Readerly Orientation: Narrative Absorption, Materiality, and the Book

Event details

David Wylot from the University of Leeds presents a talk in the series "Current Research in Narrative Studies", the research seminar of the British and Irish Association for Narrative Studies. These seminars are held in a hybrid format, with speakers and audience from the Association membership around the country, hosted at York by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies. 

Abstract:

In what ways can the study of the materiality of the book inform media-conscious narratologies of the book’s narrative comprehension? This talk pursues one answer to this question by way of an assessment of theories of narrative absorption. I argue that recent theories of narrative absorption remain insufficiently sensitive to the material, embodied, and communicative contexts of reading, in part due to their prioritisation of transportational metaphors to describe storyworld immersion. By contrast, I draw on textual materialist and embodied studies of reading to argue that narrative absorption in book reading may be better served by the terminology of 'orientation'. Orientation, I suggest, allows for a more effective integration of reading’s contexts into an account of the book’s absorbed consumption.

Bio:

David Wylot is a Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Leeds. His monograph, Reading Contingency: The Accident in Contemporary Fiction (Routledge, 2020), explores the relationship between the phenomenology of reading, narrative, and chance, and his next project sets out to consider points of contact between narrative theory and the study of the book. He has work forthcoming on the book and narrative in digital culture.