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1 Storyworlds across Media Introduction Popular culture has accustomed us to narratives that refuse to leave the stage, returning repeatedly for another round of applause and for another pot of gold. For examples, think of the many installments of the novel-based franchises of The Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire, the movie-based franchises of Star Wars and Indiana Jones, the comicsbased franchises of Batman and Spiderman, or the video game–based franchises of Tomb Raider and Warcraft. Each of the sequels, prequels, adaptations, transpositions, or modifications that make up the body of these franchises spins a story that provides instant immersion, because the recipient is spared the cognitive effort of building a world and its inhabitants from a largely blank state. The world is already in place when the recipient takes his or her first steps in it, once again. Following the established custom of the sequel, this book builds upon another book one of us edited in 2004, Narrative across Media. We decided to call the present book Storyworlds across Media instead of Narrative across Media II, though, in order to reflect the new directions that the study of the multiple medial incarnations of narrative has taken in the meantime. The replacement of “narrative” with “storyworld” acknowledges the emergences of the concept of “world” not only in narratology but also on the broader cultural scene. Nowadays we have not only multimodal representations of storyworlds that combine various types of signs and virtual online worlds that wait to be filled with stories by their player citizens but also serial storyworlds that span multiple installments and transmedial storyworlds that are deployed simultaneously across multiple media platforms, resulting in a media landscape in which creators and fans alike constantly expand, revise, and even parody them. Another difference between the present volume and the original Narrative across Media is the scope of the term “across.” In Narrative across Media, it referred to the comparison of the expressive power of 2 Ryan and Thon different media with respect to the cognitive construct constitutive of narrativity, for stories and their worlds are crucially shaped by the affordances and limitations of the media in which they are realized. Now, however, “across” is taken in both this comparative sense and in an additional sense that refers to the expansion of transmedial storyworlds across multiple media. Thinking of storyworlds as representations that transcend media not only expands the scope of narratology beyond its “native” territory of language-based narrative (native both because language was among the first media in which stories were told and because classical narratology was developed primarily with literary fiction in mind) but also provides a much-needed center of convergence and point of comparison to media studies. The explosion of new types of media in the twentieth century and their ever-increasing role in our daily life have led to a strong sense that “understanding media” (McLuhan) is key to understanding the dynamics of culture and society. Media are widely credited with the power to shape opinions and to participate in what has been called the “social construction of reality” (Berger and Luckman). But where, might we ask, does this power to construct social reality come from? For narratologists , the evident answer from media’s ability to transmit stories that shape our view of the world and affect our behavior. The stories transmitted by media do not have to concern the real world to produce real behaviors. Indeed, one only needs to look at the fan cultures that develop around the sprawling fictional narratives of film and television or at the distinctive social habits of the diverse groups of players who immerse themselves in increasingly complex game worlds to find examples of a much more direct interrelation between “fictional” narrative representation and “real” social interaction. The proliferation of the term “media convergence” (Jenkins) in the discourses of advertising and academia has created the sense that media are currently entering a new phase of control over culture and over our lives, capturing us in their increasingly thick web. But until we are able to tell what it is that media converge around, the term will remain a buzzword—as it was in the slogan of a 2003 technology exhibit in New Orleans: “Come worship at the altar of convergence” (Jenkins 6). In Storyworlds across Media, we take the deliberate step of placing narrative at the center of media convergence. This center can be conceived of [3.140.185...

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