The Rise of Transtexts

Challenges and Opportunities

Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz, Mélanie Bourdaa, Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz, Mélanie Bourdaa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317371045
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Fernsehen

This volume builds on previous notions of transmedia practices to develop the concept of transtexts, in order to account for both the industrial and user-generated contributions to the cross-media expansion of a story universe. On the one hand exists industrial transmedia texts, produced by supposedly authoritative authors or entities and directed to active audiences in the aim of fostering engagement. On the other hand are fan-produced transmedia texts, primarily intended for fellow members of the fan communities, with the Internet allowing for connections and collaboration between fans. Through both case studies and more general analyses of audience participation and reception, employing the artistic, marketing, textual, industrial, cultural, social, geographical, technological, historical, financial and legal perspectives, this multidisciplinary collection aims to expand our understanding of both transmedia storytelling and fan-produced transmedia texts.

Part I
Rethinking Transmedia

History and Typology of Transtexts

1 Historicizing Transtexts and Transmedia

Denzell Richards

Accounts of “transtexts” and “transmedia” have predominantly treated these as recent, contemporary developments.¹ There is a particular tendency toward technological-determinism, where transmedia storytelling and its assumed highly engaged audiences are seen as created by, and dependent on, digital media technology. Indeed, such practices of transtextual/-medial storytelling and audience participation are often positioned as something entirely new and distinct from what preceded them. However, in emphasizing the novelty and innovation of these approaches, scholars risk identifying too closely with a set of commercial practices that have themselves become subject to self-serving industry rhetoric and hype (Lister et al. 2009, 169–173). Instead, following Stuart Hall’s understanding of “articulation” (Morley and Chen 1996, 115), it is important to consider that current academic and industrial conceptualizations of transmedia have themselves originated in a very specific historical context and set of cultural discourses. Strongly influenced by Henry Jenkins (2006), these have placed particular emphasis on the significance of “convergence culture”, to the possible detriment of alternative perspectives. By contrast, in their social histories of emerging media, Geoffrey B. Pingree and Lisa Gitelman (2003), as well as William Boddy (2004), draw attention to the remarkably similar cultural narratives, social functions, and utopian rhetoric accompanying “new” communication technologies, from the Medieval printing press, through nineteenth century telegraph and cinema, and twentieth century broadcast radio and television, to contemporary analogue/digital convergence. Rather than something fundamentally “new” and arising out of recent technologies, therefore, Derek Johnson argues it is more appropriate to situate transtextual/-medial storytelling as an “enduring cultural process with [its] own historicity” (2009, 14, emphasis in original); a process of continuity (the social function of storytelling) as much as change (the precise technological form this takes). That is, although “contemporary convergence culture has set the stage for a greater embrace of transmedia entertainment… the processes by which stories have been spread across institutions, production cultures and audiences from different media have a much longer history” (Johnson 2011).

In this chapter, I follow Jonathan Gray’s call for a greater historicization of “entertainment studies” that transcends “medium specificity” (2010), by considering predecessor forms of transtextual and transmedial world-building, to better contextualize current cross-media narrative strategies and corporate approaches within a broader cultural history of storytelling practice, and its discursive, hegemonic and participatory traditions. There is already a growing body of research investigating nascent, pre-digital commercial transmedia convergence, adaptation, franchising and exploitation during the twentieth century (e.g., Kearney 2004, Johnson 2009, Santo 2010, Freeman 2015). By contrast, I explore a broader historical trajectory of pre- and early-modern transtextual/-medial “world-building” traditions, and consider how similar approaches inform contemporary media practices and texts, albeit articulated in different ways. Following Marsha Kinder (1991) that “transmedia intertextuality” is inherently bound up with the exercise of cultural power, I examine a range of case studies to illustrate how various historical actors (individuals, communities and institutional bodies) used different modes of transtextual/-medial storytelling for various social, ideological, and political purposes before the advent of commercial mass media, entertainment, and leisure industries. I argue this reveals the need to question contemporary technological- and textual-determinist assumptions about what constitutes “ideal” transmedia storytelling, by taking account of actual producer/consumer articulation of texts, in particular historical and cultural circumstances.

