10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age Internet-Related Fiction and the Ecology of Attention 1 The Changing Value of Literature in Times of Big Data: The Threat of Literary Depreciation under the Influence of ‘Attention Economy’ No one will doubt the observation that “there have been far-reaching changes in the life-worlds and dominant hierarchies of values that have emerged in the 21st century” 1 : in the digital age, even the ways in which literature is authored, distributed, read, and evaluated radically differ from those in the days in which print and analogousness characterised cultures The French literary theorist Yves Citton discusses this radical cultural shift in great detail, pointing out the effects of big data on the arts and the literary market He also focuses on the overabundance of literature digitally produced or/ and compiled and seemingly accessible to anyone at any time: With the progressive development of communication media and technologies […] the number of discourses [among them literary ones], images and spectacles offered to human attention has grown exponentially […] Not long ago, the economy of access to cultural goods was very tightly bound up with the production economy of material goods […] [Now, for] the (increasingly modest) price of a computer, or even a simple mobile phone, and an internet connection, billions of humans will soon have millions of books, images, songs, films, and television series at their disposal for a marginal cost of zero 2 1 Vera Nünning/ Ansgar Nünning, “Cultural Concerns, Literary Developments, Critical Debates: Contextualising the Dynamics of Generic Change and Trajectories of the British Novel in the Twenty-First Century,” The British Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Cultural Concerns - Literary Developments - Model Interpretations, eds Vera Nünning/ Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT, 2018), 25 2 Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 3 On the “Facebook society” and its consequence of “nonstop neoliberal capitalism 24/ 7” see also Nünning/ Nünning, “Cultural Concerns,” esp 21-25 316 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 The consequences of the sudden shift in culture and the literary market, that is, the aforementioned exponentially growing abundance of literature, which can be found online, are huge, in at least two respects According to Citton, a new “attention economy” 3 is on the rise, which revolves around a decisive reversal in the relationship of two interdependent economic levels: the levels of cultural production and reception On the level of reception, the value of literature seems to be decreasing Existing in a quantity impossible to process for an individual, particular novels become superfluous to the reader (or, consumer); they increasingly turn from desirable goods to objects of irritation Even though they can be bought or downloaded for free in large quantities, they can, in their entirety, never be read: “cultural frustrations arise […] from a lack of available time to read, listen or watch all the treasures hastily downloaded onto our hard drives or recklessly accumulated on our shelves ” 4 As the appeal of the single, special book is on the decline, the attention of the consumer becomes, on the level of production, a desired good Authors, publishers, and other commercial or/ and cultural agents compete to win the favour of possible consumers, to capture the attention and “time of available brains ” 5 Surrounding the literary market, its objects, and its agents, a special kind of economy is forming: an “attention economy ” It is not an economy that, in the traditional sense, revolves around material goods, the physical substance of literary artefacts, but around the immaterial good of a reader’s attention and time In a market like this, literature, the individual novel, and its special content seem to lose their worth over the rising importance and value of potential recipients and their attention As seismographic media, a plethora of novels since the 2000s have sensed, traced, and reflected this development. Reflecting literature’s contemporary environment rather than submitting the novel to the dictates of economy, many authors have started to counter the prevalent economisation of the arts These novelists, thus, similar to Yves Citton’s demand, 6 turn their focus to the ‘ecology’ of contemporary literature In their works, they concentrate on the 3 Citton, Ecology, 3 et passim 4 Ibid , 4 5 Bernard Stiegler, Économie de l’hypermarériel et psychopouvoir (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2008), 117, 222; qtd in Citton, Ecology, 17 6 Even though the term “attention economy” can capture what he calls “the formal reconfiguration of our lives” (Citton, Ecology, 20), Yves Citton doubts that people’s attention is and should be really framed in economic terms On the backdrop of Aurélien Gambony and Félix Guattari’s philosophies, he discusses terms which seem more appropriate, e g “attention ecology” (ibid ) or attention “ecosophy” (ibid , 22), as “the activity of paying attention belongs to a genuine environmental wisdom - an ecosophy” (ibid , original emphasis) Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age 317 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 context in which literature is currently being produced and read as well as on the current patterns and (im-)balances shaping the literary environment They thematically and discursively track, for instance, the relationship between literature (esp its qualities, value, and economisation), literary practices (e g , the simultaneity of deep attention and hyper-attention or old and new ways of reading), and practitioners - among them producers and receivers, the latter of whom have morphed into “high-bandwidth consumers rather than meditative thinkers ” 7 In addition, writers who, in their novels, consider the status and value of literature in the digital age seem to try to answer and counter the provocative questions posed by Jeremy Green, who even hints at a possible ‘death’ of literature. “What place is there for the novel, for the specific form of inquiry, representation, and narration that late twentieth-century novels [and early twenty-first-century novels] […] still have to offer? ” 8 Using the adverb ‘still,’ Green, too, points to a ‘before’ and an ‘after’; a before and after the digitalisation of everyday lives and the arts, a before and after the advent of digital culture, which seems not only to devalue literature but also to initiate its extinction He asks whether the novel as traditionally known and in its printed form will be outpaced in an environment of ever newly developing digital technologies, media formats, and e-genres, and by emergent, highly mutable textual forms, such as flickering flash poems 9 or hypertextual novels on the internet 10 - ‘outpaced’ in terms of relevance or even existence Initiating a movement countering the current environment of literature and the alarming shifts in the literary landscape (as described by Citton and Green), several novelists, among them writers of nanonovels and other internet-related fiction, are increasingly innovating the genre they write in. Not only do they produce experimentally fascinating fiction; they also partake in a revalorisation process of literature In creative ways, these writers assess the qualitative and quantitative status given to literature in times of big data They critically reflect and use the new channels and practices of human interaction as well as the technical means and media formats the internet age 7 Teddy Wayne, “Our (Bare) Shelves, Our Selves,” The New York Times, 12 June 2015, www nytimes com/ 2015/ 12/ 06/ fashion/ our-bare-shelves-our-selves html, n p 8 Jeremy Green, “The Novel and the Death of Literature,” Late Postmodernism, ed id (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 46 9 For instance, poems like William Poundstone’s “Project for Tachistoscope (Bottomless Pit),” Electronic Literature Collection, 2005, http: / / collection eliterature org/ 1/ works/ poundstone__project_for_tachistoscope_bottomless_pit html 10 Mark Z Danielewski’s bestselling House of Leaves (New York: Random House, 2000) is a case in point, which was first published on the internet. 318 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 has provided them with 11 In doing so, they tend to revalorise literature as a medium that both demands and deserves immersion and deep attention To show how this is accomplished, I will look at three internet-related and/ or -based forms of fiction, which make use of new techniques and media formats digitalisation has provided them with With the means at hand, they counter the negative effects that digitalisation has on the ecology of literature; they dare the recipient-related withdrawal of deep attention and the critically prognosticated threat of literature’s decrease in value or extinction in the economy of attention To show the broad generic range of fiction that displays a remarkable playfulness, inventiveness, and generic versatility within this new digital reality, I will look at three different forms of fiction that, in different ways, interact with, and reflect the realm of the digital. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) is an intermedial novel that exists in print form but imitates digital hypertexts; Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts (2007) is a transmedial novel, narrated across print and digital media; and Stephanie Hutton’s internet-based “Geology of a Girl” (2017) belongs to the emergent genre of micro-fiction. Even though very different in form, they all test the novel’s formal, aesthetical, and cultural potential in the digital age and, at the same time, under the influence of the digital In their formal and semantic complexity, they challenge their audience to consolidate old and new forms of reception, to reconsider their current media usage, to face their degradation to mere consumers by the digital industry, and to resist their and literature’s devaluation by the big data economy In the following, I will ask with which strategies these novels counter the current attention economy, revalorise literature, and demand a new degree of their recipients’ deep attention 2 David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas as an Internet-Related Intermedial Novel Revalorising Literature, Print Media, and the Reader in the Digital Age The trends sketched above - of people being increasingly frustrated with the overabundance of literature and the lack of time to immerse themselves into 11 Among recent studies which discuss the ways in which novelists make use of digital technologies and formats to reflect matters of digitalisation, the internet, and the status of the novel are Regina Schober’s “Between Nostalgic Resistance and Critical Appropriation: Contemporary Fiction on/ of the Information Age and the Potentials of (Post)Humanist Narrative,” AmerikaStudien 61 (2017), 359-379, and Anna Weigel-Heller’s monograph Fictions of the Internet: From Intermediality to Transmedia Storytelling in 21st-Century Novels (Trier: WVT, 2018) Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age 319 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 the demanding process of literary reception - do not seem to apply to David Mitchell’s oeuvre The novelist seems a remarkable exception in the time of attention economy in that, to him and his works, attention seems certain Since the publication of his first novel in 1999, he has repeatedly broken sales record after sales record; he “has been favourite to critics and a wide readership alike” and his novels manage the balancing act of being “extremely popular while simultaneously being considered ‘high-brow ’” 12 Even in the attention economy, his novels are being valued and read By looking at his most successful novel so far, Cloud Atlas (2004), 13 I will ask which strategies he applies in his innovative work to secure a wide readership’s attention and appreciation His bestseller features a highly innovative and complex structure, which relates to the internet and digital presentation strategies He draws on the ubiquitous hypertext, a network of linked data - in textual, pictorial, or other form - in which users can move ad libitum, and further develops it for the complex medium of the novel The latter becomes a gigantic hybrid masterpiece that blows up the traditional boundaries that have characterised printed texts so far With its network of data and stories, Cloud Atlas records cultural history and people’s lives across several continents from the nineteenth-century to a post-apocalyptic future, interconnecting different media, genres, and stories In Cloud Atlas, whose title not only refers to a fictional piece of music but also indicates the novel’s medial hybridity as it juxtaposes old and new ways of archiving, 14 six people tell their stories in six independent, but interrelated episodes Tied together in a quasi-hypertextual manner, these narratives become a chronicle of mankind’s successes and deficiencies as well as a history of medial and generic change. In the part entitled “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” a nineteenth-century lawyer is on a sea passage from New Zealand back to the US and writes a diary In 1931, this diary is read in an edited version by the young composer Robert Frobisher Frobisher’s story is 12 Birgit Breidenbach, “Hybridisation and Globalisation as Catalysts of Generic Change: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and The Bone Clocks (2014),” The British Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Cultural Concerns - Literary Developments - Model Interpretations, eds Vera Nünning/ Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT, 2018), 312 13 As Birgit Breidenbach specifies, it “sold more than 500,000 copies and was adapted into a major Hollywood film starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry; at the same time, it was hailed by critics and earned a spot on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize ” (Ibid ) 14 The traditional ‘atlas,’ a monumental print archive to store geographical data, is combined with a ‘cloud,’ reminiscent of ‘cloud computing,’ in which services and data are not locally but centrally stored, often on huge computer networks based in the US or Russia These data and services are only accessible from afar and provided the internet is working 320 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 recounted in “Letters from Zedelghem,” which consists of a series of letters he writes to a friend in England to tell him of his life in Belgium The episode “Half-Lives - The First Luisa Rey Mystery” is set in the 1970s and refers back to Frobisher’s letters, which are read by the main character of the present episode, a young female journalist, Luisa Rey, who puts her life at risk to uncover a hushed up nuclear scandal “Half-Lives,” in turn, crops up as an unedited manuscript in the episode entitled “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish,” which is set in present-day Britain The ‘Luisa Rey’-manuscript is read and assessed by publisher Timothy Cavendish, who, after having fled the gangster family of an angry author of his, is now trapped in a nursing home, which he first believed to be a hotel. Cavendish’s story is then referenced in the next episode In “An Orison of Sonmi~451,” set in a dystopian, futuristic Korea, the clone Sonmi~451 tells