In-Class Worksheet
Link to the Google Doc worksheet we used during the library session.
Research Librarian for English
Concordance of Shakespeare's Works
Use OpenSource Shakespeare's Concordance of Shakespeare's Complete Works to find out how many times and where in Othello (or any other play) a certain term appears.
Reference Sources
The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by
The bestselling Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms provides clear and concise definitions of the most troublesome literary terms, from abjection to zeugma. It is an essential reference tool for students of literature in any language. Now expanded and in its fourth edition, it includes increased coverage of new terms from modern critical and theoretical movements, such as feminism, schools of American poetry, Spanish verse forms, life writing, and crime fiction.
Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9780198715443Publication Date: 2015
A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory by
With new entries and sensitive edits, this fifth edition places J.A. Cuddon's indispensable dictionary firmly in the 21st Century. Written in a clear and highly readable style Comprehensive historical coverage extending from ancient times to the present day Broad intellectual and cultural range Expands on the previous edition to incorporate the most recent literary terminology New material is particularly focused in areas such as gender studies and queer theory, post-colonial theory, post-structuralism, post-modernism, narrative theory, and cultural studies. Existing entries have been edited to ensure that topics receive balanced treatment
Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9781118326008Publication Date: 2013
Possible Print Books of Interest
Request print books using the Request Item feature in Virgo (if you want the whole book). When the book is on hold for you and ready to be picked up, you will receive an email letting you know it is available. If you only need a couple of chapters of a book or an essay or two from a collection, you might also use the Request a scan feature in Virgo to ask for just the sections you need to be scanned for you (the scan limit is usually 20% of the book or less).
The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel by
The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel provides the complete history of the graphic novel from its origins in the nineteenth century to its rise and startling success in the twentieth and twenty-first century. It includes original discussion on the current state of the graphic novel and analyzes how American, European, Middle Eastern, and Japanese renditions have shaped the field. Thirty-five leading scholars and historians unpack both forgotten trajectories as well as the famous key episodes, and explain how comics transitioned from being marketed as children's entertainment. Essays address the masters of the form, including Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore, and Marjane Satrapi, and reflect on their publishing history as well as their social and political effects. This ambitious history offers an extensive, detailed and expansive scholarly account of the graphic novel, and will be a key resource for scholars and students.
Call Number: Clemons PN6710 .C34 2018ISBN: 9781107171411Publication Date: 2018
Conversations with Neil Gaiman by
The interviews presented here span the length of Gaiman's career, beginning with his first formal interview by the BBC at the age of seven and ending with a new, unpublished interview held in 2017. They cover topics as wide and varied as a young Gaiman's thoughts on Scientology and managing anger, learning the comics trade from Alan Moore, and being on the clock virtually 24/7. What emerges is a complicated picture of a man who seems fully assembled from the start of his career, but only came to feel comfortable in his own skin and voice far later in life. The man who brought Morpheus from the folds of his imagination into the world shares his dreams and aspirations from different points in his life, including informing readers where he plans to take them next.
Call Number: Ivy PR6057 .A319 Z46 2018ISBN: 9781496818690Publication Date: 2018
The Digital Banal: New Media in American Literature and Culture by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9780231184281Publication Date: 2018Discusses Jennifer Egan's works, among many others.
Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres by
Literary Nonfiction. Hybrid Genre. Poetry. Fiction. Art. Cultural Studies. When we talk about hybrid literary genres, what do we mean? Unprecedented in both its scope and approach, FAMILY RESEMBLANCE is the first anthology to explore the answer to that question in depth, providing craft essays and examples of hybrid forms by 43 distinguished authors. In this study of eight hybrid genres—including lyric essay, epistolary, poetic memoir, prose poetry, performative, short-form nonfiction, flash fiction, and pictures made of words—the family tree of hybridity takes delightful shape, showcasing how cross-genre works blend features from multiple literary parents to create new entities, forms that feel more urgent than ever in today's increasingly heterogeneous landscape. Introductions and an afterword discuss the importance and current popularity of hybridity in literature and culture and offer methods for teaching hybrid works. Intended for both scholarly and general readers, this seminal collection sparkles with inventiveness and creative zeal -- an essential guidebook to a developing field.
