Encountering Unnatural E-Literature: Tracing Interpretation and Relationality Across Multimodal Response and Digital Annotation

Abstract

The emergence of e-literature-texts created on and for digital devices has coincided with innovative, transgressive methods of storytelling. Pry, an iOS-based text, exemplifies e-literature's potential to rethink traditional narrative conventions. Rather than depict the real world as we experience it (i.e. mimesis), Pry features metaleptic elements (i.e. jarring transgressions across narrative levels) and unnatural temporality (i.e. nonlinear, contradictory jumps across time). This article traces how a graduate class of librarians and preservice teachers responded to Pry's unnatural narratology through multimodal composition and annotation. Findings suggest that e-literature may demand more expansive repertoires of text interpretation and relationality.

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English in Education
Research Journal of the National Association for the Teaching of English
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Encountering unnatural E-literature: tracing
interpretation and relationality across multimodal
response and digital annotation
Alex Corbitt, Jon M. Wargo & Clare O’Connor
To cite this article: Alex Corbitt, Jon M. Wargo & Clare O’Connor (2021): Encountering unnatural
E-literature: tracing interpretation and relationality across multimodal response and digital
annotation, English in Education, DOI: 10.1080/04250494.2021.1933424
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/04250494.2021.1933424
Published online: 16 Jun 2021.
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Encountering unnatural E-literature: tracing interpretation
and relationality across multimodal response and digital
annotation
Alex Corbitt , Jon M. Wargo and Clare O’Connor
Lynch School of Education and Human Development, Boston College, Boston, United States
ABSTRACT
The emergence of e-literature – texts created on and for digital
devices – has coincided with innovative, transgressive methods of
storytelling. Pry, an iOS-based text, exemplies e-literature’s poten-
tial to rethink traditional narrative conventions. Rather than depict
the real-world as we experience it (i.e. mimesis), Pry features meta-
leptic elements (i.e. jarring transgressions across narrative levels)
and unnatural temporality (i.e. nonlinear, contradictory jumps
across time). This article traces how a graduate class of librarians
and preservice teachers responded to Pry’s unnatural narratology
through multimodal composition and annotation. Findings suggest
that e-literature may demand more expansive repertoires of text
interpretation and relationality.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 23 November 2020
Accepted 18 May 2021
KEYWORDS
Reader-response; new
literacies; multimodality;
e-literature; narratology
Introduction
Contemporary research in English education has explored how K-12 students (ages
5–18), educators, and prospective teachers use a range of media and digital technolo-
gies to interpret and respond to print-based literature (Alvermann 2008; Doering, Beach,
and O’Brien 2007; Jocius 2013; Lewkowich 2019; Smith 2018). This interest has been
amplied by recent scholarship on how students encounter unnatural literature – texts
that subvert mimesis and refuse to “reproduce the world as we know it” (Alber 2009).
Serani and Reid (2019) and Pantaleo (2019), for instance, study how youth respond to
unnatural features of children’s and young adult literature. Norledge (2019), compara-
tively, considers how adult learners interpret unnatural story-worlds and minds. Few
studies, however, examine the aordances of digital technologies for responding to
unnatural e-literature – texts created on and for digital devices that disrupt the con-
ventions of readers’ lived reality.
Taking this paucity in scholarship as impetus for research, this study examines how
prospective English teachers and youth librarians in an online “Teaching Young Adult
Literature” course leveraged multimodal composition and digital annotation to respond
to Pry, an unnatural e-literature text. Seeking to advance a more nuanced understanding
of how readers encounter unnatural e-literature, this study explored the following
research questions:
CONTACT Alex Corbitt corbitta@bc.edu Boston College, Boston, United States
ENGLISH IN EDUCATION
https://doi.org/10.1080/04250494.2021.1933424
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

