Navigating wonderland : a narratological analysis of storyworlds across media

Abstract

This dissertation addresses the storytelling capabilities of video games, specifically within a transmedial context, in order to highlight their potential for being narrative texts. This is done through a narratological analysis of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871), and American James McGee’s video game adaption American McGee’s Alice (2000), with reference to Maire-Laure Ryan’s theory on storyworlds. The introduction shows how the concept of narrative can be related to Ryan’s theory which opens the discussion on the transmedial dimension of storyworlds across literature, and video games. The second chapter delves into these mediums’ parameters of interpretation and interaction and the paradoxical positions they face in relation to their readers or players. Additionally, the argument highlights the ways in which they can be subverted. This is followed by an analysis of the storyworld, and the mechanisms Carroll adopts in his novels which help it achieve its timeless status; a factor that, when adapted into McGee’s video game, allowed the storyworld to accommodate the medium’s ludology and interactive properties. The concluding chapter argues the narrative value of McGee’s text, in order to show that video games are an ideal medium for transmedial storytelling, able to sustain the timelessness of the literary medium in today’s technologically dependent age.