Transmedial Narratology Research Articles

Personal Storyworlds

By combining perspectives from transmedial narratology and musicology, this article explores how the notion of a “personal storyworld” can offer new opportunities for understanding the transmedial processes whereby pop artists’ personas are continually (re-)constructed and (re-)negotiated through and across myriad points of contact between artists and audiences. Emphasis is placed on the performative potential of audiovisual aesthetics and public posturing, on the one hand, and on audiences’ interpretive flexibility, on the other. These related themes are addressed through a case study of an artist who aptly exemplifies the continual transfiguration of pop personas, namely Justin Bieber. The main part of the case study concerns how Bieber’s sixth studio album, Justice (2021), and associated material (music videos, live performances, interviews, promotional material, social media posts) related to and formed part of his broader personal storyworld. This sets up an exploration of how the dynamics between retrospection and reinvention shape the reframing of personas, which raises a series of questions concerning the dialectic between continuity and change, artist-audience dynamics, and transmedial processes of interpretation.

Toward a Narratology of Western Narrative Theatre Dance

ABSTRACT: Dance is barely present in narrative studies. It is generally accepted as a narrative medium, yet lacks a systematic study that addresses its distinctive qualities. This article focuses on generic theoretical issues of dance as a narrative medium and discusses its place within current narratological debates. The first premise suggested here is that among the diferent manifestations of dance, narrative theatre dance is the fullest expression of narrativity, with a narrative essence that the notions of plot and experientiality help defining and grading. Taking the discussion through routes explored for drama, this essay also argues for a narratological model of the analysis of dance narratives on two levels: the story level and the discourse level understood as performance. Another set of considerations concentrate on the semiotic structure of dance, showing how it can be dissected in a productive way for narratological analyses. The essay ends with a discussion on the relevance of context and cultural conventions for the interpretation of dance. Underpinning these reflections are foundational studies of transmedial narratology, widely-used narratological definitions of narrative, and discussions of the narrative nature of drama as well as key texts from the history, philosophy and analysis of dance. Three examples of dance—John Weaver’s ballet The Loves of Mars and Venus (1717), Kenneth MacMillan’s The Invitation (1960), and Leonid Yakobson’s Vestris (1969)—illustrate this theoretical argumentation.

ИЛУСТРАЦИЈЕ КЊИЖЕВНОСТИ – ОДЛИКЕ И МОГУЋНОСТИ У НАСТАВИ

The goal of this paper is the interpretation of illustrations that are not primarily part of a textbook. Analysis of illustrations in the context of transmedial narratology, we want to show that each illustration has a narrative potential, so it can become a teaching tool in literature classes. By finding the common characteristics of the illustrations, we will try to show that the illustration can be viewed within a wider system.

A Tale of Two Theories

A Tale of Two Theories

DELA BRANISLAVA NUŠIĆA U TRANSMEDIJALNOM KONTEKSTU

Regardless of the fact that Branislav Nušić is one of the writers whose works are still performed as plays in theaters and despite the fact that a large number of his works has been adapted as film, television drama and series, there is no paper that presents an analysis of his screen adaptations. The subject of our research was the analysis of Nušić’s literary work from the perspective of transmedial narratology. Thanks to the transmedial method, we were able to provide a new approach to Nušić’s writings. Thus, we presented his work as well as the literature from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century from the perspective of new, contemporary theories of the literary in- terpretation. Nušić’s works were transformed into a large number of operas, comic books, theater plays, films, television films, dramas and series by the snowball effect. The analysis has confirmed that the literary work and its adaptation are two separate works made by two different creators. Interesting directorial solutions for adapting works are systemat- ically presented. Some directors followed the chronology of the events and some have deviated from that. Guided by Doležel’s typology, we have recognized all three types of conecting one fictional world to another. The works were placed in new spatial and time contexts and the directors have filled in the blanks of the original world. Different direc- torial intentions have sometimes made a change of genre. However, wishes and strivings of Nušić’s characters are intact and there are the reasons for modernity of Nušić’s works.

