Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Textual Persuasion: Trauma Representation In Mark Z. Danielewski's House Of Leaves, Elizabeth A. Wall

English Theses

Textualization is the act of putting words on a page. Typography is the style and way in which the textualization of the text appears to the reader. Together, textualization and typography have the ability to coerce the reader into a specific reading pattern. Mark Z. Danielewski has combined textualization and typography in his complex novel House of Leaves as a unique attempt to represent trauma in the space between language and written language. Typical textual play becomes textual persuasion as the reader is guided through the labyrinth of text by typographical coercion. In this novel, these elements of play essentially …