Call Number: Clemons PN45.5 .F37 2015ISBN: 9781941628027Publication Date: 2015
Finding a Form by
William Gass writes about literary language, about history, about the avant-garde, about minimalism's brief vogue, about the use of the present tense in fiction (Is it due to the lack of both a sense of history and a belief in the future?), about biography as a form, about exile - spiritual and geographical - and he examines the relationship of the writer's life to the writer's work. With dazzling intelligence and wit, Gass sifts through cultural issues of our time and contemplates how written language, whether a sentence or an entire book, is a container of consciousness, the gateway to another's mind that we enter for a while and make our own.
Call Number: Clemons PN45.5 .G355 2009ISBN: 9781564785299Publication Date: 2009
Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture by
"We could have been called a lot of things: brazen vandals, scared kids, threats to social order, self-obsessed egomaniacs, marginalized youth, outsider artists, trend setters, and thrill seekers. But, to me, we were just regular kids growing up hard in America and making the city our own. Being 'writers' gave us something to live for and 'going all city' gave us something to strive for; and for some of my friends it was something to die for." In the age of commissioned wall murals and trendy street art, it's easy to forget graffiti's complicated and often violent past in the United States. Though graffiti has become one of the most influential art forms of the twenty-first century, cities across the United States waged a war against it from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, complete with brutal police task forces. Who were the vilified taggers they targeted? Teenagers, usually, from low-income neighborhoods with little to their names except a few spray cans and a desperate need to be seen--to mark their presence on city walls and buildings even as their cities turned a blind eye to them. Going All City is the mesmerizing and painful story of these young graffiti writers, told by one of their own. Prolific LA writer Stefano Bloch came of age in the late 1990s amid constant violence, poverty, and vulnerability. He recounts vicious interactions with police; debating whether to take friends with gunshot wounds to the hospital; coping with his mother's heroin addiction; instability and homelessness; and his dread that his stepfather would get out of jail and tip his unstable life into full-blown chaos. But he also recalls moments of peace and exhilaration: marking a fresh tag; the thrill of running with his crew at night; exploring the secret landscape of LA; the dream and success of going all city. Bloch holds nothing back in this fierce, poignant memoir. Going All City is an unflinching portrait of a deeply maligned subculture and an unforgettable account of what writing on city walls means to the most vulnerable people living within them.
Call Number: Clemons GT3913.C22 L67 2019ISBN: 9780226493442Publication Date: 2019
The Literature of Reconstruction: Authentic Fiction in the New Millennium by Call Number: Clemons PS380 .F86 2015ISBN: 9781501306167Publication Date: 2015Includes chapter: "Reconstructing Narration: Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad and Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending."
Memes to Movements by
Internet memes are one of today's most unexpectedly potent and creative forms, born of digital culture and -- more and more -- in dialogue with real life. A photo of protesters, for example, in Ferguson, Missouri raising their hands in a gesture of resistance gets replicated eight thousand miles away in Hong Kong, where dissidents are fighting for voting rights. Or a viral video of a presidential candidate-elect can become the impetus for an international march of women in pink "pussy-hats," itself a viral meme come to life. In the long, winding road from grumpy cat photos, internet memes have become a central concept of modern protest. Using social media-driven movements as her guide, technologist and digital media scholar An Xiao Mina unpacks the mechanics of memes and how they operate to reinforce, amplify, and shape today's politics. She finds that the "silly" stuff of meme culture -- the photo remixes, the selfies, the Youtube songs and the pun-tastic hashtags -- are fundamentally intertwined with how we find and affirm one another, direct attention to human rights and social justice issues, build narratives, and make culture. Crucially, she reveals how in parts of the world where public dissension is downright dangerous, memes can belie contentious political opinions that would incur drastic consequences if expressed outright. And further, she examines the future of internet memes as tools in both anti-authoritarian progressive circles and government propaganda. Memes to Movements unveils the transformative power of memes, for better and worse. In a time when our movements are growing more complex and open-ended, Mina brings a fresh and sharply innovative take on the media discourse.
