Body and Text: Cultural Transformations in New Media Environments

Description

This book presents a collection of academic essays that take a fresh look at content and body transformation in the new media, highlighting how old hierarchies and canons of analysis must be revised. The movement of narratives and characterisations across forms, conventionally understood as adaptation, has commonly involved high-status classical forms (drama, epic, novel) being transformed into recorded and broadcast media (film, radio and television), or from the older recorded media to the newer ones. The advent of convergent digital platforms has further transformed hierarchies, and the formation of global conglomerates has created the commercial conditions for ever more lucrative exchanges between different media. Now source texts can move in any direction and take up any configuration, as emerging interacting fan bases drive innovation and new creative and commercial possibilities are deployed. Moreover, transformation may be not just a technology-driven creative practice and response, but at the very centre of the thematic worlds developed in those forms of story-telling which are currently popular: television series, video games, films and novels. The magic transformation of “your” money into “their” money is paralleled in contemporary media and culture by the centrality of transformation of one product to another as a media industry practice, as well as the transformation of bodies as a major theme both in the ensuing media products and in people’s identity practices in daily life. Front Matter ....Pages i-viii Introduction: All that is Solid Changes into Something Else (David Callahan, Anthony Barker)....Pages 1-9 Gender Genre Transition Translation (Roz Kaveney)....Pages 11-29 Front Matter ....Pages 31-31 Rotting, Blistered, Staggering Bodies and the Last of Ethnicity (David Callahan)....Pages 33-47 Scarlett Johansson: Into the Flesh and Out of the Flesh (Elsa Cascais Andrade)....Pages 49-66 The Tattooed Body as a Vehicle of the Self and Memory (Martin Boszorád)....Pages 67-79 Flying Bodies: Skywalker and Rooftopper Youth Communities in Interaction with the Contemporary Megalopolis (Luís Carlos S. Branco)....Pages 81-97 Who Comes After the Woman: Becoming-Plant in Han Kang’s the Vegetarian (Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia)....Pages 99-112 Assuming Direct Control: Transformation and Identity in the Mass Effect Series (Raquel Espada)....Pages 113-124 Front Matter ....Pages 125-125 Stitching, Weaving, Recreating: Frankenstein and Young Adult Fiction (Aline Ferreira)....Pages 127-138 Noah Hawley’s Fargo: How Far Can You Get from the Coen Brothers? (Anthony Barker)....Pages 139-155 From Animation to Live-Action: Reconstructing Maleficent (Larissa Schlögl, Nelson Zagalo)....Pages 157-171 On Botched Cinematic Transformations of Video Games (Bartosz Stopel)....Pages 173-190 Transmedia Storytelling: The Many Faces of Video Games, Fluid Narratives and Winding Seriality (Martin Kudláč)....Pages 191-203