Playing with Identity. Authors, Narrators, Avatars, and Players in The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide

This article offers a comparative analysis of Davey Wreden’s The Stanley Parable (Wreden 2011 / Galactic Cafe 2013) and The Beginner’s Guide (Everything Unlimited Ltd. 2015) in order to explore the interrelation of authors, narrators, avatars, and players as four salient functions in the play with identity that videogames afford. Building on theories of collective and collaborative authorship, of narratives and narrators across media, and of the avatar-player relationship, the article reconstructs the similarities and differences between the way in which The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide position their players in relation to the two games’ avatars, narrators, and (main) author, while also underscoring how both The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide use metareferential strategies to undermine any overly rigid conceptualization of these functions and their interrelation

The Literary Canon in the Age of New Media

Abstract The article offers a comparative overview of the diverging courses of the canon debate in Anglophone and Germanophone contexts. While the Anglophone canon debate has focused on the politics of canon composition, the Germanophone debate has been more concerned with the malleability and mediality of the canon. In a development that has largely gone unnoticed outside German-speaking countries, new approaches to discussing current and future processes of canonization have been developed in recent years. One pivotal element of this process has been a thorough reevaluation of newmedia as a touchstone for both defining literature in the digital age and inquiring into the mechanisms of contemporary canon formation. The article thus aims at introducing the Germanophone approach to canon developed in recent years and its results to a larger scholarly community