Subjectivity Across Media ― Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives

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 generally be understood as "qualia machines," in other words 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 oral and literary narrative, the verbal-pictorial representations characteristic for graphic narrative, the audiovisual representations characteristic for film and television, and the interactive representations characteristic for various video game genres. 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.

Maike Sarah Reinerth is a Research Associate at the Department of Media and Communication of the University of Hamburg, Germany

Jan-Noel Thon is a Research Associate at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Tubingen, Germany