Narrative Coherence: Interaction between Verbal and Visual in Game of Thrones (original) (raw)
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‘Valar Dohaeris’: Problems of Transmedia Storytelling in Game of Thrones
2015
More than fifty over five complete seasons. Five books, thousands of pages. Seven kingdoms, seven hells, one Lord of Light, and one true king, and upwards of two hundred characters! Describing the Game of Thrones series as "epic" is an understatement. If you haven't read George R. R. Martin's series, A Song of Ice and Fire, or if you haven't seen the very successful and critically acclaimed HBO television series, you may not know that each episode of Game of Thrones, like those novels, is comprised of a series of vignettes that focus on a particular character, charting each individual's narrative journey in short bursts. While serialized, characterbased storytelling is far from new, the epic scale of Game of Thrones balloons this method to new levels. The series comes to follow over thirty major characters and include over two hundred minor characters over the five seasons and five books…which are soon to be six and seven books, and who knows how many additional viewing seasons. While the television program's creators, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, should be lauded for their attention to maintaining Martin's written narrative style in a genre that has seen its share of paltry screen adaptations, the program's storytelling, like the novels, fragments character and plot development. By the time viewers are midway through Season 1, which focuses mainly on the Stark family, there are already too many major characters to get "everyone" into a single, one-hour episode, and this practice continues (and snowballs) as the show progresses and more characters and complexities are added to the narrative. What are the effects of these fragmentary narrative characteristics for viewers, and what might their purpose be? It's clear that the series strives to emphasize the inter-connectivity of these
Visuality, Continuity, and Coherence in Contemporary Fantasy Storyworlds
New Approaches to Contemporary Adaptation, ed. Betty Kaklamanidou. Detroit: Wayne State University Press., 2020
Linda Hutcheon has pointed out that “seen from the perspective of its process of reception, adaptation is a form of intertextuality” (Hutcheon 2006: 8). The contemporary entertainment industry has a huge appetite for stories. Plots, characters, themes, settings are constantly being “borrowed” and transcoded across or within media. It is thus interesting to pose the question, what is it in these transcodings that ensures a sense of continuity for the audience? What makes us feel that a new text, visual or verbal, has the kind of intertextual relationship with some other text that we would call ‘adaptation’? The factors that create continuity are closely related to those involved in maintaining coherence between sequels, or between the episodes in a series. They are largely independent of medium and apply equally to books, comics, films, television serials, etc. Some (such as plot and character) are well understood, others (such as visual style) less so. Their importance in each case depends largely on the kind of story being transcoded. This paper proposes to explore the various factors involved in creating this sense of continuity in cross-media adaptations, from book and/or comic book to cinema and television, but also from cinema to television and vice versa. In particular, we will attempt to define the nature and importance of visual style and the visual environment in high-quality fantasy and science fiction productions (such as Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Star Trek).
The construction of meaning by the viewer of a moving image is heavily dependent on preliminary embodied images and knowledge. This will be shown by using the example of transmedia storytelling. Transmedia storytelling is a narrative mode commonly used in or developing around i.a. 21st century television series. The storytelling is not restricted to the moving images of the episodes and seasons but is taking place also in further conventional media like books or new digital formats. Taking the television series Game of Thrones (2011–) as a starting point, the aim of this article is to discuss some aspects of how meaning is generated in the process of perceiving such transmedia narratives and how that affects the perception of the moving image. For this purpose, theoretical concepts both from film studies and from transmedia narratology will be compared and combined. The moving image in the attentive-impressive reception situation which is involved in transmedia storytelling is dynamised twice: on the one hand by the dynamic material moving image and on the other hand by the images embodied through perception of other media. Thereby it becomes a cyborgian image as it is composed of fragments of the material image and of fragments of images and knowledge already stored in the living body.
Essais, 2017
Television has been changing for a number of years due to the growing proliferation of platforms and the interconnection of multiple media forms. These changes have reshaped the relation between the idea of text(s) (i.e., TV series) and context(s) (i.e., fan practices) in the process of media consumption. This paper aims to clarify how, in the case of the TV series Game of Thrones (HBO) and with reference to an empirical research carried out by the authors, the interlacement of textual and contextual elements can determine different forms of experience and different levels of intersubjectivity in fans' practices.
A-Song-of-Transmedia-Storytelling_-A-Case-Study-on-Game-of-Thrones-TV-Series.pdf
Handbook of Research on Transmedia Storytelling and Narrative Strategies, 2018
This chapter describes how being one of the outcomes of new media, convergence culture enables individuals to participate in the production process of media. The active and participatory nature of the members of the modern web society has led media conglomerates to seek new methods. Transmedia storytelling is the concept which emerged as a response to this. It can be seen that this type of storytelling is commonly adopted for tv series which have lately become popular. In this chapter, being delivered with transmedia techniques, Game of Thrones tv series is analysed in terms of transmedia storytelling.
Like other genres (mis-)labeled as easy reading, Fantasy is still underrepresented in academic works. The present work aims at contributing to the corpus of literary analyses of Fantasy literature by examining the narrative structure of Martin' "A Song of Ice and Fire" series (commonly known as "A Game of Thrones" due to HBO's hugely popular TV adaptation by that title). Using Genette's and Rimmon-Kenan's theoretical work as a basis, I investigate the use and effect of Martin's narrative strategy, which involves a host of changing character-focalisers and thus a depiction of "reality" as a highly subjective construct.
With a focus on George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, the essay explores the means and resources contemporary fantasy fiction enables its readers to use in order to engage with the imagery of fictional worlds. The starting point lies in the idea that although fantasy fiction can engage its readers with such visualisations, it simultaneously enables them to make use of the worlds’ made-up nature. The article thus contributes to the view of world-building as a constant work-in-progress where the fictionality of the world is acknowledged and used as a resource. It presents material produced by readers alongside the novel and shows that the readers’ active participation in fantastic worldmaking involves constant awareness of the so-called real world and literary conventions. This not only shows us that readers are not merely “actualisators” of the ready-made world designed by an author, but also that the privately used resources in visualising are often used to promote communality.
Revista de Comunicación de la SEECI, 2024
Introduction: Sun Tzu's Art of War, a book on war strategy, is considered a source of inspiration for cinematography in the field of strategic management, as numerous films inspired by its precepts are used as didactic examples in universities and business schools. Objective: This paper analyzes Sun Tzu's work and its intertextuality between literature, cinematography and education. Specifically, it investigates whether the Game of Thrones series captures the strategic axioms of the work and whether
Episode structures in literary narratives
Journal of literary semantics, 2004
This article is concerned with the moment-by-moment unfolding of the text as we might suppose the reader to experience it; in addressing one aspect of this reading experience, I propose a definition of the episode, and of episode structure, in literary narratives. To do so, I draw on insights from Ingarden, Iser, Barthes, Eco, Jim Rosenberg, and Ed Tan, but have found most useful the discussion of narrative structure in a 1922 essay by the Russian Formalist A. A. Reformatsky, which includes an analysis of Maupassant's story "Un Coq Chanta". Reformatsky's essay is analyzed in detail. In a final section, I review responses to a short story (Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour") and consider the evidence for episodes in readers' responses. To the number of convergent criteria used for characterizing episodes I add the role of the narrative twist occurring at or near the end of an episode, serving to intensify or redirect the issues raised, and itself characterized by a distinct development in readers' feeling. Episodes provide the phases during which issues of concern to readers are managed and developed, and the analysis of the episodes of a story may thus provide a valuable framework for identifying the key developments in the responses of readers.