Notes on Contributors

Ron Ben-Tovim is a senior lecturer at Ben Gurion University's Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics, where he focuses on modern and contemporary war literature, with a special interest in trauma and disability studies. His book Poetic Prosthetics: Trauma and Language in Contemporary Veteran Writing is forthcoming via the Edinburgh University Press series Advances in Critical Military Studies.Sophus Helle is a postdoctoral researcher at Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on Babylonian epic poetry, especially Gilgamesh, and the Sumerian poems of Enheduana, both of which he has translated into Danish and English. His latest project explores the poetics of philology.Theresa Krampe is a doctoral researcher at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at Giessen University and a lecturer in media studies and media education at Osnabrück University, Germany. Her PhD project focusses on the forms and functions of metareference in videogames. Publications include “No Straight Answers: Queering Hegemonic Masculinity in BioWare's Mass Effect” (Game Studies 2018) and “The World Machine: Self-Reflexive Worldmaking in OneShot,” published in the edited volume Game | World | Architectonics (ed. Marc Bonner, Heidelberg UP 2021).Spencer Lee-Lenfield is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale University. His other research has appeared or will soon appear in Modern Language Quarterly and the Proceedings of the Modern Language Association. His current dissertation research focuses on translation between Korean and English in the Korean diaspora.Stephanie Lotzow is a PhD candidate at the Giessen Graduate Centre for Humanities (GGK) and research assistant at the German Department of Justus-Liebig-University of Giessen, Germany. In her teaching, she focuses on critical media analysis in contemporary German culture. As speaker of the Game Studies Working Group at GGK, she organizes interdisciplinary workshops on the academic study of videogames. Her PhD project presents a ludo-narratological theory for analyzing forms and functions of perturbations in horror games.Marina Ludwigs is a docent at the English Department of Stockholm University. Her specializations include narratology, generative anthropology, Girard's Mimetic Theory, and philosophy of explanation in the humanities. She has recently worked with the questions of paradox and reverse causality. Her recent articles on this topic are “Hierarchical Thinking, Grammatical Structures, and the Originary Scene” (Anthropoetics, 2020) and “Retrieving the Paradox: Freud's Death Drive and the Originary Concept of Deferral” (Anthropoetics, 2022). She is currently working on an interdisciplinary project on the topic of events and eventfulness in literature and science.Jeremy Page is a Sydney-based designer, writer, and (currently) independent researcher, with particular interests in aesthetics, phenomenology, and the various ways in which philosophy intersects with poetry and the arts. He holds a BA with double majors in writing and philosophy, a master's of creative writing, a master's of research (English), and a PhD in English from Macquarie University, with a dissertation exploring the intersections of phenomenology, music, and contemporary American poetry. His creative and scholarly works have been published in Cordite, Meanjin, Journal of New Music Research, and Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology. He can be reached at jeremy.page1@hdr.mq.edu.au.Brian Richardson teaches at the University of Maryland. His most recent works include A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives (2019), Essays on Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts (2021), and Unnatural Narratology: Extensions, Revisions, and Challenges, coedited with Jan Alber (2020). His website is https://brianerichardson.weebly.com.Jan-Noël Thon is professor and chair of media studies and media education at Osnabrück University, Germany. Recent books include From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels (coedited with Daniel Stein, 2013), Storyworlds across Media (coedited with Marie-Laure Ryan, 2014), Game Studies (coedited with Klaus Sachs-Hombach, 2015), Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture (2016), Subjectivity across Media (coedited with Maike Sarah Reinerth, 2017), Comicanalyse (coauthored with Stephan Packard, Andreas Rauscher, Véronique Sina, Lukas R. A. Wilde, and Janina Wildfeuer, 2019), and Comics and Videogames (coedited with Andreas Rauscher and Daniel Stein, 2021).Helena Van Praet is a teaching assistant in Dutch literature and PhD student in comparative literature at Université catholique de Louvain. Her research focuses on the experimental poetry of contemporary poets Rozalie Hirs and Anne Carson. Her articles have appeared in Canadian Literature, English Text Construction, and Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne.

On the pseudo-open world and ludotopian dissonance: A curious case of Cyberpunk 2077

The article proposes and discusses the term of ‘ludotopian dissonance’ in reference to flawed open-world design in computer role-playing games (cRPGs). Much like ludonarrative dissonance, this concept shall address a paradox of narrative credibility – this time, however, narrowed to the gameworld itself rather than to gameplay or storyline. This case study of Cyberpunk 2077’s world-building is supplemented with reflection upon the idea of openness or ‘openworldlness’ (‘what makes a given imaginary world truly open? Is it possible? Or is it viable for video games?’), as well as with research on explorable imaginary worlds (predominantly from the angle of transmedial narratology and interdisciplinary world-building studies). The aim of the article is to reiterate the necessity of design worlds that do not only serve as a container for storytelling, but also provide the players with an inhabitable, performative ludotopia which does not produce any dissonances between the credible storyworld and incredulous gameworld.

Pripovedanje kao čin subverzije - poziv na akciju u TV seriji platforme Hulu Sluškinjina priča

The article focuses on the comparative analysis of Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel and Bruce Miller's (2017) TV adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale. Special attention in the paper is given to the construction of the main character's identity in the respective media, most particularly the fact that in the Hulu series (2017-2022) the main character is depicted as a modern feminist activist constantly offering resistance to repressive ideology, unlike in the novel in which her new identity completely erases memories of prior existence and is compliant with inhuman treatment in Gilead. Just like Atwood, Miller applies the strategy of the interior monologue and intensifies its impact by using voice-over narration and italic subtitles that turn the audience into a secret confidante and willing ally in the main character's struggle against repressive heteronormative and misogynist rules. This thought-provoking platform of expression is purposefully used by Miller in order to emphasize the importance of storytelling as a subversive act of resistance. With the help of Atwood herself, who has been collaborating with the series cast, producers, and director in screenwriting, this TV adaptation draws attention to contemporary issues of political conflicts, sexual slavery, war, toxic pollution, poverty, LGBTQ, women's rights, as well as the need to address these issues and ultimately influence a long-craved social reform. The theoretical framework of the research relies on the concepts of transmedial narratology as elaborated by Thon (2015, 2016), Ryan (2014), Rajewski (2005), Gobyn (2019) and others.

Grafične pripovedi in pripovednost

Grafične pripovedi se nahajajo na stičišču prikazovanja in pripovedovanja zgodbe, v vsakem primeru pa zgodbo pripovedujejo, torej predstavljajo narativen žanr. Grafično pripovedovanje omogoča zastavljanje temeljnih vprašanj, ki zadevajo na primer temporalni aspekt narativnosti (razumljene kot skupek formalnih in kontekstualnih lastnosti, ki določajo pripoved) in področje fokalizacije. Grafične pripovedi s pripovednim časom upravljajo nekoliko drugače od (zgolj) literarnih besedil, saj občutek časa ustvarjajo z razmerjem med vizualnim in verbalnim. Nadalje poleg (po navadi uokvirjenih) ilustracij vsebujejo tudi tako imenovani »gutter«, »jarek« ali »luknjo«, torej vmesne prazne prostore. Teoretik in stripar Scott McCloud pravi, da je prav ta prostor v grafičnem romanu najkreativnejši; je praznina, ki najbolj buri bralčevo domišljijo, obenem pa tudi prostor, kjer se zgodi iluzija premika prostora in časa. Na primerih nekaj stripov (izpostavljeni avtorji so Art Spiegelman, Joe Sacco in Marjane Satrapi) članek prikaže specifike grafičnega pripovedovanja, ki s sekvenčnostjo podob, montažo kadrov, kompozicijo posameznih strani in drugimi strukturnimi karakteristikami omogočajo grajenje in vzdrževanje zgodbe. Ko govorimo o grafičnih pripovedih, je torej ustrezno govoriti o čezžanrski in čezmedijski naratologiji, zato razprava izpostavi tudi vlogo postklasične naratologije pri interpretaciji in razumevanju tovrstnih zgodb.

