The CounterText interview : Marie-Laure Ryan

Abstract

Marie-Laure Ryan's extensive body of work on narrative theory, media theory, and representations of space is particularly relevant to the theme of this special issue. As early as twenty-five years ago, starting with Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (1991) and moving on to Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory (1999) and Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Electronic Literature (2001), she was already addressing remediated forms of storytelling and avant-garde technologies, including the possibilities stemming from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR). Her work has consistently discussed how new forms of creating, producing, and receiving stories challenge established narratological as well as cognitive models, and looks at how perception, understanding, and experience are constantly being reconfigured in the process. In Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling (2004) and Avatars of Story (2006) she has studied the ways in which particular media affordances shape narrative forms and affect the narrative experience in relation to visual, gestural, electronic, and musical modalities in storytelling. This work is continued in Intermediality and Storytelling (2010), edited with Marina Grishakova, Storyworlds across Media: Towards a Media-Conscious Narratology (2014), edited with Jan Thon, and Narrative as Virtual Reality 2 (2015), where Ryan draws attention to the medial turn in narratology. She revisits and readapts traditional narratological analysis to media forms such as graphic novels, musicals, television, photography, and advertising, among other practices. Quite simply, therefore, Ryan's insights into what the multisensory may mean in a digital, connected world are important because she has been studying what happens to narrative traditions and the (para)literary for long enough to be finely discerning about passing trends, insignificant turns, and true game-changers. Ryan's responses to the questions in this interview on multisensory encounters with the literary are thought-provokingly and critically anticipative. They facilitate reflection on the ways in which the multisensory may be positioned alongside immersion and interactivity when developing and engaging with stories and storyworlds born from contemporary affordances. She challenges idealistic predictions of how technological developments may contribute to storytelling techniques, whilst drawing attention to spaces that have a longstanding relation with understandings of the literary and the poetic – such as, for instance, the garden – but that may be ripe for thinking anew. She responds to the challenging question of how established narratological frameworks can be used to describe experiences of the multisensory, to how children's literature has long provided examples of multisensory works, to how the distinctions that suggest themselves in terms of textual, visual, and auditory histories – and in ‘omnisemiotic’ texts, as one might say in contexts pushing to the fore multisensory encounters with the literary – become ever more urgent.