CODA: Transmedia Cultural History, Convergence Culture, and the Future of Adaptation Studies

Abstract

Adaptation studies, whether situated in literary or media studies, lacks a coherent model that illustrates how many adaptations of the same story work together, creating what Paul Davis, Brian Rose, and others refer to as “culture-texts.” Culture-texts are retold and remade countlessly, over long periods of time, building a large network of adaptations and remakes that is neither owned nor dominated by a particular author, medium, or “authoritative” version. Similarly, contemporary media studies does not fully account for how much today’s industry practices are inheritances of the past—adapted and repackaged not only for modern audiences but also for new technological, economic, legal, political, and social contexts. This chapter adapts and expands Henry Jenkins’s theories of transmedia storytelling, convergence culture, and participatory culture to develop a new model for transhistorical adaptation studies. This transhistorical view includes storytelling across a diverse range of forms and media, including literature, the performing arts, visual arts, film and television, new media, and immersive/hybrid forms. Szwydky’s “Transmedia cultural history” expands existing definitions to include long-term historical awareness and engagement. Transmedia cultural history incorporates practices of artistic production, industrial convergence, and ongoing audience (and scholarly) reception. This term explores how technology, spectacle, celebrity, the proliferation and commercialization of art forms, world-building, tie-ins, and merchandizing functioned at different historical moments. Moreover, it provides opportunities to identify and examine how cultural production in early periods has influenced complementary practices in later periods, including the present.