Call Number: Clemons HM851 .M5454 2019ISBN: 9780807056585Publication Date: 2019
The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies by
This collection of forty new essays, written by the leading scholars in adaptation studies and distinguished contributors from outside the field, is the most comprehensive volume on adaptation ever published. Written to appeal alike to specialists in adaptation, scholars in allied fields, and general readers, it hearkens back to the foundations of adaptation studies a century and more ago, surveys its ferment of activity over the past twenty years, and looks forward to the future. It considers the very different problems in adapting the classics, from the Bible to Frankenstein to Philip Roth, and the commons, from online mashups and remixes to adult movies. It surveys a dizzying range of adaptations around the world, from Latin American telenovelas to Czech cinema, from Hong Kong comics to Classics Illustrated, from Bollywood to zombies, and explores the ways media as different asradio, opera, popular song, and videogames have handled adaptation. Going still further, it examines the relations between adaptation and such intertextual practices as translation, illustration, prequels, sequels, remakes, intermediality, and transmediality.The volume's contributors consider the similarities and differences between adaptation and history, adaptation and performance, adaptation and revision, and textual and biological adaptation, casting an appreciative but critical eye on the theory and practice of adaptation scholars--and,occasionally, each other. The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies offers specific suggestions for how to read, teach, create, and write about adaptations in order to prepare for a world in which adaptation, already ubiquitous, is likely to become ever more important.
Call Number: Clemons PN171 .A33 O94 2017ISBN: 9780199331000Publication Date: 2017
Shakespearean Echoes by
Shakespearean Echoes assembles a global cast of established and emerging scholars to explore new connections between Shakespeare and contemporary culture, reflecting the complexities and conflicts of Shakespeare's current international afterlife.
Call Number: Clemons PR2976 .S33893 2015ISBN: 9781137380012Publication Date: 2015
Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hp-Hop by
Hip-hop has come a long way from its origins in the Bronx in the 1970s, when rapping and DJing were just part of a lively, decidedly local scene that also venerated b-boying and graffiti. Now hip-hop is a global phenomenon and, in the United States, a massively successful corporate enterprise predominantly controlled and consumed by whites while the most prominent performers are black. How does this shift in racial dynamics affect our understanding of contemporary hip-hop, especially when the music perpetuates stereotypes of black men? Do black listeners interpret hip-hop differently from white fans? These questions have dogged hip-hop for decades, but unlike most pundits, Michael P. Jeffries finds answers by interviewing everyday people. Instead of turning to performers or media critics, Thug Life focuses on the music's fans, young men, both black and white, and the resulting account avoids romanticism, offering an unbiased examination of how hip-hop works in people's daily lives. As Jeffries weaves the fans' voices together with his own sophisticated analysis, we are able to understand hip-hop as a tool listeners use to make sense of themselves and society as well as a rich, self-contained world containing politics and pleasure, virtue and vice.
Call Number: Music ML3918 .R37 J44 2011ISBN: 9780226395845Publication Date: 2011
Helpful URLs
- Ask a LibrarianQuestions? Ask us! Chat, call, text, or email anytime.
- Purchase RecommendationsIs there an ebook you think the UVA Library should own but doesn't? Make a purchase recommendation.
- Using Databases Off GroundsHave questions about accessing databases from off-grounds? Find more information here.
Preparing for Research
This guide was created to help you prepare for research for your argumentative paper and presentation in ENWR 1510 and as a general guide to resources for researching literature, texts, and adaptations.
In preparation for your assignments, you should think some about possible questions/topics of interest to start your research. You will also want to spend some time thinking about how you will conduct your research.
- Fine-tune your searches.
Think broadly when brainstorming search terms. What synonyms or related terms could stand in for your key search terms?
You can combine search terms using AND ("Prince of Cats" AND allusions) and OR ("urban culture" OR "hip hop culture" OR "urban remix"). Place terms you want to be searched as a phrase in quotation marks " ".
In many databases, the asterisk (*) is a truncation or "wildcard" symbol that will match all possible endings for a word stem. For example, sex* will match sexism, sexual, sexuality, sexualize, sexless, etc.
Most databases have filters or facets that allow you to narrow your results by subject, date range, etc. Limit your searches to help you find the sources you need.
- Think about where you might find the type of information you are seeking.
Will you find the research you need in an e-book? An article? A newspaper? A documentary? An interview? Depending on the requirements of your assignment, you may be looking for scholarly journal articles and/or essays/chapters from books, or you may look more broadly for credible information to meet your research need. In general, when conducting research cast a wide net when looking for the types of resources that could help answer your research question or support an argument you are making.
- Know the difference between academic and non-academic sources, and when it's appropriate to use them.
Most databases allow you to limit results to academic/scholarly/peer-reviewed sources. Be mindful of your assignment and what you're being asked to provide. Need a refresher? Watch the short video Peer Review in 3 Minutes.
- When you find a good source, use it to find other good sources.
Use the subject terms and keywords associated with an item to find other items on similar topics. Scholarly books and articles will have works cited, bibliographies, or footnotes you can mine for additional resources.
