Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling (Frontiers of Narrative) - Tapa dura

"Sporting essays by leading specialists in narratology and media studies, this volume is an absolute must for all interested in narrative genres in different media and in state of the art narrative theory."-Monika Fludernik, University of Freiburg, Germany -- Monika Fludernik "The accessable language and shared emphasis on 'the place of narrative in a comprehensive discourse theory' ensure that all readers will follow the fresh insights and penetrating observations."-Michigan Historical Review The Michigan Historical Review "Comprised largely of essays by scholars who teach narrative theory and media studies at universities in Scandinavia and the United States, [Narratives across Media] is significant among other reasons for the potentially useful contribution it makes to the ongoing paradigmatic debate about what a narrative actually is and about what it means to say that a particular medium is narrating (rather than doing something else). Broadly generalized, its explicit and implicit definition of narrative has two main components, from which it then draws two important implications for the fields of narratology and media studies."-Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

Narratology has been conceived from its earliest days as a project that transcends disciplines and media. The essays gathered here address the question of how narrative migrates, mutates, and creates meaning as it is expressed across various media. Dividing the inquiry into five areas: face-to-face narrative, still pictures, moving pictures, music, and digital media, Narrative across Media investigates how the intrinsic properties of the supporting medium shape the form of narrative and affect the narrative experience. Unlike other interdisciplinary approaches to narrative studies, all of which have tended to concentrate on narrative across language-supported fields, this unique collection provides a much-needed analysis of how narrative operates when expressed through visual, gestural, electronic, and musical means. In doing so, the collection redefines the act of storytelling. Although the fields of media and narrative studies have been invigorated by a variety of theoretical approaches, this volume seeks to avoid a dominant theoretical bias by providing instead a collection of concrete studies that inspire a direct look at texts rather than relying on a particular theory of interpretation. A contribution to both narrative and media studies, Narrative across Media is the first attempt to bridge the two disciplines.