an ‘archivist’ of her life He records the clone’s story in an audio-visual, holographic storing device called ‘orison ’ Part of Sonmi~451’s story is the outrageous incident that she has dared to watch a film (The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish) from before what must have been a major global disaster, destroying most of the world The sixth and last episode, “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After,” is set on a post-apocalyptic island called Hawaii and it refers back to Sonmi~451’s episode The survivors of the apocalypse, living as primitive folk and farmers, worship a goddess called ‘Sonmi’ and commemorate a “Fall,” after which the civilised inhabitants of the earth, the “Old Uns,” were destroyed Besides, an old man, Zachery, finds Sonmi~451’s orison. As the outline of the novel’s structure shows, the characters of all episodes are interrelated by reading, watching, or touching something that was produced in another time by another person. Every fictional material text introduced in one episode and presented in its specific medial format - a diary or an orison - is used by Mitchell as a simulated hyperlink. Although these fictional texts mentioned are no ‘real’ hyperlinks on which a reader could actually click to move to another document, they at least imitate the character and mechanisms of digital hyperlinks in the novel’s print form Mentioned in one episode and taken up in another context, the titles of the fictional texts serve as phrases that are quasi-hyperlinked, moving the readers to a separate part of the novel, a different but semantically related textual document or episode Cloud Atlas’ intermedial referencing, its reproduction of a hypertext’s network structure, however, does not end with the imitation of the hyperlinks: It is enriched by a numeric construction Each episode revolves around an axis of reflection (Fig. 1), situated in episode six, the only episode that is presented without interruption All other stories are interrupted in their middle and followed by a temporally succeeding story (first part) or a temporally preceding Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age 321 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 story (second part) In the novel’s second part, after the sixth and last story set in a post-apocalyptic time, the sequence is reverted: All stories are, one after the other and in reverse order, continued and ended Fig 1: The hyperlink and mirror structure of the six episodes in Cloud Atlas (red arrows symbolise quasi-hyperlinks; blue line symbolises axis of reflection). The effect of this structural arrangement, in which chapters are even interrupted in mid-sentence, 15 is one that heightens the impression that readers are less faced with an analogous print novel but with a novel that makes experimental use of virtual presentation formats and digital reading experiences, moving readers from one hypertextually linked document to another and back again One that evokes the discontinuous, disrupted nature of hypertextual networks and readings At the end of each episode, there is one turn of the page, and with it, similar to the ‘click’ on a hyperlink, the readers are suddenly brought to another ‘ontological level,’ i e to a completely different episode, geographical space, century, and cultural reality It seems that, with this strategy, the novel spells out, even performs, that, in an age which invites fast-forward reading and impedes immersion, both analogous and digital reception strategies need to be combined While digital genres, with their hyperlinks, not only invite distraction, they also, as Cloud Atlas’ structure shows, enable the concurrent reception of different documents and help semantically relate contents At the same time, analogous genres, like the novel, especially if they are formally as complex as Cloud Atlas, demand their recipients’ deep attention They structurally trigger people’s engagement by calling their attention to different reading strategies and forcing them to apply them in combination With this, literature is one step ahead of literary criticism and cognitive studies What Maryanne Wolf demands for future literary education, David Mitchell is already schooling his readers in: in the combination of old and new reading strategies Wolf emphasises that today’s - ‘good’ - reader needs to be able to combine the skills digital media nowadays foster (getting access to knowledge and entertainment) with those the age of print has equipped 15 For instance, the first part of “The Pacific Journal” ends with a sentence fragment. David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (London: Sceptre, 2004), 39 322 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 humankind with, foremost the ability to contemplate 16 Cloud Atlas’ complex structure illustrates: Only if digital, numeric, zigzag-style reading strategies, as invited by digital media, are combined with analogous, deep, and literary ones, as demanded by novels, will readers be able to meet the task of decoding the challenging texts of the present Acknowledging and making use of digital formats, Mitchell thus revalorises literature as a medium that is able to combine digital and analogous traditions in various and seminal ways 17 Performatively, his novel convinces readers of the formal and semantic productivity and worth of the coexistence of new media formats and traditional ones In addition, he proves that the genre of the novel, in a metareferential vein and via its complex structure, is a highly flexible one. Cloud Atlas makes intermedial use of new, digital formats of the internet while, at the same time, showing that with hyper reading strategies alone, which include “skimming, scanning, [and] fragmenting” and aim to “conserve attention,” 18 a novel’s complex structure and semantics can never be sufficiently processed. Cloud Atlas’ complex structure challenges its recipients The novel is likely to be more readily understood if readers succeed in combining their proficiency of the hypertext and their close reading as well as deep concentration faculties Forcing them to apply both old and new reading strategies, it helps readers to adjust their brains to the challenges of the digital age; it schools them in Wolf’s proposed new way of decoding highly complex textual structures and of dissecting interlaced topics as well as entwined contents While the dichotomy between the old and the new is discursively ‘performed’ and synthesised by way of Cloud Atlas’ structure, generic and medial innovation as well as the change in literary value, which the arising economi- 16 Maryanne Wolf bases her ideas of the ‘good reader’ on Aristotle’s concept of the “three lives” of good society (the “life of knowledge and productivity,” the “life of entertainment,” and the “life of contemplation”) See Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), 13 Nancy Katherine Hayles, too, argues for a synthesis of old and new media practices She believes in “contemporary technogenesis,” the idea that humans and technology co-evolve On this basis, she advocates “comparative media studies,” an innovative approach that situates digital work in print traditions and vice versa See Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012), 1-18 17 Besides the structure of the novel, its formatting combines techniques of the digital with traditional print formats: The current possibilities of digital editing and formatting inspire typographical experiments, e g the integration of alleged handwriting (Cloud Atlas, 1 et passim, or 247), newspaper clips (ibid , 115), and interview formatting (ibid , 187-245) Thus, the possibilities of the digital age are discursively put to use to explore and test the print genre’s boundaries as