[ecrea] CFP 'Small Screen Fiction', special issue of Paradoxa

Extended Call for Papers (anticipated publication date: December, 2017)

Editors: Astrid Ensslin (University of Alberta, Canada); Paweł Frelik 
(Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin, Poland); Lisa Swanstrom 
(Florida-Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida, USA)

In the last few decades, digital technologies have dramatically 
reconfigured not only the circumstances of media production and 
dissemination, but also many of their cultural forms and conventions, 
including the roles of users, producers, authors, audiences, and 
readers. Arguably the most spectacular of these digital transformations 
have affected the large screens of cinema multiplexes and the 
increasingly large screens of home televisions, but other narrative 
forms have emerged on a smaller screens as well. Today, with growing 
frequency, narratives are experienced on the smaller screens of laptops, 
tablets, and even mobile phones. These narratives often involve direct 
reader/viewer/player interaction, enabling highly idiosyncratic, 
individualized and unique narrative experiences. Some of these fictions 
are merely digitized or wikified versions of texts previously available 
in the codex form—their digital conversion affects some of the ways in 
which readers engage with them, but the basic structures of these 
narratives remain unchanged. Some others, however, have been written and 
designed (these two words often blur) specifically for these small 
screens. Their functionalities and affordances are not replicable in any 
other medial form, nor do they demonstrate an allegiance to any single 
pre-existing art form.
Paradoxa seeks articles for a special issue devoted to “Small Screen 
Fictions.” Both in-depth analyses of individual texts and more general, 
theoretical discussions are invited. The genres and media of interest 
include but are not limited to:

• DVD novels, such as Steve Tomasula’s TOC (2009);
• literary-narrative video games and ludic, gamelike fictions whose 
principal interest is in offering innovative storytelling experiences, 
such as Dear Esther (2012) and Device6 (2013);
• twitter and blog texts, such as Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box” (2012);
• collectively written, locative online texts, particularly those 
breaking narrative linearity, such as Hundekopf (2007), The LA Flood 
Project (2013) and The Silent History (2013);
• interactive graphic novels, such as Nam Le’s The Boat (2014);
• genre-bending, dialogic hybrids, such as Blast Theory’s Karen (2015);
• neo-hypertextual fictions enabled by user-friendly authoring software 
such as Twine;
• physically distributed narratives that make use of small screen 
spaces, not merely to create and display fictions, but also to navigate, 
negotiate, and interact with real-world spaces through geo-caching or 
other means, such as Ingress (2013), Cartegram (2014), and Call of the 
Wild (2015).

Similarly, possible approaches to such screen texts include but are not 
limited to:

• the changing cultural patterns and expectations of engagement with 
narrative;
• the reality and illusions of linearity and non-linearity;
• the shifting nature of public and private spectatorship;
• the role of touch and tactility, as well as other human senses in 
experiencing narratives;
• the blurring of the verbal and the visual, of fact and fiction, of 
reading and writing, of natural and artificial;
• the economic, social, and political contexts of authorship and 
readership of such texts;
• the implications of such narrative experiences for the meaning(s) and 
perceptions of fiction, genre and literature.

Abstracts of 500 words should be submitted by 15 August 2016 to the 
editors: Astrid Ensslin < (ensslin /at/ ualberta.ca)>, Pawel Frelik < 
(pawel.frelik /at/ gmail.com)> Lisa Swanstrom < (swanstro /at/ gmail.com)>. Authors of 
selected abstracts will be notified by 30 September 2016. Full drafts 
(6,000 to 8,000 words) will be due by 31 December 2016.


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