Focalization and Digital Fiction

Abstract

Focalization and Digital Fiction David Ciccoricco (bio) “Focalization,” perhaps one of the sexiest concepts to surface from narratology’s lexicon, still garners considerable attention nearly four decades after its coinage. The entry for the term in the online Living Handbook of Narratology is by far the most popular one, roughly 400 page views ahead of the second most popular, for “author.”1 Granted, that statistic may be more a function of the term’s inherent confusion than its inherent appeal, as classical narratology has spawned multiple models with irreconcilable differences and single terms with multiple meanings, all in the service of elaborating Gérard Genette’s foundational distinction that the agent who tells the narrative is not necessarily the same one who perceives it. In his contribution to the recent collection Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization, Uri Margolin outlines three directions for a revision of focalization theory: 1) expansion of its application to other media with theoretical modifications as needed; 2) reconfiguration of the available system and its categories; and 3) a reconceptualization of the whole theory by placing it within a more fundamental theoretical framework (41). A general term that Genette endowed with technical meaning in narrative theory’s structuralist prime, focalization is generally understood to involve the filtering of narrative information with varying degrees of subjectivity via any number of vantage points of characte…