The Relevance of the Novel in the Age of New Media: Transforming Interface to Interspace in Tristram Shandy and The Glide Project
International Narrative Conference, 2005
Very much like print and film, the rise of digital media instigated a radical attempt to redefine the boundaries of previously established art forms and how they define narrative. The emergence of print as a form of mass media facilitated the rise of what is now called the novel, a literary form which simultaneously challenged and shamelessly incorporated its own predecessors by virtue of its own self-reflexivity. As its name suggests, the trajectory of the novel is that of perpetual redefinition, leading not only to a constant structural renewal, but also to a fluid content that attempts to capture life itself.
At the brink of digital revolution marked by information overload, the novel is ever more relevant to New Media and its related art forms. Fiction in digital environments fulfills the vision of the novel in unexpected ways and realizes what writers such as Cervantes and Sterne set out to accomplish five centuries ago when pushing the limits of the print medium. I argue that the information superhighway created in the era of the Internet is yet another manifestation of the Sterne's desire to capture every minute detail of life with extensive digressions. In a way, digression is the trade mark of New Media art forms in which the user is allowed to wander through the text and explore it at her own pace. Consequently, the notion of conclusion in its traditional sense becomes redundant.
More importantly, the malleable nature of the digital medium provides fiction with a formal flexibility that enables it to incorporate different modes of story-telling. Thus multimedia, a concept which is also present in experimental print fiction, has become second nature to many art forms of New Media. The combination of image, text, and sound in Hypermedia fiction evoke an alternative vision of the future of story-telling.
This paper will argue that the novel continues to retain its relevancy in providing a paradigm for conceptualizing new modes of expression. By analyzing Glide, an online interactive narrative produced by Diana Slattery, Daniel O'Neil and Bill Brubaker, I will explore the ways in which digital environments incorporate and extend the underlying premises of the novel and how the malleability of the medium facilitates the integration of distinct genres and art forms.
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