well as to celebrate the haptic, visual realities of older media formats, print forms, and techniques 18 Hayles, How We Think, 12 Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age 323 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 sation of attention might have caused, are themselves thematised in the novel Through the hypertextual interconnectedness of the episodes, their characters, and fictional material objects like diaries and manuscripts, the characteristics of media and their distribution as well as people’s media usage are explored - in their historical specifics and their universal, timeless qualities. To show this, I will zoom in on the fifth story, the story of clone Sonmi~451. While chapters one to four cover the medial evolution from the nineteenth century to the present time, from diary via the letter to the telegraph and film, the fifth chapter, “An Orison of Sonmi~451,” imagines new media, thus raising the question of what will happen to traditional media in the future In Sonmi’s future, media products like books and genres like the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, handed down the generations in print, have become extremely rare; and so have films. In addition, the cultural techniques of making sense of these media products have not been passed down to post-human generations and the technical devices which give access to them have fallen into a state of technical decay People live in an age of new media, for instance, ‘sonis,’ devices that seem similar to tablets, and so-called ‘orisons,’ three dimensional, holographic fictive media, which are probably inspired by video game aesthetics and projectors Crucial to this future is, however, that not everybody is allowed to use these media - just the privileged purebloods or ‘consumers’ (genomically enhanced individuals), not sub-human slaves like the clone Sonmi~451 Slaves will be killed on being found using them; and, anyway, they lack the interest in and the knowledge of how to use them In this dystopian setting, media usage is restricted to those who have the ‘right’ class and the economic means to use, to ‘consume’ media As the sketched contents indicate, this episode reinforces the value of literary messages anthologised in print and the worth of traditional reading strategies, which need to be preserved alongside new ones and acquired by future generations so as not to be lost (as in Sonmi’s future) Older and current media are considered in a nostalgic, loving manner; at the same time, the cultural-historical dependency of media and genres is stressed The possible loss of objects of cultural value, like Andersen’s fairy tales, and of cultural practices, like watching movies, are bemoaned What is more, however, Sonmi’s story not only revalorises traditional narrative genres It confers greater value to the readers themselves, who, in the economy of attention, have become interesting to the literary market for their capital (money, time, and attention) rather than their minds Sonmi’s story makes the reader aware of the impending and existing dangers of digitalisation and new economies: Technological devices like e-readers or tablets, and with them, the education and knowledge they mediate, are commodified. 324 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 They belong only to those who are willing and able to pay for them and who know how to use them Cloud Atlas imagines the consequences of an environment that makes people “consumers” and “clones” instead of “readers” and “citizens”: An ecologised environment like Sonmi’s is likely to rob people of their personality and political agency; it makes them slaves to the market and the world Finally, the episode makes clear that Mitchell intends to re-assign value to both the cultural technique of ‘reading’ and the institution of libraries Both are celebrated as practices and tools of democracy When Sonmi~451, the clone, for the first time steps outside the diner in which she lives and serves and gets a glimpse of the outside world, she says: I didn’t even know what I needed in order to understand such a limitless place. │ Wing [another clone] replied I needed intelligence: ascension would provide this I needed time: Boom-Sook Kim’s own idleness would give me time But I also needed knowledge. │ I asked, how is knowledge found? │ ‘You must learn how to read, little sister,’ he said 19 This passage discusses education, democratisation, and their relation to future media (and by implication, current digital media) Literature and libraries open worlds of knowledge; they can educate in egalitarian and democratic ways However, one needs resources, which, in the digital age, seem to dwindle and even vanish, but should be available to everyone: time and the familiarity with traditional cultural techniques so that anyone can become and/ or stay an individual and reader, rather than a clone and consumer Cloud Atlas can thus be read as a warning against the attention economy in which readers become dehumanised consumers At the same time, it re-introduces literature, printed texts, and handwriting as traditional genres, media formats, and cultural techniques which, in all circumstances and environments, are precious and worthy of saving Their Benjaminean ‘aura’ does not at all seem lost in the ages of mechanical (and digital) reproduction Accordingly, one passage reads: In his hotel room […], Dr Rufus Sixsmith reads a sheaf of letters written to him nearly half a century ago by his friend Robert Frobisher Sixsmith knows them by heart, but their texture, rustle and his friend’s faded handwriting calm his nerves These letters are what he would save from a burning building 20 19 Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, 216 20 Ibid , 112 Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age 325 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 Both the character Sixsmith and Cloud Atlas revere the haptic, the tactile, the aural quality of the material object, of paper, of ink, and handwriting With this, they disseminate an environmental rather than economic wisdom As much as the novel uses digital strategies for innovation purposes, as much does it celebrate the pre-digital aura of ‘the material ’ Despite its formally and generically excessive use of intermedial references, Cloud Atlas displays a strong thematic appreciation for analogous times and for the printed and hand-written object; that which exists beyond the digital realm and which is - literally - handed down the generations and materially distributed across cultures 3 Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts as an Internet-Related and Partially Internet-Based Transmedial Novel Countering the Imbalance between Data-base and Narrative Similar to Cloud Atlas, Steven Hall’s debut novel, The Raw Shark Texts (2007), reacts to the challenges of digitalisation and transforms them into generic innovations In contrast to the former, the latter goes discursively one step further; it is truly transmedial It not only intermedially refers to digital text formats but also stretches across various media: firstly, parts of it have appeared in print, others on the internet; secondly, it expands the traditional confines of the novel, playing with print and formatting, incorporating pictures and even a flipbook. Beyond its structural finesse, Hall’s novel has also been lauded for its content and regarded as a “useful site of study for considering how the contemporary novel imagines its role within an increasingly variegated media ecology ” 21 The thus structured novel explores yet another aspect of the ecology of attention in the digital age: the power of hidden databases Scholars such as Lev Manovich have argued that these “structured collections of data” 22 seem to be the dominant form of cultural expression in the information age They are the centre of contemporary people’s attention, compete with, and (partially) replace the form of cultural expression that used to be hegemonic in the modern age, namely, narrative (primarily, the novel and the fiction film). 