Paratext between Time and Space in Digital Media

2012

To hear the critics tell it, one problem with emergent digital literary and art forms is that they don't yet have established stars. Where's our Shakespeare ofthe Screen? Our Pixel Picasso? How long before we have a Digital DeMille?

2006

Every time that a new technology which directly concerns the objects and processes of human culture emerges, many different potential ways of thinking seem to compete. The history of technology is neither univocal nor deterministic. Digital technologies seem to offer some solutions to the problems which Modern ways of managing, preserving and transmitting symbols and texts had created, but they do not determine the models by which these solutions will take shape. In this paper it is assumed that interdiscursivity (pragmasphere) is the place where such models are defined, in a contest in which traditional patterns and new social and cultural instances take part. So, the shapes and processes of the discourse, as they are shaped in and through new technologies, are very crucial for understanding some of the future characteristics of symbolic exchange and cultural interaction. Starting from a morphological and functional analysis of some features of digital textuality, I will dwell upon the hypermedia as a new kind of text and discourse. Hypermedia introduce some new chronotopic features into the discourse, which change our perception and construction of cultural reality, and lead us to rethink some literary and semiotic categories, which regard pragmatics but also the ontology of signs. This paper will examine and critically use the Flichy's notion of 'imaginaire', and the Aarseth's theory of 'cybertext'. Bakhtin's notions of vyskasivanie and otvetstvennost' underlie this paper as well. A dialogic principle in defining utterances is very useful in understanding hypermedia and helps us to focus on new implications of the concept of 'context'. Intermediality itself forces us to redefine the notion of context: a pragmatic and connotative context is added to a denotative context. Links are first physical approximations, then conceptual ones. An aesthetic and a historical dimension are restored to a theory of discourse, from which they had been removed by classical information theory and from the signified-centred or the signifier-centred theories of signs and communication.

This dissertation examines the theory of paratexts and how paratexts, seen as constructed carriers of meaning disseminated to audiences by producers of texts, attempt to precondition audience’s perceptions of the text and, consequently, how the meaning of the text is imposed. I will utilize concepts of “entryway paratexts” and “in medias res paratexts” and will use the example of The Matrix franchise (1999-2003) as illustrations. I will explain how paratexts have evolved into texts due to media convergence and their extensive use in transmedia storytelling. I will explain how paratexts, now texts in their own right, continue to create the meaning of the franchise understood also as text. I will utilise research based on the analysis of numerous academic works dealing with the nature of paratexts and trans-mediated narratives as well as textual analysis of carefully selected paratexts surrounding chosen examples. I argue that the mechanisms which create meaning through paratexts are in fact practices in which paratexts act as tools for the auteurs who seek to give their work a particular meaning. I will focus on the analysis of selected practices involved in the marketing campaign for The Matrix (1999) and also its American theatrical trailer and ways in which audiences are addressed in an attempt to increase the film’s general superiority. Later in this dissertation the nature of transmedia storytelling will be explained as this is crucial in understanding how paratexts work in this kind of initiative which significantly contributes to understanding paratexts as texts. I will explain what compelling carriers of meaning, able to condition the reading of the base text, spin-off short films and video game tie-ins are as elements of trans-mediated narrative built of paratexts. Subsequently, I will show how such paratexts emphasise shifts in the current era’s media-scape while also expanding the metanarrative. To do this I will explain how short films set in the world of franchise, in this case The Animatrix (2003), act as paratextual carriers of meaning and how they operate as independent texts as part of a transmedia storytelling narrative construction. Then I will attempt to show how the idea of a video game tie-in gives the transmedia storytelling model another possibility to create a textual instalment of the franchise which, based on how much it refers to the source text from which it derives, can be understood as paratext. To do this I will use an example from The Matrix franchise, 2003 game Enter the Matrix. Finally, I will emphasize key points forming a critique regarding the extensive use of paratexts as carriers of meaning which, despite certain disadvantages in their use, are tools for serving as actors of expansion for the content world as well the target audience.

