fourth media in transition conference

abstracts and papers

[arranged alphabetically by author's last name; click on linked abstract titles for a PDF of the full text of the paper]

Intermedia Narratives: European Cinema Militans
Lanfranco Aceti, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
This paper will introduce the concept of intramedia derived from Virilio and Baudrillard's analysis of the contemporary cultural context and social frameworks. This new concept will be informed by Manovich and Wilson's definitions of media and information arts. The conclusion will attempt to establish that cinema, and the avant-garde in particular, have crossed new boundaries requiring the narrative to respond to the organic and/or technological relationships established by a new "physiological" media context of interactions.

First-Person Access to the Unknowable: The Impact of Video Games on the Narrative Structure of the Contemporary War Story
Jacob Agatucci, Central Oregon Community College
This paper explores the connection between the contemporary war story and the WWII first-person shooter (FPS), a video game sub-genre. The developers of games like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty strive for realism and authenticity in their rendering of the combat experience. Such motives require a re-exploration of whether narrative can reliably represent the reality of war as well as the consequences of creating a narrative space from which such accessibility to the combat experience seems possible.

"The Hero's Journey" Paradigm: Significations, and Transformations in the Media Culture of the New Century
Lily Alexander, Hofstra University
The Hero's Journey is one of the key formulas in the culture of humankind. Campbell popularised the hero's journey formula, making it accessible to the reading public. Not coincidentally, George Lucas invited him to serve as a consultant for the Star Wars series. Evidently, the formula has tremendously enriched American film, videogame industry and new hybrid media forms relying on storytelling. My presentation addresses its function and meaning in culture, and the paradox—why this ancient formula remains so fertile inspiring new and newer stories within the contexts of emerging media technologies and historical change.

The Migration of The Emigrant: "Moberglands" in Media and on Both Sides of the Atlantic Ocean
Peter Aronsson, Linkping University, Sweden
The social memory of Swedish emigration has been molded more on the authorship of Vilhelm Moberg than research or politics. From the first novel published in 1949 (The Emigrants), the movie released in 1971 to the musical by ABBA producers in 1995, the impact on various audiences has been tremendous. How was the story of migration transformed to localized stories of a Swedish Mobergland in the southeast of Sweden and an American Mobergland north of Minneapolis?

"Late Nineties Bedroom Rock for the Missionaries": Queer as Folk, Music, and Sonic Definitions of Sexuality
Ben Aslinger, University of Wisconsin, Madison
I examine Queer As Folk’s deployment of popular music in the show’s soundtrack, and the impact music has on the way this program’s narrative articulates gay male sexual performance. How does the translation of this program from the British to the American context rearticulate sound and sexuality? Drawing on the work of Eve Sedgwick and critiques of mainstream GLBT activists’ elaboration of “visibility,” I argue for a consideration of the constitutive role sound plays in gay male cultures.

Visualizing the Story through the Reinvention of the American Scrapbook: A Crafted Narrative
Barbara A. Audet, Auburn University
Digital photography and a resurgence in the role of scrapbooking as an American hobby are a contemporary parallel to the early 20th-century use of scrapbooks and the emerging technology of photography to generate family narratives. This paper addresses, conceptually and historically, scrapbooking and photography where the cohesive and linear oral narrative is influenced and prompted both by memory and by digital image manipulation.

Communicating Truth: Testimonio, Indigenous Agents, and the Rigoberta Menchu Controversy
Roberto Avant-Mier, Boston College
In this essay, the author explores communicative dimensions (textual and contextual) of the Rigoberta Menchu controversy. The paper will first analyze the unique role testimonio plays in Latin American culture(s). The author then analyzes Menchu's claims and how they stand up to the criticism by their principal detractor, David Stoll. Finally, the authors comment on the discursive importance of the Menchu-Stoll controversy, and make a case for the heuristic value of testimonio in future investigations of Latin American work in communication studies.

Construction of Spatial Narratives in M.D. Coverley's Califia
Burcu S. Bakioglu, Indiana University
The malleability that digital platforms afford to texts necessitates a spatial approach in which exploration of the text acquires precedence over plot development. Foregrounding the spatiality of the narrative allows the digital platform to transform the text into an open environment in which the user can enter and explore at her leisure. This paper will examine how spatiality affects narrative development in M.D. Coverley's hypertext story Califia.

The Archetypal Road-Myth: From the Highway to The Matrix
Pavlos Baltas and Nikos Barbopoulos, National Technical University of Athens and Theodoros Chiotis, Oxford
The paper examines the persistence and permutations of the archetypal road myth focusing on the manner the traveller, who after getting in touch with the unknown in his wanderings, experiences a mythological and ontological shift. Pulp fiction and b-movies sharing this theme are examined alongside more recent fare such as the film The Matrix. The paper seeks to elucidate the close linkage between the urban transformations of the western city and the spatial and temporal genealogies of urban mythologies.

Narratives of War, Narratives of the Individual
Gerry Beegan, Rutgers University
This paper examines changing narratives of warfare and focuses on the Boer War (1899-1902), which was the first major industrialized war and also the first media war. The visual reporting of this conflict marked a shift in the representation of battle which continues to inform war reporting today. As warfare became increasingly complex, the media concentrated on the individual soldier. These depictions were inadequate in explaining modern warfare, yet they have persisted and intensified.

Digital Stories of Community: Mobilization, Coherence and Continuity
Ian Beeson and Clodagh Miskelly, University of the West of England
Our research explores Ricoeur's suggestion that stories have the capacity to reflect, unite, and mobilize a community. We focus on the use of computers to make community stories. We are interested in whether it is possible for community groups to create hypertextual forms of story with multiple voices and narrative threads running through them. We use some theoretical perspectives on engagement with technology and on the nature of hypertext to analyze our own work and other community digital storytelling approaches.

Familiarity and Concern in the Radio Voice of a Networked Diaspora Community
Walter Bender, MIT and Carla Gomez-Monroy, Schlumberger-SEED Foundation and Stephen Schultze, Public Radio Exchange
eRadio proposes to increase interaction and reduce alienation in diaspora communities. We report on our holistic approach to interactive radio production (including audio production, Internet exchange, and radio broadcasting) intended to foster participatory community self-discovery, identification, and assimilation in a community dispersed between New York and Mexico. Our hypothesis is that speaking with familiarity and concern to a dispersed audience of hometown folks and their descendents can strengthen the community’s oral culture and identity.

The Family Slide Evening
Julie Benjamin, University of Auckland, NZ
35mm slide photography was the popular visual medium for storytelling in New Zealand from the 1950s onwards. Many New Zealand children were brought up on slide evenings as a part of their family entertainment before the advent of television. By examining seemingly unrelated colour slides taken by serious amateur photographer Gladys Cunningham, I will analyse how visual and verbal narratives at a slide show offered clues to Gladys’s life, but also represent New Zealand social history.

Telling Stories That Aren't There: Don DeLillo's Running Dog and The Problem of Missing Film
Paul Benzon, Rutgers University
This paper considers the role that the absence of film plays in Don DeLillo's Running Dog. I suggest that by centering Running Dog’s narrative around a missing film and ultimately delivering that film to the reader through a sort of narrative playback, DeLillo stages the novel as a mediating technology within a shifting environment of reproduction, transforming the narrative and ideological stakes of that mediation beyond abstract intertextuality towards an interrogation of the modes of reproduction, perception, and possession present across different media.

