Awareness of textual constructedness: Readerly responses to multimodality in post-postmodernist fictions of the digital

This article addresses textual constructedness as a particular kind of foregrounding and focuses on the question of how readers deal with multimodality in post-postmodernist fictions of the digital (PPFDs). PPFDs are contemporary print fictions that imitate, incorporate and/or utilize digital media, and also display thematic concerns for the digitally mediated worlds in which they are set. Multimodal PPFDs combine prose segments with visual representations of emails, text messages, social media posts, memos, online forums, tweets, blogs or non-networked software (such as PowerPoint presentations). By triangulating three datasets (namely responses to open questions, Goodreads reviews and reading group data), we address the following interrelated research questions: (1) How does the awareness of textual constructedness manifest itself in readerly responses to multimodal deviations in PPFDs? (2) How can we account for the impact of researcher-led questions versus reviews written without any knowledge of the research project? (3) How does immediate versus delayed post-processing influence readers’ responses? (4) What are the effects of readers reading text passages versus full texts in their responses? (5) How do readers react to different degrees of multimodality in the texts? We show how multimodality acts as a form of literary self-reflexivity that foregrounds a text’s artificiality, provide evidence that readers notice the shifts between semiotic modes, and present a new typology of eleven distinct reading strategies for processing foregrounding in multimodal PPFDs based on empirical evidence. Overall we thus show what happens when readers become aware of shifts between semiotic modes and determine subdimensions of the awareness of textual constructedness.