Adaptation in the digital era: The case of Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Magdalena Cieślak
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Old English ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Special Effect ◽  
Adaptation Studies ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Heroic Poem ◽  
Robert Zemeckis

From fidelity discourse, through medium specificity discourse, to intertextuality and remediation approach, adaptation studies have dynamically evolved and recently have responded with particular flexibility to the advent of the digital era. Even adaptations of classical literary texts, confronting the authority of their hypotexts, have daringly broken away from their fidelity constraints and ventured onto paths facilitated by the development of new media. This article discusses Robert Zemeckis’ 2007 adaptation of Beowulf and examines this film’s potential for illustrating the manifestations of digitality in adaptation discourses. A film that did not make it (in)to the box office, and an adaptation that makes literary fans cringe, it is still a fascinating cultural intertext: a radical reinterpretation of the Old English heroic poem, a star-studded special-effect cinematic extravaganza of an adventurous director, an illustration of adaptation going remediation and an inclusive transmedia hybrid.

Romantic Capabilities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Goode
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Reception Studies ◽  
Ecological Design ◽  
Conflicting Demands ◽  
Contemporary Media

Romantic Capabilities argues that popular new media uses of literary texts often activate and make visible ways the texts were already about their relationship to medium. Devising and modelling a methodology that bridges historicist literary criticism and reception studies with media studies and formalism, it contends that how a literary text behaves when it encounters new media reveals capabilities in media that can transform how we understand the text’s significance for the original historical context in which it was created. Following an introductory chapter that explains and justifies its approach to the archive, the book analyses significant popular “media behaviors” exhibited by three major Romantic British literary corpuses: the viral circulation of William Blake’s pictures and proverbs across contemporary media, the gravitation of Victorian panorama painters and stereoscopic photographers to Walter Scott’s historical fictions, and the ongoing popular practice of writing fanfiction set in the worlds of Jane Austen’s novels and their imaginary country estates. Blake emerges from the study as an important theorist of how viral media can be used to undermine law, someone whose art deregulates through the medium of its audiences’ heterogeneous tastes and conflicting demands for wisdom. Scott’s novels are shown to have fostered a new experience of vision and understanding of frame that helped launch modern immersive media. Finally, Austenian realism is revealed as a mode of ecological design whose project fanfiction grasps and extends.

Youth and Citizenship in the Digital Age: A View from Egypt

2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Herrera
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Political Repression ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Biographical Research ◽  
Media And Communication ◽  
Generational Consciousness ◽  
Active Generation

Youth are coming of age in a digital era and learning and exercising citizenship in fundamentally different ways compared to previous generations. Around the globe, a monumental generational rupture is taking place that is being facilitated—not driven in some inevitable and teleological process—by new media and communication technologies. The bulk of research and theorizing on generations in the digital age has come out of North America and Europe; but to fully understand the rise of an active generation requires a more inclusive global lens, one that reaches to societies where high proportions of educated youth live under conditions of political repression and economic exclusion. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA), characterized by authoritarian regimes, surging youth populations, and escalating rates of both youth connectivity and unemployment, provides an ideal vantage point to understand generations and power in the digital age. Building toward this larger perspective, this article probes how Egyptian youth have been learning citizenship, forming a generational consciousness, and actively engaging in politics in the digital age. Author Linda Herrera asks how members of this generation who have been able to trigger revolt might collectively shape the kind of sustained democratic societies to which they aspire. This inquiry is informed theoretically by the sociology of generations and methodologically by biographical research with Egyptian youth.

scholarly journals Beyond The Historiography: Film Dokumenter Sejarah Sebagai Alternatif Historiografi di Indonesia

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 405
Author(s):  
Aan Ratmanto
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Documentary Films ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cost ◽  
The University ◽  
Quality Of Research

The Department of History, Faculty of Cultural Sciences, the University of Gadjah Mada in 2015 made a milestone in the development of historiography in Indonesia. They made a bold move to produce a scholar with a documentary film work instead of a thesis. In the future, it is not impossible that this step will soon be followed by other universities in Indonesia. This paper was written in response to these developments. In this digital era-and in the midst of still low interest in reading in Indonesia-emerged the discourse to seek new media for historiography in Indonesia. The film, especially documentary films are seen as new media that match the characteristics of history because of they both present real-life reality. Moreover, Indonesia with the diversity of tribes and culture and history, of course, save a variety of themes that will not run out to be appointed a documentary. Based on that, this paper will discuss the types, forms, and format of the documentary that is suitable and possible to be produced by history students as a substitute for thesis-considering the cost of film production tends to be higher than thesis research. Thus, the film of a documentary a college student, especially a history produces the quality of research and aestheticsKata 

scholarly journals Da’wah of Digital Era Applicative Study: Qs. An-Nahl: 125 on Millennial Generation

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 380-391
Author(s):  
Muhammad Raihan Nasution
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Young People ◽  
New Media ◽  
Communication Technology ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Research Approach ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Library Research ◽  
The Media ◽  
Getting Lost

In this digital era, young people are very vulnerable to negative things, therefore Islam as a religion which is rahmatan lil alamin, must take appropriate and fast actions to save young generations of Islam from getting lost in the darkness of cyberspace life. This article is prepared with a library research approach by conducting a literature review and collecting data from various sources and subsequently, the data is analyzed descriptively by presenting facts or findings which are then theoretically reviewed. Therefore da’wah of digital era really must use the media, especially new media. The development of communication technology has changed the way people communicate and interact. Nowadays, almost everyone uses the internet to send, search, and read information. Therefore, the Qur’an Surah An-Nahl: 125 offering da'wah methods of digital era have to be able to attract sympathetic Millennials, presenting representative, interactive and innovative da'wah methods through social media is the best way to save the young generations of Islam in the future.

scholarly journals Adaptation in the Age of Media Convergence

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Participatory Culture ◽  
Media Convergence ◽  
Adaptation Studies ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Fan Communities ◽  
Cover Songs ◽  
New Phenomena

This collection considers new phenomena emerging in a convergence environment from the perspective of adaptation studies. The contributions take the most prominent methods within the field to offer reconsiderations of theoretical concepts and practices in participatory culture, transmedia franchises, and new media adaptations. The authors discuss phenomena ranging from mash-ups of novels and YouTube cover songs to negotiations of authorial control and interpretative authority between media producers and fan communities to perspectives on the fictional and legal framework of brands and franchises. In this fashion, the collection expands the horizons of both adaptation and transmedia studies and provides reassessments of frequently discussed (BBC’s Sherlock or the LEGO franchise) and previously largely ignored phenomena (self-censorship in transnational franchises, mash-up novels, or YouTube cover videos).

Theorizing Adaptation in the Twenty-First Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 139-172
Author(s):  
Kamilla Elliott
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Adaptation Studies ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Theoretical Pluralism ◽  
Literature And Film

Chapter 4 traces the expansion of adaptation studies to new media and new theories in the twenty-first century. By 2006, literary film adaptation studies outnumbered general literature-and-film studies, and Linda Hutcheon authoritatively opened adaptation studies beyond literature and film and beyond dyadic disciplines and theoretical camps into a pluralism of media, disciplines, and theories, although debates between pre–theoretical turn and post–theoretical turn theories have continued. They continue because new theories have not resolved the problems of old theories for adaptation, so that scholars return to older theories to try to redress them. New theories have done a great deal for adaptation, but they have also introduced new theoretical problems: so much so, that the latest debates in adaptation study no longer lie between theoretical progressivism and theoretical return but between theoretical pluralism and theoretical abandonment. Beyond specific theories and differing modes of pluralism, this debate points to theorization’s failure to theorize adaptation more generally.

Digital Era Governance and Social Media

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-35
Author(s):  
Abdul Malik Omar
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
New Media ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
The World ◽  
Governance Process ◽  
Digital Governance ◽  
Digital Dividend ◽  
Development Application

Digital technology is at the forefront of transforming how governments operate around the world. Using Brunei's Information Department (InfoDept) as a case study, this chapter looks at how the agency has evolved from its inception in the 1950s to 2019 in its embrace of both old and new media to pursue its mission and objectives as a government-run media agency. The results demonstrate how new media, such as social media, can complement old media if done right. The case study on InfoDept contributes to the growing field of research related to the increased advancement, development, application, and impact of new technologies in bolstering the digital governance process. This chapter also provides strong evidence on how governments can improve its general governance process and unlock the digital dividend in the 21st century by incorporating new media into its public policy architectonic. Salient lessons for policymakers and practitioners on digital governance have also been presented in this chapter.

Adaptation and Interactivity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Meikle
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Adaptation Studies ◽  
Children’S Fiction ◽  
Children's Fiction

In recent years, the novel/film debate of adaptation studies yore has given way to another binary between old media and new, one in which adaptation scholars posit apps and videogames as more participatory than such predecessors as novels and films. This essay turns to the eminently interactive genre of children’s fiction to challenge the claim that digital adaptations necessarily involve different kinds of participation than other adaptive modes. Instead of asking what new media can do that old media cannot, it asks what adaptations can do that other texts cannot, tracing the movement of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are across books, films, plays, and videogames to ask what kinds of interactivity adaptations—rather than particular media—invite from their audiences.

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