Human Nature and Kafka: Issues of Commercial Cinema and its Relation to Political Agendas and the Avant-Garde
Cristiani Bilhalva, University of Southern California
Human Nature (2001) — a film directed by Michel Gondry, written by Charlie Kaufman, and produced by Spike Jonze — reflects the negotiation not of the avant-garde with mainstream cinema, but of the mainstream with the avant-garde. Taking Kaufman's Human Nature and Kafka's Report to an Academy as case studies, I'll be looking at certain subversive narrative strategies not only as a renovation source for mainstream cinema, but also as a political tool in the cultural contexts that shape the processes of storytelling.

Wild Style/ Style Wars: Same Story, Different Style
Marnie R. Binfield, University of Texas
Both the "fiction" film Wild Style and the documentary film Style Wars represent a version of hip-hop's birth that hip-hop fans accept as "real," the highest of honors in the hip-hop community. Nonetheless, Wild Style echoes throughout hip-hop culture, while Style Wars remains a largely "insider" text cited mainly by graffiti artists. This paper explores the storytelling style of each film and considers the films' roles in shaping the cultural memory of the story of the birth of hip-hop.

Run, Lola, Run: Film as a Narrative Database
Jim Bizzocchi, Simon Fraser University
Films such as Rashomon, Time Code, and Memento have a database-like structure which supports a narratively rich multi-linear viewer experience. These films organize narrative components into contending yet highly parallel plot structures. Run, Lola, Run is a rigorous example of this database narrative form. Its tightly ordered set of parallel story components forces a consideration of the constant play of chance and choice within our everyday lives. This implicitly interactive viewer experience anticipates the development of explicitly interactive narrative works.

Narrative and Micronarrative as Components of Game Experience
Jim Bizzocchi and Douglas Grant, Simon Fraser University
Why do game producers strive to incorporate narrative? What does it add to player experience? We apply these questions primarily against first-person shooters because while it appears difficult to make narrative arguments there, such underpinning is fundamental to them. Shooters stripped of narrative would be the Matrix uncloaked: extremely sparse, not very interesting spaces for play. We describe the minimal or "micronarrative" forms that enrich games through genre evocation, and support our psychological engagement within the game world.

The Story the Consultant Told: Visualization and Storytelling in Management Consulting
Mats Bjorkin, Goteborg University
“Storytelling” has been frequently used by organizational consultants for communicating change, identity, visions and strategies within organizations. Technologies of telling and visualizing stories within organizations have also changed; business intelligence systems and other decision support systems as well as internal communications systems have made it easier to disseminate stories to specific employees, but also made it more important how to tell stories. This paper discusses how different stories can change while moving between different business media systems.

Revitalizing the Hai Ba Trung Heroes' Legend
Marie-Eve Blanc, University of Montréal
This paper will talk about the Trung sisters' legend. This legend speaks about the genie of the village and famous national female warriors and heroes' legend and worship. We will demonstrate how a worship practice changes through the influence of the State and Confucianism and how the population in a context of social change (revolution, renovation) uses it and revitalizes it. It aims to analyze the process of genie/hero production in a country at the crossroads between China and South-East Asia.

Television Stories in the Making
Goran Bolin, Sodertorn University College
Against the background of the spreading of commercial television in Europe this paper discusses transformation of narrative structures in live television programming: the increased presence of documentary forms within fictional productions, and the increased emphasis on narrative forms from entertainment television in factual television. The paper seeks to understand these new generic forms and narrrative structures with the main examples taken from the Swedish live entertainment show Bingolotto, and the live broadcasts of national election night coverage and other live factual broadcasts.

Story into Short Story: Cultural Roots and Cultural Work
Melissa Bostrom, University of North Carolina
Most critics agree that the short story is descended from storytelling, a fact which positions the genre at the intersection of orality and literacy while maintaining its vexed relationship to history. This paper will demonstrate the way in which the short story’s storytelling ancestry shapes the kind of cultural work it is capable of doing and suggest the role of the short story in the contemporary United States.

Fiction's Work in the Story of Radical Radio
Martin Boyden, University of Rochester
Fiction's role in recovering radical radio practices, telling the story of what radio could be, is demonstrated through a relatively contemporary and geographically relevant example: the Madame Psychosis Radio Hour broadcast by a fictional MIT radio station in David Foster Wallace's novel, Infinite Jest. Preserving a style of wee hours radio found fleetingly in most American broadcast markets, including college radio in the Boston area, Wallace's fiction challenges the radio medium's more well-known story of frustrated radical promise.

Storytelling and the Visual Arts
Bonnie Bracey, Thornburg Center
Digital storytelling is about using art and related visual imagery in storytelling while strengthening technology skills through electronic media. Every aspect of storytelling — structure, plot, character, pace, voice, timing, and setting — have the potential to be artistically morphed into new forms using digital tools. This presentation will explore the connection between storytelling and learning and examine the ways in which learners can use art objects with storytelling activities in the classroom.

Complexity Soap: Tales of Globalization in René Pollesch's Tent Saga
Claudia Breger, Indiana University
René Pollesch is arguably the most interesting director in contemporary German-language theatre. While his work is generally praised for replacing "narrative" with critical "discourse," Pollesch's 2003/2004 globalization tetralogy Zeltsaga (Tent Saga) puts nostalgia for narrative at center-stage. My paper investigates the role of these stories, and more generally narrative, in a theatrical world that seems to be beyond the reach of its sense-making capacities.

Reconfiguring Zapotec Stories: Media Transfers, Historical Perspectives
Anna Brigido-Corachan, New York University
This paper examines the uses of the novel and video as alternative vehicles for the preservation of native (hi)stories in Oaxaca, Mexico. Zapotec stories tracing historical accounts have traditionally circulated in an oral form — storytelling, song — but also through pictoideographic writing. By appropriating contemporary venues to transmit their history, Zapotec artists rearticulate the lives of stories, traditional and new; they create alternative sites of enunciation that reinforce the language, identity, and social practices of their communities.

Test-Driving Avatars: Max Payne, Ergodic Texts, and the Character-Vehicle
Robert Buerkle, University of Southern California
Looking at Max Payne as a case study for approaching the modern video game and the narrative functions at work within, this paper considers the options offered to the player in traversing the text, as well as the constraints of identification and psychological development.

Digital Storytelling: New Literacy, New Audiences
Jean Burgess, Queensland University of Technology, Australia, and John Hartley
Digital storytelling fills a gap between everyday cultural practice and (professional) popular media that was never adequately bridged during the broadcast era. Digital stories are simple but disciplined, like a sonnet or haiku, and anyone can learn how to make them. They reconfigure the producer/consumer relationship and show how creative work by non-professional users adds value to contemporary culture. The paper examines what is needed to bring out their potential, discusses some of the emerging initiatives that aim to increase their reach, and includes examples.

Modern Messages: Contemporary Tellings of Old Tales for the Very Young
Margaret Bush, Simmons College
Which "traditional" tales are most often told for today's pre-reading audience? What happens in the reduction of these tales for very young children? This study examines the folk/fairy tales frequently published as board books, picture books, and story collections for pre-school children in the 21st century. Considering traditional tales and storytelling as building blocks in literacy development, it compares the presentation of characters, dilemmas, lessons, language and visual portrayals in the translation of old tales into modern nursery literature.

Responsa Literature, Partial Responses to Scattered Letters
J.R. Carpenter, new media artist
Throughout the post-Talmudic period, the great distances that separated Diaspora Jewry from the scholars of Babylon necessitated the evolution of responsa literature, a type of question-and-response lawmaking. Montréal poet Anne Carson has written: “People in exile write so many letters.” What part does letter writing play in maintaining or altering the narratives of families separated by divorce, emigration, or economic migration? As letter writing re-emerges, in the form of email, how does the new immediacy of this ‘question and response’ mode of communicating affect the interpersonal narrative of writer and reader?

Telling Stories of Violence: The Troubling Violence Performance Project
M. Heather Carver and Elaine J. Lawless, University of Missouri
(with performers Sadie Chandler and Shelley Ingram)
This presentation will focus on the work of Elaine Lawless (folklore studies) and Heather Carver (performance studies) in their collaborative work on the "Troubling Violence Performance Project" — a troupe of students who "perform" monologues of women's experiences with violence. In addition to this work, we have written a play about women incarcerated for allegedly killing their abusive partners.

Covering Terrorism: 911 Versus 311 in American and Spanish Newspaper Front Pages
Angel Castanos and Amor Munoz, Universidad Cardenal Herrera CEU (Valencia, Spain)
The criteria to choose images and headlines in the newspapers front pages leads to different ways to tell a story, as we can observe in the coverage of the terrorist attacks of New York and Madrid in American and Spanish dailies. US and Spanish media used the Twin Towers to globalize the 911 attack, while after the Madrid bombings both of them focused on individuals. Although cultural background determines the policy of not printing disturbing images in the US, some of the American papers showed hard pictures taken in Spain, an approach we don¹t find in most September 12 covers.

The Muslim as Other in Hindi Cinema: Exoticized, Marginalized and Demonized
Kalyani Chadha, University of Maryland
While Indian society has been the site of frequent communal differences, Hindi cinema, one of its principal cultural forces, has traditionally appeared to be an arena that has resisted Hindu-Muslim separatism, the representation of Muslims in Hindi films has received little attention. This paper traces the portrayal of Muslims within mainstream Hindi films from the 1950s to the current period, and finds that Muslims have been variously "othered" through their exoticization, marginalization, and their demonization in Hindi films.

Property Stories
Anthony Chase, Nova Southeastern Law Center
The story of property as a historical and legal phenomenon is told differently depending upon motive and audience. There is a dominant or master narrative that is animated by a basic contradiction between the idea that private individuals should be able to use their property any way they wish versus the notion that there are always fundamental duties toward others, obligations that necessarily impinge upon one's own property use. How have Hollywood motion pictures told this particular story?

Women Warriors in the Shadow Play, Reunion of the Five Swords
Fan Pen Chen, SUNY Albany
I propose to discuss the women warriors in the eighteen-volume Reunion of the Five Swords, the most popular shadow play in Hebei and Northeastern China. The unusual sensitivity to the "barbarian" women warriors in this play suggests a closer and more complex relationship between the various ethnic groups in this region. Indeed, the ingenuity and complexity of Reunion's women warriors may have contributed to its enduring popularity in a locality where the Han people, Manchus and Mongols co-exist.

Telling Stories Through LiveJournal: xf_journals and Fan Fiction
Bertha Chin, Cardiff University
Livejournal.com has allowed fans to experiment with creating personal journals written in the name of the various characters from The X-Files, gathering them under an umbrella community, xf_journals where plots can be discussed together. This paper will explore the storytelling possibilities that exist within the space of LiveJournal.com, as it seemingly appears to operate independently from the general X-Files fan fiction fandom but at the same time expands on the creative world of fan fiction production.

The Archetypal Road-Myth: From the Highway to The Matrix
Theodoros Chiotis, Oxford University; Pavlos Baltas and Nikos Barbopoulos, National Technical University of Athens
The paper examines the persistence and permutations of the archetypal road myth focusing on the manner the traveller, who after getting in touch with the unknown in his wanderings, experiences a mythological and ontological shift. Pulp fiction and b-movies sharing this theme are examined alongside more recent fare such as the film The Matrix. The paper seeks to elucidate the close linkage between the urban transformations of the western city and the spatial and temporal genealogies of urban mythologies.

Applying Oral History to Media Research
Steven Classen, California State University, Los Angeles; Devorah Heitner, Northwestern University; Mark Williams, Dartmouth College
Three scholars who have completed, or are in the process completing, major research projects in television studies that utilize oral history will make short presentations on use of oral history in their own research. They will then conduct a discussion about the use of oral history to study media audiences, media producers and media memory. Among the issues addressed: the capacity or potential for oral histories to produce new and unanticipated research topics and lines of inquiry; and the special responsibilities and ethics of oral history and the interpretive challenges of using oral history to build a historical narrative.

The Narratives of Nonfiction in New Media and the Concept of Emergence
Roderick Coover, Temple University
With special attention given to the ethnographic image, this paper rethinks the storytelling traditions of nonfiction film through the concepts of emergence and multilinearity. The paper synthesizes ideas offered by Steven Johnson, David MacDougal and others in an examination of nonfiction methodology and new media. The paper points to recent works like those of The Labyrinth Project to ask how new kinds of storytelling are emerging through tools of digital media and the metaphors that these new tools provide.

Death Is Not the End: Apocalypse and Self-Sacrifice in The Seventh Sign
Laura Copier, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis
In my paper, I will analyze the migration of the traditional biblical theme of the apocalyptic end to secular Hollywood cinema. My particular focus will be on certain cinematic strategies of narrative construction, and the denouement of the story. I will contend that The Seventh Sign is an example of secular apocalypse, a reworking of a traditional story into a new medium.

Articulating or Performing the Populist Consensus About Corrupt Politics?: Two Political Scandals in Hungary
Peter Csigo, Budapest University of Polytechnics
The media representation of politics as corrupt and immoral has often been criticized for its alienating effects. However, condemning 'corrupt politics' has become such a routine and widespread media practice that it has lost most of its (dis)engaging power. Thus, the basic representation of politics as corrupt has to be dramatized and performed as a unique story for re-gaining meaning and triggering people's imagination. The ultimate importance of narrativization will be demonstrated by exloring why two otherwise rather similar political scandals had such different results: one marginalized, the other heavily influencing the results of Hungarian parliamental elections.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Election:
The Making of Jon Stewart
Joe Cutbirth, Columbia University
Surveys show Americans increasingly get political information from late-night television. So what would someone who relied only on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart have known about the 2004 presidential campaign? A synopsis of the campaign constructed solely from 128 segments of the show, interviews with political consultants, journalists and other comedians and theories by James Carey, Todd Gitlin and Kathleen Hall Jamieson isolate Stewart's stories and examine their cultural impact.

Television: A Creative Industry?
Maire Messenger Davies, University of Ulster
The paper draws on interviews with television creative workers to examine what has been characterized pejoratively as an "industrialized" form of storytelling - the production of scripts for a weekly TV drama series (in this case, Star Trek, but with reference to other shows). The interviews raise questions about quality and cultural value, as well as the relationship of individual agency with the economics and technologies of television production. It asks: Is the term "creativity" appropriate when applied to TV storytelling?

