Author: solongandthanksforallthefish

Sir Terry Pratchett was a brilliant writer of fantasy and even better humorist, his satirical takes on fantasy in the form of the Discworld and Good Omens novels are some of the most self-aware and celebratory in the genre. It’s not a surprise then many authors were influenced by him to some degree — his name is associated with fantasy much in the same way Isaac Asimov is discussed in the science fiction community. Patrick Rothfuss, author of the Kingkiller Chronicle series, is one such author who revered Sir Terry. Not long after the latter’s death, Rothfuss wrote a blog post where he lamented and acknowledged how much Sir Terry influenced him as a person and author, picking out some quotes from a 1995 Onion interview with Sir Terry on the perception of fantasy as a genre and how reading that inspired him (Rothfuss).

The interviewer in this article talks about how Sir Terry’s writing skills are so impeccable he could’ve chosen anything and been successful: yet he chose fantasy, why? Sir Terry proceeds to acknowledge a little annoyed that while yes, fantasy is looked down on to some degree, its influence and status cannot be denied historically and critically. “Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. “, he says, citing how works like Beowulf, Gilgamesh and even the Indian Bhagadvad Gita are all arguably fantasy works by modern day views.

“Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature.” (The Onion).

Even American classics like Moby Dick and Gulliver’s Travels are fantasy works according to Sir Terry. Given that they are seen as serious literature, why pretend other works of fantasy shouldn’t be viewed as such?

Rothfuss admits this interview changed his life. In 1995, pre-Harry Potter, Game of Thrones and more cultural works that occupy the fantasy landscape and popular imagination, Rothfuss felt a little shame enjoying the genre because it was looked down upon, even though he was writing a fantasy novel! I feel the same way too to some degree, even today doing my thesis research I feel a little dumb looking at fantasy stories and ‘lowbrow’ mediums like video games where my classmates are looking at more ‘serious literature’. But both Rothfuss and I remembered why Sir Terry is important to us through this interview, and how fantasy shouldn’t be dismissed because it really does occupy a lot of cultural space: from The Avengers today to older works that wouldn’t be necessarily tagged as fantasy. There’s no shame in it and it should be enjoyed, it should be viewed critically for analysis. I definitely also really enjoyed the highly controversial take that fantasy tropes are prevalent in a lot of work not necessarily “fantasy”, because it lends credence to that genre’s influence and how audiences can enjoy it as a form of ‘high’ art. Rothfuss’ tribute was also written in 2015, and since then I think we’ve seen a lot more acceptance of fantasy as a genre too, even outside of literature. Given all of this, it’s hard to really dismiss it when it’s the critical elephant in the room right now waiting to be examined further.

Works Cited

Rothfuss, Patrick. “Thoughts on Pratchett – [Part 1].” Thoughts on Pratchett – [Part 1], 24 Aug. 2015, https://blog.patrickrothfuss.com/2015/08/thoughts-on-pratchett/.

I think a movie that had me rethinking my assumptions of it was the Sofia Coppola directed movie Lost in Translation. Starring Bill Murray as a washed up actor (Bob) who meets a young girl (Charlotte) played by Scarlett Johansson while filming commercials in Japan and makes a connection with her, this film has captured my mind for years. I’d call it my favorite movie to be honest.

However, I see it very differently as an adult versus when I saw it as an early teen. Younger me found it an endearing story of love in a difficult disconnected time, where Bob unable to deal with his problems at home found escape and solace in Japan and with someone he felt more of a connection to. As an adult, I see that differently. Lost in Translation is a story of miscommunication and lack of communication — one might read it very directly as Bob lost in literal translation, unable to understand Japanese who settles for botched English that does not remotely probably cover what was originally said (a great bonus for bilingual viewers, as there are no subtitles for an audience to hear what Bob doesn’t understand), but I also see Lost in Translation as Bob struggling to truly find love even with the connection he makes with Charlotte. The romance with Charlotte is fleeting and vapid in some ways, it’s a connection built on two people’s feelings of isolation and not a sweet meet-cute of people who relate to each other. It’s because they have no one else that their adventures in Japan together feel romantic to us.

The ending scene of the movie really sells this point home to me. Bob is leaving to head back to his family in the U.S, and the scene starts with him saying goodbye to Charlotte before being forced to take photos with his Japanese entourage. As he leaves, we get shots of him riding alone in a car driving through the dense Tokyo, with shots of crowds underscored by mostly ambient crowd noise, and Bob walking among them as he walks out of the car which only serves to further emphasize his isolation. He finds Charlotte in the crowd as they hug and cry, and Bob whispers something inaudible to the audience to her.

As a literal example of the unsaid, I always wondered what he said. Part of what the scene does is let the viewer fill in the gap with their own assumption about their take on the movie and the relationship, and younger me found it sweet and romantic. Older me really sees it different: it’s just further driving home the narrative of the disconnect, the ‘lost in translation’. This point is lost on us, and us wondering what the point of it is defeats part of the message of the movie, which is not every relationship is built on real feelings or real communication. I conclude this is a moment in the film for us to walk away with a reverse catharsis of sorts: leave the assumptions at the door and feel unfulfilled, just as this romance did for very good reasons, which is what Sofia Coppola and her great actors tried to tell us.

By the way, Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson kept what was said between them. Sofia Coppola’s choice to keep it a mystery only sells the narrative mystery and the deeper movie of the meaning further. And you know what? That’s beautiful. For years I and other fans agonized about it, but when I think about how it really gives us a true ‘lost in translation’ moment, I think it’s a great form of storytelling.

Watch the ending scene here.

From my reading list, I was examining what the critical conversation was around Henry Jenkins’ book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Combine. The term ‘convergence culture’ had effectively entered the critical sphere of media studies as an important one to talk about the evolution of media, as Jenkins puts it in the original book: “By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the
migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want.” (Jenkins, Convergence Culture 2)
Jenkins later responded to his own book in the form of an academic essay in 2011, examining the impact of the term ‘convergence culture’. He then again, responded to it in a follow up to this follow up in 2014 in another essay titled “Rethinking ‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture.’” I find this follow-up to a follow-up piece interesting because it examines a key flaw in media studies scholarship: scholarship cannot keep up with the rapid changing of media and accurately predict the future of media. “Meanwhile, the reality is shifting underneath our feet, and new scholarly work has probably been completed and is inthe
process of being published that may well change our perspectives, and each of
us continue probing deeper into the issues we are exploring here. The difficulty of such back-and-forth scholarly exchanges through print already indicates why I value the faster, more fluid, and more open exchanges that are possible through digital media.” (Jenkins, Rethinking 275)

Jenkins points out something useful here his book doesn’t do a good job of addressing, by virtue of how scholarship and book research works in media studies his discourse while widely engaged with, was behind by the time critics responded to it because of the shifts in culture that occurred after publishing. He cites the example of how his works have addressed things like the Iranian uprising, but failed to predict the Arab Spring revolution of 2011 to point out how unpredictable media and cultural shifts can be (Jenkins, Rethinking 276).

This is useful for me to think about how rapidly media studies evolves as a field because of the nature of what it works with. Many of the things I am discussing or willing to discuss critically are rapidly changing before discourse can catch up to it, and I have to adapt accordingly. Even critics who define aspects of the field such as Jenkins are not always going to be 100% reliable in explaining an issue as it develops, or have an answer to an issue that changes almost completely by the time I am examining it in the present day.

Jenkins, Henry, 1958-. Convergence Culture : Where Old and New Media Collide. New York :New York University Press, 2006.
Jenkins, Henry. “Rethinking ‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture.’” Cultural Studies, vol. 28, no. 2, Mar. 2014, pp. 267–297. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/09502386.2013.801579.

New media has the interesting dynamic of audience and author interactions. Unlike traditional texts, author and audiences have a different relationship in new media: and it revolves around the way they engage with the work. Thinking about video games for our example in contrasting this binary, how do we define who has creative ownership of the video game?

Usually there isn’t a single name attached: we often tie the creative expression of the game to a studio, publisher or a group of creators but rarely ever is a single name responsible for a whole video game. Keywords for Media Studies talks about this idea of what authorship means in context of new media like video games.

“But in analyses of television, video games, social media, transmedia, and other forms, some media scholars have set aside the preoccupation with singular authors that is commonplace throughout literary and film studies. In doing so, we have regularly instead made visible the interplay of corporate imprimatur, creative and technical personnel, and active audiences. And yet other media scholars have engaged with author theories in a limited manner, adapting them to television’s mode of production, and focusing on a small set of individual auteurs. Why is the author so categorically emphasized in regard to some media texts and products—and not others? That is, why is an author?” (“Author”, Chris 23).