23 Steven Hall’s novel contests the seeming dominance of the database, points 21 Julia Panko, “‘Memory Pressed Flat into Text’: The Importance of Print in Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts,” Contemporary Literature 52 2 (2011), 264 22 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 219 23 Ibid , 218 Nancy Katherine Hayles contests this strong statement At the same time, she agrees “with the obvious fact that databases are now pervasive in contemporary society, their growth greatly facilitated by digital media ” Hayles, How We Think, 171 326 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 to its dangers, and revalorises narrative literature by drawing attention to the affordances of what has been called “the aesthetic of bookishness ” 24 The characteristics of big data and the effects that the hidden structures of databases can have on people are summarised in a poem in The Raw Shark Texts: The dark shape glides up into the flow │ of conversations and stories, swims │ through the word-hum of packed Saturday night bars, circles the loops and │ edges of exchanged mobile numbers. ││ A telephone call is misdialled and, miles │ away, my unconscious self shifts in sleep, │ disturbed by a ringing bell. ││ From four degrees of separation, the shadow │ under the water catches the scent. A curved, │ rising signifier, a black idea fin of momentum │ and intent cuts through the distance between │ us in a spray of memes. 25 This dark poem describes the attack of the eponymous shark It is not a real one, but a conceptual shark and, instead of swimming in water, it swims in data, in ‘memes.’ These memes are the streams of ideas and flows of conversations which spread from person to person within a culture, and which, in the digital age and with the growing dominance of information technologies, have exponentially grown. The conceptual shark is, thus, a personification of databases and their potential dangers Databases are as invisible as sharks underwater: As Katherine Hayles points out, “[e]ven as the data stored in databases has exploded exponentially, the percentage accessible (or indeed even known) to the public has shrunk ” 26 Just like the predators at sea, databases, their structures, and contents are hard to spot and process They are uncanny because they gather large quantities of personal information in the dark They are at the same time deeply personal and, with it, become potentially dangerous, once one comes too close Both sharks and databases are surveillance entities While sharks track their victims down by way of their scent, databases gather material and data of their users, without them realising it until it is too late Sharks surface to attack, as in the poem; databases strip people of their identities and sell them out to companies and, even worse, governments and/ or intelligence services - hence, the uncanny feeling of internet users who are 24 Jessica Pressman, “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 48 4 (2009), 465-482 25 Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts, ‘Unspace Edition’ (Edinburgh/ New York: Canongate, 2007), 33 26 Hayles, How We Think, 200 Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age 327 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 aware of the “creepiness of knowing that one’s everyday transactions depend on invisible databases”; 27 hence the situation of Eric The shark’s victim, Eric Sanderson, is someone who personally experiences the threat of databases, their characteristics of decontextualising personal information and atomising individuality. He wakes up after a first shark attack, with no memory of who he is or of any past experiences Eric is thus an individual who experiences the dominance of the digital and the diminishing importance of narrative. His engagement with the former, personified as the conceptual shark, seems to have fragmented his self, stripped him of the holistic view of his self the latter would provide After all, “[w]hereas data elements must be atomized for databases to function efficiently, narrative fiction embeds ‘data elements’ […] in richly contextualized environments of the phrase, sentence, […] and story as a whole ” 28 Due to his contact with the shark, the amnesic protagonist is literally stripped of narrative contextualisation, of his life story He even feels this due to big data From his former self, who has written letters to his amnesic future self, he learns that, when his girlfriend died, he has activated a conceptual shark, which uses memes and information flows as well as the virally spreading disembodied texts of telecommunication technologies, like the internet, to “[feed] on human memories and the intrinsic sense of self ” 29 Eric learns that the conceptual shark wants to feed on his data and his personality; and he enters upon a quest to destroy the shark and regain his memory and, with it, narrative agency Yet, the conceptual shark is not only a metaphor for the uncanniness of databases in the digital age, it is, again, also a source of discursive inspiration The novel consists of 36 print chapters; for each chapter, there is also an ‘un-chapter ’ These ‘un-chapters’ are outside of the main printed text and they have been found sporadically since the novel’s publication, either in the virtual world, i e , online, or in the actual world, in special editions Some of these un-chapters have a short lifespan and have been only temporarily online, such as the “Aquarium Fragment,” 30 which, at least at the moment, cannot be accessed anymore With a discursive move like this, Hall expands the novel’s boundaries as a print medium. In a transmedial manner, he, firstly, distributes one narrative across several media, print and digital ones The reception process is, secondly, individualised - resembling those individ- 27 Nancy Katherine Hayles, “Material Entanglements: Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts as Slipstream Novel,” Science Fiction Studies 38 1 (2011), 115 28 Ibid , 117 29 Hall, Raw Shark, 64 30 Steven Hall, “The Aquarium Fragment: Negative 1/ 36,” Canongate, 2007, www canongate tv/ media/ pdf/ Aquarium_Fragment_Prologue pdf 328 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 ual reading processes of hypertexts, whose links users can either click on or ignore Thirdly, in terms of access, the narrative becomes as unstable as internet data, which can be easily altered (e g , Wikipedia entries) and sometimes even get lost as links become obsolete, passwords expire, or websites are deleted (e g , Hall’s un-chapters) The text is in constant motion, there is no ultimate version, and it is never fixed. And, fourthly, like databases, the novel is (at least partly) hidden; especially the digital parts of it remain, at times, invisible to readers. Thus, the novel’s data flows and un-chapters are made to appear as enigmatic and dark as databases; the disembodied texts and meanings are perceived just as evanescent, uncontrollable, and therefore potentially threatening After all, on a story level, they are used by predators like the conceptual shark The past Eric says to his future, amnesic self: “And the internet, remember there is no safe procedure for electronic information Avoid it at all costs ” 31 While one strategy of The Raw Shark Texts’ transmedialisation is its outsourcing of parts into the digital realm to make the threat of the latter imaginable to the readers and to serve as a warning of the dangers