Plotting the Story and Interactivity in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
Drew Davidson, Art Institute of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon
This paper analyzes the experience of the videogame, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, by using two diagrams. The first is a classic literary plot diagram. The second is a diagram developed by the author illustrating stages of interactivity. A close reading of the game from these two perspectives enables an exploration of how the game's story relates to the interactive elements of its gameplay.

Reality TV and the American Dream: a Cautionary Tale
June Deery, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
This paper examines the increasingly conspicuous narrative of “the makeover,” particularly as played out on reality television. Comparing the now routine dramas of spectacular personal and home makeovers reveals much about contemporary forms of commodification and suggests a shift in meaning between having and being. The marketing of previously unmediated subjects also makes the makeover show in many ways the quintessential reality TV format. Moreover, the paper argues, the makeover is the quintessential tale of late capitalism, a tale with a didactic intent.

Once Upon Right Now: The Transformation of Disney Theme Park Narratives
Andy Dehnart, Stetson University
Disney theme parks have always excelled at offering immersive, narrative-driven, hyperreal experiences. But the newest attractions represent a fundamental shift in the way guests experience Disney's three-dimensional stories. Narrated journeys are being replaced by immediate sensory experiences in which the story takes a back seat. This essay explores the narratives of Disney's theme park attractions and their subtle but significant shift from narrative-driven explorations to immediate experiences that are supported by stories.

Storytelling Between Content and Connectivity: Mapping the Potential
Mark Deuze, Indiana University
The impact of Internet on the professional identity of media professionals whose work is defined by creative storytelling - whether in advertising, journalism, public relations or related fields ­ is the theme of this presentation. The central question raised is to what extent storytelling can be content- or connectivity-based, and what level of participation is included in the narrative experience. This presentation features examples and analyses of contemporary media work between content versus connectivity, and between moderated versus unmoderated participatory communication.

Once Upon a Time in Chinese Film: Meta Narratives of Authenticity
Kimberly DeVries, MIT
With the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and In the Mood For Love during 2001, many commentators predicted that a wave of Chinese films and actors was poised pour into American cinemas. This forecast has been overly optimistic, but an increasing number of Chinese films have been picked up by American distributors and released in American theaters and video rental outlets. This paper addresses how "China" is constructed by contemporary film-makers and then packaged by distributors in a deliberate attempt to communicate with global, especially American, audiences. In particular, I consider how different genres of contemporary Chinese film each present a distinct vision of China containing implicit, or sometimes explicit assumptions about China's position in relation to the West, and about the makeup of American audiences

Comics Journalism: Truth and Subjectivity in the Work of Joe Sacco
Joellen Easton, MIT
Comic artist Joe Sacco has in the last decade earned critical acclaim for his visceral depictions of life in regions scarred by ongoing conflict particularly in Israel's occupied territories and in Eastern Bosnia during the Bosnian Civil War. This paper examines the traditional journalistic ideal of objectivity in the context of Joe Sacco's work, and explores how Sacco fuses the comics medium with a journalism that aims higher than just reporting the news.

From Jungle Book to Jungle Fever — Unchanging Stories of Racial Interaction
Suzette Ebanks, University of London
Stories about race in present-day popular culture often bear a resemblance to generations-old narratives on the same subject. In both news footage and literature, there are such intriguing similarities in the past and present attitudes about miscegenation that it becomes clear there is a narrative framework of racial interaction embedded in the British national consciousness. It is this story I propose to unearth.

Performativity, Cultural Capital, and Total-Makeover Television
Nathan Scott Epley, University of North Carolina
Total-makeover reality television is less about celebrity than about class. In series like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Faking It, and Date Patrol, the made-over are coached in multiple aspects of their everyday lives: not just what to wear, but how to wear it, how to move, how to talk, how to eat. This paper promotes understanding total-makeover TV in terms of performed, embodied cultural capital and interrogates the sub-genres articulations to whiteness and straightness.

Transformative Television: on Song Contests, Fairy Tales, and Visions of Europe
Staffan Ericson, Sodertorns University College, Sweden
This paper is about The Eurovision Song Contest; the annual, live broadcast, in which European nations compete for the best popular song. Recently, the televoting audience has unexpectedly given a series of victories to countries preparing to enter the EU Estonia, Latvia, Turkey, Ukraine). Arranging in 2002, Estonia organized the broadcast as a modern fairy tale, representing the nation's development into a free, European state. The paper will look at the symbolic strategies involved, relating them to Dayan & Katz' (1992) work on transformative media events, and Couldry's (2002) work on media rituals.

Janet Malcolm: Constructing A Journalist's Identity
Elizabeth Fakazis, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point
In 1983, New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm wrote a profile of psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, who had been fired from his post as the director of the Sigmund Freud Archives in London. When the profile was published, Masson sued Malcolm for "making up quotes" that she had attributed to him. Malcolm insisted that she hadn't made up quotes and that she had followed narrative techniques that had long been standard in journalism. The case lasted 13 years. I will use the Malcolm case to explore how stories about storytelling function within the journalism community to defend or challenge boundaries of legitimate narrative practice within the profession, and to define "legitimate journalist."

Techno-Nationalist Tales of Glory and Failure: Writing the History of Inventions in Early Film and Television
Andreas Fickers and Frank Kessler, University of Utrecht
In our paper we wish to argue that recurrent elements can be found in narratives on inventors and inventions in media technologies such as cinematography and television. Looking at accounts on the work of the Lumiere and Skladanowsky brothers, on Edison, Friese-Greene (film), Baird, Nipkow, Barthelemy and Fransworth (television) we shall analyze the narrative patterns structuring the tales of glory and failure, especially with regard to the inherent nationalist dimension.

An Act of Resistance and the Representational Aftermath: From "El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez" to Come and Take it Day
Dora Fitzgerald, University of the Incarnate Word and James Fitzgerald, St. Philips College (both San Antonio, Texas)
This paper is an analysis of Jim Mendiola’s 2001 film Come and Take it Day, which works to resurrect the story of the mythical Gregorio Cortez as well as to construct a parallel story of how the deviant label is inappropriately applied to a modern subject. In this story the past is the present. The visual and aural storytelling strategies Mendiola employs to articulate his vision speak to the fragility of identity for oppressed people, then and now.

Conditions of Narrativity
Kianga Ford, University of California at Santa Cruz and Occidental College
In the shadow of history, there are millions of tiny stories negotiated in the everyday. The Story Project solicits and produces these tiny stories as an ongoing series of installation works. Displaced from the page into the arena of the visual arts, The Story Project endeavors to address narrative as a condition, as a facilitator and filter of interactions between people and their environments.

Copyright Law and the Story of the Author
Martin Fredriksson, University of Linköping
Apart from regulating the use of other stories, copyright laws can also be regarded as stories in themselves. Stories depicting the rights and obligations of actors involved in the production and distribution of texts. My presentation will consist of a comparative analysis of copyright acts. The main purpose is to examine how the role of the author is articulated in these texts and how the story of the author is affected by changing forms of cultural production and circulation.

Using Folkloric Conventions to Construct Student Narratives
Sean Galvin, LaGuardia Community College
This paper will demonstrate how the use of folkloric materials — riddles, proverbs, puns, foodways, legends, and their analysis — are just a few of the folkloric devices we utilize to construct or deconstruct narratives, whether literary or traditional. Using these conventions for non-native English speakers can often be as or more important than teaching business or technical writing. The ability to present these materials as personal web pages or in BlackBoard has brought these courses into another dimension.

