MSARochelle+SpencerInanimate+Alic


 * Disrupting the Grand Narrative--Or Re-Articulating It?: A Discussion of Inanimate Alice as Postmodernist Children’s Literature**

Pullinger, Kate. "Inanimate Alice Homepage.” Inanimatealice.com. n.p. n.d. Web. 6 June 2012.

__**Overview**__

If Alice in the classical tale //Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland// questions “the use of a book...without pictures or conversation,” then her new-age counterpart playfully dismantles those conventions entirely. Author Kate Pullinger claims to have “written first for and specifically to be read and viewed from the screen,” and indeed, Inanimate Alice is clearly meant to function as children’s literature and “expand around the world as a pedagogical title” (Pullinger). Thus, //Inanimate Alice// delves into the excellent question posed by [|Media Studies scholar Angela Aliff]in yesterday’s class: is this new, electronic-based literature written in such a way so as to teach us how to read it? In other words, is this digital literature deceptively simple in order[| to both “teach and to delight”]? If that is the case, then perhaps //Inanimate Alice//, for all its futuristic, postmodernist elements, elicits children’s literature written in a much earlier space in time.

__**Textual Features**__ Invokes intertexuality through its subtle rethinking and reworking of Lewis Carroll’s //Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland// ( [|__http://www.literature.org/authors/carroll-lewis/alices-adventures-in-wonderland/__] ). The father is Alice's "white rabbit"; Brad, the companion Alice creates, is "Dinah the cat," and Wonderland is a place with a "sky that hums."

Maintains a voice consistent with the other digital literature we read: the story is told from a youthful, first-person perspective

Develops a clear fictional narrative

Lexia usually consists of a single sentence.

__**Media Features**__ Split screen--the screen is often divided into two clear horizontal sections.

Visual image fly across the screen, in a dazzling array of colors and sizes, in various speed.

Orientation clues are clear: the >> sign makes it obvious when the user-reader is to move on to the next screen. Still, the author plays with our sense of temporality by alternating the speed with which the user-reader can switch screens.

To some extent, this text could be considered ergodic literature. The paths are predetermined, but the user is allowed to decide when to enter.

__**Reading Experience**__ To read “Inanimate Alice” is to fall through the rabbit hole with Alice. The familiarity of the subject-matter is defamiliarized by images that require the user-reader to interact and make choices (take pictures, craft sentences). It is episodic, and the user-reader has the opportunity to "grow up" with Alice. One reader criticizes the way in which the story unfolds, writing that the story becomes "too wordy" at the end: []

__**Analysis/Interpretation**__ Again, the image is what gives this narrative its power, and cultural studies critic [|Giles Deleuze’s concept of the time-image]seems particularly relevant here.

If I understand Deleuze correctly, he associates the time-image with cinema--the moving image--and the almost imperceptible space that appears between the images. In this interstice, we develop a new way of seeing and knowing.

I would argue, then, that this is what Pullinger achieves. Her images move so quickly, and she often controls the speed with which we experience them. We, the user-reader, have the ability to pause only the frozen-image, but not the moving one, so we are constantly experiencing a time-image without recognizing it. We are being manipulated, though we feel we have agency.

Still, this sensation of--delight and discomfort--is not unfamiliar to us. Those of us who have read Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece will recognize this particular sense of double-consciousness. When we encounter the nonsense-speak found in Alice in Wonderland, we almost feel as though we understand, yet a clear, definite meaning remains outside our grasp.

In //The Post Modernist Condition,// Jean-François Lyotard writes “a work can become modern only if it is first post modern” (79). And, ironically, it is through its postmodernist attributes that Inanimate Alice achieves some of the unity of modernity.

For further review: __[]__ (Alice in Wonderland)

http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2012/02/14/award-winning-literary-fiction/comment-page-1/#comment-36413 (interview with Kate Pullinger)

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Post Modernist Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1989. Print.

1) I had questions about the Strickland article: why are ebooks not digital literature? Doesn't the format itself change the way we read, the way we think?

2) I question whether digital literature is really postmodern? If postmodernism values plurality and multiple perspectives, then how are we receiving multiple perspectives when we are forced to look through the eyes of the world through the European explorer (the perspective we encounter all-too often in history) or when we consider the gaze and the female body through what appears to be the white, middle-class woman's body--the kind of body that is most often analyzed in the media...I'm excited by this literature, but I also think it's faux-postmodern, if postmodernism even truly exists.

3) As I make my way through the Landow text, I realize that his argument would be much more effective if it provided the kind of interaction we've come to expect from digital texts (but then again, Dr. Sherwood said in today's class that scanned PDFs aren't really digital, so there's that). For instance, he takes 2 pages to summarize what stretch text is, when a simple Google search makes[| stretch text clear.]

4) In Dr. Sell's class, I'm learning that modernism always looks to the classic, and that seems to be a central idea in these digital texts--they are obsessed with the past, but they play with the past in a way that seems "postmodern."

5) Why does everything happen at Brown? What is it about Brown University?

6) Is the word "retrotech" an oxymoron?

7) I feel as though there's already been this apex of digital literature and I somehow missed the entire movement. How can texts and writers I'm just discovering, hearing about for the first time, be considered "classic"? It's enough to drive one crazy!

8) Why does Landow disagree with Ong? Ong's argument about how the computer makes us read text makes sense to me, as does his argument about second orality. Maybe I am too tired to get this point.