Adapting, Translating, and Reworking Gomorrah

This article seeks to find a balance between issues concerning adaptation and translation and issues of TV studies and film studies. Adapting a literary text for a movie or for a TV series within the same culture involves a plethora of interpretive, semiotic, and hermeneutic relationships. This case study of the Italian novel Gomorrah (2006) by Roberto Saviano considers diverse strategies of adaptation, illustrating the complex passage through different discourses, practices, and processes from Saviano’s novel to Matteo Garrone’s film (Gomorrah, 2008) and to the TV series (Gomorrah, 2014—on air). The analysis adopts a multidisciplinary methodology in order to draw attention to translational ‘continuities’ from one medium to another and to the differences and ‘discontinuities’ in transmedia reinterpretations of previous source materials

ScreenStage performance: hybridity, perception and enstrangement

This Practice as Research (PaR) proposes to articulate creative strategies within a hybrid intermedial form, known as ScreenStage Performance (SSP), integrating stage performance with screening. The strategies aim to disrupt customary perceptual patterns by means of intermedial approaches to composition as narration, invoking an awareness of these perceptions. The research integrates philosophical thinking with the creation and analysis of two ScreenStage performances – The LIFT (2021) and SEASONS (2019, 2022) – and the findings from extensive practice laboratories. The thesis posits the practice of ScreenStage as a subgenre in the intermedial field prevalent in the performing arts. ScreenStage practice attempts to represent the mediation and extension of human action through digital media and the virtual realms by means of conceptual hybridity. The thesis articulates the insights of a practitioner by applying new ways of semiotic thinking about intermediality in terms of composition, action, narration and ‘enstrangement’ (Shklovsky, 1919). SSP is considered and analysed as a system for signification and communication. Using PaR methodology (Midgelow, 2019), the thesis attempts to articulate the epistemological knowledge of SSP from the perspective of the practitioner as an artistic-researcher and the first observer. It addresses a gap in the semiotic discourse of the performing arts posed by a lack of research on both the perspective of the practitioner and the signification strategies embodied by intermedial practices and provides new perspective and terminology for dance analysis. The thesis discusses the composition and physical action through movement notation (Eshkol, 1958-2007) and physical theatre theories (Mirodan 2015, Arendell, 2020). The analysis of the narration strategies yields a unique reconfiguration of the politics of the hybrid text, which stems from the development of distinctive sorts of enstrangement strategies. The theoretical grounding of the thesis provides a particular perspective which negotiates phenomenological perception theories (Noë, 2004; Sobchack, 2016) with semiotics and media theories (Shklovsky, 1919; McLuhan, 1964; Todorov, 1977; Auslander, 2008; Pethő, 2018; Cobley, 2021) in a complementary manner. The three main theories of different fields by Alva Noë, Marshall McLuhan and Viktor Shklovsky, used to base the argument, are consistent in terms of their philosophical attempt to explore human perception as a total phenomenon. Namely, they are all interested in the activation of perception through reflective processes (Noë, 2017: 213), which act against "automatization" (Shklovsky, 2015: 162) and "numbness" (McLuhan, 2001: 6). The PaR develops phenomenological and semiotic discourse as another form of intermediality and provides creative practical and theoretical means of analysis and artmaking for practitioners, researchers, teachers and scholars

Don Quixote, intermediality and remix: Translational shifts in the semiotics of culture

In Yuri Lotman’s terms intertextual relationships as active dialogues among texts and cultures should be the starting point for an analysis of the concepts of intermediality, cross-mediality and transmediality. This article considers adaptations and remakes as intermedial processes and remix practices as transmedial ones. The article demonstrates how the processes of transposition, remake and remix may sometimes be only partial, or in other instances they may shift towards entirely different textual systems/levels. At metasemiotic levels, the strategies that build the narrative worlds may either conceal or emphasize the interdependent relations between source and target texts, as well as between their cultural semiotic systems and their emergent ‘metatexts’ of self-description. In the second half of the article brief semiotic analyses will be presented in order to investigate mechanisms of the intermedial and transmedial networks that start from a literary text, Don Quixote by Cervantes, and continue to cinema and new digital media