(1) How do prospective English teachers and youth librarians in an online “Teaching
Young Adult Literature” use digital composition and annotation to express natur-
alising and unnaturalising interpretations of Pry?
(2) How do participants use these tools and technologies to signal cognitive and
aective relationships with Pry?
This article asks the latter inquiries to examine the challenges participants faced
while interpreting and experiencing the dissonances of unnatural storytelling.
Ultimately, we suggest that the ambiguous, aective force of unnatural e-literature
highlights the aesthetic potential of multimodal composing. Narratives like Pry have
the capacity to move and inspire audiences in ways that extend beyond conscious,
causal understandings. But to allow for these moments, readers must suspend tradi-
tional modes of interpretation and relationality. To this end, we recommend that
educators interrogate literacy pedagogies that privilege naturalising, cognitive encoun-
ters with texts.
Theoretical framework
This paper is situated at the intersection of two theoretical inquiry-spaces: New Literacy
Studies (Gee 2012; Street 1984), and reader-response theory (Rosenblatt 1978; Serani
2012). Refracted through these perspectives, we examine how prospective English edu-
cators and librarians represent Pry through multimodal response and understand the text
across a variety of interpretational strategies.
New Literacy Studies (NLS)
This study is broadly grounded in sociocultural theories of literacy – particularly New
Literacy Studies (Street 1995) – wherein practices (e.g., digital composing) are shaped by
a range of social, historical, and material factors. A New Literacy Studies (NLS) perspec-
tive views composition as mediated action between agents and their cultural tools
(Vygotsky 1978; Wertsch 1998). As a theoretical perspective, NLS has enabled research-
ers and educators to consider the social practices and interactions taking place in
literacy events (e.g., reading e-Literature) and the range of modes involved in meaning-
making.
Through a NLS perspective, we consider how participants’ encounters with Pry are
“situated in dialogue with and in extension of other readings” (Smagorinsky 2001, 141).
Unlike analogue, alphanumeric texts, Pry is an immersive digital story that employs
a breadth of modes to unnatural eects. The narrative is told through video, audio, and
touch as it rapidly toggles across layers of the protagonist’s – James’s – consciousness. We
trace how Pry shapes readers’ interpretive and relational experiences in ways that some-
times contradict their histories of reading mimetic narratives and alphanumeric print. Pry’s
design and interface, constrained and mediated by the digital, asks readers to rethink how
they come to know and relate to text. Moments of participant frustration were of
particular interest to the us, as they signalled potential sites of dissonance between Pry
and their preconceptions of narrative and text.
2A. CORBITT ET AL.

Reader-response theory
Text interpretation is a contentious issue between scholars who assert that “comprehen-
sion [is] an objective enterprise” and scholars who claim that “any text allows for an
innite array of legitimate readings” (Serani 2012, 155). Reader-response theory,
a partner perspective to NLS, advances the notion that meaning crystallises through
dialectical transactions between readers and texts. Rosenblatt’s (1978) notion of “aes-
thetic reading” (i.e. relational readings in the moment, rather than instrumentalist read-
ings that aim to “take away” information) allows for expansive interpretations and
engagements with text. She explains, for example, how aesthetic reading can propel self-
inquiry and expression. Contemporary reader-response scholarship has built on
Rosenblatt’s work to address how youth situate themselves in text worlds (Cushing
2018), communicate cultural literacies (Gordon 2018), and perform across analogue and
digital landscapes (Coles and Bryer 2018). This study takes up reader-response as it
pertains to readers’ experience with unnatural narratology.
Narratologists debate the role of interpretation in the context of reading unnatural
narratives (Iversen 2013). Some scholars advocate “naturalizing” readings of unnatural
texts, employing interpretational strategies to make “strange narratives more readable”
(Alber 2009). Others endorse “[un]naturalizing readings [that] leave open the possibility
that unnatural narratives contain or produce eects and emotions that are not easily (if at
all) explainable or resolvable” (Iversen 2013, 96). The latter viewpoint suggests that
unnatural narratology disrupts static interpretations that constrain the meaning of texts
(Nielsen 2013). Like narratologists, students demonstrate a breadth of interpretive
responses to unnatural narratives. For example, Norledge (2019) highlights how unnatural
conventions can elicit conicting degrees of immersion and empathy in readers. Given
their proclivity to polarise, unnatural narratives are ripe for analysing readers’ response.
In this study, participants assumed what Serani (2012) calls a “reader as designer”
orientation. A reader as designer perspective attends to the ways readers co-design
narratives through their participation with text. We turn to a reader as designer perspec-
tive as a theoretical and methodological bridge between NLS and reader-response. To this
end, we asked participants to use a breadth of digital tools to trace their various inter-
pretational and relational encounters with Pry. Participants leveraged aural, haptic, and
visual modes to represent and reect on Pry. In our analysis, we attended to how
participants imposed meaning (naturalising) or embraced the unknowable (unnaturalis-
ing) in Pry. We also analysed how participants related to Pry across cognitive (i.e. explicitly
causal) and aective (i.e. pre-cognitive) registers.
Methods and modes of inquiry
Context and focal assignment
This study was conducted in a Spring 2017 “Teaching Young Adult Literature” course at an
urban midwestern university in the United States. The focus of the course was to examine
a variety of literary texts and consider teaching methods for secondary and extra-
academic spaces (e.g. libraries). The course was facilitated online and cross-listed for
undergraduate and graduate students. 23 students enrolled, representing a mix of pro-
spective teachers and library information science majors. 14 of the students consented to
ENGLISH IN EDUCATION 3

