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.

Watchmen Stuff over at The Hog’s Head

I’ve started a series of posts on Watchmen at Travis Prinzi’s site in anticipation of the movie.  The novel is such a complex piece of fiction that I’ve decided to tackle it in installments by analyzing the characters.  After all, the book is a character study as much as anything.  

If you’re a fan, please check out my posts and offer feedback!  I make no claims to expertise in comics (or anything, for that matter); so, your thoughts would be most welcome!

• “Who will Watch Watchmen“
• “Watchmen: Getting Started“

In Harry Potter related news, there’s also footage from an Australian news program giving a two and half minute series of clips from the Half-Blood Prince movie — and it looks frikkin’ awesome!

“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. 

CEA 2008 Presentation

This is my CEA 2008 Presentation concerning narrative in videogames.  I was only permitted about 15 minutes, and I showed a clip from Call of Duty 3 over one section discussing World War II based first-person shooters.  You can follow the link above for the Word document, or you can check out the cut/pasted version below.

Overall, the conference went well.  I sat through several presentations concerning contemporary fiction, particularly Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and White Noise.  I sometimes find it amazing that the latter novel (now 23 years old) still receives as much critical attention as it does, especially in the wake of 1998’s Underworld.  But, I also attended some panel discussions about modern technology in the classroom, and was a wee bit disappointed.  The presenters’ grand revelation was that students spend quite a bit of time using Facebook as a communication and networking application.  Uh-huh…

The Narrativity Scene

Marie-Laure Ryan’s book, Narrative as Virtual Reality (2001), has been sitting on my bookshelf for quite a while, now.  Unfortunately, as a writing teacher spreading myself across eight sections each semester, I don’t often find much time to read for my own intentions.  And when I do, it’s often to the detriment of my classes.  But I finally made it around to her book over the last couple of days, and I’ve had some time to digest some thoughts in the Introduction.  I’m a gamer; thus I take particular interest in critical scholarship of gaming and “erogodic” domains, to borrow Espen Aarseth’s terminology.  For a few years now, I’ve been thinking my way through ludological problems with narrative as an active component in game design and simulational environments.  Major theorists on this matter debated the notion for a number of years, until recently a few significant opponents to narrative theory in game studies altered their positions on this. 

Ryan stakes out a position that I find appealing.  She establishes a look at the distinctions between “interactivity” and “immersion”. 

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)