The Multimodal Evocation of Minds in Audio Drama

This article discusses the construction of fictional minds in audio drama. Drawing upon social semiotics, cognitive narratology, and the narratology of audio drama, it starts from the premise that a character's consciousness in radio plays is shaped by the conventions, constraints, and affordances of the medium. This means that the semiotic modes of the radio play are exploited in a particular way to give listeners the impression that they are accessing a character's mind, e.g. through a voice's pitch or the verbal rendering of thoughts. In a dynamics of remediation, audio drama conventionally adopts narrative strategies associated with drama (e.g., soliloquy) as well as novelistic (e.g., thought report by a heterodiegetic narrator) and cinematic procedures (e.g., extradiegetic music as an accompaniment to characters' emotions) to evoke minds. Three adaptations will serve to illustrate this dynamics: Madame Bovary (PBS, 1986), Oeroeg (2009) and The Divine Comedy (BBC, 2014). By taking imported conventions into account alongside the audiophonic deployment of voice, music, sound, silence, and words, the article aims to further our understanding of minds in audio drama – which is relatively unknown territory in narratology – and contribute to the debate on fictional minds in cognitive and transmedial narratology.

“I tell, therefore you are”: Identity in The Handmaid’s Tale. A comparison between the novel and the series

This article compares the narrative representation, and more specifically the identity (de-) construction, of the main character in the novel The Handmaid's Tale and in the first season of the eponymous series. To do so, I draw on the concepts of transmedial narratology as elaborated by Thon (2015, 2016) and Ryan (2014), that stresses that some narratological concepts originally applied to literary texts (as for example storyworlds, characters, the distinction story/discourse) are useful to analyze narrative representations in other media as well. One of the principal means in literature to represent the inner world of a character is the interior monologue. How is the interior monologue used in both the novel and the series? How does this use influence the plot in both media? And does the medium in any way determine the use of the interior monologue? Furthermore, I connect the narrative representation of the main character to the principle of remediation and demonstrate that her portrayal is inextricably linked to the medium in both series and novel.

Torquato Tasso på (kryds og) tværs

The article contributes to research into the topos of furor poeticus or poetic madness and its prominence during the romantic period. In particular, it compares how the life story of the mad Italian poet from the Renaissance, Torquato Tasso, was represented in fictionalized versions across media and art forms. Romantic versions of Tasso’s life in drama (Wolfgang Goethe and B. S. Ingemann), poetry (Lord Byron), painting (Eugène Delacroix) and instrumental music (Franz Liszt) are analyzed with the aim of highlighting which aspects of Tasso’s life are portrayed, how the affordances of the medium affect the depiction and how intermedial references and transpositions are in play. In addition to intermediality theory, the transmedial narratology of Werner Wolf is introduced and employed to compare to what degree the different media and art forms can convey prototypical aspects of narrativity. Moving from the most prototypical to the least prototypical narrative genre, the article finds that the more representations of Tasso focus on his time spent in a madhouse, the more the narrative stresses experientiality at the expense of investment in plot development. The affordances of strong narrative media and strong and weak narrative-inducing media may highlight different aspects of the experientiality of furor poeticus, but in all cases the representation of Tasso is performed in an innovative romantic style.

Network AestheticsTransmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture

Network AestheticsTransmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture

Percorsi transmediali. Appunti sul potenziale euristico della transmedialità nel campo delle letterature comparate

In the light of the vast debate on relations between media and on today's convergence culture, the present contribution focuses on the concepts of inter- and transmediality, with particular attention to the field of 'transmedial narratology'. The aim is, on the one hand, to raise questions as to the basic understanding of 'transmediality' in comparison with 'intermediality' and as to how these categories can be defined against one another; on the other hand, to map out the heuristic potential of a transmedial research perspective in the wider field of Comparative literature.