Socrates Meets Borges: Telling Digital Stories Around the Virtual Liberal Arts Campfire
Barbara Ganley and Hector Vila, Middlebury College
In this paper, two Middlebury College professors will argue that the synthesis of web authoring with digital storytelling recreates dimensions of extended and enduring connectivity, privileging the importance of story to community, to advocacy and activism, to education and to a sense of personal efficacy. Digital storytelling, in particular, asks practioners to reconsider the role and form of stories in academic discourse and in their own creative and intellectual investigations.

The Is No New Media: A Narrative of New Media
Bernard Michael Geoghegan, Northwestern University
Editors of new media anthologies find themselves in an uncomfortable position: the designation “new” or “emerging media” suggests indeterminacy, yet their projects are committed to producing something that resembles a distinct, defined field with its own disciplinary interests and needs. I examine how scholars “tell stories” that forge the imaginary identification known as “new media," while their pedagogical practices simultaneously disrupt this story and suggest a more compelling basis for “new media studies.”

Parmalat: A Study in Fractured Narrative
Dawn Gilpin, Temple University
Multiple and in some cases conflicting accounts originating from a single source may be described as "fractured narratives," which uphold the standards of current public relations theory but which can also produce striking dissonances. To explore this phenomenon, this paper traces the different self-narratives produced by Italian multinational Parmalat in its relations with various internal and external stakeholders during the year leading up to the discovery, in December 2003, of $10 billion in "missing" declared corporate assets.

Stories about Computers
David Golumbia, University of Virginia
Computer scientists often write about or advocate for particular directions in future computer design, and only very few of these have turned out to be accurate. At the same time, computer narratives in SF fiction and media often turn out to correctly predict the shape and function of digital technology. This paper analyzes works by computer scientists and SF writers to see what role narratives and their reception play in the construction and definition of digital technology and its culture.

Familiarity and Concern in the Radio Voice of a Networked Diaspora Community
Carla Gomez-Monroy, Schlumberger-SEED Foundation; Walter Bender, MIT; Stephen Schultze, Public Radio Exchange
eRadio proposes to increase interaction and reduce alienation in
diaspora communities. We report on our holistic approach to
interactive radio production (including audio production, Internet
exchange, and radio broadcasting) intended to foster participatory community self-discovery, identification, and assimilation in a community dispersed between New York and Mexico. Our hypothesis is that speaking with familiarity and concern to a dispersed audience of hometown folks and their descendents can strengthen the community’s oral culture and identity.

Old Stories in New Dresses?
Babette Grabner, independent scholar
In western cultures, there hardly exist storytellers in the traditional sense anymore. The question that arises from that is where the stories have moved to. Is it possible that people of the 21st century do not need stories any more, or has another medium taken over the function of storytelling? I want to look at the processing of stories in film, and address the question: are the new stories in cinema merely old stories in new dresses?

Storytelling Across the Media
Michael Grabowski, College of New Rochelle
In an environment in which industries are increasingly dependent upon multiple media, too many courses focus on only a single medium. Integrating the work of scholars who explore media theory (Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Neil Postman), this presentation will explore how to engage students within a production course in order to assess how the biases of each medium influence the stories they tell.

Narrative and Micronarrative as Components of Game Experience
Douglas Grant and Jim Bizzocchi, Simon Fraser University
Why do game producers strive to incorporate narrative? What does it add to player experience? We apply these questions primarily against first-person shooters because while it appears difficult to make narrative arguments there, such underpinning is fundamental to them. Shooters stripped of narrative would be the Matrix uncloaked: extremely sparse, not very interesting spaces for play. We describe the minimal or "micronarrative" forms that enrich games through genre evocation, and support our psychological engagement within the game world.

Whose Story Is This? Resurrecting the TV Author
Jonathan Gray, University of California, Berkeley
The author, we have been told, is dead. Turning specifically to television, the medium's oft-communal model of creation also fits with the idea of an absent author. However, in recent years, television has witnessed a concentrated return of the author, or what Foucault calls the author-function, with the likes of Matt Groening, David Chase, Alan Bell, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Greg Berlanti, Aaron Sorkin, J. J. Abrams, and others becoming common names spoken of by viewers, often in reverential terms. This paper studies what role authors now play, and what roles they are asked to play as go-betweens for producers and audiences, networking notions of textual ownership, diegetic creation, fan identification, and viewer rights.

Okonkwo and the Storyteller: Death, Meaning, and Accident in Achebe and Benjamin
Jonathan Greenberg, Montclair State University
This essay seeks to explore the concept of accident in Chinua Achebe' s Things Fall Apart by juxtaposing this foundational Nigerian novel with two disparate texts: Walter Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller" and Aristotle's reading of Sophocles' "Oedipos Tyrannos" in the Poetics. All three texts afford complementary angles on the question of whether, or how, the representation of death bestows meaning on a literary text and indeed on the process of history itself.

Passion[ate] Storytelling: Transmedia Versions of The Crucifixion
Alison Griffiths, Baruch College
This paper investigates Medieval cathedrals, the 1895 Cyclorama of Jerusalem panorama, and Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ as distinct but related ways of experiencing one of the world’s most memorable (and politically charged) stories, namely, the Crucifixion. Inscribed in each of these historically diverse and medium-specific ways of re-telling this ur-narrative of Christ’s death and resurrection is a notion of the “revered gaze,” a way of encountering and making sense of images that are intended to be spectacular in form and content.

What Happens Next?: Strategies of Improvisational Storytelling
Jessica Hammer, Columbia University
Interactive narrative is a tricky beast. How can we create stories that are genuinely responsive to user input and interaction, but that still make sense as good old-fashioned narratives? This presentation examines some of the strategies and techniques of interactive storytelling that are used by folk practitioners such as role-players and improvisational comics. It also explores the lessons these storytellers have for technologically-mediated interactive narratives.

Fireworks in Film and TV
Mary Beth Haralovich, University of Arizona
Film and television use specific attributes of fireworks to complement the stories being told. Fireworks contribute contemporary or historical realism to the culmination of civic celebrations and sports. In romance mise-en-scene, fireworks are a lingering motif; the couple literally "sees stars" as they embrace. Comedy exploits the explosive nature of fireworks, turning the danger of unstoppable sequential firing into slapstick. Avant-garde film explores the streaming forms and sounds of fireworks. This paper explores the various ways that display fireworks are used in screen storytelling.

Blogging and Journalistic Standards
Christopher Harper, Temple University
A decade ago, the word "blog" didn't really exist. Today, however, Web logs, or blogs, have had a profound impact on the storytelling of the World Wide Web. This presentation will analyze how bloggers have used the Web as a means to step outside of the traditional journalistic standards of objectivity, balance, and fairness to return to perhaps a mixture of the partisan press during the 18th and 19th centuries and the muckrakers of the early 20th Century.

The Alien Logic of White Noise
Justin Hayes, Quinnipiac University
DeLillo’s White Noise shows how America is re-mythologized through the transition from print to electronic culture. Television generates a total-field awareness, which foregrounds the discourse of print, closing its open network of signs to form an iconic structure. This changes words from signs to symbols, meaningful for their direct effect on the psyche. Narratives thereby come to operate as the myths pervading popular culture as tabloid stories.

