[Summary of the volume Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media. Narrative Minds and Virtual Worlds. 2015/2016] (original) (raw)
Related papers
2016
Following Marie-Laure Ryan's 2004 Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, the collection Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology (2014; co-edited with Jan-Noel Thon) in its fifteen essays considers "storyworlds as representations that transcend media" (2). In this volume, Ryan and Thon distance themselves from critical approaches that emphasize the convergence and confusion of narratives and narrative structures, such as W. J. T. Mitchell's claim that "all media are mixed media" (258), focusing instead on the divergences that emerge from specific narrative typologies. The essays that comprise this volume promote a transition from classical to a media-conscious narratology that would address a range of disciplines and media applications, such as television, comics, and computer games. This makes Storyworlds across Media an important volume that contributes to the formulation of a more substantially enhanced narratological consciousness, one that is significantly informed by the malleable landscape of contemporary media. The first section of the collection, with the title "Mediality and Transmediality," aims both to sketch the theoretical framework out of which media-conscious narratology can emerge, and to provide an enriched understanding of subjective representation and transmedial fictionality in the contemporary media landscape. This section begins with an articulation of the danger that exists with terms such as "multimedia media." Ryan's "Story/World/Media: Tuning the Instruments of a Media-Conscious Narratology" proposes such analytical tools that both acknowledge media consciousness and reflect the inherent complexities of current cultural discourses. "Storyworlds," she proposes, is a term that can enable narratology to be positioned at the center of media convergence, while also reinforcing awareness of the interrelation between worldmaking and current developments in transmediality and multimodality. Through a detailed exploration of emplotment in Shakespearean plays, Patrick Holm Hogan's essay "Emplotting a Storyworld in Drama: Selection, Time, and Construal in the Discourse of Hamlet," describes drama as "not only a storyworld-thus what is represented-but also a discourse, or a means of representing the storyworld and thus how that storyworld is represented" (50). Following Hogan's analysis, Thon, in "Subjectivity across Media: On Transmedial Strategies of Subjective Representation in Contemporary Feature Films, Graphic Novels, and Computer Games," explores the transmedial strategies employed in various narrative representations, suggesting that they reflect the "dual perspective" of a media-conscious transmedial narratology; that of being "transmedial in analytical scope but [one that] remains media conscious in methodological orientation" (92). Section two in the volume features five essays under the title "Multimodality and Intermediality." Actually, it seeks to avoid yet another restrictive term that would account for the complexities of developments across media, but it does regard multimodality as an approach that can efficiently reflect literary and cinematic productions of the last two decades. In particular, Wolfgang Hallet's essay "The Rise of the Multimodal Novel: Generic Change and Its Narratological Implications" suggests that the "multiplication of semiotic modes significantly changes the notion of 'narrative discourse' in
My contribution aims at the problematic and non-symetrical relationship between fiction and narration. Transmedial narrative analyses often focus on works that are also part of the domain of fiction -at least according to some theorists of fiction such as Kendall Walton, Gregory Currie and Marie-Laure Ryan. At the same time, the generation of fictional truths differs greatly between different narrative media. This manifests itself most prominently in certain narratological categories, which seem to appear in identical fashion in different media, but which ultimately are slightly different and often media specifically altered. The most notable of these problematic categories is also the most basic one, namely the narrator. Even though there seem to be good reasons for the hypotheses that there can be something like "narratorless narration" even in literature (even though this claim is highly disputed), it is more often accepted that filmic narration lacks an equivalent to the narrator in literature. This difference between media has consequences for other categories as well, for example unreliable narration: Heterodiegetic, non-anthropomorphic narration seems to be an odd candidate for unreliable narration, according to scholars as Bruno Zerweck, since there is no agent who can be hold accountable for the unreliability of the story. In my paper I aim to discuss the role of the narrator as a mediating agency in different media. Special focus will lie on questions of fictionality, the generation of fictional truths, and unreliable narration in literary fiction and films. Bio J. Alexander Bareis, PhD, is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre of Languages and Literature of Lund University, Sweden. His research focuses mainly on theories of fiction and narratology. He has written a book on the relation of theories of fiction and narratology, edited a book on metafiction in contemporary German literature, and published a number of articles on these and similar subjects. He has been a visiting scholar at the Department of Philosophy, University of Michigan and is a member of the research group "Fictionality" at Freie Universität Berlin, as well as a member of the European Narratology Network. Currently, he is a researcher with funding from the Swedish Scientific Council with a project on diachronic approaches to narratology.
