What is a multimodal novel? And why is the genre on its return in our digital age? How should we understand the notion of the embodied reader? And why bother about rhythm and rhyme in the 21st century?

Books are more than just neutral containers of narratives; they are material, palpable objects, often multimodal in nature. In this podcast, Natalia Igl, associate researcher at LCE and Marie Skłodowska-Curie recent postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, discusses how and why the material and multimodal aspects of a book, literary journal, or poem affect our readerly experience perhaps more than we suspect. In a conversation with Stijn Vervaet, she explains how a literary work’s multimodality and materiality operates, and how we read with our bodies.

This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska Curie grant agreement No 794549.

Post-production: Eivind Rutle

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