Lars Elleström: Narration in Literature and other Media
Narration is a transmedial phenomenon. The notion of narration is very much elaborated within literary studies, but the theoretical field of transmedial narratology is still in its infancy. To say that comic strips, children’s books or advertising are “combinations” of text and image gives a vague idea of their medial characteristics, but it is not enough to form a basis for the understanding of, for instance, the way they narrate. Indeed, the very notions of “text” and “image” are far too ambiguous and overlapping to serve as distinct theoretical tools without being thoroughly specified. In this paper, I would like to develop a theoretical model that was presented in my article “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations”, published in 2010. The central argument of the article is that all media must be understood as constituted by four modalities: the material, the sensorial, the spatiotemporal and the semiotic modalities. Individual media and media types, however, differ when it comes to the modes of the modalities. A still image, for instance, is spatial whereas a movie is both spatial and temporal. A piece of music and a recited poem are aural whereas a printed novel and a comic strip are visual.
My point in the paper will be that narration in all kinds of media can be properly analyzed and compared only if one accounts for all the modal characteristics of the media in question. I will investigate a few contemporary literary and non-literary examples of narration and demonstrate the modal differences that make them narrate in both similar and dissimilar ways. The argumentation will be based on a presumption that narration is deeply dependent on the interpretive process where virtual worlds are shaped: a narrative is a meaningful whole that is created in the mind of the perceiver, based on the specific modal characteristics of the medium.
Astrid Ensslin: Playing with rather than by the rules: metaludicity, allusive fallacy and illusory agency in The Path
The Path by Tale of Tales (2009) is an art game that remediates the Perrauldian tale of 'Little Red Riding Hood'. It replaces the linear plot of the original folk narrative with a gameworld placed in a contemporary gothic setting and increases the original character repository by introducing six female protagonists at different stages of adolescence, thereby conveying a postmodern pluralistic approach to victimised female identity. The game thus situates itself firmly in the creative and critical canon surrounding its urtext, and in particular its much debated sexual connotations, psychoanalytical interpretations and feminist concerns (Dundes 1989, Zipes 1993).
The paper begins by examining literary aspects of fictionality that are exhibited within the game, and which underscore its hybrid status between art game and digital literary narrative (cf. Ensslin, forthcoming 2011; 2012). In doing so, the analysis is positioned within the broad trajectory of functional ludo-narrativism (Ryan 2006: 203), which aims to examine how elements of game design, gameplay, narrative and textuality concur to evoke distinctive receptive and interactive experiences. The second part of the paper offers a ludo-narratological reading of The Path. It is informed theoretically by the Situationist concept of détournement, which combines processes of aesthetic appropriation and subversion '[u]sing play as a practice to transcend rigid forms and to break constraints' (Dragona 2010: 27). In particular, the analysis will take into account three etymological variants of playfulness: (1) metaludicity, i.e. the ways in which The Path thematises and problematises game mechanic features typically occurring in commercial blockbusters, such as high-speed action, navigability, achievement and reward; (2) allusive fallacy in the sense of design features that use intertextuality, pro- and analepsis as disconcerting rather than cohesive narrative devices; and (3) illusory agency, which refers to projecting false impressions of player freedom and impact (MacCallum-Stewart and Parsler 2007).
Ole Karlsen: Gesture in ekphrastic poetry.The case of Paal-Helge Haugens Meditasjonar over Georges de La Tour (Meditations on Georges de La Tour)
Paal-Helge Haugen’s long poem Meditasjonar over Georges de La Tour (1990) is a major works in modern Norwegian poetry. It consists of 34 closely inter-linked poems, each of these an ekphrasis on a painting by the 17th century painter Georges de La Tour. Only five of the poems, however, are directly linked to the La Tour-paintings in which they originated whereas the relationship between the remaining 29 poems and their pre-texts (paintings) are meditative to the extent that the pre-text cannot be identified, or at least not easily so. Through the concept of gesture linked with Haugen’s own understanding of the Barhtesian “Third Meaning” (in his article “A Presence which does not present itself”, 2002) in paintings and the concept of gesture in poetry (understood as emphasis, voice), I will try to show how the relationship between the poems and the paintings work in Haugen’s meditations through a case study of one or two texts from the long poem as a whole.
