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  • 2014 James Phelan Prize for Best Contribution to Narrative

This year’s prize was awarded to a cluster of essays in the January 2013 issue (Volume 21, No. 1) on “Paratexts and Digital Narrative” by Birte Christ and Dorothee Birke, Paul Benzon, and Ellen McCracken. Birke and Christ’s “Paratext and Digitized Narrative: Mapping the Field” explores the ways Gérard Genette’s influential print-based account of paratexts needs to be revised in order to account for the nature and functions of paratexts in digital environments. Benzon’s “Bootleg Paratextuality and Digital Temporality: Towards an Alternate Present of the DVD” considers the DVD as a medium moving from a position of dominance to one of obsolescence, examines the nature of paratextuality in bootleg video, and reads the bootleg aesthetics of the DVD edition of the film Borat. Finally, McCracken’s “Expanding Genette’s Epitext/Peritext Model for Transitional Electronic Literature: Centrifugal and Centripetal Vectors on Kindles and iPads” analyzes the new kinds of paratexts that come into play when books are read on portable e-reading devices, considers paratexts such as advertising and footnotes on the Kindle and iPad, and discusses the role of multimedia books in experimental digital literature.

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