Transformation Of Story Research Articles

‘The Fallow Narratives’ and The Pier: Writing for comics within transmedia storytelling

Abstract Storytelling across media presents a variety of concerns for the practitioner in terms of production and consumption, for transmedia storytelling expands a story across a variety of media within some consistent storyworld, often to enhance and integrate the experience of the audience/user/player. This expansion does not necessarily adapt the same story to generate interrelated narratives within a cohesive cosmos – narratives may be perceived and engaged with separately, and yet may also advance a larger consistent story. ‘The Fallow Narratives’ is a transmedia storytelling project currently being developed at the University of South Wales to explore narrative and the transformation of story across media, and examine what creative writing, particularly scriptwriting, may reveal of its production related media. The themes of identity, memory and perception are explored within each story across the project, told through: Fallow (animation), The Pier (comic), Desistance (video game), The Deep Machine (songs), Observance (journal), dell’ Arte (mixed media), Stain (music video) and The Quay (novel). The Pier tells the story of a boy, Casper Fallow, who loses his younger brother in a late night fire at a pier where they had gone to imagine and play out a Punch and Judy show. It is the story of his subsequent healing and harmful journeys after he is taken to a sanatorium, his release, and his years as a Punch and Judy puppet maker and storyteller. Through exploring the development of ‘The Fallow Narratives’ this article will discuss the process of writing for comics while considering a transmedia cosmology, and through examining the creation of The Pier what this may reveal of comics as image and language text.

Revising the Colonial Caribbean: “Three-Fingered Jack” and the Jamaican Pantomime

In 1780, the notorious rebel “Three-Finger’d Jack” Mansong escaped from slavery into the Blue Mountains of Jamaica and murdered hundreds of travelers. The dangerous outlaw remained at large for almost two years before he was captured and killed by the same Maroon who had allegedly taken two of his fingers in an earlier skirmish. 1 Jack’s exploits captured the British imagination, prompting over twenty biographical accounts in the Romantic period alone, including John Fawcett’s tremendously successful London pantomime, Obi; or Three-Finger’d Jack (1800). 2 Two hundred years after Jack’s execution, Kingston’s Little Theatre Movement (LTM) celebrated Jack as a freedom fighter in its annual pantomime. Written by playwright Ted Dwyer, Mansong (1980) amalgamates elements of British literary and theater traditions with Jamaican folk history into a creolized text that reflects the island’s troubled past as well as the syncretism of the Jamaican pantomime. Dwyer’s Mansong engages the problems and practices of representation from within a primarily oral culture, calling particular attention the transatlantic exchange and transformation of stories about slavery, colonialism, and their aftermaths. The Jamaican Royal Gazette published the first known account of Three-Finger’d Jack in 1780, issuing the governor’s proclamation for the reward and capture of the runaway. Early the following year it reported Jack’s death at the hands of Maroons, runaway slaves who formed autonomous communities in remote areas. These early journalistic accounts emphasize Jack’s leadership of some sixty runaway slaves and their eventual dispersal; after 1799, however, accounts of his life—some more sympathetic than others—describe him as a solitary bandit allegedly protected by obeah (obi), an Afro-Caribbean system of beliefs. 3 For the first three decades of the nineteenth century, fictional and stage adaptations of his life and his obi circulated in England, the provinces, and the United States. Despite Jack’s enduring reputation as a bandit, originated and perpetuated by the colonial British, Jamaican playwrights and directors have harnessed Jack’s energy to celebrate Jamaican independence from England and from a past of slavery and colonialism. To this day, Jack Mansong remains a significant though problematic figure in Jamaican oral and literary culture. Although Jack’s story has circulated around the Atlantic for over two hundred years, critical accounts of his life have been largely Eurocentric and pay scant attention to the Jamaican perspective. Somewhat ironically, recent scholarship frequently invokes the vocabulary of loss and recovery. 4 Chuck Rzepka, for example, suggests that the Obi plays offer Romantic period scholars a means to consider “our own cultural amnesia” (“Obi Now” 3). Debbie Lee identifies the cure for this amnesia in African American tragedian

