Digital print in the material world: paratext in service of narrative

Abstract

In the early 1990s, most large American publishing houses adopted desktop publishing software, creating an entirely digital book design and layout process. And no one noticed. To this day, only a few scholars have mentioned this fact, and there has been no significant consideration of the effect that desktop publishing has had on literature. This article considers how desktop publishing was employed in three twenty-first century novels: Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2001), Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). These novels are very different and employ desktop publishing software in different ways, showing the expansion of possibility in the era of digital print. Yet, all three also show a tendency to use the expanded typographic possibilities of digital technology to reinforce narrative and textual meaning, rather than to disrupt the workings of language or book traditions.