Space dictates this will not be a complete history of transtextual/-medial storytelling. Examples have been chosen for illustrative value and could be significantly expanded and elaborated. Rather, the chapter demonstrates how particular modes of transmedia (logics of folk, canon, and branding) can be historicized by exploring related predecessor examples and forms. I begin by considering participatory storytelling’s origins within folk traditions, and how the mutable understanding of authorship and narrative associated with these continues to inform audience engagement with, and influence on, contemporary transmedia storyworlds. I contrast this with canonical approaches to narrative coherence and textual authority associated with organized religion, illustrated by the development and promotion of early church dogma during the fourth to eighth centuries. Religious bodies were arguably the first institutions dedicated to establishing over-arching storyworlds through texts which mutually reinforced one another across multiple media, asserting authority over production and interpretation. Contemporary media corporations similarly enforce story canon and the use of textual materials from their properties. Such policing is related to transmedia branding. Less coherent but more adaptable than canonical approaches, brands are symbolic narratives which cumulatively connote particular values and qualities across texts. The political application of this logic is illustrated here by the Tudor dynasty’s patronage of early-English Renaissance art and literature circa 1475–1600, to project, perform, and reinforce the monarch’s authority across all levels of society at a time when the modern notion of the independent, secular “nation state” began to emerge. It is not my contention that these examples can be directly equated to contemporary practices. Instead, I argue that they are analogous to them, suggesting that various transtextual/-medial cultural logics preexist our contemporary period (albeit articulated differently in various historical contexts) and have not been determined by technological or commercial developments alone.

Participatory Audiences and the Folk Tradition

It has become axiomatic in scholarly accounts of transmedia storytelling, to echo Jenkins’ point that similar practices can be traced back to folk traditions (2006, 139–143); however, the implications of this idea are rarely interrogated in any depth. Jenkins’ analogy of convergence audiences and folk practices followed his work on fan reception (1992; and with Tulloch 1995), which explored how like-minded audiences who were particularly invested in particular media texts formed communities engaged in a range of extratextual, and potentially commercially resistant, participatory practices. These included “poaching” aspects of the copyrighted work and incorporating this into fans’ everyday lives, contesting “ownership” of the text and making it more coherent and meaningful for themselves through activities like sharing amateur criticism and fiction within their social networks, facilitated by communal activities such as conventions. Contemporary transmedia franchises like the post-2008 Marvel superhero films and television series often build and promote their narratives incrementally across multiple intersecting sites and texts, precisely in order to invite this kind of enhanced audience interaction and engagement (if not active participation in story development) for commercial purposes, encouraging what John Fiske calls “semiotic”, “enunciative”, and “textual” productivity (1992, 37–42) such as fan fiction, art, and cosplay, shared online and in person. The oral tradition of folk tale similarly relies on close interaction between storyteller, text, and audience, drawing on a reservoir of existing tales the audience is already familiar with to adapt and develop new stories, incorporating these within communal social activities and customs (Zipes 1999, 1–7; Benson 2003, 19–21). However, there are also significant differences—especially in terms of the relative levels of cultural capital and authority between contemporary corporate authors and audiences compared to the folk context—which problematizes any direct equation of contemporary “grassroots” fan activities with participatory folk practices.

Folk tales have their origin in pre-literate oral traditions. Their original authors are either unknown mythic figures (such as Homer), or the earliest textual source is by an identified author but already an adaptation of an existing spoken-word story. Examples are ubiquitous, and include classical tales such as The Iliad or the labors of Hercules, Norse sagas, bardic romances from the Middle Ages, Australian Aboriginal stories of dreamtime, Native American mythologies of the Great Spirit, European fairytales such as those collected by Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm in the nineteenth century, and African-American slave stories about Brier Rabbit. The folk tradition involves these and similar stories being repeatedly appropriated, adapted and varied by different storytellers during each telling, to suit their intended audience—if, indeed, it is possible to distinguish between storyteller and audience in a context where the audience intervenes in the storytelling (Bauman and Braid 1998). In this performative mode, the audience’s pre-existing familiarity with the material is taken for granted, and pleasure derived from how the story is communally told. Story content is subject to variation, there is no specific continuity between tales featuring the same characters, and significant moments (of character origins, relationships, or deaths) may be contradictory (Foley 1998). Folk tales are, therefore, transtextual to the extent they draw on a pool of pre-existing, iconic textual elements (characters and scenarios) which possess shared cultural value and can be reworked according to the needs of the present moment.

