Dr Julian Reidy is a post-doctoral researcher
affiliated with the Thomas Mann archive at the Department of Humanities, Social
and Political Sciences at ETH, Zürich. In September, Julian will be a one-term
visiting professor at the University of Geneva. Julian’s interests cover
intergenerational relationships in post 1945 German literature, the semantics
of ‘Barbarism’ from the 18th century to the present, Bernward Vesper, and of
course Thomas Mann. Julian is the author of two monographs Forget[ting] What
Parents Are: A Re-reading and Literary History of 'Vaeterliteratur',
and Reconstruction and Postheroism: Paradigms of Generational Novels in
Contemporary German Literature. He is currently working on his
Habilitation thesis, which will deal with Interiors and the Semantics
of Space in Thomas Mann. Julian has published widely on Mann, Bernward
Vesper, and generational/family novels. He also contributed two articles to the
forthcoming Thomas-Mann-Handbook. Wednesday’s paper,
‘Narrative Games’, is a taster of a forthcoming article.
Abstract:
„You just complicate the
narrative!“ Computer games as ‚Erzählspiele’ (narrative games)
Dr. Julian Reidy, ETH Zürich
The
German Reallexikon der deutschen
Literaturwissenschaft defines a narrator as “diejenige Instanz, die die
Information über die erzählte Welt vermittelt”, that is, the arbiter and
intermediator of the information contained within a fictional text. The
discipline of narratology provides scholars with the necessary tools to identify
narrators in non-interactive media – but things get messy when computer games,
a new and by definition interactive medium, come into play. The “task” assigned
to a computer game’s ‘reader’ is not merely an “interpretative” one, he or she
is actually “responsible for creating the plot” through ludic action. And the
plot set in motion by the player was itself already predetermined by the game’s
programmers. Who, then, mediates, arbitrates, ‘narrates’ a computer game? Can
computer games even be considered to be narratives at all or are they – as
Jesper Juul stipulates – mere tests of “performative skills”, lacking the
qualities usually ascribed to narratives? By tackling questions such as these,
my paper will attempt to clarify the narratological status of computer games.
In accordance with Albrecht Koschorke’s recent insights into the connections
between ‘narrative’ and ‘play’, the “homo
narrans” and the “homo ludens”, I
will present a multi-faceted narratological model of the computer game that
takes into account the young medium’s aesthetic specificity and its inherent
artistic and critical potential.
George Potts is a PhD candidate at University College London,
researching the relationship between the writings of John Milton and Geoffrey
Hill supervised by Prof. Philip Horne, and funded by a Wolfson Scholarship. He
has a strong secondary interest in film and television, is currently running a
series of seminars at UCL on contemporary TV drama and is in the early stages
of editing a collection of essays on national identity in contemporary TV
drama. George has reviewed for the TLS and the Los Angeles Review of
Books.
Abstract:
‘You seen The
Godfather?’ – The Sopranos and
the postmodern gangster
In recent years, the television drama series has undergone radical
development, both in terms of series-creators’ ambitions for the medium and the
levels of expectation of the audience. Episodic storylines have increasingly
expanded into season-long arcs, allowing for a far greater subtlety to
narratives, which are no longer dependent upon satisfying the casual viewer.
Instead changes in distribution – DVD boxsets, online viewing and cable
networks such as HBO and AMC – have created a culture in which complexity is
increasingly important to TV, impacting upon how one should create and watch a
series.
Premiering on HBO in 1999, The Sopranos is arguably the most significant television series of
the last twenty years. A critical darling as well as the most commercially
successful cable series in the history of TV, The Sopranos won 21 Emmy Awards
and 5 Golden Globes across its six seasons. The show has been described by The New Yorker as ‘the richest
achievement in the
history of television’ and was voted the greatest TV drama of all time by the Guardian. It ushered in a new era of
drama, in particular a golden age of television for HBO at the turn of the new
millennium.
This paper will offer a close reading of
the different ways in which The Sopranos consciously
engages with the mafia film tradition. Beginning with Sopranos creator David Chase’s assertion that ‘most mob dramas are period
pieces … even if they’re set in the present day, they feel like they belong to
a different era’, the paper will consider how the series reinvented a dominant strand of American cinema for the small
screen. Mob dramas are heavily indebted to generic conceptions, questing
back to cinematic masterpieces such as The
Godfather (1972) and Goodfellas
(1990) which loom large over the landscape of cinema history. In attempting to
rework the genre for the twenty-first century, any director has to make the
difficult transition from a film in which gangsters’ conceptions of themselves
are based upon notions of family and honour, passed down through generations,
to conceptions that derive from the mafia movie itself.
By considering the metatextual quality of The Sopranos, this paper will explore one way in which the series
broke new ground for television drama by aspiring to something that cinema had
never attempted. As well as this, it will briefly consider the way in which
other HBO television series have achieved critical acclaim by freeing
themselves from generic constraints – The
Wire and the police procedural, Deadwood
and the western – while others, such as Boardwalk
Empire, have perhaps been marginalised because they have retreated back
into period drama and failed to carry on The
Sopranos’ legacy.
