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ENGLISH 4323 X2: SPECIAL TOPICS IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE 2 In spite of the illusions established by print culture traditions, stories refuse to remain static. Like the earliest storytelling practices, recent narratives, facilitated by new media technologies and networked communications, often exchange the limits of single-authorship, self-containment, and consistency for collaborative, participatory storytelling that not only occupies various media platforms simultaneously, but also focuses more on establishing or extending a fictional world or universe than on the narrow development of a particular character or story arc. Such efforts represent the latest attempts to diversify narrative practice and to extend story-based ideas across multiple platforms. This course will explore the ways in which these alternative models of storytelling intersect with and emerge from more conventional print-based narrative practices. We will investigate how serialized narratives, fan fiction, and collaborative authorship in print-based fiction has contributed to an increasing prevalence of vast narratives and transmedia storytelling. Primary examples and secondary critical scholarship will introduce us to the following ideas: emergent fictional platforms; blurring boundaries between readers, consumers, authors and players; multi-platform extensions of fictional environments; integrity and creative mutation during the development and extension of fictional worlds; the economies that generate and sustain the growth of such worlds; interactive communities of collaborative consumer-participants; and the specific ways that this shift expands our more traditional literary understandings of narrativity, the boundaries of fiction and the place of stories. Download the course syllabus here! |