For well over a century, filmmakers have adapted print texts into stories featuring images and music. Before cinema, playwrights rendered popular novels into embodied, spoken dramatic stories, even when the novel had not yet completed its initial serial publication run. In an era of new technologies and entertainment conglomerates, interconnected stories emerge across media, creating an overarching storyworld that exceeds the boundaries of a single text or mode of representation. Extended reality (XR) and games immerse us into tales that require physical interaction.
English 494 examines the relationship between stories and the media in which we create and experience them. How does the medium shape the story? What happens when stories move across media or simultaneously appear in multiple media? What possibilities do new media technologies present for storytelling and inhabiting storyworlds? What limits do media—and the industries supporting creation and distribution—place on the stories that can be told? To explore these questions, we will focus on three types of story-media relationships: adaptation, transmedia, and immersion. We will use adaptation, narrative, transmedia, and new media theory to analyze creative texts composed in various forms: print alphabetic and visual books, film (including 360-degree and VR cinema), games, podcasts, and webtexts, among others. Moreover, we will investigate the contexts surrounding not only the development of particular media but also the stories told within it.
To develop an understanding of various story-media relationships, we will analyze two cases of stories that have moved among or unfolded across novels, comics, film, television, fanfiction, and games. Students will draw on critical methods learned via the case studies to develop a final project.