Section Days abstract book 2010.indd - RUB Research School ...

LOST IN HYPERTEXT?! CROSSING THE LINE WITH
A NEW CONCEPT OF NARRATION?
Daniela Olek/Christine Piepiorka
Fakultät für Philologie; Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 44780 Bochum, Germany
e-mail: daniela.olek@rub.de; christine.piepiorka@rub.de
Evoked by the emergence of new media like the internet and the convergence of established
media, an aesthetic transformation has occured in the last decade and a new kind of
audiovisual narration, emanating in particular from television and film and indicated by an
increasing transgression of media borders, has been formed.
Following the advances in technology and media, more and more narrations nowadays are
conceived in the tradition of complex fictional worlds like the Star Wars universe, for
example. This means that those narrations are not only limited to a single medium, but are
distributed over several connected media like television, comics, video games etc. Henry
Jenkins (2006, 95) called this transmedia storytelling.
Such narrations are no longer linearly and causally arranged, but develop their story over
these diverse media. With such a presentation the viewers do more than simply watch: instead
they must actively seek out the fragments, crossing the borders of widely-varying media
platforms, and construct them into a coherent story.
Consulting Wulffs (2007, 42) premise, that the diegesis is the condition for a narration, we
ask whether and how the narrative and structural divergence exceed the diegetic borders of
the audiovisual text. Is Sourrieau’s term “diegesis”, hitherto used, sufficient to describe
these specific phenomena, or are new concepts like Matt Hills’ (2002, 147) “hyperdiegesis”
needed? In fact, we would like to discuss whether a transgression of the term diegesis itself
can be seen, and if so, whether it has occured and how could it be understood.
Furthermore we want to consider the implications for existing concepts of the ‘viewer’,
because we argue that the innovations of narration are always accompanied by new cultural
and social forms of media usage, which supersede existing forms. With the help of
contemporary US television series, we want to analyse these issues, because such series lend
themselves to a diversified spectrum of transmedial extensions.
Furthermore this range of topics allows the borders of media studies to be crossed and an
interdisciplinary perspective to be reached.
References:
Hills, Matt (2002): Fan Cultures. London: Routledge.
Jenkins, Henry (2006): Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide. New York:
New York Univ. Press.
Wulff, Hans J. (2007): Schichtenbau und Prozesshaftigkeit des Diegetischen. Zwei
Anmerkungen. In: Montage/AV 16,2, S. 39-51.