Storyworlds Across Media - (Frontiers of Narrative) by Marie-Laure Ryan & Jan-Noël Thon (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The proliferation of media and their ever-increasing role in our daily life has produced a strong sense that understanding media--everything from oral storytelling, literary narrative, newspapers, and comics to radio, film, TV, and video games--is key to understanding the dynamics of culture and society. Storyworlds across Media explores how media, old and new, give birth to various types of storyworlds and provide different ways of experiencing them, inviting readers to join an ongoing theoretical conversation focused on the question: how can narratology achieve media-consciousness?
The first part of the volume critically assesses the cross- and transmedial validity of narratological concepts such as storyworld, narrator, representation of subjectivity, and fictionality. The second part deals with issues of multimodality and intermediality across media. The third part explores the relation between media convergence and transmedial storyworlds, examining emergent forms of storytelling based on multiple media platforms. Taken together, these essays build the foundation for a media-conscious narratology that acknowledges both similarities and differences in the ways media narrate.

Review Quotes

"Storyworlds across Media offers a diverse and challenging collection of essays. . . . The collection as a whole abundantly proves that a media-conscious narratology is a must if narrative theory wants to keep up with the times."--Image and Narrative

"Storyworlds across Media fruitfully explores an important new concept in narrative theory--the storyworld--that is of compelling interest across disciplines, from TV writing and popular culture to digital media design and artificial intelligence."--Janet H. Murray, author of Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace

-- (9/23/2013 12:00:00 AM)

"Storyworlds across Media offers a great deal of insight into the contemporary cultural use of proliferating opportunities (especially in digital media) for innovation in storytelling."--Richard Walsh, author of Novel Arguments: Reading Innovative American Fiction-- (9/23/2013 12:00:00 AM)

"Seminal for transmedia and narratology scholars. . . . A fascinating exploration of new analytical ideas that help explain the power and technique of media collisions now available in modern storytelling."--Kris Baranovic, Big Muddy

About the Author

Marie-Laure Ryan is an independent scholar. She is the author of Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory; Narrative as Virtual Reality; and Avatars of Story, as well as the editor of Narrative across Media (Nebraska, 2004), among others. Jan-Noël Thon is a research associate in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Tübingen. Most recently, he has coedited From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative.