Editor’s Column: Storyworlds—and Storyworlds—in Transition

The same double emphasis that has been central to the mission of Storyworlds from the start—the dual focus on the full variety of storytelling practices as well as the many scholarly perspectives that can illuminate those practices—informs the present issue. Thus Storyworlds 5 features articles that explore narrative practices across a range of semiotic environments, including paintings, digital (and more specifically social) media, television, and print texts. Further, to analyze these modes of storytelling, contributors to the present issue draw on ideas from an equally diverse set of explanatory frameworks, from narratology, art history, analytic philosophy, and ecocriticism to digital media studies, theories of seriality, and television research. As a whole, then, the issue provides a sense of the fluid, variable nature of narrative worldmaking, suggesting how people create, engage with, and recruit from storyworlds in all sorts of settings, with any number of means, and for all kinds of reasons. One strategy for studying this transmedial and trans-situational profile of storytelling is to trace how particular narrative worlds, refusing to be fossilized, get taken up in new ways over time—in adaptations, remediations, rewrites, and serial extensions (whether prequels or sequels) of stories anchored in what thereby become “transmedial worlds.”¹ Another strategy for studying the scope and variety of narrative worldmaking—a strategy collectively outlined by the contributors to the present issue—is to engage in a more general investigation of how different storytelling environments afford different opportunities and challenges when it comes to projecting and deploying narrative worlds. Both of these strategies for inquiry underscore how all storyworlds are, in a sense, storyworlds in transition—whether they are gaining or losing prominence in the story repertoire of a given interpretive community, being morphed through adaptations or serializations, or taking their place in the ever-expanding network of narratives embedded in a changing media ecology, which gives shape to (even as it shaped by) the storytelling impulse itself.

Focusing on several case studies in pictorial art, Michael Ranta suggests how recent work on the factors associated with narrativity, or the degree to which a given text or discourse lends itself to being interpreted as a narrative, can shed light on the storytelling potential of static images such as paintings. At the same time, Ranta’s analysis shows how art historians’ development of the concept of “world views”—that is, the “general factual and normative frameworks” by means of which interpreters make sense of images like those presented in paintings—has broader relevance for the study of stories across media. Ranta also links art-historical discussions of world views with research in psychology, artificial intelligence, and other fields highlighting the role of narrative as a cognitive tool or instrument of mind. For her part, Ruth Page reconsiders previous work on narrative seriality by investigating storytelling practices used in the digital environments that make up what are now termed social media. More specifically, examining wikis, sites used to upload and share video content, and microblogging sites, Page shows how these new digital environments promote or at least enable new modes of seriality. The segmentation of full-length documentaries into shorter installments on YouTube, the use of reverse-chronological archiving on Twitter, and the sequenced deletion (rather than addition) of material on Wikipedia: these sorts of story-generating practices and the interpretive skills they necessitate suggest the need for a broader model of seriality; a model of this sort would provide a wider context both for research on seriality in social media and for scholarship based on more traditional, plot-driven serial forms.

Patrick Keating also develops new tools for the study of serial storytelling, but his article focuses on television rather than social media. In particular, Keating draws on the ideas of Meir Sternberg and David Bordwell to study narrative dynamics in the competitive reality show, using Project Runway as his primary case study. Exploring the hybrid nature of competitive reality programs, which combine features of unscripted documentary films with some of the editing techniques used to enhance audience involvement in fictional television serials, Keating examines the functions of flashbacks, flash...