Me and Harry Potter

UPDATE!: THE BOOK IS NOW AVAILABLE FROM AMAZON.COM!  CLICK THE IMAGE TO GO TO ITS PAGE.

See that?  It’s an anthology kids, one dedicated to Harry Potter.  And your’s truly has an essay in it.  I’m psyched because the essay was a culmination of a lot of work, and this anthology has been in the pipeline for a while from Zossima Press.

It’s edited by my good friend at The Hog’s Head, Travis Prinzi — who has his own well received HP related book available, as well.

Several other authors of fine talent and scholarship have work in the anthology as well.  It is well worth the read.

Click the image to go to Amazon and buy it when it becomes available!

Thanks go out to both Travis and Bob Trexler, Zossima’s managing editor, for their hard work on the book.  Their help definitely made my work far better than it was.

Vis Rhet Homework: Jenkins, HP, and the Perils of Being a Fan

Henrii Jenkins

Update:  find the strikethrough below.  An editing error on my part  implied something it shouldn’t have.  I apologize for any misunderstanding.

You can find some info on Henry Jenkins in an earlier homework post.  To update a bit, Jenkins has been blogging regularly about different facets of “Critical Information Studies,” and has touched on the legal battleground taking shape among fans, bloggers, artists, and media corporations.  In his latest post is a section calling for more attention to the role and interpretation of “fair use” in participatory communities.

Media Literacy

Jenkins states in the opening paragraph of Chapter 5 of Convergence Culture that “Storytellers now think about storytelling in terms of creating openings for consumer participation” (175).  Many artists are seeking to create works that become vehicles with which people can craft experiences rather than simply channels through which to communicate information.

Visual Rhetoric Homework and some other things…

I’ve linked the blog into the wiki for ENGL 806 Visual Rhetoric, one of courses through ODU this semester.  I need to regularly blog about my reading for the class.  Thus, some of the posts here will consist of that work.  Some of that reading list is stuff I’ve touched on here, anyway.  Henry Jenkins, for example, is a regular name on the blog, and Confessions of an Aca-fan is linked in the blogroll on the right.

from Stroupe's homepage

This week’s work included “Visualizing English: Recognizing the Hybrid Literacy of Visual and Verbal Authorship on the Web”, by Craig Stroupe.  The article originally appeared in College English in 2000, and reprinted in Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World (Ed. Carolyn Handa).  He synthesizes Peter Elbow’s highly influential model of writing as a process with Elizabeth Castro’s handbook for using Netscape on a Mac to generate both a critique of English Studies’ conservative bias against images, and to develop a hybridized perspective that addresses “a more diverse amalgamation of literacies [...] among many forms of literacy and professional/rhetorical authority” (14).

First, Stroupe argues that ES’s general dismissiveness of the visual as somehow less critical than verbal modes of representation, “subsum[ing] images under the dominant literacy of verbal culture” (14).  This stems from the West’s longstanding reliance upon the verbal as the primary mode of representing thought — logos is the Greek word co-opted in classical rhetoric to represent this.  The postmodern movement reassessed this dependency, dismissing “logocentrism”, or epistemologies stemming from language as the perfect signifier of thought, as too simple, sometimes fixing the nodal into too linear patterns of thought.  As the visual stakes a larger and larger claim to discourse and epistemes, logocentric patterns of mediation and representation become more and more limited in their capacity to functionally demonstrate the rhetorical subject.

I’ve experienced such a problem first-hand.  A couple of years ago, as I was giving a colloquium presentation to my colleagues in a very traditional English department that focused on games as potential narrative devices worthy of ES’s critical attentions, one question stood out among the few that I received:

Can I get the same effect from playing a game before bed that I get from a book?

“Narrative Multitasking”

If I am wrong, someone please correct me, but I’ve spent some time pondering soem things I haven’t found much mention of in the literature discussing narrative formation.  I’ve taken to the term “narrative multitasking” as at least a preliminary step to defining narrative phenomena that seem endemic to modern expressive cultures:

1. The ability to tell a story simultaneously across multiple media forms.  This isn’t remarkable in itself, except that these simultaneous retellings often alter elements of the narrative to fit the expressive capabilities of the different modes used.  Sometimes, this means simply emphasizing different aspects of the narrative, depending on whether the mode used is written, visual, or playable.  The distinctions between films and novels have been given a lot of attention now that it’s quite common for movies to be adapted from books (and vice versa).  Games have presented a different problem because the aesthetics, rhetoric, and semiotics of gaming have yet to be firmly established.  Just to taste the potential complexities, read Consalvo and Dutton’s article from Gamestudies (2006), or Stephen Malliet’s article from the same issue.   
2. Narratives are now also responsible for accomodating expectations from their audience that are new and constantly shifting. 

The easy contemporary example of this is the Harry Potter franchise. 

Deathly Hallows Will Be Two Films…

Deathly Hallows will be two movies.  Discussion has already started at The Hogs Head.

You can leave comments here, too.

Reflections on Umberto Eco and Narrative

Read several of Umberto Eco’s essays over the weekend, including a couple that deal with postmodern literary techniques and the role(s) of literature.  He summarizes a couple of interesting ideas, including metanarrative and intertextual irony.  Metanarratives are literary devices and elements that comment on the construction of the story in which they are used.  Intertextual Irony is a reliance on allusional structures that are not always apparent to the reader.  Related to this is the notion of double coding, that the allusions can be read on different levels by different readers:  some will miss the allusions entirely; some will recognize the allusions, but do nothing to pursue their full texture; others will comprehend the references and take pains to comprehend their function(s) within the text and the contextual interpretative practices that the reader employ to make sense of them (historical, reader-response, objective correlative, etc.). 

What is important to me is “On Some Functions of Literature”:

Literary texts explicitly provide us with what we will never cast doubt on, but also, unlike the real world, they flag with supreme authority what we are to take as important in them, and what we must not take as a point of departure for freewheeling interpretations.  (5)