Multimodality, Transmediality, and Ethics in Post-Postmodernist Fictions of the Digital

This article proposes and examines the new generic category of post-postmodernist fictions of the digital (PPFDs): contemporary print fictions that imitate, incorporate, and/or utilize digital media, and also display thematic concerns for the digitally mediated worlds in which they are set. We situate them within a broader post-postmodern context of contemporary fiction in which self-reflexive devices, associated with postmodernism, are repurposed to make an ethical point about the digitally mediated world outside of the text. We offer a new typology of multimodal and transmedial PPFDs by adapting and schematizing the concepts of visual modality, paratext, and remediation to theorize 6 subtypes; a new methodology for analyzing PPFDs using a medium-specific approach and hypothetical intentionalism; and new analyses of two works which exemplify the ways in which multimodality and transmediality can be used synthetically and thematically in PPFDs. We conclude that while PPFDs use self-reflexive and potentially estranging techniques, they make serious ethical points about the digitally mediated world they represent such that they urge their readers to oscillate between (joyful) immersion and (critical) reflection.