Astrid Ensslin
My research interests are in Digital Humanities, bridging digital media and game studies, electronic literature and digital fiction, (ludo-)narratology, stylistics, discourse and corpus analysis. I have a BA/MA (Distinction) from Tuebingen University (2002), a Postgraduate Teaching Certificate from Leeds University and a PhD (s.c.l.) from Heidelberg University (2006). I am founding editor of the MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities and the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds. I have (co-)directed various externally funded projects, such as the AHRC "Reading Digital Fiction" project, the Leverhulme "Digital Fiction International Network" (DFIN), and the AHRC 'What's Hard in German' Corpus Project (with Prof Anke Luedeling, Berlin Humboldt).
For updates on my research outputs, teaching, etc., follow the link to my homepage.
For updates on my research outputs, teaching, etc., follow the link to my homepage.
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Books by Astrid Ensslin
Today, with growing frequency, narratives are experienced on the smaller screens of laptops, tablets, and even mobile phones, which in turn become “all-purpose reading machines” (Tosca and Pedersen 358) that shape the ways in which our bodies and minds interact with narrative meanings. Narratives that we peruse via small screens typically 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 concepts often blur) specifically for interactive small screens. The functionalities and affordances of these digital-born fictions (see Bell et al.) are not replicable in any other medial form; nor can they be made manifest in any printed form; nor do they demonstrate an allegiance to any single pre-existing art form. It is within the idiosyncratic nature of small screen fictions that they embrace the experimental affordances of the tools in and for which they are written, and that they give rise to ever new ways of gestural manipulations (Bouchardon). They allow us to explore new ways of using parts or functions of our bodies – be it our hands and fingers, voice, breath, or even brain waves and full-body motion – in combination with exploratory-noematic strategies of reading and play. By the same token, small screen fictions accentuate and foreground the playful nature of reading and situate it in contexts and settings conventionally reserved for immersive video gaming, for example.
The contributions to this special issue seek to capture and exemplify some of these trends. They range from in-depth analyses of individual texts to theoretical and philosophical discussions and empirical reader-response studies. They span a diversity of different platforms and genres, from narrative videogames and ludic, gamelike fictions using 3D immersive environments, touchscreen technologies, or more traditional mouse-and-keyboard combinations; to participatory social media narratives; networked and locative narratives; interactive graphic novels; interactive hypermedia, as well as haptic and augmented reality fictions. Furthermore, the articles compiled in this collection show that small screen fictions appeal to a variety of target audiences, from indie gamers to bloggers, and from pre-school children with a propensity for canonical cartoon characters to mature adults with an interest in exploring the depths of human trauma through palimpsestically layered, symbolic landscapes.
Thematically, our authors engage with the changing cultural and demographic patterns and expectations of engagement with digital narrative; they evaluate the shifting and conflicted roles and power relationships revolving around concepts of co- and fan authorship in narrative creation and construction as well as the economic, cultural, social, and political contexts of authoring and reading networked narratives; they address the role of touch and tactility, as well as other human senses in experiencing embodied narrative; they consider the material implications of reading and interacting with code-generated works; they discuss the convergence of historical philosophical and avant-garde thought from the Sublime to contemporary bookishness (Pressman); they address the affordances and cognitive effects of multilinear, fragmented storytelling, particularly in relation to narrative hypothesis formation and forensic reading; they reflect upon the challenges associated with theorizing and analyzing ludo-literary and ludo-narrative artefacts that necessitate alternative, cross-disciplinary yet simultaneously medium-specific hermeneutic frameworks. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, they each shed light on individual facets of how the meanings and our perceptions of fiction, genre, and literature are bound to transform in light of the textual, perceptive, and interactive phenomena under investigation.
This essay is a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Language and Media (ed. Perrin and Cotter, 2017).
Focal areas explored in this book include:
• aspects of videogame textuality and how games relate to other texts
• the formation of lexical terms and use of metaphor in the language of gaming
• gamer slang and 'buddylects'
• the construction of game worlds and their rules, of gamer identities and communities
• dominant discourse patterns among gamers and how they relate to the nature of gaming
• the multimodal language of games and gaming
• the ways in which ideologies of race, gender, media effects and language are constructed.
Informed by the very latest scholarship and illustrated with topical examples throughout, The Language of Gaming is ideal for students of applied linguistics, videogame studies and media studies who are seeking a wide-ranging introduction to the field.
