Description

• Title:
  Your Choice and Negative Affect in Alejandro Zambra’s Multiple Choice (2014) and Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (2019)
• Creator:
  Wong, Denise
• Contributor:
  Rembowska-Płuciennik, Magdalena;
  Jeziorska-Haładyj, Joanna;
  Queen Mary University of London, School of English and Drama
• Description:
  This essay builds upon David Herman’s idea of double deixis to explore the ‘choose-yourown- adventure’ (CYOA) form as a popular subtype of you-narration that foregrounds reader involvement, co-creation, and agency. The central conceit from such instances of hypertext fiction to self-help writing seems to be that you — the reader/consumer — have a choice. However, in my reading of Alejandro Zambra’s Multiple Choice (2014) and Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (2019), the false equivalence between choice and non-choice becomes particularly palpable when considering the affect of the second-person mode. While the former exemplifies what Irene Kacandes has called ‘proto-’ or ‘paper hypertext’ (2001: 200), the latter is also a memoir. I look at the underexamined intersection of hypertext fiction and autobiographical writing in the history of second-person narratives to restore the significance of negative affect to critical discussion. The agency to choose in you-narratives not only involves the anticipation of guilt, fault and/or shame, but autodiegetic instances of you-narration like Machado’s memoir formalise Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenological description of shame and Denise Riley’s concept of malignant inner speech, or malediction.
• Object availability:
  free access
• Rights:
  Uznanie autorstwa 4.0 Międzynarodowe;
  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
• Date:
  2023.04.15;
  2022
• Type:
  Article
• Language:
  English
• Format:
  application/pdf
• Publisher:
  Łódzkie Towarzystwo Naukowe; Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Relation:
  Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich;4;
  65
• Subject:
  second-person narration;
  hypertext fiction;
  shame;
  choice;
  Alejandro Zambra;
  Carmen Maria Machado
• Identifier:
  0084-4446;
  http://hdl.handle.net/11089/46716 ;
  2451-0335;
  10.26485/ZRL/2022/65.4/3
• Data provider:
  Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Can I use it?:
  check license
• Type:
  image