Experimenting with materials: print and digital synergies

The dynamic presence of digital technologies nowadays has paved the path for the writing of intricate stories that invite us to rethink how they have actually been conceptualized and created with emphasis placed both on their textual qualities and the medium through which they are delivered. This kind of writing either develops in tandem with an experimental take on the book form or it draws on its codex roots and the utilization of various digital supported platforms, AR technologies, mobile phones, and apps. This has certainly led to a reconsideration of the literariness of such writings since this no longer relies on the verbal elements of a story but also on the synergies that develop between the verbal, visual, tactile and aural elements readers come across through the use of print and digital narratives. By drawing on the observations of various theoreticians such as N. Katherine Hayles, Marie-Laure Ryan, Jessica Pressman, Jason Farman and others a number of case studies will be presented with attention paid to various North American authors and their experimentation with diverse media of production.

Dr. Tatiani G. Rapatzikou is Associate Professor at the Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh), Greece. She holds a B.A. from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, while for her graduate studies she holds an M.A. from Lancaster University and a Ph.D. in from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K. (funded by the Board of Greek State Scholarships Foundation, I.K.Y). She was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the M.I.T. Comparative Media Studies program (2009). She has received fellowships including the Arthur Miller Centre Award (2000), the BAAS Short Term Travel Award (2000), and British Library Eccles Centre for American Studies Visiting Fellowship (2020). She was a Visiting Research Scholar at the Program in Literature at Duke University, U.S. (2012) and at the Department of English at York University, Toronto, Canada (2016). Her articles and (co)editing projects that appear in volumes of scholarly journals and essay collections focus on contemporary American prose and poetry (print and digital), while her monograph titled Gothic Motifs in the Fiction of William Gibson (Rodopi 2004) concentrates on the technological uncanny and cyber-gothic. She recently co-edited the volumes Ethnicity and Gender Debates: Cross-Readings of the United States of America in the New Millennium (Peter Lang 2020) and Απ-εικονίσεις της Αμερικής [Visualizing America] (Hellenic Association for American Studies Digital Publications for the National Documentation Center 2021). She is a member of the main editorial board of the following two online peer/blind reviewed journals: Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media (hosted by AUTh) and AmLit: American Literatures (hosted by the University of Graz, Austria). She is currently the Vice President of the Hellenic Association for American Studies (HELAAS), while between 2014-2022 she was the Secretary General of the European Association for American Studies (EAAS). In addition, she served as the Director of the Digital Humanities Lab “Psifis” at AUTh for the period between 2019-2022. Her teaching and research covers the areas of contemporary American literature, postmodern writing practice, cyberpunk/cyberculture with emphasis on William Gibson, electronic literature, print and digital convergence.