experimental literature. Thus, the chapter holds up the intrigant as the historically disregarded counterpart of the narrator, the existence of which sheds light on how interactivity manifests itself across media and how the boundaries of diegetic levels may become increasingly more permeable in contemporary narratives.

The distinction between the functions of ‘primary’ and ‘orienting’ spaces in digital art, locative narratives, and games is explained and subsequently contrasted with the lack of universal consensus on the nature of space in print fiction in ‘Space Across Narrative Media’. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the ‘chronotope’ and Franco Moretti’s maps, the chapter highlights the productivity of the inseparability of time and space in texts, for our understanding of narrative space as well as the importance of perspective in this context. Viewing narrative as an interface is at the core of Punday’s argumentation, and this chapter revisits this central principle to demonstrate how this element of media artefacts (the handling of which overlaps with the theme of artefactuality as discussed in the Companion) renders space visible in digital media in ways which are less apparent in film and print texts. Such visualisations may facilitate the improvement of notoriously nebulous conventional notions of narrative space.

One of the most fascinating contributions of this monograph to the field of narratology is the chapter ‘Algorithm and Database in Possible Worlds Theory’, which deals with the role of the notions of algorithm and database and their relation to genre in the construction of fictional worlds. Building on definitive works by Lev Manovich and Marie-Laure Ryan, Punday uses possible worlds theory to facilitate readers’ understanding of this complex constellation. After identifying databases as a possible representation of the sum of a world’s elements and algorithms as the worldmaking ‘operations’ these elements are subjected to (cf. 128), the text proceeds to show how genre functions as readers’ key to the co-construction of the alternate world of a narrative (such as in the case of popular transmedia franchises). In this sense, authors promote the idea of the reader’s active participation in the worldbuilding process as a form of gap-filling. A possible limitation of the theoretical foundation of the chapter in this context is the omission of references to the relevant tenets of reader-response criticism. Importantly, the chapter successfully argues that narrative and database as forms of representation, commonly touted as opposites, are possible to reconcile by utilising the ‘computational mindset’ (127) which has emerged since the late twentieth century.

In a somewhat unorthodox fashion, the conclusion includes two new examples to allow for a closer look at how narratives as artefacts incorporate different forms of play. In relation to the game Black and White, Punday discusses how the affordances of computer hardware affect the types of experience and worldbuilding a game can offer. In an analogue context, the unit invokes Margaret Atwood’s 1983 ‘Happy Endings’, a short story which plays on its artefactuality and subverts linear story progression while also highlighting the role of scale in characterisation. The closing remarks make the analysis more balanced and reassert Punday’s argument that digital media can give us new insights into narratology while the reverse also applies. In this way, Punday rounds off the discussion using a technique similar to that used in the afterword of the Companion, by adding the missing puzzle piece; the omission of which might evoke in the reader a sense of anticipation akin to the resolution of a thrilling story.

For the contemporary novel, the insights of the two volumes jointly offer a number of implications. Firstly, they may bring readers closer to an understanding of the mediational context in which the novel is embedded, and the entanglements within this system. As a particularly mouldable narrative form, the digital media novel is capable of absorbing influences from the ecology wherein it exists. Zevin’s novel has been introduced as it models this aspect of the genre on a formal and thematic level alike. It employs representational elements and tropes known from gaming while it also showcases the intrinsic intermediality and situatedness of digital games and self-reflexively addresses the place of the novel among current forms of art and the range of its aesthetic responses to video games.

In turn, the interaction between the novel and digital media can also shape our notions of literariness and narrativity in and outside of this literary form. The difference between the perspectives introduced here has less to do with the four years between the publication dates of the two works, rather, they stem from a difference between their respective scopes. Playing at Narratology hones in on narrativity between two media, whereas the contributions of The Routledge Companion to Literary Media illustrate how literariness can be present across many distinct but interrelated forms of expression. What connects the two endeavours are, ultimately, their respective shifts in perspective which serve to reveal characteristics of narrative made more apparent by digital games in the former case and the fluidity of literariness in the latter.

Notes

1. This argument runs through Marie-Laure Ryan’s works on the topic and is expounded in detail in her 2015 book Narrative as Virtual Reality 2. [^{^}]

References