Original scientific paper
Traces of literary texts in a transmedial memory space
Lovro Škopljanac
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Abstract
The paper questions the received opinion of monomedial reception of literary texts according to which the information about a work that has been read would usually stem exclusively from the written medium, and would not include notions about other similar contents derived from other media. The topic is discussed by pointing to data from three empirical studies that have been conducted over the last ten years by the paper's author, individually or in collaboration. The first to be considered briefly are the results from two studies conducted on 90 lay readers of literature from Croatia and the USA, which indicate that about a quarter of readers (26%) mention at least one similar type of content in other media when recalling works of literature that they had remembered well. Then the focus of the paper shifts to the current study with an updated methodology, in which 320 readers from Croatia have taken part, out of which number almost three quarters (72%) have remembered at least one contact between a remembered text and its content in other media. Content analysis on paraphrased reports by more than 30 participants tries to identify the most common media and phenomena which shape the transmedial space which has been subsequently defined. One of them is the phenomenon of linking, which means that lay readers easily link the same content in several media, which in turn helps define the umbrella term Spontaneous Transmedia Amalgamation (STA). The third study also shows that the most common transmedial contacts connected to literature are in the following media: film (74% of respondents evidencing STA), drama performance (22%), series (13%) and music (4%), alongside an “other” category (5%) containing several other specific media. STA is then further broken down into five constituent modes: I) memory entanglement, II) fuzzy connection, III) media complementarity, IV) blended memories, and V) memory scaffolding. In conclusion, all the recognized elements and patterns are conceptualized as indicators of the notion of potential space, especially when it comes to literary characters as the element most often remembered transmedially, which also makes the characters the most common “inhabitants” of such a transmedial memory space.
Keywords
literary reception; transmedial space; potential space; Spontaneous Transmedia Amalgamation
Hrčak ID:
304957
URI
Publication date:
29.6.2023.
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