Subjectivity Across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives

Media in general and narrative media in particular have the potential to represent not only a variety of both possible and actual worlds but also the perception and consciousness of characters in these worlds. Hence, media can be understood as "qualia machines," as technologies that allow for the production of subjective experiences within the affordances and limitations posed by the conventions of their specific mediality. This edited collection examines the transmedial as well as the medium-specific strategies employed by the verbal representations characteristic for literary texts, the verbal-pictorial representations characteristic for comics, the audiovisual representations characteristic for films, and the interactive representations characteristic for video games. Combining theoretical perspectives from analytic philosophy, cognitive theory, and narratology with approaches from phenomenology, psychosemiotics, and social semiotics, the contributions collected in this volume provide a state-of-the-art map of current research on a wide variety of ways in which subjectivity can be represented across conventionally distinct media.

Maike Sarah Reinerth is a Research Associate for Media and Communication Studies at the University of Hamburg, Germany. Research interests include representations of subjectivity (Ph.D. project), cognitive film theory, and animation studies. Her most recent publication is ＂Metaphors of the Mind in Film: A Cognitive-Cultural Perspective＂ (Embodied Metaphors in Film, Television, and Video Games, 2016).

Jan-Noël Thon is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Tuebingen, Germany. Research interests include film studies, television studies, comics studies, game studies, transmedial narratology, media convergence, and post/documentary in digital media culture. He has published widely in these areas, most recently Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture (2016).