Hoaxing the “Real”: On the Meta-Narratives of Reality Television
Alison Hearn, University of Western Ontario
This paper will explore hoax reality shows, such as Joe Schmo, and My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss, arguing that they function as meta-narratives of the spectacle, telling stories about the challenge of their own construction. In these shows, the established conventions of reality television become the narrative ground, the participants’ desire to "be on TV" becomes figural, and audience pleasure derives from witnessing contestants’ eventual "capture" inside a cultural logic they wish to be a part of but ultimately cannot control.

Old Images and New Stories in Indigenous Cinemas
Joanna Hearne, University of Missouri, Columbia
This paper explores contemporary indigenous film and digital video productions that re-assess prior systems of Western image-making. Filmmakers such as Victor Masayesva, Chris Eyre, and Zacharias Kunuk engage with the history of Indian representations in documentary and Western genres by using discontinuity editing, film clips, photographs, and — especially — oral storytelling and song through voiceovers, interviews, re-enactments, and sound bridges. Contemporary indigenous cinematic “repatriations” re-integrate archival footage into community tribal identities and change the stories that give meaning to images on screen.

Publishing Poverty: Contemporary Narratives of Social Suffering
Sarah J. Heidt, Kenyon College
This paper explores collections of case studies or transcribed interviews of social suffering produced since the early 1990s, including Bourdieu's The Weight of the World and Shipler's The Working Poor. Using recent auto/biography theory, I analyze textual attempts to characterize experiences of poverty and ask how efficacious they have been in giving voices to the voiceless and making those voices audible. I also explore how the Internet has made individuals'experiences of working poverty legible without utilizing commercial presses.

Applying Oral History to Media Research
Devorah Heitner, Northwestern University; Steven Classen, California State University, Los Angeles; Mark Williams, Dartmouth College
Three scholars who have completed, or are in the process completing, major research projects in television studies that utilize oral history will make short presentations on use of oral history in their own research. They will then conduct a discussion about the use of oral history to study media audiences, media producers and media memory. Among the issues addressed: the capacity or potential for oral histories to produce new and unanticipated research topics and lines of inquiry; and the special responsibilities and ethics of oral history and the interpretive challenges of using oral history to build a historical narrative.

Cognitive Approaches to Stories and Storytelling
David Herman, The Ohio State University
Because of the range of artifacts and media falling under their purview, their richly interdisciplinary heritage, and the varying backgrounds and interests of their practitioners, cognitive approaches to narrative at present constitute more a set of loosely confederated heuristic schemes than a systematic framework for research on stories. Working toward an integrative model, this paper surveys a number of cognitively oriented paradigms for narrative analysis, exploring how the field has been shaped by ideas from structuralist narratology, artificial-intelligence research, cognitive linguistics, conversation analysis, and discursive psychology.

Narrative Archaeology: Reading the Landscape
Jeremy Hight, new media artist
GPS has been used for military weapon tracking, for navigation and mapping, but it and wireless are now able to be used to set locations as triggers in physical space for narrative segments that build as one moves across the city space. The act of reading/ interacting with technology and nonlinear narrative now moves from the isolation of individuals and their computers to a new sense of community as the work is to be experienced in groups and in the city at large. A writer can set scenes in physical locations but now can also use narrative segments to tell of unseen layers of architecture, history, ethnography and other areas where the person can read the places in city. There will be anthologies, not in books on shelves, but laid out in physical space as artists explore linking areas with locative media-driven narratives across city spaces.

Memory Work: Narrating Media Experiences
Brigitte Hipfl, Klagenfurt University (Austria)
This paper will address “memory work” as a means to explore the readings of popular stories in film and television. Short autobiographical narratives regarding media experiences are seen as ways in which people position themselves in relation to dominant discourses and ideologies. Analyzing the narratives will give us insights into how authors constitute themselves as social subjects. This will be demonstrated by focusing on reading of films like Amalie as well as popular TV programs.

Microlearning and Narration
Theo Hug, University of Innsbruck
Microlearning deals with relatively small learning units and short-term-focused activities. The paper presents a special concept, Integrated Micro Learning (IML), based on a patent-pending technology. This approach supports repetitive learning through embedding the learning process into the daily routine by making use of communication devices. Through this method new learning spaces emerge and become available for life-long learning. In this context, the role of narrations and storytelling for the designing of “micro units” and didactical arrangements will be explored.

The Use of Unconscious Reflexivity in Contemporary Film Narratives
Jan Jagodzinski, University of Alberta
This presentation makes the case that there is an increasing number of films that introduce a ‘doubled reflectivity’ into the narratives. In addition to the self-reflectivity of the actors themselves, or the self-reflectivity of the story, an unconscious dimension to the characters is explicitly shown. This playfulness of time, where the usual "tenses" of language no longer hold true illustrate what Deleuze called "time cinema." Through a number of recent films I intend to demonstrate this current postmodern twist in cinema narratives.

Just Men in Tights?: What Genre Theory Can Teach Us About the Persistence of Superhero Comics
Henry Jenkins, MIT
The American comic book represents a rich case study for thinking about genre: once most works operate in the same genre, the role of genre in managing difference starts to break down. Previous writers have celebrated one or moments of revisionism during which comic book auteurs rethought or reworked basic building blocks, often with the goal of offering an ideological critique of the whole tradition. Yet, revisionism has been part of the way the superhero gernre oeprated from the beginning, part of an ongoing process of renewal and differentiation sustainging interest among maturing readers. This paper examines a range of different strategies including gender mixing, "elseworlds," global hybridity, moral inversion, and the mainstreaming of alternative comics artists, which keep this genre fresh for contemporary comic readers.

Our Violence, their Violence: Exploring the Emotional and Relational Matrix of Terrorist Cinema
Vamsee Juluri, University of San Francisco
This paper explores, from the perspective of Gandhian nonviolence, the representation of violence in popular Indian films about terrorism such as Mission: Kashmir (Hindi) and Khadgam (Telugu). On the basis of postcolonialist critiques of modernity and studies of the epistemic politics of cultural reception in India, it outlines an emotional and relational framework in the terrorist narrative of Indian cinema that may offer insights into a popular sensibility about ahimsa, or nonviolence.

Fandom@net: Changing Relationship between Media Consumers and Producers
Inkyu Kang, University of Wisconsin at Madison
My paper explores how the Internet has changed fandom culture. The Internet has made a successful alternative medium in Korea, but it is also changing media industry practices from casting for soap operas to financing and promoting big-budget films. Based on specific case studies, my paper argues for the contingency of fan culture, offering a critique of a free-floating theorization of fandom.

Four Narrative Styles in Transmedia Storytelling
online version
Julia Evergreen Keefer, NYU
Inspired by film, the Internet, particle physics, psychoanalysis, Berber and Bedouin storytelling and environmental science, I will use four narrative styles — recursive, pass-the-ball linear, tandem-competitive, and conglomerate or layered — in four different works of fiction, analyzing the way time, space, point of view and language change with the different perspectives, and how the narrators color the content.

One Hundred Years of Cisco, Zorro, and Other Latina/o Good Bandits
Gary Keller, Arizona State University
Beginning in 1904, Cisco, and then Zorro and other Latina/o bandits have been the subjects of a media cycle that continues unabated into the 21st century. This paper will review the salient aspects of the Cisco and Zorro cycles including the following: their relationship to actual historical or quasi-historical social bandits of the 19th century; the evolution of these cycles into the world of mass media and mass culture including film, television, comics, games, puzzles, and pastimes; and the emergence of Hispanic female counterparts to Zorro and Cisco.

