Reading Post-Postmodernist Fictions of the Digital: Narrative, Technology, and Cognition in the Twenty-First Century

在当代文化研究中，理论家们越来越多地发现一种运动，从后现代主义的好玩的自我反思到一种更真诚的、道德意识的、政治参与的后后现代主义元虚构戏剧形式。在后现代主义明显离开后留下的空白中，“数字现代主义”、“元现代主义”、“cosmodernism”和“后后现代主义”都被提出作为继承者。虽然这些观点都基于一个略有不同的论点，但它们背后的共同观点是，与后现代主义艺术相关的反讽自我反思手段不再被用来通过暴露所有叙事的人为性来疏远读者/观众。相反，后后现代主义文化在情感上吸引观众关注与现实世界相关的非常具体的道德、伦理和政治问题。在文学研究中，后现代主义之后的小说研究倾向于关注以文本为基础的文学小说。然而，在这种背景下缺少的是对数字媒体（作为当前技术时代的表现形式，因此是当代文化的主要场所）如何在后后现代主义艺术形式中被探索和利用的彻底调查。此外，虽然研究经常推测后后现代主义小说对读者的影响，但关于读者对后后现代主义小说的反应的说法尚未得到彻底的实证检验。为了填补这些研究空白，本项目将调查我们所定义的“后后现代主义数字小说”（ppfd）的流行程度、独特性和受众接受程度，即模仿、整合和/或利用数字媒体的当代印刷小说，并展示数字技术对社会伦理影响的主题关注。在这个项目中，我们的调查仅限于英文ppfd。一些PPFDs，如玛丽亚·森普尔的《你去哪儿了，伯纳黛特》（2012）和赫尔曼·沃克的《立法者》（2012），将散文文本与其他符码模式结合起来，如视觉化的电子邮件、短信、Skype记录、备忘录、在线论坛、推特和博客。其他PPFDs，如Amaranth Borsuk和Brad house的《Between Page and Screen》（2012）和Marisha Pessl的《Night Film》（2013），将读者从纸质小说带到相关网站、应用程序或社交媒体平台上的额外材料。该项目将提出PPFD的新类别，创建PPFD的目录，发展PPFD的新类型，并研究数字媒体在符号学、结构、本体论和主题上使用PPFD的独特和一致的方式。还将通过读者反应研究计划调查ppfd的道德和伦理影响，该计划将ppfd的仔细阅读与相关读者数据的分析相结合。通过在线评论网站、阅读小组讨论和个人问卷调查收集的数据，将设计并发布三项实证研究，以评估后后现代主义自我反思的影响。总体而言，该项目旨在了解ppfd的自我反思道德，并确定数字媒体的使用如何影响认知。项目产出包括：网站、社交媒体账户、ppfd开放获取目录、会议论文、期刊文章、研讨会、公开讲座和读者反馈数据集。

Within contemporary cultural studies, theorists increasingly detect a movement away from postmodernism's playful self-reflexivity to a more sincere, ethically conscious, and politically engaged form of post postmodernist metafictional play. In the gap left by postmodernism's apparent departure, "digimodernism", "metamodernism", "cosmodernism", and "post-postmodernism" have all been proposed as successors. While these perspectives each rest on a slightly different argument, the common idea behind them all is that the ironic self-reflexive devices associated with postmodernist art are no longer used to alienate the reader/viewer by exposing the artificiality of all narratives. Rather, post-postmodernist culture emotionally engages the audience with very specific moral, ethical, and political issues that are relevant to the real world. Within literary studies, scholarship on fiction after postmodernism has tended to focus on text-based literary fiction published in print. However, what is missing from that context is a thorough investigation into how digital media - as a manifestation of the current technological epoch and thus a prime locus of contemporary culture - are explored in and exploited by post-postmodernist forms of art. Moreover, while research often speculates about the effect of post-postmodernist fiction on readers, claims about reader responses to post-postmodernist fictions have not been thoroughly empirically tested.In seeking to fill these gaps in research, this project will investigate the prevalence, distinctiveness, and audience reception of what we define as "Post-Postmodernist Fictions of the Digital" (PPFDs), i.e., contemporary print fictions that imitate, incorporate, and/or utilise digital media, and display a thematic concern with the ethical implications of digital technology for society. In this project we limited our investigation to PPFDs written in English. Some PPFDs, such as Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2012) and Herman Wouk's The Lawgiver (2012) combine prose text with other semiotic modes such as visually represented e-mails, text messages, Skype transcripts, memos, online forums, tweets, and blogs. Other PPFDs, such as Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse's Between Page and Screen (2012) and Marisha Pessl's Night Film (2013), take the reader beyond the printed novel to additional material on related websites, apps, or social media platforms. The project will propose the new category of PPFD, create a catalogue of PPFDs, develop of a new typology of PPFDs, and examine the distinct and congruent ways that digital media is utilised semiotically, structurally, ontologically, and thematically PPFDs. The moral and ethical implications of PPFDs will also be investigated via a reader response research program which combines close readings of PPFDs with the analysis of associated reader data. Three empirical studies will be designed and delivered to assess the effects of post-postmodernist self-reflexivity with data gathered from online review sites, reading group discussions, and individual questionnaire responses. Overall, the project is thus designed to understand the self-reflexive ethics of PPFDs and to determine how the use of digital media impacts cognition. Project outputs include: a website, social media account, an open access catalogue of PPFDs, conference papers, journal articles, workshops, public lectures, and reader response datasets.