Critical Reflections On Audience And Narrativity

Communication Yearbook 40 completes four decades of publishing state-of-the-discipline literature reviews and essays. In the final Communication Yearbook volume, editor Elisia L. Cohen includes chapters representing international and interdisciplinary scholarship, demonstrating the broad global interests of the International Communication Association. The contents include summaries of communication research programs that represent the most innovative work currently. Emphasizing timely disciplinary concerns and enduring theoretical questions, this volume will be valuable to scholars throughout the communication discipline and beyond.

This book examines the complex ways in which television articulates ideas about DNA in the early 21st century. Considering television’s distinct aesthetic and narrative forms, as well as its specific cultural roles, it identifies TV as a key site for the genetic imaginary. The book addresses the key themes of complexity and kinship, which function as nodes around which older essentialist notions about the human genome clash with newly emergent post-genomic sensibilities. Analysing a wide range of US and UK programmes, from science documentaries, science fiction serials and crime procedurals, to family history programmes, sitcoms and reality shows, Television and the Genetic Imaginary illustrates the extent to which molecular frameworks of understanding now permeate popular culture.

This book argues narrative, people and place are inseparable and pursues the consequences of this insight through the design of narrative environments. This is a new and distinct area of practice that weaves together and extends narrative theory, spatial theory and design theory. Examples of narrative spaces, such as exhibitions, brand experiences, urban design and socially engaged participatory interventions in the public realm, are explored to show how space acts as a medium of communication through a synthesis of materials, structures and technologies, and how particular social behaviours are reproduced or critiqued through spatial narratives. This book will be of interest to scholars in design studies, urban studies, architecture, new materialism and design practitioners in the creative industries.

Death, Culture and Leisure: Playing Dead is an inter- and multi-disciplinary volume that engages with the diverse nexuses that exist between death, culture and leisure. At its heart, it is a playful exploration of the way in which we play with both death and the dead.

The book proposes a new perspective on avant-garde cinema, utilising approaches from intermediality to explore how the spirit of experimentation, a hallmark of historical avant-garde and post-war artistic movements, is still present in contemporary filmmaking today. The volume explores how contemporary avant-garde filmmakers have brought innovation to modern cinema. Filmmakers, such as, Jean-Luc Godard, Lars von Trier, and Alexander Sokurov and their contemporary works will be analyzed, reflecting on their experimentation with cinematic techniques and the mixing of the film medium with other media, such as literature, theatre, and painting. Important research questions considered throughout the book include: How do intermedial experiments convey meaning in films? What is the impact on the spectator of the mixing of various media forms in cinema? And how are the contemporary films of Jean-Luc Godard, Lars von Trier, and Alexander Sokurov innovative and experimental? The book is devoted to all these themes and provides a thorough analysis of contemporary films examined through an intermedial perspective. Providing a comprehensive analysis of contemporary avant-garde filmmaking from an intermedial perspective, this book will be of interest to graduate students and scholars working in intermedial studies, film and media studies, and cultural studies.

Narrative Analysis is organized around three approaches or "readings." Literary Readings focus on aesthetic, metaphorical, and other literary qualities inherent to narrative approaches. Social-Relational Readings build upon the idea that narrative discourse is personal but also echoes political, economic, and other material relationships in the environment. Readings through the Force of History explain how narrators come to know themselves and their worlds in terms of and in spite of the received explanations of time and place. Working in a range of ethnic, geographic, generational, class, and institutional communities, the authors demonstrate how they have used narrative inquiry to explore development in challenging social contexts.

This book calls for an investigation of the ›borderlands of narrativity‹ — the complex and culturally productive area where the symbolic form of narrative meets other symbolic logics, such as data(base), play, spectacle, or ritual. It opens up a conversation about the ›beyond‹ of narrative, about the myriad constellations in which narrativity interlaces with, rubs against, or morphs into the principles of other forms. To conceptualize these borderlands, the book introduces the notion of »narrative liminality,« which the 16 articles utilize to engage literature, popular culture, digital technology, historical artifacts, and other kinds of texts from a time span of close to 200 years.