The role of authorship is tricky in relation to audience because of how the medium of video games interact. As Chris puts it, “Following Hall, scholars have found the authoring roles of the viewer/player/user particularly conspicuous in interactive and narratively open-ended forms such as video games and those dependent on user-generated content. In the former, the player makes narrative-twisting choices within a defined universe” (Chris 23). We are now presented with the binary that author and audience are not explicitly separated in other media such as novels or poetry, but instead they are simultaneous and engaging the other via the text. Going back to the previous quote, the idea of ‘active’ audiences is interesting because new media like video games requires more on the part of audiences to interact with what the ‘author’ has put forth, whereas one might argue novel readers are more ‘passive’ and cannot respond beyond the words on the page. Similarly, having an ‘author’ figure to point to means audiences can engage with them. Be it an actual auteur-creator or a PR head for a studio, there is a direct connection through social media and other outlets to be able to discuss the work and its mechanisms.

The interesting point of unpacking this binary is that it redefines what it means to engage with a creative expression where the author-audience relationship is changed. Media like video games rely on this dynamic to make it work as a form of entertainment because both participants are so closely linked they cannot engage with the work without engaging with the other. Video games are designed by anywhere from a singular individual to multiple people with a certain kind of player/audience in mind. The relationship would fall apart if the traditional presentation of creative expression was maintained. Instead, we get a new kind of expression that can only function with the willing consent of both author and audience’s active involvement.

Works Cited
Chris, Cynthia. “Author.” Keywords for Media Studies, New York University Press, New York, 2017, pp. 21–23.

Independent Reading List

Secondary Works:

Asimov, Isaac. Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection. Voyager, 1996.

Freeman, Matthew, and Renira R Gambarato, editors. The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies. Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2018.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press, 2008.

Johnson, Derek. From Networks to Netflix: A Guide to Changing Channels. Routledge, 2018.

King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Scribner, 2000. (new)

Payne, Matthew Thomas, and Nina Huntemann. How to Play Video Games. New York University Press, 2019.

Perren, Alisa, and Gregory Steirer. The American Comic Book Industry and Hollywood. British Film Institute, 2021.

Fawaz, Ramzi, et al. Keywords for Comics Studies. New York University Press, 2021.

Primary Works for Consideration:

Community . Created by Dan Harmon, season 1-6, 2006.

Supergiant Games. Hades. Version 1.0 for Windows PC. 2020.

Gaiman, Neil, and Terry Pratchett. Good Omens. Opus Press, 1993.

Toby Fox. Undertale. Version 1.0 for Windows PC. 2015.

Fraction, Matt, et al. Hawkeye. My Life as a Weapon. Marvel Entertainment, 2013.

TYPE-MOON. Fate/Grand Order DelightWorks Entertainment. Android/iOS. 2015

Araki, Hirohiko. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 7: Steel Ball Run. Shueisa, 2013.

Coppola, Sofia, director. Lost in Translation. Focus Features, 2003. (new)

Update:

After some darts throwing at things I liked, I found I wanted to do more of these primary texts listed above because they struck some significant narrative chord in me that I would like to explore further as a creative and a scholar. I’m still in the discovery process and I want to rehaul some of my secondary reading to slowly reflect what I might be aiming at for my thesis, but right now it’s just going with the flow of my interests and like a wise person (read: me) said in class: “if I ain’t interested I ain’t botherin”.

Journal to Review:
The Journal of Popular Culture (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15405931)

Keywords:
Mass media , film/television studies, Genre,

I developed this list with some assistance from Professor Greg Steirer in our very own English department. I am currently still a little undecided in my focus of scholarship, but I am primarily interested in mass media and visual media, especially more of the popular culture kind. This includes things like anime, manga, comics, video games, television and film. I am curious about publication histories, cross-media storytelling, the way different media works to tell stories within their format, adaptations, narratives and how diversity plays a part in representational storytelling.

The funny thing about comics is that they’ve never been taken super seriously as a literary medium in critical conversation. The more ironic thing is that right now, the comic book as a medium is responsible for much of popular culture discourse — adaptations of comic books are leading Hollywood’s TV shows and movie spheres, from the likes of the DC TV shows on the CW to Marvel’s cinematic universe blockbusters.
Comic books, usually when brought up evoke a very specific image as the Keywords for Comic Studies essay on the topic discusses. In the Jared Gardner essay, he goes over the various forms of publications that have been referred to as comic books throughout history. First were “autho-litographies” and other visual prints that were developed starting in the 1860s, and cartoons were regularly published in periodicals in that period. Newspaper comic reprints eventually took over as the dominant form of comics, with compilations later becoming the ‘comic book’. Eventually in the 1940s, after the Great Depression, superhero comics led the medium with the rise of Marvel and DC.
Modern comics have now evolved a little, with superhero comics still leading the pack, other forms have become popular. Graphic novels are on the rise now, gaining in popularity outside of the Marvel/DC dominated landscape. A recent Washington Post article examines this popularity boom, noting that among young readers literary graphic novels were selling well (MacPherson). MacPherson also points out another interesting debate at the heart of comic books as a critical medium:

