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It has become something of a cliché within the field of narratology to assert the commercial, aesthetic, and sociocultural relevance of narrative representations, but the fact remains that narratives are everywhere. Whenever we read a novel or a comic, watch a film or an episode of our favorite television series, or play the latest video game, we are likely to engage with narrative media. Similarly, the intermedial adaptations and transmedial entertainment franchises that have become increasingly visible during the past few decades are, at their core, narrative forms. Since a significant part of contemporary media culture is defined by the narratives we tell each other via various media, th...
Media in general and narrative media in particular have the potential to represent not only a variety of both possible and actual worlds but also the perception and consciousness of characters in these worlds. Hence, media can be understood as "qualia machines," as technologies that allow for the production of subjective experiences within the affordances and limitations posed by the conventions of their specific mediality. This edited collection examines the transmedial as well as the medium-specific strategies employed by the verbal representations characteristic for literary texts, the verbal-pictorial representations characteristic for comics, the audiovisual representations characteristic for films, and the interactive representations characteristic for video games. Combining theoretical perspectives from analytic philosophy, cognitive theory, and narratology with approaches from phenomenology, psychosemiotics, and social semiotics, the contributions collected in this volume provide a state-of-the-art map of current research on a wide variety of ways in which subjectivity can be represented across conventionally distinct media.
The proliferation of media and their ever-increasing role in our daily life has produced a strong sense that understanding media—everything from oral storytelling, literary narrative, newspapers, and comics to radio, film, TV, and video games—is key to understanding the dynamics of culture and society. Storyworlds across Media explores how media, old and new, give birth to various types of storyworlds and provide different ways of experiencing them, inviting readers to join an ongoing theoretical conversation focused on the question: how can narratology achieve media-consciousness? The first part of the volume critically assesses the cross- and transmedial validity of narratological concepts such as storyworld, narrator, representation of subjectivity, and fictionality. The second part deals with issues of multimodality and intermediality across media. The third part explores the relation between media convergence and transmedial storyworlds, examining emergent forms of storytelling based on multiple media platforms. Taken together, these essays build the foundation for a media-conscious narratology that acknowledges both similarities and differences in the ways media narrate.
This essay collection examines the theory and history of graphic narrative as one of the most interesting and versatile forms of storytelling in contemporary media culture. Its contributions test the applicability of narratological concepts to graphic narrative, examine aspects of graphic narrative beyond the ‘single work’, consider the development of particular narrative strategies within individual genres, and trace the forms and functions of graphic narrative across cultures. Analyzing a wide range of texts, genres, and narrative strategies from both theoretical and historical perspectives, the international group of scholars gathered here offers state-of-the-art research on graphic narrative in the context of an increasingly postclassical and transmedial narratology. This is the revised second edition of From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels, which was originally published in the Narratologia series.
This book offers the first comprehensive study of the many interfaces shaping the relationship between comics and videogames. It combines in-depth conceptual reflection with a rich selection of paradigmatic case studies from contemporary media culture. The editors have gathered a distinguished group of international scholars working at the interstices of comics studies and game studies to explore two interrelated areas of inquiry: The first part of the book focuses on hybrid medialities and experimental aesthetics "between" comics and videogames; the second part zooms in on how comics and videogames function as transmedia expansions within an increasingly convergent and participatory media c...
The 'narrative turn' in the humanities, which expanded the study of narrative to various disciplines, has found a correlate in the 'medial turn' in narratology. Long restricted to language-based literary fiction, narratology has found new life in the recognition that storytelling can take place in a variety of media, and often combines signs belonging to different semiotic categories: visual, auditory, linguistic and perhaps even tactile. The essays gathered in this volume apply the newly gained awareness of the expressive power of media to particular texts, demonstrating the productivity of a medium-aware analysis. Through the examination of a wide variety of different media, ranging from w...
The first systematic, comprehensive reference covering the ideas, genres, and concepts behind digital media. The study of what is collectively labeled “New Media”—the cultural and artistic practices made possible by digital technology—has become one of the most vibrant areas of scholarly activity and is rapidly turning into an established academic field, with many universities now offering it as a major. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media is the first comprehensive reference work to which teachers, students, and the curious can quickly turn for reliable information on the key terms and concepts of the field. The contributors present entries on nearly 150 ideas, genres, and theoretical concepts that have allowed digital media to produce some of the most innovative intellectual, artistic, and social practices of our time. The result is an easy-to-consult reference for digital media scholars or anyone wishing to become familiar with this fast-developing field.
Intermedial Studies provides a concise, hands-on introduction to the analysis of a broad array of texts from a variety of media – including literature, film, music, performance, news and videogames, addressing fiction and non-fiction, mass media and social media. The detailed introduction offers a short history of the field and outlines the main theoretical approaches to the field. Part I explains the approach, examining and exemplifying the dimensions that construct every media product. The following sections offer practical examples and case studies using many examples, which will be familiar to students, from Sherlock Holmes and football, to news, vlogs and videogames. This book is the only textbook taking both a theoretical and practical approach to intermedial studies. The book will be of use to students from a variety of disciplines looking at any form of adaptation, from comparative literature to film adaptations, fan fictions and spoken performances. The book equips students with the language and understanding to confidently and competently apply their own intermedial analysis to any text.
This collection of essays looks at two important manifestations of postclassical narratology, namely transmedial narratology on the one hand, and unnatural narratology on the other. The articles deal with films, graphic novels, computer games, web series, the performing arts, journalism, reality games, music, musicals, and the representation of impossibilities. The essays demonstrate how new media and genres as well as unnatural narratives challenge classical forms of narration in ways that call for the development of analytical tools and modelling systems that move beyond classical structuralist narratology. The articles thus contribute to the further development of both transmedial and unnatural narrative theory, two of the most important manifestations of postclassical narratology.
Stories do not actually exist in the world but are created and structured- modeled- through the process of mediation, i.e. through the means and techniques by which they are represented. This is an important field, not only for narratology but a