Paper Cuts: Investigating Paper Affect in Post-Millennial Literature

This critical-creative thesis will take the form of a multimodal text that will simultaneously analyse and materially engage with the relationship between paper and contemporary experimental literature. Paper Cuts will bring together literary studies and creative writing with elements of fine art and graphic design by experimenting with the 'graphic surface' (White, 2005) using techniques such as décollage, découpé and fold-over alongside varied typesettings in order to explore the sense of the tactile provoked by printbased media. The final piece will be a hybrid text that intertwines creative narrative and critical discussion, combining a critical analysis of the use of print-based media in contemporary literature with my own experimental fictional narrative. Building on Barthes' (1975) claims that the text provokes emotional and libidinal responses, Paper Cuts will analyse how haptic and other forms of embodied engagement with paper can trigger affect in the reader. The thesis will examine largely neglected contemporary print-and-paper-based experimental texts including Dodson's Bats of the Republic (2015), which includes illustrations and supplementary documents; Zambra's Multiple Choice (2016), written in the form of an aptitude test; and Stephenson and Galland's The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (2017), which includes photocopied material and varying typography.
This thesis builds directly on my previous experience of working in English, Creative Writing and Graphic Design. For my MRes, I am working on a critical-creative thesis on contemporary experimental fiction which will allow me to gain subject expertise and creative skills that will prepare me directly for the proposed project. I am also a member of the Critical Poetics research group, which has heightened my interest in developing cross-disciplinary and creative-critical approaches to the text. My BA Creative Writing dissertation (awarded the highest grade in 2018) took the form of an experimental multinarrative text. I was also awarded the Carcanet Press/PN Review Prize for my BA work. My final year elective modules included 'Literature in Theory', with core sessions on literature, and digital and print technologies. In 2017 I joined Museumand, the National Caribbean Heritage Museum, as a Creative Assistant, and in September 2018 I took up a curatorial placement with Nottingham Contemporary. Both roles have allowed me to work with cultural sector organisations that are both regionally and nationally significant. My prior studies in Creative Media Production and Graphic Design have provided me with a detailed understanding of forms of visual arts experimentation that will be invaluable to my proposed project.
Building on recent work in affect theory (e.g. Ahmed, 2004; Malinowska and Miller, 2017; Stern, 2019), Paper Cuts will examine how interacting with the printed medium can produce various psychophysiological responses. In the past two decades critical work on hapticity and embodied cognition has started to emerge, including notable work by Hayles (2012), Borsuk (2015) and Kuzmicová (2017). However, whereas existing research tends to place digital production at the forefront of literary experimentation, the proposed project will consider how paper continues to offer forms of literary innovation. O'Donnell (2013), Krukowsi (2017) and Sax (2017) reflect on how analogue modes of cultural production have resurfaced in recent years, provoking tactile and other forms of sensory response. Bilton (2012) comments on the haptic affordances of paper while Leslie (2016) understands the encounter with the touch screen as ambivalently responsive and closed to authentic interaction. Considering the resurgence of analogue practice in contemporary culture and building on Kress (2009), Gibbons (2016) and Jewitt et al's (2016) work on multimodal literature, this project will consider how the printed medium not only persists but is also essential to new literary practices.