English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Towards a Theory of Transmedial Immersion(2020) Frew, Kathryn Kaczmarek; Kraus, Kari; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Immersion names a physical, mental, and emotional state in which narrative can take control over a reader. Traditional theories of immersion, rooted in the metaphors of enchantment and transportation, assume that the boundaries of the text constitute the boundaries of the reader’s engagement with the story. In other words, if you close the book, immersion ends. Transmedia narratives, such as the Matrix franchise, challenge these assumptions because the story moves across media boundaries. By putting theories from disciplines such as psychology, cognitive science, narratology, and media studies in conversation and testing them against case studies of transmedia narratives, I propose a new theory of transmedial immersion that accommodates all narratives, particularly those crossing media boundaries. Transmedial immersion is the phenomenological experience of a narrative by which the features of the storyworld, characters, and plot become the primary focus of the reader/viewer/player’s consciousness. This immersion bleeds beyond the boundaries of the medium and narrative experience, allowing it to be individual or communal. As I show through a reading of the interaction of print text, augmented reality, and digital narrative in The Ice-Bound Concordance, transmedial immersion relies on distributed, rather than focused, attention, and embraces the materiality and hypermediacy of the reading/viewing/playing experience. Contrary to assumed effortlessness, transmedial immersion requires cognitive effort as readers collate and assemble all the aspects of the narrative. For example, players of the alternate reality games DUST and The Tessera use cognitive blending (as described by Mark Turner) to blur the ontological boundaries of fiction and reality, demonstrated in their use of metalepsis. Finally, transmedial immersion allows the narrative to be simultaneously enjoyed and critiqued, an approach Alexis Lothian calls “critical fandom.” The theory explains how Harry Potter fans reacted to the Fantastic Beasts movies by embracing Newt Scamander as an unlikely hero while raising concerns about cultural appropriation and queer representation. This theory of transmedial immersion not only provides a framework for understanding narrative engagement in the new media landscape, it also prompts literary scholars to reexamine how their assumptions about the process of reading, viewing, and playing texts in a single medium inform their criticism.Item Literary Joint Attention: Social Cognition and the Puzzles of Modernism(2008-04-07) Tobin, Vera; Turner, Mark; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The fundamental claim of this project is that the mechanics of social cognition--how we think intersubjectively and process social information--are highly relevant to the study of literature. Specifically, it presents a theory of literary discourse as the emergent product of a network of joint activities and joint attention. Research on joint attention frequently focuses on contexts in which this aspect of social cognition is not fully developed, such as in early childhood, or for autistic people. The study of literature, on the other hand, is continually engaged with circumstances in which joint attention is relevant, highly developed, and complex. Here, linguistics and cognitive science provide the basis for specific and particularizing claims about literature, while literary texts are used to support broader theoretical work about language and the mind. The focus is on modern literature in English and its reception. Many of these texts exploit systematic egocentric biases in social cognition and communication to produce effective ironies and narrative surprises. Further, both detective fiction and experimental Modernist fiction frequently dramatize problems of joint attention that can be traced to the ultimate relation between author, reader, and text. Extended analysis, with special attention to Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, demonstrates the importance of this joint attentional trope. In these texts, the external and perceptible serve not only as triggers for the events of a single consciousness, but as a locus for the potential for intersubjective experience, both inside and outside the text. A case study of the publication and reception history of Marianne Moore's "Poetry," finally, demonstrates the utility of a cognitively realistic approach to textual criticism. These literary activities also serve as an important proving ground for the claims of cognitive science, demonstrating complexities of and constraints on shared viewpoint phenomena.