ABSTRACT
This chapter is devoted to the analysis of fiction works by Lance Olsen: two multimodal short stories (co-authored with Andi Olsen) from the collection Sewing Shut My Eyes (2000) and two novels – Head in Flames (2009) and Dreamlives of Debris (2017). Following an overview of Olsen’s oeuvre and a brief presentation of the works in question, the chapter considers the indebtedness of their formal properties to the poetics of collage, focusing in particular on their use of appropriation, juxtaposition and multimodality. The last section focuses on the content of Olsen’s works and examines the numerous contemporary crises which they address, including the damaging social effects of television and celebrity culture in Sewing Shut My Eyes, the violent clash of Western liberalism with Islamist fundamentalism in Head in Flames and the anxieties of digital culture in Dreamlives of Debris. The final part also assesses the suitability of collage to represent those phenomena while referring to Olsen’s own theoretical pronouncements on collage as a literary form.