Unspeakable Images: On the Interplay between Verbal and Iconic Narration in Benedetti's "Cinco anõs de vida"

This article deals with the relationship between verbal narrative and images (iconic narrative) in the illustrated edition of a short story by Mario Benedetti, Cinco anos de vida, taken from Historias de Paris . It forms a companion piece to an article I published in 2013 on the relationship between (verbal) narration and fiction in this short story, particularly its ending. The theoretical framework of the present article is that of transmedial narratology. From transmedial narratology, I retain five major propositions which are presented in the first section. There is one proposition, however, which I cannot accept. It concerns the necessary presence of a fictional narrator in every fictional verbal narrative. In my 2013 article, I tried to show that the analysis of a fictional third person narrative like Cinco anos de vida could completely dispense with the concept of a fictional narrator. What I would like to show here is that this approach does not contradict the other propositions of transmedial narratology, nor an analysis based on these propositions. My position is that there are fictional narratives with and without a fictional narrator, but this opposition does not correspond to an opposition between media, namely between (verbal) language and other media. The two forms of fictional narrative coexist in some media, but not in all. The demonstration also rests on the interview I had with the painter Antonio Segui in his workshop in Arcueil, near Paris, on June 29, 2015.

Close Encounters between Bible and Film: An Interdisciplinary Engagement eds. by Laura Copier and Caroline Vander Stichele

Reviewed by: Close Encounters between Bible and Film: An Interdisciplinary Engagement eds. by Laura Copier and Caroline Vander Stichele Philippa Carter laura copier and caroline vander stichele (eds.), Close Encounters between Bible and Film: An Interdisciplinary Engagement (SBLSS 87; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2016). Pp. viii + 333. Paper $48.95. This collection of essays offers an excellent survey of interdisciplinary approaches to the Bible and film, illustrating how the field has moved beyond "the study of the narrative and themes of a film" (p. 1) into a field "where rich and diverse methodological approaches have deepened the reading, analysis, and understanding of the multiple encounters between Bible and film" (p. 2). The volume provides concrete examples of analysis that are genuinely interdisciplinary and outlines techniques to achieve such an approach. Following an introduction by the two editors and George Aichele's piece, "Film Theory and Biblical Studies," the contributions are divided into three sections. Part 1, "Film Technique as Interpretive Lens," includes Larry J. Kreitzer, "The Obtrusive Glimpse: Alfred Hitchcock and the Naked Young Man (Mark 14:51-52)"; Richard Walsh, "On the Harmony of the (Asocial) Gospel: Intolerance's Crosscut Stories"; and Reinhold Zwick, "Reading Biblical Stories with Cinematic Eyes: A Methodological Approach from the Perspective of Transmedial Narratology." Part 2, "Close Encounters between Texts and Films," comprises Michelle Fletcher, "'Behold, I'll Be Back': Terminator, the Book of Revelation and the Power of the Past"; David Shepherd, "'David's Anger Was Greatly Kindled': Melodrama, the Silent Cinema, and the Books of Samuel"; Laura Copier and Caroline Vander Stichele, "Death and Disaster: 2012 Meets Noah"; Tarja Laine's "Religion as Environmental Ethics: Darren Aronofsky's Noah." The volume concludes with part 3, "Interdisciplinary Conversations," containing Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati, "Controversial Mary: Religious Motifs and Conflicting Receptions of Godard's Je vous salue, Marie"; Robert Paul Seesengood, "A World of Feeling: The Affect of Lars von Trier and/as Biblical Apocalyptic"; Jeffrey L. Staley's "Martin Scorsese's Aviator as Theological Complement to His Last Temptation of Christ"; Matthew S. Rindge, "Lusting after Lester's Lolita: Perpetuating and Resisting the Male Gaze in American Beauty"; Abigail Pelham, "Objects and the 'Extended Self': The Construction of Identity in Moonrise Kingdom and the Tabernacle Narratives"; and Jeremy Punt, "The Odds Are Ever in the Empire's Favor: Postcolonial Subject Positioning in The Hunger Games." Anyone interested in the encounter between Bible and film could pick a contribution at random and find enlightening treatments of the topic, but the opening essay by Aichele is especially useful in outlining how such an encounter should be understood. Aichele insists on the importance of semiotics when studying the Bible and film together. His other points—"film is not Bible and Bible is not film" (p. 14); "there is no privileged member in the [End Page 180] film–Bible relationship" (p. 17); "film is not film any more, or at least it is not only film" (p. 19; emphasis his); and today not only film but the Bible is commodified for mass production and consumption—address critical issues in the field. Aichele is characteristically candid regarding the weaknesses of much of the joint study of film and Bible in the past. His point that the privileging of the biblical text—primarily due to the historical concerns of biblical studies as a field—must end if such joint study is to advance resonates. Scholars "must stop privileging history, which serves as a screen—a smoke screen, not a movie screen—behind which the older text that is the Bible is regarded as an original in relation to which the film must be secondary and derivative" (p. 18). Beyond Aichele's contribution, each section rewards the reader with a variety of approaches. Kreitzer's piece in the first section explores how consideration of Hitchcock's famous anonymous cameos in most of his films can inform our understanding of Mark 14:51-52. Both the cameos and the enigmatic verses may well share four features: identification with the intended audience, retention of authorial anonymity, the establishment of a point of narrative transition, and a comic element. Zwick advocates reading biblical narrative with "cinematic eyes." In his treatment of the transfiguration episode in...

Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture by Jan-Noël Thon

Reviewed by: Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture by Jan-Noël Thon Jan Horstmann (bio) Jan-Noël Thon. Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture. Lincoln, London: U of Nebraska P, 2016. xxii + 527 pp. $60.00. ISBN: 978-0-8032-7720-5. A new publication in the University of Nebraska's Frontiers of Narrative series is Jan-Noël Thon's revised PhD thesis, Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture. It provides a theoretical framework for research on transmedial strategies of storytelling as well as case studies of narrative representations in three different media: contemporary film, comics, and video games. In this case, these media represent "contemporary media culture." The book is divided into three parts, each of which focuses on one of three transmedial aspects of narrative representation. These are (1) the representation of storyworlds, (2) narratorial representations, and (3) subjective representations of characters' consciousnesses. In each part, Thon first builds up a theoretical basis and subsequently shows the concept "at work" in methodological analyses across the three media. Thon's contribution fills a research gap, namely the need to create a "genuinely transmedial narratology" (xviii) for media studies in particular but also for literary studies of narrative representations. Although he primarily focuses on the three mentioned media, his approach is not limited to them. He intends the categories he deals with to be open to adaptation and the analysis of other media or even of convergent narrative works of different media. Likewise, his transmedial approach leads to a critical reconsideration of existing narratological concepts and terms. In the first chapter, "Toward a Transmedial Narratology," Thon situates himself in relation to various theoretical discourses in both narratology and media studies and makes it clear that his book provides not only a theoretical framework but, in particular, a method "for the analysis of prototypical aspects of narrative across media" (6). Although his approach is clearly [End Page 247] associated with transgeneric and intermedial movements in postclassical and neoclassical narrative studies, he does not fail to clarify the connections between his approach and the other two main research areas in narratology, contextualist and cognitive narratology. Comparing different understandings of media, mediality, intermediality, and transmediality, for the most part Thon discusses the approaches of Marie-Laure Ryan, Irina Rajewsky, David Herman, and Werner Wolf, arguing that a transmedial narratology should not be "a collection of medium-specific narratological terms and concepts" (15). Instead, it should focus on continuous and neutral aspects that appear across media, while preventing media-blindness as well as media-relativism. His aim, therefore, is to "examine a variety of strategies of narrative representation across a range of conventionally distinct narrative media while at the same time acknowledging both similarities and differences in the ways these media narrate" (31). Part I is thus concerned with "Storyworlds across Media," expanding upon the classical story/discourse distinction by referring to storyworld conceptions established by researchers such as Herman, Ryan, and Lubomír Doležel, all of whom emphasize that there is more to the story ("implicit narrative content"; 37) than that which is explicitly presented. Storyworlds are therefore "mental models of who did what to and with whom, when, where, why, and in what fashion in the world to which recipients relocate" (Herman, Story Logic 9, quoted on 44f.). Because the spatial, temporal, and causal relations between the represented events and existents also contribute to the constitution of the storyworld, Thon describes storyworlds as "intersubjective communicative constructs based on a given narrative representation" (54). Consequently, Thon states a need to clearly differentiate between the internal mental representation of a world, its external medial representation and the storyworld itself (cf. 51). He points out that the recipients of a narrative representation do two things: they (1) "fill in the gaps" with their world (and fictional) knowledge, which researchers commonly agree upon; but also (2) willingly ignore aspects of the representation that are medium-specific and do not represent the storyworld. Thon writes with recourse to Gregory Currie's representational correspondence (60) and Kendall L. Walton's principle of charity (61) about the "medium-specific forms of charity" (70) recipients provide. In doing so, they seek to make sense of seemingly...

