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For all its theoretical prominence, medium remains an elusive concept, because it is not an analytic category created by theoreticians to serve a specific purpose, but a word of natural language, and like most of the words of language it has multiple senses. One way to address the issue of media is through their relations to other concepts. In this article I focus on genres, facts and truth as bearers of particularly important relations to media for both epistemological and narratological reasons. In contrast to models that regard genres as members of a system distinguished from each other through homogeneous criteria, I conceive individual genres as elements of an unstructured, expandable, heterogeneous and ever-changing list. In this approach, genres are defined positively—by their semantic content, their formal rules, or their pragmatic function—and new genres develop when new needs arise for communication. Media can be defined as distinct modes of communication, while genres are distinct forms of expression within media. But this distinction does not offer a fool-proof criterion of distinction, and it is often difficult to distinguish media from genres, especially in digital textuality. Truth, or more precisely the ability to claim truth, is not a property common to all members of a certain medium, but rather one that creates distinctions within media, as well as between them. Language-based media, film, photography and audio recording have the greatest power to claim truth: language-based ones, because they can articulate propositions; recordings, because they are based on mechanical capture of auditive or visual data that exist in the world. But most media can be used to tell either factual or fictional stories (with some exceptions discussed in the paper). This variability does not occur on the level of genre: all texts of the same genre share the same status with respect to truth and fictionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marie-Laure Ryan is an independent scholar based in Colorado. She is the author of Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory (1991), Narrative as Virtual Reality (2001), Avatars of Story (2006), Narrative as Virtual Reality 2 (2015), Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative (2016, with Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryahu), and over 100 articles on narratology, media theory, and digital culture. In October 2021, Dr. Jiayi Chen interviewed Ryan by email about possible worlds narratology, narrative across media, and the recent development of narratology. During the discussion, Ryan elaborates on the productive ways transmedia narratology can complement the language-based enterprise of narrative theory, as well as its position in relation to other strands of narrative inquiry. To conclude, Ryan points out the recent trends that have been enriching and expanding the territory of narratology before mapping out some areas that merit greater attention and future investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever the devil's advocate, Richard Walsh argues in a 2017 article that drawing maps based on narrative fiction is a meaningless activity, because (1) narrative cognition is temporal and not spatial; (2) narrative fiction does not project worlds in any experiential sense of the term (i. e. worlds as immersive environments) but only "worlds" as textual constructs, as products of écriture; and (3) reading should lead to meaningful interpretations, and inferences should be limited by a principle of relevance. His example of futile map-making is the floor plan which is included in the English editions of Alain Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie but is absent from the original French edition. In this article, I argue that narrative cognition is not a specialized ability distinct from the forms of cognition that we use in practical life, but rather, the product of these abilities; and I defend the validity of narrative mapping as way to engage the imagination with – yes – a storyworld. This is not to say that narrative understanding requires the drawing or mental contemplation of a comprehensive representation of the storyworld; usually the formation of partial mental maps is sufficient to follow the plot. But for some readers (among them Nabokov) drawing graphic maps is a way to engage the imagination with the storyworld and to enhance comprehension. This map-making activity can go far beyond making sense of the text and become an autonomous activity comparable to writing fan fiction. To support this view, I invoke the numerous maps found on the Internet for narratives ranging from Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. While the strictly "textualist" aesthetics of orthodox literary theory would regard these maps as frivolous, a world-oriented approach regards the urge to map and diagram as a legitimate form of active participation in narrative, because, while you can imagine too little to appreciate these texts, you cannot imagine too much. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article investigates the relations between the narratological concept of transfictionality and the trendy phenomenon of transmedial storytelling. Made popular as a concept by Henry Jenkins (2006), transmedial storytelling is the creation of a storyworld through multiple documents belonging to various media. The three fundamental operations of transfictionality--expansion, modification, and transposition--are investigated in terms of their potential for transmedial storytelling. After an analysis of the variety of documents that make up the storyworld of Alpha o.y (Südwestrundfunk 2010), a German transmedial story system that comprises a TV rniniseries, radio plays, fictional web pages, and links to nonfictional texts created independently of the project, the article asks under which conditions an alternate reality game (ARG) could be added to the system without spoiling the experience of those people who limit their exploration of the storyworld to watching the TV show. In turn, the last section asks what kind of stories lend themselves to transmedial projects and why such projects are currently popular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]