More Than One Way to (Mis)Read a Mockingbird

The task of criticism, then, is not to situate itself within the same space as the text, allowing to speak or completing what necessarily leaves unsaid. On the contrary, its function is to install itself in the very incompleteness of the work in order to theorise it--to explain the ideological necessity of those 'not-saids' which constitutes the very principle of its identity. --Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology To Kill has become the object of recent renewal of critical interest, starting with Claudia D. Johnson's To Kill Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries (1994) and culminating in On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections (2007). (1) Reading through this critical corpus, one is struck by two things: the recurrence of need to justify having spent one's time on To Kill in the first place (Johnson, Jolley, Hover & Hovet, and to lesser degree, Rowe) and the repetitive insistence on the themes of racism, sexism, and the 'coming of age' typology of the novel. Secondary themes, such as the focus on gothic elements by Johnson, the emphasis on vision by Champion, or the very coherent analysis of gift economy by John Carlos Rowe, seem to give the credit for greater discursive density, but one senses that the dynamics of the critical debate on the are already beginning to go around in circles. This gives some weight to the suspicion that To Kill Mockingbird, despite its awards and popularity, is less than great novel, without quelling the intuition that is, at the same time, worthy of critical consideration. (2) My goal here will be to elucidate some of the characteristics of this not quite splendid failure, but at least lopsided achievement. To do so, I will interrogate those aspects of the text that are radically open to interpretative debate, the knots and tangles in the work that seem to indicate points of unresolved tension symptomatic of artistic or ideological compromise. (3) These fault-lines that disrupt the evenness of the writing are related to most aspects of the novel: its structural cohesion, the identification and status of main character, and its ideological positioning in terms of race, class, and gender. What is fascinating about these textual disturbances is that they do not necessarily give rise, in recent criticism, to questioning of the presuppositions or pressures that produced them, but rather that they tend to fuel process of disavowal: refusal to see. In concrete terms, this is manifested by critical propensity to fill in the disturbing blanks, to smooth over contradictions, or simply to misread the text. Originating from few short stories, To Kill is first of all the product of marketing pressures. In the mid-1950s, Harper Lee showed the stories she had written about her childhood experiences to literary agent who suggested that she consider going step further by weaving the stories into ... She attempted to do so in 1956 and year later, she had completed the first draft of To Kill Mockingbird (Nelle). The transformation of the stories into was not immediately successful. Editors at Lippincott criticized the novel's structure, which they felt read like series of short stories strung together, but saw promise in the book and encouraged Lee to rewrite (Chapman & Dear 270; qtd in Petry 160). Lee spent nearly three years modifying her work to meet the editors' requirements. The first question this raises is: why was the transformation of short stories into considered to be a step further; why couldn't the stories be published as short stories? Clearly the answer is that novels were more marketable than short story collections. In his biography of Alice Munro, Robert Thacker notes that in the 1950s and 1960s it was truism among publishers that [short story] collections did not sell, and that they should be attempted only once an author's reputation was already established through the prior publication of novel (142). …

Transformasi Cerita Serat Menak dalam Pertunjukan Wayang Golek Menak

The change of form from written literature to performing arts produces a new genre, for the reason, transformation of all intrinsic as well extrinsic aspects are complex and varied the changes in performing arts which come from serat menak show that serat menak has had transformation. Concerning that serat menak is adaptation form Hikayat Amir, it is not impossible that artists of wayang golek menak may base their works directly form the original work. The aims of this discussion include (1) describing story (lakon) wayang golek menak; (2) describing transformation forms of serat menak in lakon wayang golek menak covering character, setting, story, and theme; (3) mapping the development of serat menak in lakon wayang golek menak. The aims will be fulfilled by using reception and intertextual approaches approaches. Based on both approaches, it can be found out that serat menak becomes the source of some stories (lakon) in wayang golek menak. Transformation of story can be seen in the hiprogramming stories in serat menak. Story pattern in wayang golek menak manak have double characters. Transformation of setting can be found in the addition and different names of places where the story happens. Transformation of character appears in the change of name and the additional new names for not basic characters. The difference and addition of name, place and character occur because of the different pronounciation, miss information, as well as the dalang creativities in recept serat menak. The reason is that the performance of wayang golek menak is inherited orally so that the development of serat menak in lakon wayang golek menak is very extensive and complex. Dalang can freely create lakon in accordance to his view and his family as well as social cultural background. Keyword : Transformation, Serat Menak, Wayang Golek Menak

La béance entre les scènes

The Yawning (Gap) Between the Scenes Writing in the feminine in 1989 is to write against the monotonous senselessness of 'the normal' in order to give a form to my desire, a woman form, since form can't be neuter. Writing is a place of passage where I shed my conventional (normal) uniforms in order to think a new fiction which will give me back my voice in all its polytonality, all its bodily shock points. I write against myself, against the narrativity indoctrinated in mefrom infancy, memoryas the anecdote ofmy fouryear old selfwho hadn't been subdued yet. But I also write memoryas a zone of exploration where, through a reinvented fiction, I come to understand reality other-wise. In Bonheur (Happiness), I wanted to explore that kitsch word, how it is inseparable from suffering. My writing is made ofthe clashing ofconcepts, ofliterary genres, the transformation ofstory into aspace where sense is confused with the sensual. I seek to knock out binary logic, to produce what might becalled alogic of aporia, women-logic. I can't accept the destruction of the western subject of discourse without proposing a possible reconstruction where I can speakand pass from the object ofmasculine desire to the function of subjectactingon myown desire. Forawoman it's notaquestion ofto be or not to be but rather how to be while not being.