Introduction: Becoming Familiar with The Familiar, or, The Imaginary Novel and the Imagination

Abstract

This essay is the introduction to the special issue of Orbit: A Journal of American Literature on Mark Z. Danielewski's The Familiar. As a starting point for readers, it places the the five novels in the context of a longer literary history of multimodal writing. I argue that this alternative history undermines the realist monomodal paradigm that still persists in literature and literary criticism and challenges their normativity that has, for example, mainly excluded multimodal forms such as children's literature or comics. At the same time, I identify a corresponding narrative bias in considerations of multimodal literature, as I connect The Familiar to poetic models of meaning-making. I also argue that the imagination is a central concern of Danielewski's pentalogy, connecting plot elements such as VEM to readerly engagement and empathy. Finally, the introduction includes summaries of all the contributions to this special issue as well as a link to a bibliography of Danielewski criticism.