participate in the study (three self-identied as men, 11 self-identied as women). 10
students were English education majors and four students were library and information
science majors. The participants ranged in age from 20–43 and had a breadth of experi-
ence with young adult literature.
The course’s focal assignment was titled “Swipe, Tap, Read: Making Experience(s) Move
with Responding to e-Literature.” The assignment invited students to read a work of
e-literature and portray their reading experience through multimodal video responses.
Despite having the option to choose one of two e-literature texts (Pry [Tender Claws LLC,
Gorman 2014] or Inanimate Alice), all focal participants chose to read Pry. Jon provided
participants with a range of open-source media and tools to represent their encounters
with Pry. Participants were also invited to create original content for their responses. Their
responses combined video, audio, photography, and annotation. Aware that video pro-
duction might be an unfamiliar mode of composing for some participants, Jon created
a sample video to model how to use the relevant software.
At the conclusion of creating their multimodal response, participants used a free open
source program called VideoAnt to embed annotations. VideoAnt allowed users to upload
media and queue annotations along specied timestamps. When the media was replayed,
their annotations emerged in the margins of the project at the designated times. In the
data generation and analyses sections we explain how these compositions and annota-
tions informed our analysis.
Limitations of assignment
Jon’s assignment contained numerous limitations and creative constraints that may have
impacted student-produced responses. For example, his sample video likely framed how
participants structured and presented their nal video responses. Participants also had
varying prociencies in creating videos and annotating their projects with VideoAnt.
Although participants were invited to use a limitless array of borrowed and user-
generated content (e.g., open stock video hosted on https://www.pexels.com/videos/),
some felt more comfortable using a small, user-friendly toolkit of audiovisual clips. It is
also worth mentioning that the semester timeframe of the project may have impacted the
length and scope of the completed projects. Despite this, our research team was pleased
to nd that none of the participants reported feeling that the project materials limited
their precision of response. We were also delighted to see how participants used similar
video tracks to communicate drastically dierent readings of Pry.
Pry and unnatural narratology
Pry is an iOS-based text by Tender Claws LLC released in 2014 by Samantha Gorman and
Danny Cannizzaro. As a text, Pry invites readers to enter the mind and viewpoint of James,
a Gulf War veteran who is adjusting to civilian life. Through pinching and pulling the
screen, readers advance the narrative by “prying” into James’s rst-person subconscious.
Pry leverages the haptic, aural, and visual aordances of mobile media to detail James’s
memories, portray his battle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and document his
vision loss. The more readers interact with the text, the more information they discover
about James’s past and present.
4A. CORBITT ET AL.