Need help? Ask a librarian.
Finding secondary scholarship about your text
Databases for Researching Literature or Film (See an A-Z list of all databases)
MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB) indexes the broadest range of resources about literature in all languages, as well as film, television, and popular culture, including over 4,000 journals as well as books and dissertations. For articles not available full-text in MLA, click on “Find article @ UVa Libraries,” or look up the journal title in Virgo, the library catalog.
ProQuest One Literature is for scholars who want to engage with an exhaustive and diverse set of scholarly resources around a given literary topic for research. It contains 3 million literature citations from thousands of journals, monographs, dissertations, and more than 500,000 primary works – including rare and obscure texts, multiple versions, and non-traditional sources like comics, theater performances, and author readings.
Film & Television Literature Index includes reviews of films and articles on theory, preservation and restoration, writing, production, cinematography, and technical aspects of both film and television in the US and internationally.
JSTOR includes older issues of scholarly journals in many disciplines including literature, from the start to 3-5 years ago. Use the JSTOR Understanding Series Tool (if link does not work, look in JSTOR under the Tools dropdown) to find articles that discuss particular lines in Romeo and Juliet.
Project Muse offers searchable full text of nearly 600 scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and mathematics, mostly from North American university presses. Older volumes are often available from JSTOR.
Databases for searching a wide range of multidisciplinary topics
Academic Search Complete is a large general database of articles from scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers on many topics. Updated daily, it can be the best source for resources about very current topics.
The Social Science and Humanities Library provides online access to a broad range of journal content across 14 disciplines related to social sciences and humanities, including media and communication studies, library and information science, security and defense studies, business, management and economics, and education. Includes many journals published on behalf of associations, organizations, and societies related to these disciplines.
Finding books & articles using Virgo
Virgo, the UVA Library’s primary search tool, contains catalog records for books, print journals, DVDs, maps, and digitized materials, as well as links to online articles from our rich array of subscription journals. You can search catalog materials and articles together - a regular search will provide tabs for books, articles, and other materials. You can also use the Filter tools on the left to limit your results by author, language, publication date, and more. To find online, set the Availability filter to Online to limit your catalog search results.
Example E-Books of Possible Interest
The Artistry of Neil Gaiman: Finding Light in the Shadows by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9781496821645Publication Date: 2019Neil Gaiman (b. 1960) reigns as one of the most critically decorated and popular authors of the last fifty years. Perhaps best known as the writer of the Harvey, Eisner, and World Fantasy Award-winning series The Sandman, Gaiman quickly became equally renowned in literary circles for Neverwhere, Coraline, and the award-winning American Gods, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie Medal-winning The Graveyard Book. For adults, children, comics readers, and viewers of the BBC's Doctor Who, Gaiman's writing has crossed the borders of virtually all media, making him a celebrity around the world. Despite Gaiman's incredible contributions to comics, his work remains underrepresented in sustained fashion in comics studies. In this book, the thirteen essays and two interviews with Gaiman and his frequent collaborator, artist P. Craig Russell, examine the work of Gaiman and his many illustrators. The essays discuss Gaiman's oeuvre regarding the qualities that make his work unique in his eschewing of typical categories, his proclamations to "make good art," and his own constant efforts to do so however the genres and audiences may slip into one another. The Artistry of Neil Gaiman forms a complicated picture of a man who has always seemed fully assembled virtually from the start of his career, but only came to feel comfortable in his own voice far later in life.
A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9781118917534Publication Date: 2014This is a comprehensive collection of original essays that explorethe aesthetics, economics, and mechanics of movie adaptation, fromthe days of silent cinema to contemporary franchise phenomena.Featuring a range of theoretical approaches, and chapters on thehistorical, ideological and economic aspects of adaptation, thevolume reflects today?s acceptance of intertextuality as avital and progressive cultural force. Incorporates new research in adaptation studies Features a chapter on the Harry Potter franchise, as well asother contemporary perspectives Showcases work by leading Shakespeare adaptation scholars Explores fascinating topics such as ?unfilmable?texts Includes detailed considerations of Ian McEwan?sAtonement and Conrad?s Heart of Darkness
Literature and Social Media by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in Virgo.ISBN: 9781000025859Publication Date: 2020From Instapoetry to BookTube, contemporary literary cultures and practices are increasingly intertwined with social media. In this lively and wide-ranging study, Bronwen Thomas explores how social media provides new ways of connecting with and rediscovering established literary works and authors while also facilitating the emergence of unique and distinctive forms of creative expression. This book combines analysis of current forms and practices with an examination of how social media fosters ongoing collaborative discourse amongst both informal and formal literary networks, and demonstrating how the participatory practices of social media have the potential to radically transform how literature is produced, shared and circulated. The first study of its kind to focus specifically on social media, Literature and Social Media provides a timely and engaging account of the state of the art, while interrogating the rhetoric that so often accompanies discussion of the 'new' in this context.
