A Cognitive-Narrative Reading of Electronic Literature: Self-Blame Emotions in Queerskins: A Novel (2012)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.28914/Atlantis-2025-47.1.14Keywords:
cognitive process, emotion systems, multimodal web-fictions, self-blame emotions, working memoryAbstract
Electronic Literature diminishes the boundaries between different art forms. Multimodal web-fictions, as the second generation of electronic literature, portrays narratives through textual, visual, auditory, and navigational modes. By focusing on Patrick Colm Hogan’s cognitive-narrative theories, this paper reveals the relationship between the multimodal narrative of web-fictions and emotion systems. Furthermore, each mode indicates a different emotionally orienting function of narrative. A case study, Queerskins: A Novel (2012) by Illya Szilak, is scrutinized in order to depict the working memory processes at play during the activation of specific emotion systems, including self-blame emotions. The present research illustrates that the multimodal narratives of electronic works could be considered as the external manifestations of the cognitive processes, embedded in the working memory, during the actuation of emotion systems. As such, various different modes have essential roles in picturing different types of information, perceptions, memories, and imaginations, which are stored in the working memory and decoding those emotion elicitors, which are perceived, remembered, or imagined. This paper highlights how the behaviors and actions of the main character, Sebastian are directed by self-blame emotions, such as shame and guilt, which have been engraved in his mind since his childhood, and how they lead him toward self-sacrifice.
Downloads
References
Ciccoricco, David. 2018. “Rebooting Cognition in Electronic Literature.” In J. Tabbi (Ed), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature 2018. 151-164. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Gibbons, Allison. 2012. Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature. New York: Routledge.
Hayles, Katherine. N. 2008. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Indiana: University of Notre Dame.
Hogan, Patrick. C. 2003. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists. New York: Routledge.
—. 2003. The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—. 2011. What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jewitt, Carey. 2005. “Multimodality, Reading, and Writing for the 21st Century.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 26. (3), 315-331.
Kress, Gunther. 2003. Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge.
—. 2010. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. New York: Routledge.
Punday, Daniel. 2018. Narrativity. In J. Tabbi (Ed), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature (pp 133-150). London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Oately, Keith, Dacher Keltner and Jennifer Jenkins. 2007. Understanding Emotions. Malden: Blackwell.
Rettberg, Scott. 2019. Electronic Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Saemmer, Alexandra. “Hyperfiction as a Medium for Drifting Times: A Close Reading of the German Hyperfiction Zeit für die Bombe.” Analyzing Digital Fictions. Eds. Alice Bell, et al. New York: Routledge, 2014.
Smith, Hazel. 2016. The Contemporary Literature-Music Relationship: Intermedia, Voice, Technology, Cross-Cultural Exchange. New York: Routledge.
Szilak, Illya and Cyril Tsiboulski. 2012, March 22. Queerskins: A Novel. Electronic Literature Collection Volume Three. < http:// www.queerskins.com/#title>.
—. 2015. “Towards Minor Literary Forms: Digital Literature and the Art of Failure.” Electronic Book Review.
Tabbi, Joseph. 2018. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Tillewein, Brian. 2013. “New Media Objects: The Future of Electronic Literature and Its Influence on Print Stylistics.” (Publication No. 148). College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations.
Van Leeuwen, Theo. 2005. Introducing Social Semiotics. London: Routledge.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Hanieh Zaltash, Farid Parvaneh, Narges Montakhabi Bakhtvar
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The authors retain copyright of articles. They authorise AEDEAN to publish them in its journal Atlantis and to include them in the indexing and abstracting services, academic databases and repositories the journal participates in.
Under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), for non-commercial (i.e., personal or academic) purposes only, users are free to share (i.e., copy and redistribute in any medium or format) and adapt (i.e., remix, transform and build upon) articles published in Atlantis, free of charge and without obtaining prior permission from the publisher or the author(s), as long as they give appropriate credit to the author, the journal (Atlantis) and the publisher (AEDEAN), provide the relevant URL link to the original publication and indicate if changes were made. Such attribution may be done in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the journal endorses the user or their use of the material published therein. Users who adapt (i.e., remix, transform or build upon the material) must distribute their contributions under the same licence as the original.
Self-archiving is also permitted, so that authors are allowed to deposit the published PDF version of their articles in academic and/or institutional repositories, without fee or embargo. Authors may also post their individual articles on their personal websites, again on condition that the original link to the online edition is provided.
Authors are expected to know and heed basic ground rules that preclude simultaneous submission and/or duplicate publication. Prospective contributors to Atlantis commit themselves to the following when they submit a manuscript:
- That no concurrent consideration of the same, or almost identical, work by any other journal and/or publisher is taking place.
- That the potential contribution has not appeared previously, in any form whatsoever, in another journal, electronic format or as a chapter/section of a book.
Seeking permission for the use of copyright material is the responsibility of the author.
