Organised by Research Area 5, "Building Digital Communities"

Paula Wojcik (University of Vienna): "Interfigurality – on the cultural mobility of literary characters"

Since the 19^th century, the ‘old’ medium of the book has been converging with ‘new’ (digital) techniques, forming new alliances with new printing methods, materials, radio, PC games and many more – this is a process that Henry Jenkins labels a ‘convergence culture’. This development has two main consequences: 1) a fragmentation of literary works into elements such as title, quotation, character, or author and 2) their emancipation from the literary origin, with a largely uncontrolled intermedia dissemination that does not have to pass the established gatekeepers and institutions. In this process of media evolution, in particular literary characters seem to have developed “a tremendous integrative power into the media system” (Leschke and Heidbrink 2010, 29). We address this observation in a project on "Interfigurality,” this is on the representation, circulation, adaptation and appropriation of literary characters in media such as film and PC games, in newspapers, magazines and in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. In my presentation, I would like to introduce this project that we are preparing with an Austrian-German group of researchers and discuss some of the initial results of our work.