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Your Choice and Negative Affect in Alejandro Zambra’s “Multiple Choice” (2014) and Carmen Maria Machado’s "In the Dream House” (2019)

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Wong D.

Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich

2022

vol. 65

issue 4

35-50

This essay builds upon David Herman’s idea of double deixis to explore the ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ (CYOA) form as a popular subtype of you-narration that foregrounds reader involvement, co-creation, and agency. The central conceit from such instances of hypertext fiction to self-help writing seems to be that you - the reader/consumer - have a choice. However, in my reading of Alejandro Zambra’s Multiple Choice (2014) and Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (2019), the false equivalence between choice and non-choice becomes particularly palpable when considering the affect of the second-person mode. While the former exemplifies what Irene Kacandes has called ‘proto-’ or ‘paper hypertext’ (2001: 200), the latter is also a memoir. I look at the underexamined intersection of hypertext fiction and autobiographical writing in the history of second-person narratives to restore the significance of negative affect to critical discussion. The agency to choose in you-narratives not only involves the anticipation of guilt, fault and/or shame, but autodiegetic instances of you-narration like Machado’s memoir formalise Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenological description of shame and Denise Riley’s concept of malignant inner speech, or malediction.

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1 Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich

1 Wong D.

1 2022

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Your Choice and Negative Affect in Alejandro Zambra’s “Multiple Choice” (2014) and Carmen Maria Machado’s "In the Dream House” (2019)