TY - JOUR
T1 - Dynamic Texts as Hotbeds for Transmedia Storytelling: A Case Study on the Story Universe of The Journey to the West
AU - Wall, Barbara
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - Transmedia storytelling is often promoted as the future of storytelling. By Henry Jenkins’ definition of transmedia storytelling, though, we can also find transmedia stories in the past. Taking The Journey to the West as a case study, I show how it is a transmedia story that started to unfold hundreds of years ago. While The Journey is conventionally identified with a Chinese novel, most people are familiar with The Journey universe through films, comics, or computer games. Although Jenkins argues that transmedia stories are too broad to be grasped, I suggest that by approaching them as what Roland Barthes calls dynamic texts we can develop tools for comprehension and analysis. In this study I demonstrate how such a tool might work by applying Barthes’ concept to Korean variations of The Journey, and in particular by using tree diagrams and an animation to create a visual map of the story’s elements.
AB - Transmedia storytelling is often promoted as the future of storytelling. By Henry Jenkins’ definition of transmedia storytelling, though, we can also find transmedia stories in the past. Taking The Journey to the West as a case study, I show how it is a transmedia story that started to unfold hundreds of years ago. While The Journey is conventionally identified with a Chinese novel, most people are familiar with The Journey universe through films, comics, or computer games. Although Jenkins argues that transmedia stories are too broad to be grasped, I suggest that by approaching them as what Roland Barthes calls dynamic texts we can develop tools for comprehension and analysis. In this study I demonstrate how such a tool might work by applying Barthes’ concept to Korean variations of The Journey, and in particular by using tree diagrams and an animation to create a visual map of the story’s elements.
KW - transmedia storytelling
KW - dynamic texts
KW - Henry Jenkins
KW - Roland Barthes
KW - radial tree diagrams
KW - mapping
KW - PHP/JavaScript application
M3 - Journal article
SN - 1932-8036
VL - 13
SP - 2116
EP - 2142
JO - International Journal of Communication
JF - International Journal of Communication
ER -