Multimodal Mediations in Traversing Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves.

Multimodal novels are crafted ingeniously to solicit cognitive engagement of the reader and elicit proactive responses from them even through cognitive dissonance and self-implication. Analyzing typographical multimodal novels is a form of narrative remediation, and it involves reading that forgoes its unilaterality to represent the collective consciousness of all the narrative participants--the reader, the author, the characters, the text and the worlds they embody. Typographical novels pose cognitive challenges at the very onset and the reader realizes that cognitive negotiations are vital in operating tasks that were undemanding in conventional novels. The negated dedication in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000) is a warning that the readers ignore when they enter the tangled web of space that entraps them cognitively and corporeally. The readers are caught in the textual labyrinth in infinite regress that they have to mediate to decipher the fallacious narrative world. This paper studies the multifaceted cognitive reconciliations and multimodal re-mediations taken up by the reader in traversing the paratextual threshold of House of Leaves. The negation in the dedication demands complex cognitive processing that simultaneously prohibits and entices the reader into the storyworld. A transdisciplinary integration of multimodality theories and concepts of cognitive narratology is utilized to describe and decode the cognitive interplay of verbal and nonverbal modes in the multimodal novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]