Steen Klitgård Povlsen: The Picture of the Author
The relation between literature and the visual arts has been discussed since antiquity, often under the heading: ‘ekphrasis’: the verbal representation of the visual representation. During the latest decades a complex inter-arts-discussion has developed, also in relation to the term coned by Garrett Stewart: ‘reverse ekphrasis’, i.e. pictures depicting reading and therefore literature as such.
In my book “The Picture of the Author” I have tried to extend this term ‘reverse ekphrasis’ examining a number of author-portraits, where you in most cases know that the painter knew the model’s work, a knowledge that can be recognized in the way he or she painted the model. My thesis is that a painter not only depicts what he/she sees, but also what he/she knows. In some cases, however, it is not possible to prove such knowledge or it is even unlikely, nevertheless I have in my interpretation of the picture used my knowledge of the work of the model. Not to document the genesis of the picture but because it is impossible to suppress this aspect when you look at such pictures. In this respect the relation between literature and the visual arts can be a starting point for ‘conversations’ that can lead you far away from the origin.
In my paper I will give some examples of my analysis and present my basic methodological problems.
Timothy C. Murray: Digital Longing: Mourning Becomes Desire on the Horizon of New Media
The lecture will discuss the epistemological shifts central to the transition from analogue culture to new media art. Distinguishing between complex sentiments of mourning and desire endemic to the digital age, Murray positions the aesthetic arguments of Rancière and Deleuze in relation to recent international developments in interactive screen arts. Discussing performances and installations from France, Korea, China, and Japan, he argues for a deeply significant archeological shift from projection to fold that is emphasized, if not wholly embodied, by the digital condition. Mourning for the stability of projection and its passive spectatorial reception gives way to the new media installation’s refoldings of data transfer and data becoming, a process dependent on the continuous variations of performative participation, networked data, and computerized sound.
David Trotter: Literature in the First Media Age.
This paper will investigate the consequences for literature of the emergence during the first decades of the twentieth century of what we might now want to call a media 'ecology'. Taking Britain between the world wars as its focus, it will attempt to develop ways to conceptualize the enduring rivalry between representational media such as literature and film and connective media such as telephony and radio.
In my book “The Picture of the Author” I have tried to extend this term ‘reverse ekphrasis’ examining a number of author-portraits, where you in most cases know that the painter knew the model’s work, a knowledge that can be recognized in the way he or she painted the model. My thesis is that a painter not only depicts what he/she sees, but also what he/she knows. In some cases, however, it is not possible to prove such knowledge or it is even unlikely, nevertheless I have in my interpretation of the picture used my knowledge of the work of the model. Not to document the genesis of the picture but because it is impossible to suppress this aspect when you look at such pictures. In this respect the relation between literature and the visual arts can be a starting point for ‘conversations’ that can lead you far away from the origin.
In my paper I will give some examples of my analysis and present my basic methodological problems.
Timothy C. Murray: Digital Longing: Mourning Becomes Desire on the Horizon of New Media
The lecture will discuss the epistemological shifts central to the transition from analogue culture to new media art. Distinguishing between complex sentiments of mourning and desire endemic to the digital age, Murray positions the aesthetic arguments of Rancière and Deleuze in relation to recent international developments in interactive screen arts. Discussing performances and installations from France, Korea, China, and Japan, he argues for a deeply significant archeological shift from projection to fold that is emphasized, if not wholly embodied, by the digital condition. Mourning for the stability of projection and its passive spectatorial reception gives way to the new media installation’s refoldings of data transfer and data becoming, a process dependent on the continuous variations of performative participation, networked data, and computerized sound.
David Trotter: Literature in the First Media Age.
This paper will investigate the consequences for literature of the emergence during the first decades of the twentieth century of what we might now want to call a media 'ecology'. Taking Britain between the world wars as its focus, it will attempt to develop ways to conceptualize the enduring rivalry between representational media such as literature and film and connective media such as telephony and radio.
