Self-Consciousness from Page to Screen: The Transmedial Tristram Shandy and the Narratology of Transmediality
Pedro Javier Pardo, University of Salamanca, pardo@usal.es
Ohio State University, pardo-garcia.1@osu.edu
My aim in this presentation is to offer a glimpse at my research at Project Narrative by briefly examining Michael Winterbottom’s 2005 film adaptation of Laurence’s Sterne Tristram Shandy and, in so doing, proposing a narratological approach to reflexive transmediality (also a transmedial approach to narrative reflexivity, but that is beyond the scope of this talk). Winterbottom’s film succeeds in translating into the filmic medium the assorted series of literary devices which have established Sterne’s masterpiece as a paradigmatic self-conscious novel, thus making explicit the possibility of extrapolating most—not to say all—metafictional kinds or modes from literature to film. Such an accomplishment is based on appropriation rather than adaptation, since the filmmaker turns the story of Tristram’s attempt to write his autobiography into that of a director and his crew trying to adapt Tristram Shandy into the cinematic medium, both equally fraught with difficulties and failure. In this sense, the movie includes two films, one which is a literal though synthetic remediation of the novel, and another one framing it and narrating its fictional enunciation (in simiar way as the novel includes the fictional narration of Tristram’s autobiography). This duplicity leaves room for a vast array of reflexive possibilities and turns the movie into a true encyclopaedia of film metafiction, encompassing from the self-referential to the self-conscious, from discursive to thematic self-consciousness, from metafictional mirror to self-conscious metalepsis, from introvert to extrovert reflexivity. This is why this film is an ideal playground for exploring the three modes of transmedial self-consciousness my research is focusing on now: (1) transmediation (film adaptation of literary metafiction); (2) remediation (literary metafiction in film); and (3) appropriation (film metafiction).
Pedro Javier Pardo is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Salamanca. He specializes in the reception and transwriting of Don Quixote in the English-speaking world and in film and literature relations.
Margins of Metalepsis
Henning Hufnagel, University of Zürich
I am presenting here a work in progress. Scholars generally try to define metalepsis in a global, exhaustive, sometimes even transmedial way. Where they aim at the general, I propose to start with the particular, with the presumably special cases, exceptions and rarities, aiming at uncovering blind spots and inconsistencies in the definitions that lead to a reconsideration of these definitions. I propose to explore the concept of metalepsis coming from its peripheries, from its margins, hoping to shed in this way new light on the core specifics of the concept.
I guess one could characterize this way of doing as inspired by deconstructivism, if not in a philosophical at least in a technical sense. Therefore, the project’s title is a conscious clin d’oeil at Jacques Derrida’s book Marges de la philosophie, translated into German beautifully if liberally as “Randgänge der Philosophie”: a walk on the edge of philosophy, a walk on the edge of the concept.
Some of the questions I would like to explore in this talk are:
- Why do all major definitions of metalepsis focus on anthropomorphic instances?
- Why is there such an important corpus of metalepsis in children’s culture?
- Are there really never metalepses between narrative level and reality?
Meeting ID: 925 8218 5611
Password: 838658