Unnatural narratives, like Pry, are those “that conspicuously violate conventions of
standard narrative forms” (Richardson, 2011). They
have temporalities, storyworlds, mind representations, or acts of narration that would have to
be construed as . . . impossible or implausible in real-world storytelling situations, but that
allow the reader to interpret them instead as reliable, possible, and/or authoritative by cueing
her to change her interpretational strategies. (Nielsen 2013).
Pry embodies various characteristics of unnatural narratology, including metalepsis (i.e.
jarring transgressions across narrative levels), unnatural temporality (i.e. nonlinear, contra-
dictory jumps across time), and unnatural minds (i.e. narrative minds that resist
interpretation).
Metalepsis in pry
Metalepsis is a characteristic of unnatural narratology that refers to transgressions across
narrative boundaries (Bell 2013; Bell and Alber 2012). As a metaleptic text, Pry jumps
across four horizontal narrative levels: 1) James’ experiences in the storyworld (diegetic
level); 2) James’ narration (extra-diegetic level 1); 3) James’ subconscious (extra-diegetic
level 2); and 4) the chapters and menus outside of the storyworld (extra-textual). Readers
experience frequent, often jarring transgressions between levels (see Figure 1). One
moment readers might experience life through James’ eyes, whereas in another moment
they might jump into his subconscious and encounter ashing images and words. Pry’s
metaleptic jumps create a frenzied experience that challenges readers to make sense of
fragmented information across the various narrative levels.
Unnatural temporality in pry
Natural temporality occurs when “the narrator tells the story retrospectively (i.e., in the
past tense), as the audience’s reception of the story is prospective; the interested reader
wants to learn what has already happened and moves ever closer to the time of the
narrating” (Alber et al. 2010, 116). Pry, however, jumps across the past, present, and future
without any sense of linearity or continuity. Readers are presented with alternative time-
lines and contradictory events. A linear sequence of James’ life events eludes the reader.
Figure 1. Narrative levels in pry.
ENGLISH IN EDUCATION 5

Unnatural minds in pry
Narratology often employs a theory of mind (ToM) approach to interpretation. Our ability
to understand others and our social milieu is rooted in a kind of mind reading (Baron-
Cohen et al. 1995). Palmer (2007) argues that readers employ mind reading to understand
a text’s narrator. In Pry, however, James dees readers’ eorts to read his mind. Metalepsis
and unnatural temporality converge in Pry to confront readers with what Stefan Iversen
calls the “unnatural mind” (Iversen 2013). The unnatural mind disrupts the rules and
norms of cognitive narratology and requires new methods of interpretation.
The “unreadable” mind, according to Abbott (2008), is one that holds readers captive as
they are left to cope with dissonance and discomfort. When readers impose meaning and
interpretation on the unreadable mind, they leverage reductive analysis to alleviate this
discomfort. Abbott explains how “the very act of grasping at meaning suggests . . . that
the unreadable is, by and large, unendurable and that, one way or another, readers will
nd some strategy to make it go away” (Abbott 2008, 453). Abbott outlines three
naturalising interpretive strategies that readers often employ to avoid captivity in the
unreadable mind: 1) stereotyping the mind (i.e. James is crazy), 2) framing the mind as
a catalyst (i.e. James is instrumental, a means to reveal other characters), and 3) symbolis-
ing the mind (i.e. James is a metaphor for trauma). All of these readings seek natural
resolutions to unnatural phenomena.
Abbott’s critique of naturalising interpretive strategies highlights a tension in the
eld of unnatural narratology scholarship. Scholars like Jan Alber strive to “develop
‘sense-making strategies’ for the ‘impossible storyworlds’ of postmodern ction – in
eect, to make the unreadable ‘readable’” (Abbott 2008, 448). However, scholars like
H. Porter Abbott, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Stefan Ivensen seek to embrace the captivity
of the unreadable mind. They strive to move into a space of logical dissonance and
aective resonance, allowing the “haunting feeling [unnatural] narratives produce to
teach us something . . . [beyond] the current intellectual and emotional setup of
humans” (Iversen 2013). Our methods of data generation and analysis sought to trace
how participant responses mirrored and disrupted these tensions in narratology
studies.
Data generation
In this article, we focus our analyses on two forms of data: design interviews and VideoAnt
compositions.
Design interviews
Focal participants engaged in two 60-minute semi-structured group design interviews
(Dalton et al. 2015) online. These interviews occurred both in the ideation phase of the
project (at the conclusion of reading Pry) and in the prototype phase (the initial drafting of
the video artefact). Design interviews were used to learn more about students’ perspec-
tives on their own multimodal processes responding to Pry. Participants described their
meta-modal decision making, asked questions about narrative structure, and outlined
their nished products. The design interviews were transcribed by the research team.
Additional materials and related artefacts (i.e. organisers’ notes, and mentor texts) used
during the ideation phase were collected from consenting participants.
6A. CORBITT ET AL.

