Event
Expanding Beyond Borders: Fictional Worlds, Transmedial Universes, Fan Communities
It is no co-incidence that a growing number of publications dedicated to world-building theory and postclassical approaches to narrative and media studies has coincided with the acquisition of LucasArts by The Walt Disney Company or massive changes in movies and video games development. It has already been shown many a time that so-called transmedial universes composed of various “work-specific storyworlds”, as Jan-Noël Thon terms them, prove immense success in setting-up successful franchises which allow for new recipient practices to emerge. This is why the organisers of "Expanding Beyond Borders. Fictional worlds, Transmedial Universes, Fan communities" international conference would like all the interested attendees to focus on that particular phenomenon - and ponder whether the ideal of world-consistency, pursed by so many filmmakers, video game developers, and writers in the industry, is really only a matter of economical control, or maybe it can be only provided by transfictional links in-between a variety of diverse, both top-down and bottom-up-created storyworlds. Proposed topics may include but are not limited to:
- key and emerging concepts in transmedia studies and transmedial narratology;
- transmedial strategies in narrative representation;
- faces of transfictionality: cross-overs, spin-offs, merging worlds;
- the paradigm of coherence: retroactive continuity (ret-cons) and fix-ups,
- massive universes and heterocosms and their role in setting-up a franchise: Marvel Cinematic Universe (Disney/Marvel Studios), Dark Universe (Universal), DC Universe (DC Comics), Star Wars Universe (Disney/Lucas Arts) etc.
- possible worlds, fictional worlds, storyworlds, and transmedial universes;
- top-down and bottom-up world-building and storytelling;
- ways of inhabiting fictional/virtual worlds: immersion, attraction, engagement, entrancement;
- ways of engaging fans in convergent world-building;
- participatory narratives: fan fiction, slash fiction, fan art, fanimes, video game mods etc.
- fan & fandom studies with particular emphasis on shaping fan communities (e.g. Dr Who or Sherlock fandom) and social worlds (e.g. MMORPG or table top RPG communities);
- economy of fictional world-building: brands, franchises & merchandise;
- canonical and apocryphal narratives: who’s really steering the mothership?
- various media channels (musical, graphic, textual) as world-building engines;
- fictionalization of heteroreferential elements (like different variations of Disney’s castle in the opening of Disney-produced movies);
- migration of transfictional elements to the internet (e.g. music cosplay in The Piano Guys or Lindsey Stirling’s videos);
- case studies of fictional/transmedial/virtual/online worlds and their multimedia representations (in literature, films, video games, graphic novels, animations, mangas & animes).
Further details regarding the venue, suggested accommodation and transportation will be continuously updated at the website transmedialstudies.wordpress.com. Organisers do welcome all questions and requests at transmedialstudies@gmail.com. The conference will be followed by a peer-reviewed monograph, published by Facta Ficta Research Centre and licenced under Creative Commons 4.0 as an ebook stored in a globally accessible repository (CeON Center for Open Science) and / or a peer-reviewed special edition of open access scholarly journal.
The Organising Committee
Ksenia Olkusz, PhD (Facta Ficta Research Centre in Kraków)
Piotr Kubiński, PhD (University of Warsaw)
Barbara Szymczak-Maciejczyk (Pedagogical University of Kraków).
Krzysztof M. Maj (Jagiellonian University, Facta Ficta Research Centre in Kraków) – project co-ordinator