of the internet, other transmedia strategies serve as enhancement of the readers’ esteem of the databases’ devalued other: namely, narrative As typographic experiments in The Raw Shark Texts and story elements show, print media serve, within this story world, as alternatives to the digital, as worlds that offer safety, security, and a certain kind of felicity The typographic elements in the novel are manifold: There is a shark attack simulated by way of a flipbook (cf. Fig. 2); there is a postcard, a map, a film still, and concrete poetry. And all of these elements extend the boundaries of the genre novel as they stretch The Raw Shark Texts’ narrative beyond words In this innovative way, Hall’s work becomes part of a body of novels that commit themselves to an “aesthetics of bookishness,” 32 which “exploit the power of the print page in ways that draw attention to the book as a multimedia format, one informed by and connected to digital technologies ” 33 At the same time, these bookish novels emanate a particular fondness for the printed page and convey a certain esteem for the possibilities of the genre ‘novel’ and its adaptation qualities to new environments, such as the current attention ecology 31 Hall, Raw Shark, 81 32 Pressman, “Aesthetic of Bookishness,” 465-482 33 Ibid , 465 329 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age Fig 2: Elements of The Raw Shark Texts’ flipbook, ‘The conceptual shark, attacking’ (Raw Shark Texts 357, 375) On the story level, print media are staged as opposition to the digital, too Print and digital forms are compared regarding their character and contrasted to each other in their respective assessment In contrast to the threat of the digital, which atomises and de-contextualises data, printed texts and narrative fiction, which link data to each other and to their contexts in specific ways, provide safety. This is why, on his quest to kill the predator, Eric finds shelter in embodied, materially fixed and stable texts: He travels through underground labyrinths of paper tunnels, which are entirely built of books and in which “everything, everything has been covered in words, words in so many languages ” 34 These print safe houses are even sacralised. On his flight from the shark, Eric encounters a “chamber with a yellow domed roof made of what looked to be telephone directories […] The walls themselves had been built from […] hardback books mainly, with the odd thick softback dictionaries, thesauruses, textbooks […] and had been constructed with careful bricklaying techniques ” And he and his companion realise, “‘Wow […] It’s like a church ’” 35 With this sacralisation of the haptic and embodied textual realities, the novel self-referentially endows worth to itself, as a print medium, as a genre, and as a narrative With its transmedia strategies, The Raw Shark Texts, in consequence, challenge the alleged dominance of databases in the digital era in favour of showing the strengths of narrative They both stage and revere the novel’s generic flexibility as well as narrative’s ability 34 Hall, Raw Shark, 227 35 Ibid , 229 330 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 to heal people, who can either escape to literary texts as safe havens or make use of narrative’s potential to historicise and contextualise individual lives, so people can feel healthy and whole again 4 Internet-Based Micro-Fiction as ‘Aesthetic Laboratory’ and Means to Regain Readers’ Deep Attention In the digital age, there has been a flood of very short fiction, which is referred to with various expressions: there is the “nanonovel,” 36 “micro-fiction,” 37 “short-short fiction,” 38 or “flash-fiction.” 39 And although, as Michael Basseler in his literary-historiographical sketch states, the literary fragment and the short story have had a long tradition, 40 it is notable that the surge in digitalisation seems to correlate with a proliferation of fiction that is marked by an extreme brevity These works tend to be of even ‘shorter shortness’ than conventional short stories; hence the various aforementioned prefixes. Of course, ‘brevity’ and ‘shortness’ are relative categories, and there are historical predecessors of, for instance, even stories as short as six words 41 This is why I would refrain from calling it a “new narrative genre ” 42 What is new, however, is that the genre has, in the last decades, proliferated on the internet, as Fishelov illustrates by his choice of examples Even though there are a couple of print anthologies of micro-fiction, 43 the genre has become intricately tied to and evolved with digitalisation Nanonovels have become mainly ‘inter- 36 Jules Horne, Nanonovels: Five-Minute Flash Fiction (Selkirik: Texthouse, 2015) 37 See the arts and culture blog HeadStuff, especially Bart Van Goethem’s posting “20 Micro-Fiction Stories,” HeadStuff, 29 May 2014, www headstuff org/ culture/ literature/ 20-micro-fiction-stories/ , n.p. 38 Michael Basseler, “Short-Short Fiction,” The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English, eds Paul Delaney/ Adrian Hunter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2019), 147-159 39 National Flash Fiction Day, https: / / nationalflashfictionday.co.uk/ . 40 Basseler, “Short-Short Fiction,” 147-148 41 The apocryphal story “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” attributed to Hemmingway is a case in point; see David Fishelov, “The Poetics of Six-Word Stories,” Narrative 27 1 (2019), 31-33 42 Cf. ibid., 31. See also Ashley Chantler on the difficulty of “pinning down” the genre’s origin; Chantler, “Notes towards the Definition of the Short-Short Story,” The Short Story, ed Ailsa Cox (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 39 43 For instance, James Thomas/ Robert Shapard/ Christopher Merrill, eds, Flash Fiction International: Very Short Stories from Around the World (New York: W W Norton Co , 2015); Tom Hazuka/ Denise Thomas/ James Thomas, eds, Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories (New York: W W Norton Co , 1992) Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age 331 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 net-based: ’ They are produced with the help of the internet, 44 they are mainly published there, they are dominantly received there 45 The ‘economic’ genre, at least at a first glance, seems to fit the needs and constraints of the current attention economy perfectly because it is a genre less defined by certain qualities than by quantity Authors like Jules Horne advertise their nanonovels with the fact that they have written them in five minutes each, 46 and collectors promote their digital anthologies by referring to the shortness of time a reader needs to spend on reading their selections: “You can probably power through all of these great short-short stories in one long bathroom break ” 47 Due to this, critics have attributed the genre’s popularity to contemporary people’s tendency of being either easily distracted or hyper-attentive They state that short-short stories seem to fit the reading habits of the “emailing, texting, abbreviating ADD generation ” 48 However, the obviously wide-spread notion that nanonovels can be processed in a brief time span and with such minimal effort that even people with attention deficits manage to pay attention to them seems to be misleading. Of course, there is flash fiction which might be processed rather quickly, such as “21st Century Man - A Study” (“‘I post, therefore I am ’”), or “The Abused Dancer” (“After everyone left, she did endless pirouettes on his grave ”) 49 More often than not, however, there is internet-based fiction that requires its readers’ deep attention If one refrains from focusing on the genre’s brevity alone, one realises its preeminent quality of being rather poorly contextualised This can be seen when one looks at Stephanie Hutton’s “Geology of a Girl” (2017), second 44 There are online tutorials on how to write micro-fiction, see David Gaffney’s “Stories in your pocket: how to write flash fiction,” The Guardian, 14 May 2012, https: / / www theguardian.com/ books/ 2012/ may/ 14/ how-to-write-flash-fiction, n.p., and writers like Jules Horne report how they get inspiration for their nanonovels by browsing the internet: “Insert the word or phrase you find into Google. This is the title of your story. │ Open the first non-sponsored page that appears. Something on this page is your stimulus │ Set a timer and write for five minutes. │ Stop.” Horne, Nanonovels, xi 45 There are websites such as Six Word Stories, www sixwordstories net/ ; and National Flash-Fiction Day, https: / / www.nationalflashfictionday.co.uk/ , which anthologise the best brief fiction; there are also blogs on which individuals post their own work or collect others’ micro-fiction. 