Perspectivas del libro impreso en el siglo XXI a través del estudio de caso de la novela “House of leaves“ de Mark Z. Danielewski

Abstract

In 2000, Mark Z. Danielewski published House of Leaves, an original and complex novel that mixes genres and where literature and graphic design go hand in hand. This work arises in the midst of the digital revolution of the 21st century, as an example of a literary trend that consists of writing books that cling to their codex form, disdaining the possibilities offered by electronic texts, in an apology for what Jessica Pressman has called “the aesthetic of bookishness”. These novels express a desire to renew the medium and add to the verbal narration a whole set of material, visual and transmedia elements that give rise to complicated literary works that require from the reader new ways of approaching and understanding the texts. This could be considered as the latest more stage in the history of the book and the evolution of literary forms within the current cultural context. This phenomenon is studied through various related theories such as the multimodality proposals of Alison Gibbons, the liberature of Zenon Fajfer and Katarzyna Bazarnik or the ideas about cybertexts and electronic literature proposed by Espen J. Aarseth or N. Katherine Hayles. Hence, this thesis presents itself as, a case study focused on the aforementioned novel by Mark Z. Danielewski, since it can be considered an epitome of this trend, taking into consideration all these mentioned features can be perfectly identified in it.