Digital Narratives

For as long as anyone can remember, novelists like Gore Vidal and Phillip Roth have been sounding the death knell of narrative, killed off (we hear) by the rise of screen-based digital media. While it’s true that the sale of printed novels has declined, other forms of interactive storytelling – from video games to “netprov” and virtual reality fiction – have demonstrated how narrative persists , even prospers, in new media. In fact, in Japan, SMS technology has breathed new life into the novel through “cell phone literature,” a popular genre written and distributed in text-message-sized snippets. This course considers what it means to tell stories in an age of digital media. We’ll begin by writing a traditional short story (fiction or creative non-fiction), focusing on plot and structure. We’ll then experiment with “translating” this narrative into a variety of new media forms. How does your story change when told as an interactive fiction? as a video game? as a hypertext novel? or on different platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook or Second Life? With each “translation,” we’ll read relevant texts on narratology and media theory as a way of giving us a shared vocabulary for discussing these new genres, and we’ll explore some of the best examples of creative writing in them. This course will be run as a workshop. While there will be a significant amount of reading (or playing, or watching, or listening) each week, emphasis will be on 1) learning some basic skills necessary to work within new media genres and 2) playfully, creatively experimenting with these skills. You’ll leave this course with a deeper understanding of the architecture of new media, including the World Wide Web and audiovisual forms like digital film and video games, as well as with a suite of basic technical literacies applicable across all disciplines.