VideoAnt compositions.
Participants responded to Pry by recording video journal entries that traced their encoun-
ters in reading the e-literature text. In each entry, participants leveraged a breadth of
stock footage, home video, screen recordings, music, and sound eects to represent their
interpretations, emotional responses, and reections on Pry. Participants compiled their
entries into personal compilations to document the entirety of their reading process.
These compilations were uploaded to VideoAnt – an online program that allows users to
annotate videos at designated time intervals. As in their design interviews, participants
used annotations to explain their composition processes and logics. The focal participants
submitted a total of 14 VideoAnt compositions. The videos ranged from 240 seconds
(4 minutes) to 597 seconds (9 minutes and 58 seconds). The average length of the videos
was 302 seconds (5 minutes and 2 seconds). In addition to the VideoAnt compositions,
participants submitted nal reections on the project’s content, process, and product.
These nal reections were a mix of written narratives and digital screen recordings.
Data analysis
Our rst step of analysis was to convene and deductively generate an initial coding
scheme. We agreed that we would parse the data for moments of naturalising and
unaturalizing interpretations of Pry. Aligning with Abbot’s (Abbott 2008) framework, we
dened naturalising interpretations of Pry as those that stereotyped the mind (i.e. James is
crazy), framed the mind as a catalyst (i.e. James is instrumental, a means to reveal other
characters), or symbolised the mind (i.e. James is a metaphor for trauma). We dened
unnaturalising interpretations of Pry as those that did not strain to resolve logical or
phenomenological dissonances in the text.
Our team also aligned our initial coding scheme to track participants’ relational inter-
actions with Pry. Narratologists evoke psychoanalytic theory to distinguish between
cognitive and aective emotional responses to text. Cognitive responses to texts are
often dened in the eld as conscious, causal connections between readers and the text.
For example, a reader might recognise that a text activates a childhood memory that
resonates on an emotional register. Alternatively, aective responses to texts are less
causal and more implicit. A text might move readers in ways that do not inspire repre-
sentational associations or causal linkages. While it is reductive to suggest that unnatural
narratology always connects with readers on an aective level, unnatural narratives may
be more likely to test the boundaries between cognitive and aective response.
Multimodal transcription
Thinking with Norris’ (2011) multimodal transcription techniques, we planned to examine
the data across modes to consider how certain modalities assumed more rhetorical
signicance, or “density,” throughout the compositions. We transcribed the 14 VideoAnt
artefacts, splicing them into 3-second intervals. Each 3-second interval documented the
corresponding image, voice over, sound/music, text/print, and annotation of the compo-
sition. The intervals were organised into tables to demonstrate the compositional ow of
the video artefacts (see Figure 2). The nal transcription set comprised 363 tables and
1,435 corresponding intervals.
ENGLISH IN EDUCATION 7

Having dened our terms, we coded the VideoAnt artefacts and transcripts to docu-
ment how participants used multimodal response to express their interpretive and
relational encounters with Pry. Four themes emerged: 1) Naturalising Interpretation, 2)
Unnaturalising Interpretation, 3) Cognitive Relationality, and 4) Aective Relationality.
Coding the videos and transcripts helped us consider how dierent interpretations and
relationalities surfaced and receded throughout the compositions. We then time stamped
and compiled our initial codes into four theme-specic tables for each participant (see
Figure 3). This helped us look across similar codes and understand how trajectories of
interpretation and relationality took shape throughout each participant’s video response.
For example, by compiling all the moments of naturalising interpretation in a participant’s
Figure 2. Multimodal transcription of participant videoant response to pry.
Figure 3. Compiling codes in theme-specific tables.
8A. CORBITT ET AL.

