Intermediality and Storytelling (Narratologia: Contributions to Narrative Theory)

The ‘narrative turn’ in the humanities, which expanded the study of narrative to various disciplines, has found a correlate in the ‘medial turn’ in narratology. Long restricted to language-based literary fiction, narratology has found new life in the recognition that storytelling can take place in a variety of media, and often combines signs belonging to different semiotic categories: visual, auditory, linguistic and perhaps even tactile. The essays gathered in this volume apply the newly gained awareness of the expressive power of media to particular texts, demonstrating the productivity of a medium-aware analysis. Through the examination of a wide variety of different media, ranging from widely studied, such as literature and film, to new, neglected, or non-standard ones, such as graphic novels, photography, television, musicals, computer games and advertising, they address some of the most fundamental questions raised by the medial turn in narratology: how can narrative meaning be created in media other than language; how do different types of signs collaborate with each other in so-called ‘multi-modal works’, and what new forms of narrativity are made possible by the emergence of digital media.

The ‘narrative turn’ in the humanities, which expanded the study of narrative to various disciplines, has found a correlate in the ‘medial turn’ in narratology. Long restricted to language-based literary fiction, narratology has found new life in the recognition that storytelling can take place in a variety of media, and often combines signs belonging to different semiotic categories: visual, auditory, linguistic and perhaps even tactile. The essays gathered in this volume apply the newly gained awareness of the expressive power of media to particular texts, demonstrating the productivity of a medium-aware analysis. Through the examination of a wide variety of different media, ranging from widely studied, such as literature and film, to new, neglected, or non-standard ones, such as graphic novels, photography, television, musicals, computer games and advertising, they address some of the most fundamental questions raised by the medial turn in narratology: how can narrative meaning be created in media other than language; how do different types of signs collaborate witheach other in so-called ‘multi-modal works’, and what new forms of narrativity are made possible by the emergence of digital media.

Frontmatter Contents Editors’ preface Fiction, Cognition, and Non-Verbal Media Narrativity and Segmentivity, or, Poetry in the Gutter Vulgar Metaphysicians: William S. Burroughs, Alan Moore, Art Spiegelman, and the Medium of the Book Previously On: Prime Time Serials and the Mechanics of Memory The Paranoid Style in Narrative: The Anxiety of Storytelling After 9/11 Inter-Action Movies: Multi-Protagonist Films and Relationism All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing! Prolegomena: On Film Musicals and Narrative Photo Narrative, Sequential Photography, Photonovels The Failure of Art: Problems of Verbal and Visual Representation in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Interactivity and Interaction: Text and Talk in Online Communities Games of Interpretation and a Graphophiliac God of War Advertising the Medium: On the Narrative Worlds of a Multimedia Promotional Campaign for a Public Service Television Channel The Narrative Worlds and Multimodal Figures of House of Leaves: “— find your own words; I have no more” Intermedial Metarepresentations Backmatter Extending narratological analysis to media as varied as graphic novels, photography, television, musicals, computer games and advertising, the essays gathered in this volume address some of the most fundamental questions raised by the medial turn in narratology: how can narrative meaning be created in media other than language; how do different types of signs collaborate with each other in so-called 'multimodal works'; and what new forms of narrativity are made possible by the emergence of digital media