Everything’s Not Comin' Up Roses: Cultural Conflict and the Hollywood Musical
Kelly Kessler, CUNY Queens College
"Everything's Not Comin' Up Roses" focuses on the ways in which chnages in American Culture ultimately led to the rewriting of the American Hollywood musical. Whether by reflecting an apathy or pessimism toward romance (Sweet Charity, All That Jazz, At Long Last Love), an acknowledgment of racial or sexual difference/ strife (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Hair, Zoot Suit), or a generalized sense of unrest (Jesus Christ Superstar, Pennies from Heavan, Tommy), the stories told by such films rework one of the most culture-affirming genres of the classical Hollywood period to suit contemporary experiences.

Interrogating the Women Warrior: War, Patriotism and Family Loyalty in Lady Warriors of the Yang Family
Poh Cheng Khoo, independent scholar
In this paper, I look at the trope of the woman warrior as depicted in the Singapore-Taiwan-China joint production of Lady Warriors of the Yang Family (2001). A modern re-interpretation of a traditional Chinese mythic historical tale of patriotism and family loyalty, the serial's multi-dimensional treatment of the woman warrior figure is an exercise in interrogating the popular but often controversial issue of women in positions of power. I argue that this particular enactment of the Yang Family story effectively champions the transformational role of women warriors and its relevance in an age of moral ambivalence and socio-political transition.

The Uses of Fairy Tales in Psychotherapy
Bette U. Kiernan, psychotherapist (Palo Alto, CA)
The contributors to psychoanalysis looked to mythology to understand the psyche. A look into mythic and fairy tales patterns can still yield insights and clinical directions for contemporary psychotherapists. Fairy tales help develop reframes, have existential messages, and images to transform pain into creativity. This presentation integrates knowledge from psychoanalysis, systems theories, and cognitive psychology to demonstrate the link between fairy tales and spirit. The patterns encoded in myths that transcend suffering will be defined.

Media Stories: Murder, Motives and Moralities
Madeleine Kleberg and Ester Pollack, Stockholm University
In this paper, we'll analyze two stories of murder: one from 1932 and 2004. What can they tell us about social order and the role of journalism at the time? Is there a classic storytelling of crime and murder? We analyze how crime and perpetrators, their motives and victims are represented in leading Swedish newspapers; and how, especially in editorials, moralities about the misdeeds are framed into each period with its prevailing criminal policy and with its ideological-political interpretations of a society in "modern times."

"Do it First, Do it Yourself, and Keep on Doing it": The Persistence of the American Dream in the Gangster Film
Amanda Ann Klein, University of Pittsburgh
This paper investigates how gangster films retell the story of the American Dream across different social and historical periods. This story of an individual striving for success only to be punished for this desire can be traced to early 1900s robber barons whose meteoric rise to wealth and power embodied the belief that hard work, no matter how unscrupulous, is rewarded. The gangster film's fundamental structure of individual desire versus communal needs is replayed throughout the genre's history; its changes highlighting public views of who or what constitutes the Public Enemy.

Narrativity and Narrativism as Important Factors in Modern Journalism: Storytelling in Appropriate or Exaggerating Ways?
Sebastian Koehler, Leipzig University (Germany)
I focus on the increasing role of a particular kind of storytelling, which I call "narrativism": Narrativity is an integral part of modern journalism, as long as it is one part beside other modes of journalistic communication in all their diversity of content, form and perspective. Problems arise if narrativity becomes exaggerated, one-sided and displacing - in particular problems of over-simplification and excessive emotionalisation. Accordingly, I analyse the audiovisual storytelling of two events during the Iraq-War 2003: The coverage of the "saving" of Jessica Lynch in April 2003, and the coverage of the "capture" of Saddam Hussein in December 2003.

Retelling 9/11 on American Television: The West Wing and Ally McBeal
Jaap Kooijman, University of Amsterdam
The two 9/11 episodes of The West Wing (3:1, NBC, October 2001) and Ally McBeal (5:7, Fox, December 2001) are similar in that they show how America as a collective (should) deal with such a catastrophic experience. Both function as building blocks of the American "imagined community" (Benedict Anderson). However, while The West Wing explicitly treats 9/11 as an international issue, Ally McBeal only implicitly refers to 9/11 by presenting fictional accounts of local and personal tragedy. In this way, Ally McBeal personalizes and de-politicizes 9/11.

The Power of Stories to Build Solidarity Across Difference
Sara Koopman, University of British Columbia
How is a white middle class U.S. woman so moved by the story of an indigenous massacre survivor from Guatemala that she does 6 months of prison in protest? Many who do civil disobedience to close the School of the Americas, of the U.S. army, are motivated by stories of survivors of torture at the hands of graduates. How does connection across difference happen through stories? A case study and discussion of empathy vs. sympathy. Includes brief performances of stories.

Arab Reality Television: An Alternative Story to Arab Reality?
Marwan Kraidy, American University
This paper will explore how the stories told by Arab reality television articulate the social, political and economic realities of the Arab world. Based on five months of fieldwork in the Arab world in 2004 and textual analyses, it focuses on public discourse — on Arab-Western relations, male-female dynamics, etc. — surrounding Star Academy, a Fame-meets-Big Brother French reality television format, and the most popular and controversial program in the history of Arab television.

Digital Storytelling at the National Gallery of Art
Joe Lambert, Center for Digital Storytelling and Julie Springer, National Gallery of Art
This presentation will review the goals and results of the digital storytelling tutorials for K-12 teachers that took place at the National Gallery of Art's Teacher Institute in the summers of 2003 and 2004. The value of digital storytelling will be addressed through the perspectives of the organizing museum educator and the digital storytelling coach. Select digital stories—powerful 3 to 4-minute movies about art made by teachers participating in the program—will also be shown.

David Lynch and Robert Wilson: Contemporary Surrealist Storytellers
Kurt Lancaster, Fort Lewis College
In the films of David Lynch and the stage work of Robert Wilson, we can see how both of these directors -- working in different media -- blend the surrealistic forces of internal and external reality into stories that define their style and mark them as progenitors of a contemporary surrealistic movement. I will examine their work through the lens of Breton's lecture, "What is Surrealism?" and place these contemporary directors in context of the postmodern movement.

The Little Match Girl in America: Hans Christian Andersen and the Topos of the Dying Child
Henrik R. Lassen, University of Southern Denmark
Hans Christian Andersen's short tale "The Little Match Girl" (1845) relies on the depiction of the moment of a child's death presented interdependently with a set of complex traditional expectations, a topos well loved by nineteenth-century readers. By the 1860s, Andersen's original contributions to the standard topos had become fully integrated in American popular tradition as an acceptable variant of the "dying child" topos, and to this day the story may be seen to perform important cultural functions in America.

Telling Stories of Violence: The Troubling Violence Performance Project
Elaine J. Lawless and M. Heather Carver, University of Missouri
(with performers Sadie Chandler and Shelley Ingram)
This presentation will focus on the work of Elaine Lawless (folklore studies) and Heather Carver (performance studies) in their collaborative work on the "Troubling Violence Performance Project" — a troupe of students who "perform" monologues of women's experiences with violence. In addition to this work, we have written a play about women incarcerated for allegedly killing their abusive partners.

