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The tagline for Ryan Murphy's American Horror Story: Freak Show (AHS: Freak Show) is 'Wir Sind Alle Freaks', a German phrase that clearly signals the show's 'freaktopic' intention. 'We are all freaks' introduces a narrative that promises to collapse boundaries between the self and other, allowing viewers to see themselves as more like the freakish characters at the heart of Elsa Mars' Cabinet of Curiosities than the outsiders threatening their lives. However, this invitation, combined with the narrative focus on normate characters instead invokes the countercultural appropriation of 'freak' as an anti-establishment rebellion. These narratives provide not a 'freaktopia', but rather an escape, both temporary and permanent, from 'normative' values for non-freakish characters, and an outright rejection of those norms. While this choice seems in some ways informed by contemporary notions of social justice, access, and inclusion, in which the 'normative' characters act in alliance with their underprivileged 'freak' peers, Ryan Murphy's AHS: Freak Show ultimately troubles its very tagline. Through an analysis of the AHS: Freak Show's narrative structures surrounding capital, family, and consumption, I argue that the myth of a 'freaktopia' collapses under the weight of its own neo-liberal dream, and is ultimately consumed by mainstream capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of a 'paratext' has become widely accepted and used within fan studies, as an all-encompassing term for both official and unofficial productions associated with contemporary transmedia productions -- to the point where some scholars are arguing for the dissolution of the boundary between 'text' and 'paratext'. But although some excellent empirical work has been and is being done on the range and operations of particular paratextual networks, not many people adopting the concept have considered its meaning and implications in the work of its originator, Gerard Genette. This essay looks back at Genette's work, and contrasts his ideas with a number of contemporary uses, before outlining (via some test cases from materials associated with Game of Thrones) a working conception of 'paratextuality'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 2000s RAI television drama makes a temporal turn that coincides with Second Republic's revisionism of the divided memory of crucial episodes in post-Unification Italian history. This article examines two historical mini-series on Italian migration in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Il Grande Torino/The Great Torino (2005) and Marcinelle/Inferno Below (2003). In both narratives the microhistory of migration lived and performed by ordinary people is coupled with the macrohistory of disaster: respectively the 1949 Superga airplane crash, which brought an end to the Grande Torino football team, and the Marcinelle coalmine fire of 8 August 1956, which killed 136 Italian workers. These historical narratives work within transmedial constellations of cultural memory and interact with institutionalized collective memory. In both cases the model image of the Italian migrant worker as a redemptive figure of Italy's post-war regeneration in television documentaries of the 1950s and 1960s is replaced by a contemporary ambivalent representation of the paradoxes of migration, and redemption is activated instead by the story of disaster and as a specific quality of Italian character. Both episodes can be seen as a homage to the sacrifice of labour of the Italian worker with the difference that the main character of Il Grande Torino/The Great Torino sacrifices his individual migrant story to the memory of the Superga disaster, while Marcinelle's hero becomes the redemptive figure of the Italian migrant worker thanks to the exceptional circumstances created by the mine catastrophe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]