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Themesicon: navigation pathOverview of Media Articon: navigation pathNarration
 
 
 
 
 

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contemporary media. Among these are:

* «De-fableizing»: This is the word Jakob Wassermann uses to describe the process of prying stories free from chains of cause-and-effect. Instead, the stories concentrate on mere happening, a sequence of states.[6]

* Simultaneity: Major novels of the twentieth century depict the simultaneous, fragmented, disparate presence of heterogeneous elements in modern (urban) life.

* Detail: In modern narrative one can find detailed descriptions of everyday objects that are seemingly superfluous to the logics of narrative plot development (for example, in the writing of Alain Robbe-Grillet, founder of the «nouveau roman»).

* Authorship: Authorship itself becomes a theme of the narrative, in some cases by linking biography and work (for example, Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway, Peter Handke).

An additional narrative tool developed by the modern novel, one that was first able to unfold its full aesthetic force in electronic media, is perspectivization. The narrator tells the story from

 

various perspectives and is also himself a part of the story, allowing for various routes to accessing the psyches of the characters involved. Techniques such as the inner monologue, stream of consciousness and free association shape the narrative. In media theory, this is later developed further into the «endogenous point of view,»[7] which refers not only to the author, but also to the reader/recipient. Due to the fact that perspectivization, although first developed as a narrative means in the modern novel, ultimately unfolded its full aesthetic force in electronic media, where it ended up taking on a radical form, I will take a closer look at this narrative strategy in the following.

Joyce and the narrative principle of ‹networking›

The change in narrative perspectives evokes an unstable perception, already making its appearance as a defining characteristic in the novels of James Joyce, especially in «Ulysses» (1922) and «Finnegans Wake» (1939). Joyce makes use of the process of perspectivization to split up the subject so that it is no longer a uniform quantity and to abrogate the subject's strict discreteness from the object world. This process

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