THE READER AND MULTIMODALITY: A CASE STUDY ON MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI’S THE FAMILIARBukovec, Nejc (Avtor) Lipovšek, Frančiška (Mentor) Krevel, Mojca (Komentor) Mark Z. DanielewskiAlison Gibbonsmultimodalitydoubly deictic subjectivitysemioticsThe present master’s thesis is an exploration of multimodal techniques and their cognitive impact on the reader on the case of Mark Z Danielewski’s pentalogy The Familiar. The pictorial turn as described by W. J. T. Mitchell finds contemporary society to be completely infatuated with the image. The shift towards the visual has been happening in literature as well, from Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk to Gibbon’s theory of the multimodal genre, and the present thesis places Danielewski’s series of novels at the very pinnacle of the multimodal experimentation. The novels mostly utilise the multimodal techniques for the purposes of characterisation and link the reader and the character through a process called doubly deictic subjectivity. In the thesis these notions are put to the test empirically. A study performed on actual readers confirms the cognitive link between the reader and the character to be higher in multimodally enhanced texts. As opposed to traditionally presented literature, multimodal enhancements also engender a higher engagement of the readers. The present analysis is far from definitive and limited in scope, but it does open up more avenues for further studies.20242024-03-08 07:45:20Magistrsko delo/naloga154899sl