Immersion through Google Street View: multimodal representation of storyworld in Entrances & Exits by Reif Larsen

Abstract

This article investigates the potential of new media for the creation of immersive verbal-visual forms by using Reif Larsen’s Entrances & Exits (2016) as a case study. Designed for touchscreen devices such as tablets and mobile phones, this digital imagetext combines Google Street View and verbal passages to produce a narrative with which the reader is invited to engage in a haptic manner, going beyond the mode of reception typical of print literature. Having discussed the hybridity of Entrances & Exits and the peculiar nature of Google Street View as a continuous and navigable visualization of actual space, the article draws on multimodal and cognitive narrative theories to analyse the ways in which the geovisual and the verbal interanimate each other. It focuses in particular on immersion as an embodied, sensorial experience, which Larsen enhances by allowing the reader to explore the space of the storyworld from the internal perceptual perspective of the narrator–protagonist. Simultaneously, he self-reflexively discloses fissures and glitches in Google Street View and thus elicits a reflection on the representational capacity of digital geovisuality. The article concludes by suggesting that Entrances & Exits belongs to the vanguard of a new genre of digital imagetexts that integrate textuality, visuality, and haptics.