Papers by Astrid Ensslin
Today, with growing frequency, narratives are experienced on the smaller screens of laptops, tablets, and even mobile phones, which in turn become “all-purpose reading machines” (Tosca and Pedersen 358) that shape the ways in which our bodies and minds interact with narrative meanings. Narratives that we peruse via small screens typically 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 concepts often blur) specifically for interactive small screens. The functionalities and affordances of these digital-born fictions (see Bell et al.) are not replicable in any other medial form; nor can they be made manifest in any printed form; nor do they demonstrate an allegiance to any single pre-existing art form. It is within the idiosyncratic nature of small screen fictions that they embrace the experimental affordances of the tools in and for which they are written, and that they give rise to ever new ways of gestural manipulations (Bouchardon). They allow us to explore new ways of using parts or functions of our bodies – be it our hands and fingers, voice, breath, or even brain waves and full-body motion – in combination with exploratory-noematic strategies of reading and play. By the same token, small screen fictions accentuate and foreground the playful nature of reading and situate it in contexts and settings conventionally reserved for immersive video gaming, for example.
The contributions to this special issue seek to capture and exemplify some of these trends. They range from in-depth analyses of individual texts to theoretical and philosophical discussions and empirical reader-response studies. They span a diversity of different platforms and genres, from narrative videogames and ludic, gamelike fictions using 3D immersive environments, touchscreen technologies, or more traditional mouse-and-keyboard combinations; to participatory social media narratives; networked and locative narratives; interactive graphic novels; interactive hypermedia, as well as haptic and augmented reality fictions. Furthermore, the articles compiled in this collection show that small screen fictions appeal to a variety of target audiences, from indie gamers to bloggers, and from pre-school children with a propensity for canonical cartoon characters to mature adults with an interest in exploring the depths of human trauma through palimpsestically layered, symbolic landscapes.
Thematically, our authors engage with the changing cultural and demographic patterns and expectations of engagement with digital narrative; they evaluate the shifting and conflicted roles and power relationships revolving around concepts of co- and fan authorship in narrative creation and construction as well as the economic, cultural, social, and political contexts of authoring and reading networked narratives; they address the role of touch and tactility, as well as other human senses in experiencing embodied narrative; they consider the material implications of reading and interacting with code-generated works; they discuss the convergence of historical philosophical and avant-garde thought from the Sublime to contemporary bookishness (Pressman); they address the affordances and cognitive effects of multilinear, fragmented storytelling, particularly in relation to narrative hypothesis formation and forensic reading; they reflect upon the challenges associated with theorizing and analyzing ludo-literary and ludo-narrative artefacts that necessitate alternative, cross-disciplinary yet simultaneously medium-specific hermeneutic frameworks. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, they each shed light on individual facets of how the meanings and our perceptions of fiction, genre, and literature are bound to transform in light of the textual, perceptive, and interactive phenomena under investigation.
This essay is a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Language and Media (ed. Perrin and Cotter, 2017).
Focal areas explored in this book include:
• aspects of videogame textuality and how games relate to other texts
• the formation of lexical terms and use of metaphor in the language of gaming
• gamer slang and 'buddylects'
• the construction of game worlds and their rules, of gamer identities and communities
• dominant discourse patterns among gamers and how they relate to the nature of gaming
• the multimodal language of games and gaming
• the ways in which ideologies of race, gender, media effects and language are constructed.
Informed by the very latest scholarship and illustrated with topical examples throughout, The Language of Gaming is ideal for students of applied linguistics, videogame studies and media studies who are seeking a wide-ranging introduction to the field.
The paper outlines a deductive approach to second-person narration in Deena Larsen and geniwate's (2003) The Princess Murderer which aims to test the claims of previously published analyses (Ensslin and Bell 2012, Bell and Ensslin 2011) on the effect of textual ‘you’ with real readers. Presenting preliminary findings from a pilot study, we combine an analysis of reader-responses to a range of ‘you’s in The Princess Murderer alongside a stylistic analysis of the text to show how those responses might be generated. We aim to show whether the readers’ responses corroborate or challenge current theories of textual you (e.g. Herman 2002) and also offer a new empirical approach to testing textual 'you' in digital fiction more generally (cf. Brunyé et al 2009).
Key words: digital fiction; textual you; digital reading; methodology; empirical
The project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Funding Ref: AH/K004174/1).