Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The modalities of reading are incessantly evolving, and many sensational reimaginations stipulate that the reader approaches a text as a challenge. In the narrativization of experimentality, the codes of perception of a reader are scrutinized with a conscious effort made by the author to create a rhizome of seemingly endless connections and departures. Re-interpretations of the defining boundaries of textuality, enhanced by digital tools, facilitate a space for unconventional storytelling and inventive conceptual contingencies. S. by Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams is a text that has a novel inside a novel where the inner novel called “Ship of Theseus” has a fictitious author, and the outer novel progresses on the margins of the inner novel as a conversation between two students. An illusion is created where readers presume that they have the agency to assemble all the codes of the text to assemble a coherent narrative that explains everything. The study critically investigates how S. demands to be decoded conceptually and structurally. It explores the formation of a peculiar semiotic narrative grammar to trace the significant shifts in contemporary experimental fiction that effectuate a paradigm shift in “reading.” Through literary criticism and inquiries into textuality, the study seeks to situate the idea of a ‘book’ and a ‘puzzle’ in the digital age and foreground the emergence of a narrative aesthetic and the power of signification it exerts while capturing the state-of-the-art of experimentality in textual culture.