46 Horne, Nanonovels, xi 47 Nataf, Emmanuel, “7 Flash Fiction Stories That Are Worth (a Tiny Amount of) Your Time,” Electric Lit: Reading into Everything, 12 October 2018, https: / / electricliterature com/ 7-flash-fiction-stories-that-are-worth-a-tiny-amount-of-your-time/ , n.p. 48 Chantler, “Notes,” 40 49 Both short-shorts, “21st Century Man - A Study” and “The Abused Dancer,” have been posted by Barth von Goethem in “20 Micro-Fiction Stories,” HeadStuff, 29 May 2014, www.headstuff.org/ culture/ literature/ 20-micro-fiction-stories/ , n.p. 332 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 place winner of the National Flash-Fiction Day’s micro-fiction competition 2017, which will be quoted in its entirety below: Ella kept one pebble in her pocket and rubbed it down to sand, running the grains through her fingers. Stones sneaked in through holes in her shoes. Her legs turned to rocks She leant against the sisterhood of brick on the playground and watched girls skip together like lambs A boulder weighed heavily in her stomach She curled forwards by habit. Her head filled with the detritus of life. A new girl started school in May with fire in her eyes. She whispered to Ella with aniseed breath ‘lava is liquid rock,’ the girl took her hand and ran 50 Nanonovels like the “Geology of a Girl” firstly often keep their filling out of essential content narremes, such as ‘character,’ ‘time,’ or ‘space,’ at a minimum The author does not give us any extensive information about Ella’s character, her history, or her socio-cultural provenance She does not specify if the protagonist encounters the other girls in school or private contexts She does not enlighten us whether Ella is generally an unhappy girl, as suggested by the title (‘geology’ is the study of the earth’s structure, surface, and origin; the ‘geology’ of Ella indicates that her general character must be considered similar to the earth’s inanimate surface), or just in this particular playground situation, which is not further specified or narrativised. Concerning her current situation, the readers can merely assume that the protagonist feels either different or isolated from her peers, as they are contrasted to each other: the other girls are described as cheerfully bouncing, animate beings, as lambs, whereas Ella is associated with inanimate objects, stones and rock, and therefore with a certain gravitas Additionally, and in contrast to the moving girls, the reader witnesses how Ella is gradually getting petrified, her organism metaphorically morphing into a fossilised form, as her legs become like solid rock, a boulder blocks her stomach, and detritus fills her brains. Secondly, flash fictions’ quality of being rather poorly contextualised becomes also manifest in their beginnings and endings, which tend to be rather open They present readers only with the “tip of the iceberg,” thus making them “more active participant[s] in the reading process ” 51 In the particular case of Stephanie Hutton’s nanonovel, we do not know why exactly the protagonist feels excluded, why she feels closer to a brick wall than to her peers Has something extraordinary happened to her prior to the short-short story’s beginning, isolating her from the others? Or is there a history of her being bul- 50 Hutton, Stephanie, “Geology of a Girl,” National Flash Fiction Day, 2017, https: / / www nationalflashfictionday co uk/ index php/ competition/ 2017-microfiction-results/ #Hutton, n p 51 Fishelov, “Six-Word Stories,” 37 Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age 333 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 lied by the other children for no reason, because of her character, or because she has been made victim of racial discrimination or social othering (maybe she is less well-off than the other girls, as there are holes in her shoes)? What happens when the new girl takes Ella’s hand and runs with her? Is Ella finally rescued from her isolation, as the ending suggests? Has she gained a friend who not only knows of melting lava stone but also that and how Ella must be cured from a state of petrification? Thirdly, micro-fiction like “Geology of a Girl” usually displays plenty of disnarrated elements Ella “curls forward by habit”: What does this phrase suggest, which information does it withhold? Is she ill? Does she have a tick? Is it important that a “girl” and not a “boy” rescues Ella; why does the girl have “fire in her eyes”? Are these implications of Ella’s homosexuality? Do these qualities imply that the other girls are cold and dismissive towards her? What has the new girl’s smell to do with anything and the fact that she appears in May? Fourthly and finally, micro-fiction’s elliptic quality tends to both draw on and subvert readers’ previous literary knowledge “Geology of a Girl,” with its topic, reminds one of classical narratives, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses With Ella being petrified, it also triggers genre knowledge of ‘magic realism.’ In addition, the micro-narrative draws on the ‘poem’ due to its ultra-complex structure and its metaphorical density referring to all kinds of minerals While “Geology of a Girl,” with its topics and form, potentially triggers previous genre knowledge and expectations, it never matches them completely; the reader is more dazzled than enlightened by the competing allusions to other narratives and genres Trying to make sense of them (or their combination) in the micro-fiction’s context is a further challenge. As these examples of “Geology of a Girl”’s reduced narrativisation show, there is sometimes fairly little that would enable a reader of micro-fiction to construct its meaning in an instant To understand works like Hutton’s, readers are likely to need to invest more time and attention than authors and publishers commonly suggest 52 Therefore nanonovels like “Geology of a Girl” do actually not bend to the rules of the attention economy Rather, they serve as “aesthetic laboratories” that aim at regaining readers’ curiosity, deep attention, and regard for narrative literature in what is supposedly an Attention Deficit Disorder generation. 52 See also Fishelov’s emphasis of short fiction’s stimulation of cognitive processes. Like the six-word stories he examines, nanonovels like Hutton’s decidedly “assign [an] active role to the reader in constructing the missing parts of the story ” (ibid , 38) 334 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 Hutton’s flash fiction shows in at least three respects that internet-based short-short fiction fulfils the tasks of aesthetic laboratories, as Yves Citton defines them, in which readers’ reflexive attention is demanded and rewarded with a renewed esteem of what both “an artist can do and a spectator [or, reader] experience ” 53 Firstly, in the reception of very short stories like Hutton’s, recipients are provided with a “space that is temporarily isolated from the daily world [and] becomes a place of investigation, where […] [they] can test certain limits of what can be done, felt, discovered, thought or justified.” 