Subjectivity across Media Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives [Hardcover]

Media in general and narrative media in particular have the potential to represent not only a variety of both possible and actual worlds but also the perception and consciousness of characters in these worlds. Hence, media can be understood as qualia machines, as technologies that allow for the production of subjective experiences within the affordances and limitations posed by the conventions of their specific mediality. This edited collection examines the transmedial as well as the medium-specific strategies employed by the verbal representations characteristic for literary texts, the verbal-pictorial representations characteristic for comics, the audiovisual representations characteristic for films, and the interactive representations characteristic for video games. Combining theoretical perspectives from analytic philosophy, cognitive theory, and narratology with approaches from phenomenology, psychosemiotics, and social semiotics, the contributions collected in this volume provide a state-of-the-art map of current research on a wide variety of ways in which subjectivity can be represented across conventionally distinct media.

Introduction: Subjectivity across Media

1. The Expression of Subjectivity in Fiction: The Case of Internal Focalization

2. Child Minds through Gaps and Metaphors: On Two Strategies for Consciousness Representation in Literary Narrative

3. Cybernetic and Kinetic: Representing Subjectivity in Digital Fiction

4. The Body at Work: Subjectivity in Graphic Memoir