Transmedial Narratology Revisited: On the Intersubjective Construction of Storyworlds and the Problem of Representational Correspondence in Films, Comics, and Video Games

Located within the more encompassing project of a genuinely transmedial narratology, this article's focus is twofold: on the one hand, it aims to further our understanding of strategies of narrative representation and processes of narrative comprehension across media by developing a transmedial conceptualization of storyworlds as intersubjective communicative constructs; on the other hand, it will zoom in on transmedial as well as medium-specific forms of representational correspondence (sensu Currie), examining the question to what extent spectators of films, readers of comics, and players of video games may choose to apply variations of the principle of charity (sensu Walton) in cases where default assumptions about the relation between a narrative representation and the storyworld(s) it represents become problematic or even collapse entirely.

Adventures in Duck-Rabbitry: Multistable Elements of Graphic Narrative

Multistability refers to those moments in a narrative when readers are made aware of two mutually exclusive possibilities, conceived as an analogy to the visual illusion of the duck-rabbit, which can be seen either as a duck or as a rabbit, but not as both at the same time. Such mutually exclusive possibilities can arise from image elements that have different functions in different panels, words that refer to different things in the dialogue and the panel images, narration that can be read as either extra-or intradiegetic, or, indeed, moments of hesitation whether a metalepsis (a transgression of narrative boundaries) has taken place or not. Duck-rabbitry, that is, the tendency to create multistable moments (or instances that mimick the "tilt" between one percept and another), is a narrative effect in its own right and therefore needs to be distinguished from multiperspective, polyphonic narration, and allegory (because, in these cases, the two possibilities are not mutually exclusive), as well as from irony (because, in this case, one possibility is considered superior to the other). It extends across the narrative space of the fictional world, the narrative time of the plot construction, and the experience of the reader, leading to particular effects of fluency and rupture. While this article foregrounds comics as a medium that is particularly prone to duck-rabbitry, the conclusion also draws attention to its occurrence in other media and its importance for the project of transmedial narratology.

Transmedial Narratology: Theoretical Foundations and Some Applications (Fiction, Single Pictures, Instrumental Music)

Drawing on research by, among others, Monika Fludernik, Marie-Laure Ryan, and previous publications by the author, the present article outlines the foundations of a transmedial narratology that draws on intermediality theory, frame theory, and prototype semantics. These foundations permit the simultaneous conceptualization of narrative as a semiotic macro-mode and as a cognitive frame which enables recipients to classify given artifacts (texts, performances, etc.) as more or less narrative in accordance with the extent to which narremes as features of prototypical narratives can be recognized. This approach is illustrated with examples taken from three media: literary fiction, the visual arts, and instrumental music. The comparison of the different narrative potentials of these media leads to some general reflections on both the recipient's and the artifact's share in narrativization (the artifact and the medium it belongs to can be strongly narrative, more or less narrativity-inducing, or non-narrative), moreover on constitutive elements of a media-conscious narratology, and a typology of medial realization of narrativity based on transmission modes. In conclusion, benefits and problems of transmedial narratology are adumbrated.