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AdAptAtion in the Age of MediA ConvergenCe
paratext to media franchises, highlighting the active role of paratexts in
creating and continuing franchise texts. Dorothee Birke and Birte Christ
have elaborated Genette’s ideas for a situation of convergence culture and
transmedia storytelling, examining how paratexts fulfill interpretive,
commercial, or navigational functions in determining contemporary readers’
transmedia experience of narratives. 2
This chapter takes four steps towards investigating how literary publishing
houses respond to the ubiquitous remixes and mashups to be found on lowthreshold digital platforms of participation. It will, first, delineate paratexts
as zones of transaction, shifting research emphases from textual towards
performative concerns and highlighting the way cultures negotiate textual
distribution and circulation. Secondly, it will examine the question of how
paratexts regulate the quasi-religious textuality of fandom participation;
thirdly, the role of paratextual canonization will be a special focus within
this textuality. Finally, the chapter argues that printed products within the
field attempt to perform a nostalgic authorization and re-materialization of
literature, highlighting the haptic and material qualities of “bookishness.”
Media Protocols: Paratexts as zones of transaction
Practices of reading are subject to a number of media protocols or a media
apparatus that have been identified by both materialist apparatus theories
of media (Jean-Louis Baudry, Friedrich Kittler) 3 and cultural studies’ media
theory, with an emphasis on the social practices emerging with media technologies (Raymond Williams, Lisa Gitelman) 4 . Classic apparatus theories
would, in the wake of Michel Foucault or Louis Althusser, analyze how the
apparatus wields political power via a cultural and social conglomerate
of practices and “interpellations.” Convergence and transmedia theories,
on the other hand, have more recently tried to highlight the way in which
the circulation of media products has ushered in a new phase of cultural
production that is less clearly determined by top-down processes and takes
2 Jonathan Gray. Show Sold Separately (New York: NYU Press, 2010), 10. Dorothee Birke and
Birte Christ, “Paratext and Digitized Narrative: Mapping the Field,” Narrative 21, no. 1 (2013).
3 E.g., Jean-Louis Baudry and Alan Williams, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic
Apparatus” Film Quarterly 28, no. 2, (1974–1975); Friedrich Kittler, Grammophon, Film, Typewriter
(Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose 1986).
4 Raymond Williams, Television. Technology and Cultural Form, 2 nd ed. (London: Routledge,
1990); Lisa Gitelman Always Already New. Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2006).
AdAptAtion in the Age of MediA ConvergenCe
paratext to media franchises, highlighting the active role of paratexts in
creating and continuing franchise texts. Dorothee Birke and Birte Christ
have elaborated Genette’s ideas for a situation of convergence culture and
transmedia storytelling, examining how paratexts fulfill interpretive,
commercial, or navigational functions in determining contemporary readers’
transmedia experience of narratives. 2
This chapter takes four steps towards investigating how literary publishing
houses respond to the ubiquitous remixes and mashups to be found on lowthreshold digital platforms of participation. It will, first, delineate paratexts
as zones of transaction, shifting research emphases from textual towards
performative concerns and highlighting the way cultures negotiate textual
distribution and circulation. Secondly, it will examine the question of how
paratexts regulate the quasi-religious textuality of fandom participation;
thirdly, the role of paratextual canonization will be a special focus within
this textuality. Finally, the chapter argues that printed products within the
field attempt to perform a nostalgic authorization and re-materialization of
literature, highlighting the haptic and material qualities of “bookishness.”
Media Protocols: Paratexts as zones of transaction
Practices of reading are subject to a number of media protocols or a media
apparatus that have been identified by both materialist apparatus theories
of media (Jean-Louis Baudry, Friedrich Kittler) 3 and cultural studies’ media
theory, with an emphasis on the social practices emerging with media technologies (Raymond Williams, Lisa Gitelman) 4 . Classic apparatus theories
would, in the wake of Michel Foucault or Louis Althusser, analyze how the
apparatus wields political power via a cultural and social conglomerate
of practices and “interpellations.” Convergence and transmedia theories,
on the other hand, have more recently tried to highlight the way in which
the circulation of media products has ushered in a new phase of cultural
production that is less clearly determined by top-down processes and takes
2 Jonathan Gray. Show Sold Separately (New York: NYU Press, 2010), 10. Dorothee Birke and
Birte Christ, “Paratext and Digitized Narrative: Mapping the Field,” Narrative 21, no. 1 (2013).
3 E.g., Jean-Louis Baudry and Alan Williams, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic
Apparatus” Film Quarterly 28, no. 2, (1974–1975); Friedrich Kittler, Grammophon, Film, Typewriter
(Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose 1986).
4 Raymond Williams, Television. Technology and Cultural Form, 2 nd ed. (London: Routledge,
1990); Lisa Gitelman Always Already New. Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2006).