Directional adposition use in English, Swedish and Finnish

Directional adpositions such as to the left of describe where a Figure is in relation to a Ground. English and Swedish directional adpositions refer to the location of a Figure in relation to a Ground, whether both are static or in motion. In contrast, the Finnish directional adpositions edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) solely describe the location of a moving Figure in relation to a moving Ground (Nikanne, 2003). When using directional adpositions, a frame of reference must be assumed for interpreting the meaning of directional adpositions. For example, the meaning of to the left of in English can be based on a relative (speaker or listener based) reference frame or an intrinsic (object based) reference frame (Levinson, 1996). When a Figure and a Ground are both in motion, it is possible for a Figure to be described as being behind or in front of the Ground, even if neither have intrinsic features. As shown by Walker (in preparation), there are good reasons to assume that in the latter case a motion based reference frame is involved. This means that if Finnish speakers would use edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) more frequently in situations where both the Figure and Ground are in motion, a difference in reference frame use between Finnish on one hand and English and Swedish on the other could be expected. We asked native English, Swedish and Finnish speakers’ to select adpositions from a language specific list to describe the location of a Figure relative to a Ground when both were shown to be moving on a computer screen. We were interested in any differences between Finnish, English and Swedish speakers. All languages showed a predominant use of directional spatial adpositions referring to the lexical concepts TO THE LEFT OF, TO THE RIGHT OF, ABOVE and BELOW. There were no differences between the languages in directional adpositions use or reference frame use, including reference frame use based on motion. We conclude that despite differences in the grammars of the languages involved, and potential differences in reference frame system use, the three languages investigated encode Figure location in relation to Ground location in a similar way when both are in motion. Levinson, S. C. (1996). Frames of reference and Molyneux’s question: Crosslingiuistic evidence. In P. Bloom, M.A. Peterson, L. Nadel & M.F. Garrett (Eds.) Language and Space (pp.109-170). Massachusetts: MIT Press. Nikanne, U. (2003). How Finnish postpositions see the axis system. In E. van der Zee & J. Slack (Eds.), Representing direction in language and space. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Walker, C. (in preparation). Motion encoding in language, the use of spatial locatives in a motion context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Lincoln, Lincoln. United Kingdo

Existence of Parallel Universes as Sacred Timelines: Narrative Concept in Modern Fictional Works

Multidimensional or often referred to as the vast and countless universe (multiverse) is currently a hot issue in modern society and many people believe that the existence of this diverse universe is real. The representation of the existence of this diverse universe has been shown in the television series which is an adaptation of the comic series titled ‘Loki’, then a collection of fairy tales traveling to a fantasy world titled ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’ which in the big screen version consists of three main series namely The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, Prince Caspian and The Voyage of The Dawn Treader, then a novel titled ‘Dark Matter’ and a film entitled ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once'. These works of fiction are similar to the concept of emphasizing the process of transformation from the real world as it is today and then moving to other universes in the story. The main character in the story experiences a multi-dimensional journey that is difficult to explain logically. This study uses qualitative descriptive methods using a comparative literary approach combined with semiotic theory and the concept of equilibrium in narrative theory to dissect and analyze the hidden meanings that appear in these works of fiction. The results obtained from this study are that the idea of multi-dimensional life, multi-universes and parallel universes has become a very popular thing in various works of modern fiction. The superiority of storytelling techniques like this gives the author freedom and flexibility in creating a work, and the idea of storytelling like this will trigger tremendous curiosity for the reader or audience

Factuality, Fictionality, and Self-Referentiality in the Context of Intertextual Poetics: J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg reading F. M. Dostoevsky’s work and life

The paper approaches the aspects of factuality and fictionality first in the context of intertextuality. Intertextuality is conceived, on the one hand, as a poetic device for the accentuation and the semantic evaluation of the factual within a “fictional” world (plot) created by literary discourse engendering an entire semantic universe. On the other hand, intertextuality is regarded as a tool for the semantic transposition of referentiality in the literary text into a self-reflexive mode of discourse evolution, integrating the text’s self-definition from a cultural historical point of view. In a wider sense, self-referentiality links the domains of the intratextual and the intertextual, explaining the phenomenon of historicity through poetic discourse, in a way which can be interpreted from a semiotic point of view. When in a process of semiotic reading, the literary text is conceptualised as a complex semiotic system revealing itself in its dynamic development, it is possible to differentiate various theoretical and methodological approaches to the correlation of the key concepts of factuality, fictionality, and self-referentiality ([self-]reflexivity)

nn Walks in the Fictional Woods

This paper presents a novel exploration of the interaction between generative AI models, visualization, and narrative generation processes, using OpenAI's GPT as a case study. Drawing on Umberto Eco's ``Six Walks in the Fictional Woods'', we engender a speculative, transdisciplinary scientific narrative plentiful with references and links to relevant talks. To enrich our exposition, we present a visualization prototype to analyze storyboarded narratives, and extensive conversations with ChatGPT. Our paper is thoroughly decorated with thoughtful decorations that try to encode meaning and complement the narrative.Comment: this is a submission for alt.vis 202