Political Discourse in Film: Pierre Falardeau, His Works, and the Independence Movement in Quebec
Julie LeBlanc, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Controversial film director, Pierre Falardeau, is renowned for his works and activism relating to the independence movement in Québec. The director's personal, uncensored political messages are transmitted in his films with raw and direct criticism. With the use of published interviews and personal discussions with the film director, this paper explores how political manifestos are present in films describing and interpreting historical and fictional narratives about the state of Quebec, its people, and its possible independence.

QuickTime Technology and the CD-ROM: The (Retro)Future of Storytelling?
Bruno Lessard, University of Montreal
This presentation examines the future of storytelling in two seemingly passé visual environments: the QuickTime movie and the CD-ROM. Striving to overcome and yet to retain, and reinvent cinema, this counter-history of visuality implies that to go beyond cinema is, paradoxically, to use outmoded engines of visual storytelling such as the panorama and early film. The temporality of these visual technologies, when considered in the CD-ROM environment, seems to be anachronistic: it evokes and repeats the aesthetics of early cinema and yet points to the future of cinema with its "interactive" moments and its digital treatment of images.

Re(ap)proaching Linearity: The Postmodern Disintegration of Narrative
Marc Leverette, Rutgers University
For the purposes of this discussion I shall consider postmodernity only as it relates to the realm of linearity and storytelling in the age of digital media. I will look historically at structural linear narrative and its relation to communication media, how particular scholars have approached the phenomenon of disintegration media ecologically, and its cultural implications. Additionally, I will examine how the gnomic style of the symbolist movement (which is both modern and postmodern in its sensibilities) might be the most apt comparison to contemporary digital mediation, which follows not a continuous, linear, or unbroken line of thought, but rather creates a tessellated pattern of ideas (“probes” to use McLuhan’s phrase), each tile in the mental mosaic just one particular facet of the overall pattern.

Shadows from Another Place: Transposed Spaces
Paula Levine, San Francisco State University
Distances and differences often diminish the impact of traumatic events, such as war, upon other lives being lived in safety. But what if the safety of distance between foreign and domestic territories collapsed, and impact of foreign events could be seen,
“experienced” and grounded in local terms? This paper presents "Shadows from another place," a web-based Global Positioning System (GPS) project that employs mapping as a narrative device to dissolve the distinctions between foreign and domestic, and create new narrative contiguity.

The Sound of Silents: Representations of Speech in Silent Film
Torey Liepa, New York University
The mid-1910s saw the establishment of the feature-length film as the standard form of filmmaking. As these movies became increasingly respected by middle-class audiences, film producers realized the potential, yet relatively untapped profit to be made from entertaining these groups. Through their desire to reach this large body of consumers, American filmmakers attempted to tell different kinds of stories; complex, psychologically motivated stories that were driven by character. This paper explores how and why silent American cinema of the 1910s incorporated character language, in the form of dialogue intertitles, as a means to deepen character psychology.

The End of the World as We Know It: Narratives of Environmental Apocalypse in Contemporary Literature and Other Media
Anthony Lioi, MIT
This paper will examine the transmission and refiguration of traditional narratives of apocalypse in contemporary American environmental literature, television, and film. Examples to be considered include: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring; Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead; Don DeLillo, White Noise; The X-Files; Buffy theVampire Slayer; the Godzilla films; The Day After Tomorrow; and Spirited Away.

Hollywood’s Romantic Comedy: Formula and Gender Dynamics
Leah Lowe, Connecticut College
Formulaic romantic comedy provides a forum for the exploration of gender dynamics and gender norms within specific cultural and social historical contexts. This presentation focuses on the historical evolution of romantic comedy’s cinematic narrative and its treatment of gender by comparing the conventions of gender representation associated with classical Hollywood screwball comedy of the 1930s and early 40s (It Happened One Night, The Lady Eve) with representational conventions of contemporary Hollywood romantic comedy (Bridget Jones’s Diary, Runaway Bride).

Story Telling and the Politics of Representation
Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber, Suffolk University
This paper analyzes the contribution of the film Circle of Dreams (Israel, 2000) to a new form of story telling about Mizrahim (Oriental Jews) in Israel. The film, written and directed by Beni Torati, a Persian-Israeli, represents a new cultural and political form of story telling. On one hand, it empowers Mizrahim by shattering images and stereotypes of Mizrahim in Israeli media (Shohat, 89). On the other hand, it demonstrates the political power of self-representation.

Storytelling, Technologies and Traditions in Italy: Storie Mandaliche
Erica Magris, Scuola Normale Superiore and University Paris III
Storie Mandaliche is a cyber-storytelling conceived as a work in progress in 1998 by Andrea Balzola and Giacomo Verde, based on the combination of the digital technology with the mandala archetype and with the Italian folk practice of oral narrative. This paper discusses first the cultural syncretism of the tale, the connection between said words and FlashMx animations, and, secondly, the position of the public, called to choose which story to listen to, thus becoming not only audience, but also an active player.

Dead Stars and Film Form
Neepa Majumdar, University of Pittsburgh
At the apocryphal origin of film stardom lies the story of the rumored death of actress Florence Lawrence in a street accident. This paper takes the recurrent fascination with stories of dead and injured stars as its starting point to examine the impact of photographic indexicality and cinema's dialectic of presence and absence on the textual form and reception of films whose stars have died during production.

Memories through Multimedia: Documenting our Lives
Atteqa Malik, digital artist
The neurotic compulsion to collect memories using images and videos is taking on epidemic proportions all over the world. Exposure to media persona has resulted in "camera awareness" among individuals by affecting the way they conduct themselves at recorded events. How are physically recorded memories overlapping with subconscious ones to create new twists in the stories of human lives? An observation of Karachi’s urban culture, that filters out the attitudes defining this new human condition, will be the essence of my paper.

Cyberaesthetics, Bioethics, Digital-Autopsies: Involution, Extramodernity, Compressionism
Robert "Ouimette" Martinez, European Graduate School (Saas-Fee, Switzerland)
In this presentation, I analyze an installation artwork by Teiji Furuhashi, titled Lovers (Dying Pictures, Loving Pictures) (1994). I contend that this work of art represents a digital narrative involved with an appearance of cyberspace, an ethics of life signified by love, and an extramodern problematic that contests a Western centered historical subject. Furthermore, I analyze this installation in order to see how compressed narratives regarding contemporary concepts of the "naked" and the "nude" are related insofar as death and causality imply theories about life and structure, respectively.

Tuberculosis Narratives: (Im)Patient Stories from a Culture of Writing and Curing
Jean Mason, Ryerson University
This presentation examines how the migration of patients' tuberculosis narratives across history, culture and media creates a multi-perspectival approach to illness that is essential to accurate historical documentation, and beneficial to practitioners and patients who look to these documents for medical knowledge. Data is drawn from the principal investigator's four-year study of TB narratives written by patients at North America's premier sanatoria in Saranac Lake, New York, prior to effective drug therapy (1884-1954). The presentation will focus on specific archival material. The related theoretical intersections of narrative medicine, pathographic writing, and expressive writing will provide the theoretical framework for discussion.

Glocalized Narratives: Nostalgic American Images in Japanese Print Advertisements
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