“Before we go any further, though, here’s another question at the heart of the matter: Should we call these books “comics” or “graphic novels”? Over the years, “comics” has become something of a pejorative, meaning a less-than-literary book played for laughs. “Graphic novel” sounds more highbrow, but it’s not always correct, given that many of these books now are memoirs and other kinds of nonfiction. In addition, some people still get tripped up by the multiple meanings of the word “graphic” (MacPherson).

The debate about taking comics seriously critically also comes into the terminology of what is a comic book, and if calling a comic a graphic novel makes it more acceptable as a literary work. Interestingly, American comics are also losing popularity. Eastern comic books, particularly Japanese manga are now regularly outselling American superhero comics for many reasons, as Stratos notes in a report that compiled reactions to this statement.

I personally find it a very interesting medium, and I think it deserves more critical and scholarly attention. Graphic novels, comics, manga etc. are now all rising in popularity for distinct reasons, dominating the cultural landscape somehow in conversation. Dismissing it would be a disservice and a failure on the literature academia world’s part to understand how this medium is thriving today. The debate about what constitutes a comic is an examinable one as well, and maybe part of the conversation about why critical conversation is lagging in discussing the medium.

Works Cited

Gardner, Jared, and Jared Gardner. “Comic Book.” Keywords, 1 Jan. 2021, keywords.nyupress.org/comics-studies/essay/comic-book/.

MacPherson, Karen. “Perspective | Don’t Be Afraid to Let Children Read Graphic Novels. They’re Real Books.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 28 Feb. 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/dont-be-afraid-to-let-children-read-graphic-novels-theyre-real-books/2020/02/27/ed374b92-4dd7-11ea-9b5c-eac5b16dafaa_story.html.
Stratos. “Worldwide, Manga Is Outselling American Comics.” UltraMunch, 28 May 2021, ultramunch.com/worldwide-manga-is-outselling-american-comics/.

I really emotionally resonated with the fifth stanza about death in Book One. “Death, men say, is like a sea”, the stanza opens, illustrating a metaphor of a vastness that encapsulates people with emotions like “terror” like a deadly storm (Field 8) as it is compared to. Field however, does not follow this up with more frightening images of death. They instead take a different approach that one might read as rationalizing grief and a sense of loss with something more accepting and kinder.

The next part goes “Death is like the deep, warm sand/Pleasant when we come to land/Covering up with tender hand/The wave’s drifted error.” (Field 8). The imagery in this is almost the opposite and quite peaceful. Now we see a calm landscape, post-storm, one that implies the sea of death from before made a mistake in being this angry, and is now guided by the “tender hand” mentioned before. Interestingly, the first three lines also rhyme well, adding to the pleasant sounding flow of this part.

The third stanza focuses on the life of the deceased. “Life’s a tortured, booming gurge” it begins, implying a frustration with living and how difficult it is to be alive. This part also has the same three-rhyme scheme as before (gurge/urge/surge) but this one sounds rougher, and stronger words like transmute, passion and ambition stand out a lot.

The fourth stanza takes a similar approach to the second in the continued tone of peacefulness in an attitude to death. “Death’s a couch of golden ground,/ Warm soft, permeable mound,/Where from memory’s sound/We shall have remission.” The three-rhyme scheme here is much softer, and the Fields use a much more delicate set of words in this part as well. Warm, soft and permeable sound a lot more acceptable and safe than the storm and terror from the first part. This section of the stanza also takes the most welcoming and accepting approach of death too. The “remission” they bring up from “memory’s sound” implies a strong sense of relief for the deceased, like yes dying may not have been easy and terrifying, but in death they have peace from the troubles that plagued them. This is a place to relax.

I love this stanza because it takes a complex view of grief and a primal fear of death, which so far has been brought up previously at the beginning, where “mortal men” are told not to fear grief, and take it easy (Field 1). The sense of loss and grief is brought up a few times so far, and as someone who’s personally grieved a lot about things I’ve lost before, this view on death is almost relieving.