90
AdAptAtion in the Age of MediA ConvergenCe
of contemporary popular culture: “Hamlet’s father is now a zombie.” 8 The
text emerges at the cost of textual nuance and intensity of engagement,
but gains in ironic intertextual and intermedial resonances, for instance
when Ophelia joins the group “Maidens Who Don’t Float.” In fact, the limitations of Facebook are willfully invoked in a parody targeting both the play
and the fairly unsubtle choices for communication in some social media
environments. Either one regards this “reception in the mode of distraction”
as a further nail in the coffin of art’s aura or as a clever indictment of the
limitations of the Facebook media protocol. It is only in Liao’s reproduction,
which includes the iconic Facebook design, that the adaptation develops
its full and immediate parodic potential, and clearly, the case shows how
authorship is diluted in the circulation of internet memes.
This emerging Hamlet textuality not only reformats and remixes, but in
so doing at the same time diminishes and expands Shakespeare’s Hamlet:
it performs the play according to the media protocol of Facebook. We can,
however, also notice a reverse tendency: contemporary mashup novels
tend to invoke “old” media protocols in a particular pastiche that reiterates
popular franchises such as Star Wars or cult movies such as The Big Lebowski
according to the protocols of Shakespearean play texts. What is interesting
is that all of these reformattings, remixes, and mashups seem to take the
texts for granted and do not even attempt an interpretative engagement
with the text. The desire is liturgical: the mashup novel seeks to re-perform,
not to engage hermeneutically, with Shakespeare, Star Wars, or The Big
Lebowski. This re-performance takes place within both the books’ texts and
their paratexts, which reinforce a discussion of authorization, ownership,
and the writing process that supersedes any discussion of interpretative
engagement.
To sum up recent approaches to paratexts in the hybridity of transmedia
participation: we have to consider paratexts as a study of the pragmatics
and performativity of literature, establishing “a zone not only of transition
but also of transaction.” 9 To put it quite bluntly: paratexts are done, rather
than written. The key problem of the term “paratext” in this “distributed”
or “circulating” textuality is the status of the literary text. It is no longer the
textual center from which the “para”-textuality emerges. 10 Unlike Genette
has it, paratexts do much more than primarily reinforce “the author’s
8 Ibid.
9 Genette, Paratexts, 407.
10 Ellen McCracken, “Expanding Genette’s Epitext/Peritext Model for Transitional Electronic
Literature: Centrifugal and Centripetal Vectors on Kindles and iPads,” Narrative 21, no. 1 (2013): 106.
AdAptAtion in the Age of MediA ConvergenCe
of contemporary popular culture: “Hamlet’s father is now a zombie.” 8 The
text emerges at the cost of textual nuance and intensity of engagement,
but gains in ironic intertextual and intermedial resonances, for instance
when Ophelia joins the group “Maidens Who Don’t Float.” In fact, the limitations of Facebook are willfully invoked in a parody targeting both the play
and the fairly unsubtle choices for communication in some social media
environments. Either one regards this “reception in the mode of distraction”
as a further nail in the coffin of art’s aura or as a clever indictment of the
limitations of the Facebook media protocol. It is only in Liao’s reproduction,
which includes the iconic Facebook design, that the adaptation develops
its full and immediate parodic potential, and clearly, the case shows how
authorship is diluted in the circulation of internet memes.
This emerging Hamlet textuality not only reformats and remixes, but in
so doing at the same time diminishes and expands Shakespeare’s Hamlet:
it performs the play according to the media protocol of Facebook. We can,
however, also notice a reverse tendency: contemporary mashup novels
tend to invoke “old” media protocols in a particular pastiche that reiterates
popular franchises such as Star Wars or cult movies such as The Big Lebowski
according to the protocols of Shakespearean play texts. What is interesting
is that all of these reformattings, remixes, and mashups seem to take the
texts for granted and do not even attempt an interpretative engagement
with the text. The desire is liturgical: the mashup novel seeks to re-perform,
not to engage hermeneutically, with Shakespeare, Star Wars, or The Big
Lebowski. This re-performance takes place within both the books’ texts and
their paratexts, which reinforce a discussion of authorization, ownership,
and the writing process that supersedes any discussion of interpretative
engagement.
To sum up recent approaches to paratexts in the hybridity of transmedia
participation: we have to consider paratexts as a study of the pragmatics
and performativity of literature, establishing “a zone not only of transition
but also of transaction.” 9 To put it quite bluntly: paratexts are done, rather
than written. The key problem of the term “paratext” in this “distributed”
or “circulating” textuality is the status of the literary text. It is no longer the
textual center from which the “para”-textuality emerges. 10 Unlike Genette
has it, paratexts do much more than primarily reinforce “the author’s
8 Ibid.
9 Genette, Paratexts, 407.
10 Ellen McCracken, “Expanding Genette’s Epitext/Peritext Model for Transitional Electronic
Literature: Centrifugal and Centripetal Vectors on Kindles and iPads,” Narrative 21, no. 1 (2013): 106.