The folk mode therefore differs in several significant respects to Jenkins’ description of contemporary transmedia storytelling, as “a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience, [where], ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story” (2011, emphasis in original). Compared to the folk mode’s bottom-up, open, flexible and participatory approach (emphasizing textual familiarity, repetition, and multiplicity), Jenkins’ definition suggests closely directed, top-down narrative seriality (episodic story events intersecting in close cause-and-effect linear continuity). This conception limits potential participation to filling-in narrative gaps, rather than facilitating appropriation or reinvention as associated with traditional folk practices. Furthermore, because Jenkins’ definition is sometimes taken as an “ideal” model of what transmedia storytelling “should” be, this means significant issues of authorial/commercial intent, as well as actual audience use of texts in practice, are often overlooked in favor of a purely formalist, textual-determinist approach. This is significant because the more precisely defined and delimited contemporary transmedia storytelling becomes, the more likely commentators are to overlook significant historical antecedents and predecessor forms which achieve similar ends (in terms of their textual effects and reception by audiences), even if through different means. Indeed, Jenkins acknowledges some of these limitations when, with other scholars, he recognizes that certain media franchises such as DC superheroes (particularly Batman) do explicitly evoke a folk mode of transmedia, by encouraging regular narrative reinvention and operating simultaneous transmedia continuities (Jenkins 2009; Pearson and Urrichio 1991; Brooker 2012).

As the DC “multiverse” of coexisting alternative continuities suggests, contemporary transmedia franchises can promote comparatively open and flexible “sliding signifiers” (Kinder 1991)—where iconic characters are reworked in different forms and for different purposes across a range of diverse media—rather than constructing closed transtextual frameworks resistant to narrative adaptation or audience appropriation. However, unlike traditional folk practices, this occurs within a commercial context. Regardless of how contemporary transmedia storytelling may evoke participatory modes of engagement, it remains intellectual property owned and controlled by an individual, institutional, or corporate author, rather than the audience. Whereas folk characters and stories are communally owned, modern copyright law and widespread acceptance of cultural conventions arising from eighteenth–nineteenth century Romanticism and Immanuel Kant’s theory of mind, attribute individual authors (artists, writers, etc.) with the cultural capital to determine what their work is and how it should be understood (Ryan 1992). While often contested, these factors remain hegemonic conventions of modern cultural production. Regardless of how creative or influential particular fanworks may be, contemporary “grassroots” audiences never have the same cultural influence or power over the construction, presentation and dissemination of texts, as those who own the commercial rights and/or are invested with the cultural authority to determine, delimit, and exploit these. Therefore, while such texts may invite participation to varying extents, they are also caught up in struggles of cultural legitimacy and the exercise of cultural (creative) power. None of this is entirely new, or the result of a unique set of historical circumstances. Rather, as the following section demonstrates, the cultural power to construct, maintain, and police shared storyworlds has often been invested in particular sources of authority. Historicizing transtextual/-medial practices requires that the antecedents of these developments be traced, not just in commercial entertainment but also other forms of cultural storytelling (myth-making) and narrative world-building.

Canon and Dogma

The extent of storytelling’s historical cultural power—and its ability to influence real world sociopolitical action and behavior—is clearly illustrated through the example of organized religion. This relies on communities of believers who share understandings of agreed theology, scripture, liturgy and doctrine; while participating in common conventions, traditions and rituals; with recourse to some ultimate authority (whether individual or collective) which determines “correct” belief. From a historical perspective, an illuminating period is the transition from late-Antiquity to the early-Middle Ages, circa fourth to eighth centuries. Judith Herrin explores how, during this period, “both the Christian and the Muslim inheritors of the Roman Empire… came to define their world in solely religious terms”, arguing that “as the ancient world collapsed, faith rather than imperial rule became the feature that identified the universe” and religion “fused the political, social, and cultural into self-contained systems” (1987, 8). The focus here will be on the institutional, liturgical, and artistic development of the early Christian church. Several aspects of this mirror contemporary debates about narrative coherency in, cultural “ownership” of, and the right to legitimately exploit, transtextual properties across various media (written and representational), in order to present a contiguous story universe (in this case, the story of the universe) that is mutually constru...