Edge3: Multimodality, Dialogics and Fiction

Abstract

This paper sets out to explore fiction, literary multimodality and dialogism using the example of Wikipedia as an enabling hypertext technology. It will be proposed that the digital architecture and the user conventions of the genre offer a strikingly adaptive framework for the writing of fiction. The notion of the wiki as a collaborative creative site will be examined as a (virtual) spatial and temporal medium for the shifting multiplicities of narrative voice. Dialogical engagement with the linear textual conventions of story-telling and authorial voice are brought into play, in this context, through vocal, textual, visual, and spatial elements. As a means of locating this discussion in terms of both theory and practice, I will address the development of my in-progress novella, Edge3, a fictional account of an online creative writing community where members occupy a virtual, or digital, studio in which they improvise textual responses to the broad theme of transformation. This project emerged from my experience of producing and editing pages on Wikipedia, as a way of exploring literary character development and generic transformation as a possible challenge to the linearity of standard literary forms. Adopting the nominal structure of a 'wiki', or digital encyclopaedia, the story's themes are enmeshed with its methodological frame: displacement, isolation, randomness of loss and the pursuit of literary form.