Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling

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. Marie-Laure Ryan is an independent scholar. She is the author of Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media and Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory.