Digital Narrative: Negotiating a Path between Experimental Writing and Popular Culture

Is there room, between the aggressively avant-gardistic, conceptual, often not-to-be-repeated experiments of electronic literature, and the stereotyped or utilitarian narratives of computer games and social media, for new forms of narrative that take advantage of the affordances of digital technology without sacrificing what makes narrative so important for the life of the mind, namely its ability to capture actual or imaginary life experience ? In this presentation I will discuss three digital or semi-digital texts that could fill the gap between the ‘North Pole’ of novelty for novelty's sake and the Tropics of popular culture: the reworking of the tale of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in the independent game The Path, the linear, multimodal story Inanimate Alice by Kate Pullinger, and the augmented book Night Film by Marisha Pessl.