Image Narrative, 2014
Storyworlds across Media can be read as a sequel to Narrative across Media, published in 2004 and edited by Marie-Laure Ryan. The substitution of "narrative" with "storyworld" reflects changes within narrative theory in the past decade. The term "world" stresses the constructive and imaginative aspect of narratives: they create universes. They do so with the help of readers, who use their cognitive and imaginative faculties to turn the narrative text into an imagined storyworld. So, the shift in terminology shows the increasing importance of constructivism and anthropocentrism: narratives are worlds constructed by humans. In addition, the "Media" mentioned in the title have proliferated since 2004 and have received much more attention from narratologists, who traditionally limited their analytic efforts to textual narratives. The digital age has not just seen the birth of new media, but has also encouraged their interaction and convergence. In this book, Ryan and the contributors "take the deliberate step of placing narrative at the center of media convergence." (2) For this step to be successful, the traditional toolbox and concepts of narratology have to be adapted to the field of media. Roughly speaking, there are three possibilities in this adaptation: some concepts are "medium free" (e.g. "setting") and can be used as they are. Others are "medium specific" (e.g. the "gutter" of comics) and need extensive revision when applied to another medium. In between there are concepts such as "interactivity," which are "transmedially valid yet not medium-free." (4) The confrontation and combination of approaches and media is much more prominent in this book than in the earlier Narrative across Media. While the latter was structured on the basis of media (e.g. a part on "still pictures", another on "music"), the various parts of Storyworlds across Media all focus on mixes of approaches, modalities and media. The first part of the book is devoted to theoretical elaborations of narratological tools and concepts for other media, ranging from narrator and focalization to fictionality and narrative frames. The second part deals with "two different kinds of relationships between media that seem particularly relevant for the project of a media-conscious narratology-multimodality and intermediality." (9) The first indicates the combination of different sign systems within one form (e.g. text and pictures in comics); the second indicates one medium referring to another (e.g. a text about a piece of music or trying to sound like music). Films, multimodal novels, video games, and comics are the favorite media discussed in this part of the book.
retts.net
We live in an age of ubiquitous digital textuality. We are teaching the first generation of digital-native students, who are more accustomed to writing and reading email than they are to writing and reading letters, more inclined to send an instant message to a classmate than to pass a note, and more likely to read their news online than they are to pick up a newspaper. Yet almost all these students come to our classes having had no specifically literary experience on their computer screens, and they are not accustomed to considering electronic environments as spaces for narrative literature.
Digital Narratives in Extended Realities
Roadmapping Extended Reality
XR technologies are increasingly considered as expressive media with special qualities for narrative representation. In this chapter, we chart some of the major challenges inherent in the implementation of digital narratives in XR. For this purpose, we consider the intersections between different research domains like classical and post-structural narratology, cognitive narratology, literary studies, computer science, game research, cognitive science, and particularly interactive digital narratives (IDN) and storytelling. As with IDN, many of the challenges of implementing narratives in XR have to do with the trade-offs between interactivity and immersion. In this direction, we aim to contribute to the bridging between the IDN and XR research domains. We elaborate on specific issues in IDN that may require particular care in XR, such as agency, embodiment, narration, "point of view technologies, " artificial agents, and AI. Additionally, we provide examples of different application domains in games, serious games, cultural experiences, healthcare, and immersive journalism. To conclude, we highlight the eminent role of narrative cognition in XR and suggest a roadmap for combining XR technologies, cognitive sciences, advanced biometric signals processing, and storytelling techniques for investigating ways we interact cognitively with stories and the effects of XR narratives on the human emotional-cognitive system.
Masters Thesis: Media, Art and Performance RMA at Utrecht University, 2019
Narrative is viewed by a growing body of interdisciplinary work as an immanent medium through which humans interpret the world and their life. The author claims that in accordance, a level of narrative interpretation should be situated within the temporality of lived experience, of being-in-interaction with the world. To achieve this, the predominant understanding of narrative as an abstract structure actualized in conscious, reflective thought should be supplemented with a more immediate phenomenological level, where narrative framing is in direct interplay with embodied experience. In this scope, this thesis develops an initial theoretical framework that posits narrativity, the narrative quality of experience, as an embodied and enactive modality. Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity, which develops a model of dynamic circularity between action, narrative interpretation, and the formation of life stories, is positioned at the base of this framework. Ricoeur’s view is adapted and expanded via Alva Noë’s theory of enactive perception, according to which all perceptual experience is actively enacted through implicit sensorimotor knowledge, and involves skillful interpretation via ‘practical understanding’ of movement in environment. The author stipulates that narrativity might be entangled with enactive perception, and therefore construed in relationality to the dynamics of movement and action. This claim is further expanded via Mieke Bal’s narratological concept of focalization –according to which narrative perspective is calibrated through “the movement of the look” – to suggest the concept of enactive narrative focalization. This framework is applied to discuss interactive digital narrative media, where the spectator is positioned inside the ‘storyworld’ to become an interactor, and stories unfold through navigating an environment. By analyzing past work in this field such as the game Journey (2012), the author claims that his thought on embodied narrativity provides a potentially valuable theorization of how interactive narratives take shape in experience. In particular, the notion of enactive focalization underscores the narrativity of movement, and hence the resonances between the authoring of tangible movement dynamics in digital environments and narrative understanding. Keywords: narrative phenomenology; interactive digital narrative; embodied cognition; enactive perception; environmental storytelling; movement dynamics; focalization; narrative identity.