video, we were able to consider how that participant used a variety of multimodal
techniques to escape Pry’s narrative dissonances.
During the early stages of data analysis, we noticed a contradiction in our method.
Although we sought to understand moments of unnaturalising interpretation in the data,
we initially employed naturalising reading strategies to understand participants’ artefacts.
Alex often found himself inferring symbolic connections between participants’ narration
and visual content. For example, in one artefact he traced a symbolic linkage between an
image of a bridge and a participant’s voiceover saying she “made connections” through-
out her reading of Pry. However, the participant provided no indication that she intended
a metaphorical pairing between image and narration. Through inter-rater reliability
checks, Alex realised he was imposing a naturalising reading of the artefact. Moving
forward, the research team relied heavily on participant annotations and design inter-
views to better document authorial intent.
Findings
Our analyses suggest that participants used multimodal response and digital annotation
to illuminate their naturalising interpretations, unnaturalising interpretations, cognitive
relationalities, and aective relationalities. While our ndings organise these phenomena
in discrete categories, it is important to note that participants’ compositions sometimes
embodied multiple modes of interpretation and relationality. For example, some partici-
pants embraced the metaleptic qualities of James’ mind in one moment, and leveraged
symbolism and metaphor to resolve metaleptic dissonance in another. Some participants
were cognisant of how Pry made them feel in one moment, and resonated with the text in
pre-conscious, nonlinear ways in another. Thus, we acknowledge that the snapshots of
composition highlighted below are situated in larger, more nuanced, assemblages of
multimodal response.
Naturalising interpretations of pry
Many participant responses noticed instances of metalepsis (i.e. jumps across narrative
levels) and unnatural temporality (i.e. disorienting jumps in time) in Pry. To resolve the
tensions between Pry’s reality and the real world, the participants leveraged two natur-
alising interpretive strategies: stereotyping and symbolising James’ mind. Participants
used these strategies to ll in plot holes and solve the puzzle of Pry.
Four participants stereotyped James’ mind by characterising him as “crazy” or “unreli-
able.” They attributed James’ unreliability to the frequent metaleptic jumps in the text.
One participant narrated how “it is hard to trust the narrator, not because of his actions,
but because we are constantly moving between his reality, his failing vision, and his
subconscious.” The video included a photograph of a tree reected on a pond in the
moonlight. The participant’s annotations explained how the image represented the
juxtaposition between reality and James’ mind. Another participant said that readers
“are seeing the world through James’ unreliable eyes. It is the reader’s job to . . . piece
the story together.” We categorised these responses as naturalising because they render
James’ subconscious as “not real,” making the abstract elements of Pry easier to interpret
by dismissal.
ENGLISH IN EDUCATION 9

Two participants interpreted James’ mind as a symbol and metaphor. One explained
how Pry’s rapid shifts in time and perspective symbolised trauma. Their video response
oscillated from image to image, depicting how they thought Pry “triggers” readers.
Another participant wrote that Pry was an eective example of young adult e-literature
because James’ blindness is a metaphor for adolescence. The participant featured a video
of a man diving into a dark pool of water. Their annotation read, “Pry allow[s] young adults
to . . . experience the trials and tribulations of growing up through James’ story. Though
not literally blind, growing as humans is often done somewhat blindly.” By interpreting
James as a symbol or metaphor, participants were freed from contending with the
possibility that certain abstract scenes in Pry might be literal.
Unnaturalising interpretations of pry
After a signicant amount of deliberation, our team concluded that only one partici-
pant demonstrated an unnaturalising interpretation of Pry. This participant used
a variety of modalities to acknowledge dissonant ontologies of character, time, and
space in Pry.
The participant’s unnaturalising response began with blurred footage of a crowded
public space. People were walking in dierent directions, coming in and out of focus. The
light exposure intensied as white light blurred the images, and the reel eventually faded
to white. Overlaying this scene, the participant explained how James “feels like a group of
dierent people moving through separate worlds. It has me thinking about perception
and how it’s dierent in Pry than a traditional novel.” An audio track of ambient noise
accompanied the participant’s voice. A bellowing note droned as strings emerged and
receded from the discord. This scene is unnaturalising because it did not attempt to
leverage analysis that resolved the narrative dissonances of the text. Instead, the partici-
pant created a moment in which he could think across the unusual dimensions of James’
character.
The participant’s video went on to anticipate that more readers will “turn” to
e-literature in the future. During this moment, the participant included grainy footage
of children turning a merry-go-round. His annotations mentioned that we “may also
notice [he] use[s] the image of ‘turning’ the merry-go-round as a pun.” This was
signicant because puns are epistemologically distinct from symbols and metaphors.
Whereas symbols and metaphors substitute one subject for another, puns superimpose
subjects over one another without the assumption of equivalency. Cummings (2007)
explains how unnatural narratology corresponds with a degree of metaphoric failure.
This participant’s usage of puns invited dissonance in a way that other participant
responses did not.
We must acknowledge, however, that this participant’s unnaturalising interpreta-
tions were eeting. A minute later, the participant concluded that James is an unreli-
able narrator. This rapid transition highlights a limitation of the study. Participants’
video and annotations were static, retrospective artefacts. They did not highlight the
real-time interpretive logics during their pivotal encounters with Pry. This participant’s
shift from unnaturalising to naturalising interpretation suggests the temptation of
naturalising readings. Their response, however, does not highlight how this transition
occurred.
10 A. CORBITT ET AL.

