This book analyzes and theorizes unnatural (that is, antimimetic) narratives in digital media; in doing so it promises to greatly extend the range of unnatural studies, revise and add to narrative theory, intervene in the theory and analysis of digital narratives, and critically deploy and assess cognitive narratology. It is a highly ambitious work that is situated on several intersecting cutting edges.
After a useful introduction that defines its terms and situates its interventions, the work focuses on five distinct, important, and contested areas: multilinearity and narrative contradiction, interactional metalepsis, impossible space and time, extreme digital narration, and the functions of “you” in digital works. The first chapter, on multilinearity and narrative contradiction, is representative of the book's many strengths. The authors differentiate between contradictions in the story and in the discourse, and briefly analyze a variety of contradictions in hyperfictions, interactive fictions, and narrative videogames. Discussing works by Stuart...
