Print as Remediation for the Multimedia? Elasticity of Multimodal Narratives

Abstract

In The Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin writes that “In principle, any genre could be included in the construction of the novel, and in fact it is difficult to find any genres that have not at some point been incorporated into a novel by someone” (320-321). The novel has always been a site of experimentations, generic as well as formal: the “elasticity” Bakhtin praises may indeed be applied to all the media the novel incorporates, and it is tempting to apply Bakhtin’s quote to the process of remediation and the notion of elasticity to multimodal narratives (“Multimodal Literature” 420). The latter foregrounds the format-image-text interaction in all its diverse variations, the visuality of typography, the reproduction of documents, as well as the book’s materiality through pierced, folded or flipped pages. In the whole of Anglophone literature—at least since Tristram Shandy and all the more so in the last 20 years—there are indeed works which reproduce almost all the effects other media allow, up to the use of animated pictures (through the use of flipbooks), sounds or even smells (in several picture books).

Going against the premise that digital literature is the most favorable place for remediation, I want to examine whether printed multimodal fictions do not in fact offer such a large range of media that they are quite capable of incorporating other existing media, thanks to their ability to transform themselves.