Cognitive relationships to pry
Our analyses also highlighted how participants’ cognitive relationships with Pry typically
traced a linear causality between Pry’s unnatural narratology and their frictional emotional
responses. Our two salient coding themes for cognitive relationships with Pry were
“confusion” and “anxiety.”
One participant noted that Pry lled her with many questions. In the prologue, for
example, she asked, “Why is he packing a bag? What will the context of the plot be? Where
will my emotions be after the plot of the story has come to an end?” She paired her
questions with various blurred images of people walking about. The participant explained
how the blur eect illustrated her confusion navigating the plot. Similarly, another
participant featured footage of smoke and annotated that the jarring transitions in Pry
made James’ story “hard to grasp. Like smoke.” These responses marked a causality
between Pry’s unnatural narratology and participants’ feelings of confusion.
Two participants, in comparison, signalled deeper tensions with Pry’s narrative. One
noted that Pry’s various modalities, particularly the haptic elements, made him anxious
and frustrated. The non-linear process of pinching and pulling the screen to toggle across
James’ levels of consciousness felt random to him. He depicted his feelings with a video
clip of someone trying to hammer a screw into a block of wood. His annotation read,
“using a hammer for a screw and a wrench for a nail is how I felt. I had no clue if what I was
doing was right.” The second participant voiced her anxieties with Pry in a dierent way.
Her responses sought to imitate Pry’s inaccessibility by rapidly ashing images and video
clips across the screen. Her annotation explained that she wanted to instil viewers with
the same kinds of anxiety that she felt while navigating the various perspectives in Pry.
Both participants traced a clear connection between their anxieties and the conventions
of Pry’s storytelling. These conscious linkages – between their emotions and the text –
made these participants’ relationships with Pry distinctly cognitive.
Aective relationships to pry
Participants’ aective relationships with Pry lacked reections on causality (e.g. “X aspect
of Pry made me feel Y”). We coded aective responses to Pry as moments that were
emotionally charged, but eluded conscious understanding. For example, one participant
explained how the sound in Pry inspired her to go exit her house and lm a loose shingle
on her roof. Her video lingers on the shingle, apping in the wind. After twelve seconds,
she said, “no words, just movement and awkwardness.” We coded this moment as
aective because the participant captures a moment of resonance without making it
explicitly causal or representational. Similarly, another participant shared how she felt
a deep, mysterious connection with Pry. She recounted how Pry made her pause, put her
feet up on her desk, and sip coee in a moment of preconscious resonance. She
concluded that Pry created a space to “think and listen,” providing each reader with
a unique feeling of connection.
We also noticed that aective responses to Pry corresponded to participants’ waning
counterparthood. Counterparthood is the felt distinction between the reader and a text
(Bell and Alber 2012). Pry situates readers in James’ perspective to an immersive degree.
One participant explained how he was “literally seeing the story through James’ eyes” and
ENGLISH IN EDUCATION 11

