| CODE | ENG5042 | ||||||
| TITLE | Remediating Narrative | ||||||
| UM LEVEL | 05 - Postgraduate Modular Diploma or Degree Course | ||||||
| MQF LEVEL | 7 | ||||||
| ECTS CREDITS | 10 | ||||||
| DEPARTMENT | English | ||||||
| DESCRIPTION | The unit will tackle central concepts underlying remediation and narrative as follows: - Mediation and Remediation: During this class, students will revisit the history of media briefly exploring the affordances of each media and the different experience each offers its users. The cultural change in communication brought about by each media will be viewed within the context of its emergence as well as modern-day practices. The notion of narrative and the elements that compose it, will also be explained. Beginning from radio and television and working their way up through the advent of computers and the Internet, students will consider how each media responds to the challenges of interactivity, immediacy and connectivity. - Writing Technology and Material Culture: The connection between writing and print will be studied more deeply through a juxtaposition with the dynamic at play in the communication strategies of websites. Notions of chronology and linearity will be questioned as the media's influence on the production of narrative will be discussed. The emergence of the image as a dominant factor in the production of narrative is also a central consideration. - Hypertext and Cyberspace: Wordprocessing and hypertext techniques will be introduced and various examples taken into consideration. Concepts of the real and the virtual will be discussed at this point, leading on to a re-evaluation of narrative's representative value. In cyberspace the connective value of a narrative is just as important as its representative one and this affects the way that it is produced. New production techniques will be showcased and trends such as narrowcasting and networked dialogue will be discussed. - Interactive Fiction: The level of interactivity offered by various media determines the way in which readers/ viewers/ players/ users engage with the narrative. Discourse and genre also affect the way in which narrative is remediated and will be discussed through case studies. - Multimedia Storytelling: Adapting or appropriating stories, producing the same story for different media from the start and translating aspects of story across media are all strategies for multimedia storytelling that need to be evaluated through a discussion about technological convergence and distributed narrative. All multimedia texts function at four levels of communication; discourse, design, production and distribution and as narrative is remediated, all four levels must be taken into consideration. - Screen and Interface: The method of receiving and interpreting a text in today's media landscape often involves interaction with a screen and the interface becomes an important platform through which narrative can reach readers. Better understanding of the function of the screen and the uses of the interface will help outline the production process of narrative in the contemporary landscape. Discussion of the screen will include a brief overview of the classic screen, the dynamic screen and the interactive screen. - Author and Reader: Traditional processes of textual production and reception are rapidly changing and during this class specific attention is given to the idea of authorship and readership. Students will question who is responsible for the fulfilment of meaning and how this affects the consumption of narrative. - Back to Immersion: At this point a discussion about the concept of 'tele-' will be held, leading to a discussion on its use in telephony, television, teletheory, telepresence and so on. Reflection upon the relation of the self to narrative through the process of immersion and the ways in which this changes through the development of media will bring together many of the concepts discussed throughout the course. - Presentations: Course participants will be asked to identify a narrative that has been remediated successfully or not, discussing the reasons behind their choice and presenting it to the class for discussion. Study-unit Aims - To study the history of media in order to understand how media transmute and are remediated. To understand the affordances of each media and the concept and process of remediation well. - To analyze transmedia story properties through their narrative elements, namely; setting, character, plot, time and diegesis in order to understand how to produce narrative for different media. Also to understand the role played by discourse and genre in remediated narrative. - To consider the main processes at play when a narrative is remediated, namely; interactivity, adaptation, connectivity, hypertextuality, immersion, distributed networks. - To predict the activity of users and their role in the creation and interpretation of textual meaning, whilst analyzing different methods of engagement with narrative based on media developments in the recent past. Learning Outcomes 1. Knowledge & Understanding: By the end of the study-unit the student will be able to: - Appreciate how each new media incorporates aspects of older media whilst also modifying them. - Appreciate the affordances of each media better and how these affect the production of narrative in each media. - Identify the core elements of a successful narrative. - Assess reader and discourse expectations and needs, understanding the context surrounding textual production and reception better. - Pin down reconfigured patterns of engagement between readers and texts as the contemporary media landscape shifts incredibly fast. 2. Skills: By the end of the study-unit the student will be able to: - Produce media-specific texts making the most of the particular media at hand. - Understand what changes need to be made to a text that must translate across media. - Produce narrative that is 'spreadable' because of its distributed aesthetics. - Place text successfully leading to better chances of publication. - Critique and review different narratives published in any media more professionally. - Adopt a holistic approach (taking into consideration communicative levels of multimedia texts; discourse, design, production, distribution, as well as intrinsic narrative elements; plot, setting, character, time and diegesis) to textual production for the various media. Main Text/s and any supplementary readings - Bolter, Jay David, Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print (Oxford: Routledge, 2011) - Bolter, Jay David, and Grusin, Richard, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2000) - Herman, David, ed., Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999) - Kress, Gunther and Van Leeuwen, Theo, Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication (London: Arnold, 2001) - Landow, George P., Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization (Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992, repr. 2006) - Manovich, Lev, The Language of New Media (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2001) - Ryan, Marie-Laure, ed., Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004) - Thorburn, David, and Jenkins, Henry, eds., Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2003) |
||||||
| STUDY-UNIT TYPE | Lecture and Tutorial | ||||||
| METHOD OF ASSESSMENT |
|
||||||
| LECTURER/S | Giuliana Fenech |
||||||
|
The University makes every effort to ensure that the published Courses Plans, Programmes of Study and Study-Unit information are complete and up-to-date at the time of publication. The University reserves the right to make changes in case errors are detected after publication.
The availability of optional units may be subject to timetabling constraints. Units not attracting a sufficient number of registrations may be withdrawn without notice. It should be noted that all the information in the description above applies to study-units available during the academic year 2025/6. It may be subject to change in subsequent years. |
|||||||