Rebecca Skains

Bio: Rebecca Skains is an academic researcher from Bangor University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Narrative & Composition (language). The author has an hindex of 3, co-authored 7 publications receiving 20 citations.

Færwhile & the multimodal creative practice : composing fiction from analogue to digital

Abstract: This practice-led research project explores the influence of digital tools on the composition of narrative. Its purpose was to create a fictional narrative in both analogue (print) and digital forms, observing and analysing the effects of this multimodal composition on the writer's creative practice, and on the resulting narratives. This project thus consists of both the creative artefacts and the critical exegesis that presents the analysis of the creative process and artefacts. The creative artefacts encompass the analogue novella Faerwhile, included in this bound thesis as print novella, and its digital counterpart, included in the attached DVD as HTML digital fiction. The digital fiction actualises the narrative's fabula through a variety of narrative media, including Flash fiction, blog fiction, interactive fiction, and hyperfiction. These platforms were chosen in order to gain a broader understanding of the available media and their literary affordances; the selection of each was based primarily on its suitability for best crafting and communicating the characters, themes, and voice of each individual story or chapter. The critical thesis examines how composing multimodal texts refocuses the writer's cognitive composition process on media-specific semiotic translations, and results in texts that depart from traditional narrative forms into anti-linear structures engaging in unnatural narration. The chapters included present my practice-led methodology; an examination of how the specific materiality of digital media affords multimodal layering of meaning; an analysis of the shift from mimetic first- and third-person narration in work preceding this research to unnatural narration and anti-linear structures in both the analogue and digital artefacts; a discussion of the implicit collaboration that arises from appropriating digital resources such as visuals, audio, and source code shared online under Creative Commons licensing; and an exploration of how knowledge and awareness of digital technologies and ergodic literature results in changes to the composition process, shifting it from a monomodal translation of imagined story to written text, to a multimodal practice engaged in multiple media even in planning stages.

Creative Commons and Appropriation: Implicit Collaboration in Digital Works

Abstract: Appropriation is a common practice in art and literature; electronic literature in particular lends itself readily to appropriation and collaboration, due to its multimodal and born-digital nature. This paper presents practice-based research examining the effects of digital appropriation on two works of digital fiction (a hyperfiction and an interactive fiction), demonstrating how it alters the creative writer’s typical process, as well as the resulting narrative itself. This practice of appropriation results in “implicit collaboration” between the digital creative writer and those whose work is appropriated, an arguable form of shared authorship. Questions regarding the ethics of this practice, including copyright concerns and authorship, are discussed.

Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction

Abstract: Brian Richardson. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. 166 pp. $55.95 cloth; $24.95 paper. Brian Richardson's Unnatural Voices is a major contribution to narratology. Its starting point is the highly convincing thesis that 'narrative theory, despite its emphasis on narrative and narrators, has not yet systematically examined the impressive range of unusual postmodern and other avant garde strategies of narration', in part because postmodernism 'has often proven resistant to traditional narrative theory' (ix). He explains that the book is intended to rectify these unfortunate absences. It explores in depth one of the most significant aspects of late modernist, avant garde, and postmodern narrative - the creation, fragmentation, and reconstitution of narrative voices - and offers a theoretical account of these unusual and innovative strategies. This is an empirical study that describes and theorizes the actual practices of significant authors . . . Such an inductive approach is essential because many extreme forms of narration seem to have been invented precisely to transgress fundamental linguistic and rhetorical categories, (ix) In essence, the book comprises an inventory and theoretical overview of a large number of innovative contemporary uses of narrators and narration. These are contrasted with current theories of narrative poetics that, Richardson plausibly argues, cannot fully comprehend them. Such innovations include a new kind of narrative that hinges on the unexpected disclosure of a homodiegetic narrator towards the end of an apparently heterodiegetic text (for example, Ian McEwan's Atonement); 'it', 'they', and passive voice narration; second person narration (divided into standard, hypothetical, and autotelic); 'we' narration; multiperson narration (for example, texts that employ first and third person narration); indeterminate speakers; impossible acts of narration; interlocutor narration (for example, the 'Ithaca' episode in Ulysses); 'denarration' (narrators denying the truth of what they have just said); 'permeable' narration ('the uncanny and inexplicable intrusion of the voice of another within the narrator's consciousness' [95]); distinctively postmodern types of unreliable narrators such as fraudulent, contradictory, incommensurate, and disframed narrators; and unusual narrators in contemporary drama. And all in one hundred and forty pages! The final chapter, after discussing the modernist origins of contemporary anti-realist practices, ends with a plea for a general 'anti-poetics' of narrative that should be considered as a supplement and foil to traditional poetics. The proposal is not for a different poetics but for an additional one; that is, for an anti-mimetic poetics that supplements existing mimetic theories. Such a model will allow us to greatly expand the area covered by narrative theory, and will allow it to embrace a host of earlier non-mimetic literatures. And only in this way can we begin to do justice to the most effective imaginative achievements in narrative in our time. (138) Specifically, he suggests that 'we will be most effective as narrative theorists if we reject models that insist, based on categories derived from linguistics or natural narrative, on firm distinctions, binary oppositions, fixed hierarchies, or impermeable categories' (139). In Richardson's view, instead of such rigid typologies, we need an alternative model that stresses the permeability, instability, and playful mutability of the voices in non-mimetic fictions. Unnatural Voices is just what a narratological book should be: its proposals for narrative theory are original and important, and it also contains a number of illuminating readings of individual works. The book features an encyclopedic reference to a wide range of narratives from various countries, both postmodern and other (although the regular use of Samuel Beckett narratives provides a thread of continuity). …

Creative Practice as Research: Discourse on Methodology

Abstract: In recent years artistic practice has developed into a major focus of research activity, both as process and product, and discourse in various disciplines have made a strong case for its validity a...

Film and literature

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