54 Secondly, if one etymologically looks at the word ‘laboratory,’ a kind of ‘labour’ has to be done upon receiving micro-fiction; readers have to work hard to fill narrative gaps and process competing allusions to traditional genres. All of this poses “a certain challenge” to people’s “attention capabilities (a challenge to […] [their] tolerance of classification delay).” 55 And thirdly, due to nanonovels’ challenging nature, the aesthetic laboratory in which they are experienced demands readers’ deep attention to be prioritised over the principle of economy 56 Nanonovels do not allow for economic, quick processing and swift generic classifications; rather, they call for concentration, meditation, and reflexion. Despite flourishing in a digital environment, internet-based micro-fiction as aesthetic laboratory therefore counters the economised principles of the digital age, the economy of attention, and the hyper reading strategies of an alleged ADD generation As aesthetic laboratory, it rather re-gains readers’ deep attention and, in consequence, renews their regard for literature, writers, and their own labour of close reading and contemplating the meanings of very short fiction. 5 Digitalisation Spurring Genre Innovation - Internet- Based and -Related Fictions Revalorising Literature in the Framework of an Ecology of Attention If one takes the time to reflect the variety of the internet-based and internet-related fictions that have proliferated in the digital age, it becomes clear that digitalisation does not really pose a lethal threat to literature or the “literary brain,” the extinction of which is feared by Yves Citton 57 Although the age of 53 Citton, Ecology, 152 54 Ibid , 151 55 Ibid , 152 56 Ibid 57 Ibid , 144-148 335 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age information-overload, non-stop consumption, data oversupply, and hyper attention economises people’s everyday lives and the realm of literature, which is in danger of being devalued, contemporary fiction has the power to counter these developments With Jessica Pressman, even in the digital age, the novel does what the novel has always done: it challenges expectations of what the novel does and can do The novel is a genre concerned with newness and novelty, and digital technologies enable new ways of exploring novelty across literary content, form, and format as well as across production, distribution, and reception processes 58 Authors make use of the rich variety of digital technologies, practices, and realities to develop new kinds of novels; and the resulting generic variety and innovation is impressive (Fig 3) The works analysed above illustrate the broad spectrum of how fiction in the information age communicates and mediates between print tradition and the realm of the digital. There are, firstly, conventional print novels, like Cloud Atlas, which relate to the internet by intermedially referring to or imitating digital media, formats, and genres, and, at the same time, show their appreciation for print and deep attention; with the combination of these strategies, they revalorise literature, print media, and the reader in the digital age There are, secondly, transmedial novels, like The Raw Shark Texts, which narrativise their stories across different media, the printed book and the internet and which experiment with ‘bookish aesthetics ’ They serve as a warning of the dangers of databases, which seem to have supplanted narrative in the digital age In addition, they not only enhance the general value of narrative, they also self-reflexively pay tribute to the novel’s generic flexibility. Thirdly, there is a genre which, at a first glance, seems to bend to the rules of attention economy: the highly economised, mainly digital micro-fiction. However, it is this genre, which radically counters the mechanisms of the digital age by staging literature as an ‘aesthetic laboratory,’ that places literary ecology before economy, encourages recipients’ immersion, labour, and reflection, and, in doing so, renews their esteem for novelists, themselves, and the merits of deep attention Even though all the analysed works heavily draw on digitalisation for inspiration and genre innovation, they subvert the attention economy nowadays prevalent, revalorising literature and stressing the importance of placing literature in an ecology of attention One can thus conclude, with Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning, that contemporary fiction is “not only alive and kicking, it has even continued to flourish by engaging with a host of current issues, generating new forms and 58 Pressman, “The Novel in the Digital Age,” 254 336 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 sub-genres, enjoying great popularity and cultural prestige” 59 - and successfully reinforcing its own worth in the digital age Tradition of Print Realm of the Digital Cloud Atlas The Raw Shark Texts “Geology of a Girl” Generic Forms • in print • internet-related • partly in print, partly digital, • internet-related, partly internet-based • micro-fiction • dominantly digital1 • mainly internet-based Styles • intermedial referencing imitation of hypertextual network structure • mirror structure • thematic exploration of universal and specific media histories • transmedial storytelling • thematic comparison of databases and narrative • thematic opposition of print and digital media • aesthetics of ‘bookishness’ in story, format, and layout • radical quantification, economisation of signs, production, and (allegedly) reception • quality of reduced narrativisation and contextualisation Functions • demands both its recipients’ proficiency of the hypertext and their close reading faculties • literary education (school of being a ‘good reader,’ sensu M. Wolf) • re-assignment of value to print materialities, the cultural technique of ‘deep reading’, libraries, and the reader • warning of hidden databases • enhancement of narrative value • tribute to the novel’s generic flexibility • aesthetic laboratory • enabling immersion, labour, and reflection • renewal of esteem for novelists and readers as well as deep attention 1 The fact that this particular flash fiction has been anthologised in print is an exception, rather than the rule. Fig 3: Fictions’ Generic Spectrum between Print Tradition and Digital Realms: Overview of Forms, Styles, and Functions of Genre Innovation in the Digital Age Works Cited Primary Literature Danielewski, Mark Z House of Leaves New York: Random House, 2000 Hall, Steven “The Aquarium Fragment: Negative 1/ 36 ” Canongate, 2007, www canongate tv/ media/ pdf/ Aquarium_Fragment_Prologue pdf Accessed 19 July 2015 Hall, Steven The Raw Shark Texts. ‘Unspace Edition.’ Edinburgh/ New York: Canongate, 2007 Horne, Jules Nanonovels: Five-Minute Flash Fiction Selkirik: Texthouse, 2015 59 Vera Nünning/ Ansgar Nünning “An Outline of the Objectives, Features and Challenges of the British Novel in the Twenty-First Century,” The British Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Cultural Concerns - Literary Developments - Model Interpretations, eds Vera Nünning/ Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT, 2018), 3 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 Hutton, Stephanie “Geology of a Girl ” National Flash Fiction Day, 2017, https: / / www nationalflashfictionday.co.uk/ index.php/ competition/ 2017-microfiction-results/ #Hutton. 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