“coming together with the app.” Another participant reported an even deeper connec-
tion, writing how there was “almost no distinction between me and James at all.” These
moments can be read as aective resonances insofar as participants’ sense of “me”
eroded. They were left in a relational proximity to Pry that preceded, or exceeded, their
identity as a “reader.” To some extent this experience disrupts the onto-epistemic founda-
tions of reader-response theory. Indeed, some readers’ sense of being and knowing
became linked with Pry in ways that evaded delineation. Therefore, it was sometimes
hard to distinguish whether participants responded to the text as extratextual readers or
as James himself.
Discussion and implications
In a 2016 interview, avant-garde lmmaker Harmony Korine explained his unconven-
tional, perhaps unnatural, approach to storytelling. He said,
“You want to make a movie“ that is almost post-articulation . . . . like a physical experience, or
a drug experience that has some kind of transcendence, ends in a peak moment, and then
kind of disappears. I always say, ‘if I could talk it away or explain it, I just “wouldn’t make [the
lm].’ (Rotten Tomatoes 2016“).
Korine’s directorial style is illuminating in two ways. First, it aptly describes the unnatur-
alising and aective encounters that some participants had with Pry. Second, it highlights
how texts like Pry leverage multimodality to craft narrative experiences that resist articu-
lation and static interpretation. Korine shirks cognitive, causal analysis of his work. Instead,
he strives to create moments of charged reader response that irt with the limits of
comprehension.
As documented in our ndings, the majority of participants expressed naturalising
interpretations and cognitive relationships to Pry. Moments of unnaturalising interpre-
tations and aective relationships to Pry were evident, albeit eeting. Nevertheless, our
participant data helps problematise theoretical tensions within narratology studies.
Whereas some scholars frame naturalising interpretation and unnaturalising interpreta-
tion as opposite poles of an epistemic binary, our participants oscillated between the
two orientations in ways that challenged this dichotomy. This leads us to consider how
readers might hold space for multiple interpretations of a text at the same time. Perhaps
readers can understand James across all his manifestations: an unreliable narrator,
a symbol, and a composite of various selves that converge in contradictory ways.
Pedagogically, we might help readers attend to a spectrum of ways texts move us to
interpret and relate.
Our research team conceded that unnaturalising interpretations of Pry were often
short-lived and relationally fraught. However, we also noticed that participants with
precognitive, aective relationships to Pry had a unique capacity to embrace the narrative
dissonances of the text. For example, the participant who lmed the loose shingle on her
roof was immersed in a moment of aective response that was wholly unconcerned with
reconciling the narrative contradictions in Pry. Helping readers foster precognitive, aec-
tive links with texts may help them embrace unnatural narratives in less frictional ways. To
this end, readers might try asking questions like “What does this scene evoke?” before
asking “What does this scene mean?”
12 A. CORBITT ET AL.

Finally, we noticed that participants regularly said they wanted to read Pry “correctly.”
We suspect that English classrooms too often impose universal interpretations on texts.
Rather than reifying “right” and “wrong” ways of reading, we advocate allowing learners
the space to sit with interpretive dissonance and precognitive relationality. Indeed,
emerging e-literature texts require an expansive repertoire of knowing and being with
text.
Though this article does not intend to privilege unnaturalising, aective understand-
ings of texts, our ndings highlight the precarity of reading Pry only through naturalising
and cognitive frames. While there are aspects of James’ story that can be rendered
comprehensible through stereotype, metaphor, and symbol, there are other aspects of
his story that defy naturalising readings. Participants who reduced James to an unreliable
narrator or a symbol of trauma did not attend to the robust complexities of the text.
Unnatural narratives like Pry remind us that reading is a personal experience lled with
interpretive and relational tensions with texts. Educators are tasked with helping students
negotiate these tensions. This study surveyed an array of students’ negotiations with Pry.
Whereas some students made Pry familiar through naturalising analysis, others oscillated
between making Pry intelligible and attuning to the ways that Pry moves and eludes. We
hope that these vignettes and humble recommendations help teachers engage in reex-
ive interrogations of their own reading and instruction.
Disclosure of potential conicts of interest
No potential conict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributors
Alex Corbitt is a doctoral student in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at
Boston College. Email: corbitta@bc.edu
Jon M. Wargo is an assistant professor of Teaching, Curriculum, and Society in the Lynch School of
Education and Human Development at Boston College. Email: wargoj@bc.edu
Clare O’Connor is an elementary educator in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania USA. Email: oconnoqu@bc.
edu
ORCID
Alex Corbitt http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3453-3214
Jon M. Wargo http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9100-9091
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