Storyworlds across Media

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Storyworlds across Media

Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology

Edited by Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon

Frontiers of Narrative Series

380 pages
50 illustrations, 5 tables, 9 diagrams

Paperback

July 2014

978-0-8032-4563-1

$35.00 Add to Cart
eBook (EPUB)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

July 2014

978-0-8032-5533-3

$35.00 Add to Cart
eBook (PDF)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

July 2014

978-0-8032-5532-6

$35.00 Add to Cart

About the Book

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.
 
 

Author Bio

Marie-Laure Ryan is an independent scholar. She is the author of Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory; Narrative as Virtual Reality; and Avatars of Story, as well as the editor of Narrative across Media (Nebraska, 2004), among others. Jan-Noël Thon is a research associate in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Tübingen. Most recently, he has coedited From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative.

Praise

"Seminal for transmedia and narratology scholars. . . . A fascinating exploration of new analytical ideas that help explain the power and technique of media collisions now available in modern storytelling."—Kris Baranovic, Big Muddy

"Storyworlds across Media offers a diverse and challenging collection of essays. . . . The collection as a whole abundantly proves that a media-conscious narratology is a must if narrative theory wants to keep up with the times."—Image and Narrative


Storyworlds across Media fruitfully explores an important new concept in narrative theory—the storyworld—that is of compelling interest across disciplines, from TV writing and popular culture to digital media design and artificial intelligence.”—Janet H. Murray, author of Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace


Storyworlds across Media offers a great deal of insight into the contemporary cultural use of proliferating opportunities (especially in digital media) for innovation in storytelling.”—Richard Walsh, author of Novel Arguments: Reading Innovative American Fiction


Table of Contents

List of Illustrations    
Acknowledgments    
Storyworlds across Media: Introduction    
Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon
Part I. Mediality and Transmediality
1. Story/Worlds/Media: Tuning the Instruments of a Media-Conscious Narratology    
Marie-Laure Ryan
2. Emplotting a Storyworld in Drama: Selection, Time, and Construal in the Discourse of Hamlet    
Patrick Colm Hogan
3. Subjectivity across Media: On Transmedial Strategies of Subjective Representation in Contemporary Feature Films, Graphic Novels, and Computer Games    
Jan-Noël Thon
4. Fiction across Media: Toward a Transmedial Concept of Fictionality    
Frank Zipfel
5. Framings of Narrative in Literature and the Pictorial Arts    
Werner Wolf
Part II: Multimodality and Intermediality
6. The Rise of the Multimodal Novel: Generic Change and Its Narratological Implications    
Wolfgang Hallet
7. On Absent Carrot Sticks: The Level of Abstraction in Video Games    
Jesper Juul
8. Film + Comics: A Multimodal Romance in the Age of Transmedial Convergence    
Jared Gardner
9. Tell It Like a Game: Scott Pilgrim and Performative Media Rivalry    
Jeff Thoss
10. Those Insane Dream Sequences: Experientiality and Distorted Experience in Literature and Video Games    
Marco Caracciolo
Part III: Transmedia Storytelling and Transmedial Worlds
11. Strategies of Storytelling on Transmedia Television    
Jason Mittell
12. A Taxonomy of Transmedia Storytelling    
Colin B. Harvey
13. Game of Thrones: Transmedial Worlds, Fandom, and Social Gaming    
Lisbeth Klastrup and Susana Tosca
14. Transmedial Narration and Fan Fiction: The Storyworld of The Vampire Diaries    
Maria Lindgren Leavenworth
15. The Developing Storyworld of H. P. Lovecraft    
Van Leavenworth
Contributors    
Index