Electronic thesis. Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, 2014., 2014

In this study, I argue for the need to extend Genette’s typology of the paratext to analyze twenty-first century literary narratives. “Paratexts 2.0” are formalized in a model that presents the new categories of material peritexts and digital epitexts and their main functions. The new model provides a heuristic for contemporary narratives whose authors exploit various semiotic modes in their printed books, and the affordances of Web 2.0 technologies in the digital world. My dissertation is therefore also an attempt to complement the rhetorical approach to narrative with investigations on mediality and modality, and a discussion on the extra-textual dimension of authorial agency. Finally, according to a diachronic perspective, this study explores the ethical values embedded in the choice of using paratexts 2.0 as resources of narrative communication in relation to post-postmodern American literature.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2014

Volume 16 (2014) Issue 5 Article 3 E-Lit E-Lite er ra atur ture e, N , New M ew Medi edia A a Ar rt t, a , and E-Lit nd E-Lite er ra ar ry C y Cr rit itic ici is sm m J Ja ane nez S z Str treho ehovec vec Ljubljana Follow this and additional works at:

in "Mimesis Journal", 2014

The purpose of the paper is to identify some converging lines that appear increasingly strong in the relationship between digital media and contemporary art. A convergence that was widely anticipated (in the Twentieth Century avant-garde movement in general, and especially in its conceptual trends). The paper will give a quick overview of how digital media are offering a new conceptual and operational scenario, reconfiguring on the one hand the expectations of individuals and institutions about digital tools, and on the other offering the artists new opportunities to elaborate their expressiveness and experimental creativity.

in Body Images in the Post-Cinematic Scenario. The Digitization of Bodies, Mimesis International, 2017

This paper examines how the advent of the mobile/locative paradigm redefines the role of the body (embodiment) in the cultural processes of Digital Media, extending the notion of storytelling from a simple author–text–user relationship, mediated by the screen interface, into a complex narrative project that positions the body and its media competences within a precise physical space characterized by geographical, historical and cultural coordinates. The mobile/locative paradigm is based on the sum of the technological, perceptive, emotional, cognitive, behavioural, cultural characteristics that are determined by the ever increasing spread of smartphones, used not so much as interpersonal communication devices but mostly as devices to access the net and hence media products. It is a decided change in paradigm compared to the static fruition that has always typified the relationship with the mass media (cinema, TV, performing arts, desktop computer), since the mobility of the media end-user gives a strong relevance to the location in which the fruition takes place. Geo-positioning, end-user tracking, the enormous amount of encyclopaedic data that can be associated to the presence of that body in that place in that moment determine a profound change in cultural processes: with the diffusion of Digital Media space becomes text, since it is automatically read and written by the body of the user; and at the same time text becomes space, since the textuality of Digital Media is characterised by immersiveness, interactivity, multidimensionality, and thus by the accessibility which is typical of spaces be they real or virtual (Lughi 2013).

cfi.au.dk

The new media text is simultaneously non-linear and inter-textual, having its origins in modernist collage and montage aesthetic practices. A number of traditional media paths can be brought together in this new form of electronic writing. The modernist practice of visual montage can be traced to the film concepts espoused by Sergei Eisenstein in the early 20 th century in Russia. Film theorist Anna Chen discusses Eisenstein's seminal work in the early development of film art, referring to him as the founding father of montage editing techniques. These foregrounded the ideological dimensions of cutting sequences of film and the meaning thus created by the formal construction of camera angles forming the frame. Editing sequences in film, utilising cutting strategies that juxtaposed images, sounds and texts to create dramatic meaning within the cinematic frame are now synthesised in the virtual editing environment of computer software non-linear editing interfaces. 1 According to Chen, traditional theatrical methods were not really transformed in the adaptation of stage productions to film by the early cinematic techniques of foundation practitioners, such as George Méliès and the Lumière brothers. Their mise-en-scène was passive and stationary. It was not until the revolutionary methods of Sergei Eisenstein and American D.W. Griffith that camera position, movement, and angles began to be consciously used to construct an ideological space for the viewer. In the creation of moving images, camera zooming and tracking, close ups and extreme long shots of actors and objects, and editing (montage) produced juxtaposition and meaning, a film language expressing intellectual and political statements. …Eisenstein traced the origins of montage back to literature. Parallel montage -cutting away to simultaneous action -can be summed up simply by the literary device, 'Meanwhile, back at the ranch...' As for 2 Sergei Eisenstein, 'Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today', Film Form, Dennis Dobson, 1951, p195, quoted in Anna Chen op cit.