Alice’s Anima: The Obligation of a Transmedia Reading

Abstract

This paper suggests an analysis of “Inanimate Alice” by Kate Pullinger as an example of a transmedia narrative that triggers a new reading experience whilst proposing a literary alterity between reading and performance. Narrative experiences that elect the visual plasticity, interchanging games and tactility as drivers of the creative process are not new. Yet, narrative experiences, which have been created in the gap between reality and fiction, have found on the digital realm the ideal environment to multiple hybrid experiences. A critical analysis of this digital fiction tries to illustrate how literary art finds its space and time in a metamorphosed continuum and crafts experience with a transmedia reading. All the multimedia hybrids with which this digital literary work engages, challenge readers to interpret different signals and poetic structures that also embed game rhetoric. Yet, among Alice’s playful world and cognitive dissonance, meaning is only found and reading happens when time, space and attention are available to configure the story and interpret significance. Transmedia literacies give life to this experience of online reading when they focus and draw attention not to a simple new behaviour or a single new practice, but to different objective and subjective value forms.