On African-American Rhetoric by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9781351610629Publication Date: 2018On African-American Rhetoric traces the arc of strategic language use by African Americans from rhetorical forms such as slave narratives and the spirituals to Black digital expression and contemporary activism. The governing idea is to illustrate the basic call-response process of African-American culture and to demonstrate how this dynamic has been and continues to be central to the language used by African Americans to make collective cultural and political statements. Ranging across genres and disciplines, including rhetorical theory, poetry, fiction, folklore, speeches, music, film, pedagogy, and memes, Gilyard and Banks consider language developments that have occurred both inside and outside of organizations and institutions. Along with paying attention to recent events, this book incorporates discussion of important forerunners who have carried the rhetorical baton.
On the Graphic Novel by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in Virgo.ISBN: 9781628464818Publication Date: 2015A noted comics artist himself, Santiago García follows the history of the graphic novel from early nineteenth-century European sequential art, through the development of newspaper strips in the United States, to the development of the twentieth-century comic book and its subsequent crisis. He considers the aesthetic and entrepreneurial innovations that established the conditions for the rise of the graphic novel all over the world. García not only treats the formal components of the art, but also examines the cultural position of comics in various formats as a popular medium. Typically associated with children, often viewed as unedifying and even at times as a threat to moral character, comics art has come a long way. With such examples from around the world as Spain, France, Germany, and Japan, García illustrates how the graphic novel, with its increasingly global and aesthetically sophisticated profile, represents a new model for graphic narrative production that empowers authors and challenges longstanding social prejudices against comics and what they can achieve.
Openness of Comics: Generating Meaning within Flexible Structures by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9781496805973Publication Date: 2018Never before have comics seemed so popular or diversified, proliferating across a broad spectrum of genres, experimenting with a variety of techniques, and gaining recognition as a legitimate, rich form of art. Maaheen Ahmed examines this trend by taking up philosopher Umberto Eco's notion of the open work of art, whereby the reader--or listener or viewer, as the case may be--is offered several possibilities of interpretation in a cohesive narrative and aesthetic structure. Ahmed delineates the visual, literary, and other medium-specific features used by comics to form open rather than closed works, methods by which comics generate or limit meaning as well as increase and structure the scope of reading into a work. Ahmed analyzes a diverse group of British, American, and European (Franco-Belgian, German, Finnish) comics. She treats examples from the key genre categories of fictionalized memoirs and biographies, adventure and superhero, noir, black comedy and crime, science fiction and fantasy. Her analyses demonstrate the ways in which comics generate openness by concentrating on the gaps essential to the very medium of comics, the range of meaning ensconced within words and images as well as their interaction with each other.
Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9780429288807Publication Date: 2020Four hundred years after William Shakespeare's death, his works continue to not only fill playhouses around the world, but also be adapted in various forms for consumption in popular culture, including in film, television, comics and graphic novels, and digital media. Drawing on theories of play and adaptation, Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations demonstrates how the practices of Shakespearean adaptations are frequently products of playful, and sometimes irreverent, engagements that allow new 'Shakespeares' to emerge, revealing Shakespeare's ongoing impact in popular culture. Significantly, this collection explores the role of play in the construction of meaning in Shakespearean adaptations--adaptations of both the works of Shakespeare, and of Shakespeare the man--and contributes to the growing scholarly interest in playfulness both past and present. The chapters in Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations engage with the diverse ways that play is used in Shakespearean adaptations on stage, screen, and page, examining how these adaptations draw out existing humour in Shakespeare's works, the ways that play is used as a pedagogical aid to help explain complex language, themes, and emotions found in Shakespeare's works, and more generally how play and playfulness can make Shakespeare 'relatable,' 'relevant,' and entertaining for successive generations of audiences and readers.
The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 0415716047Publication Date: 2019Includes essay on Jennifer Egan and her work. Abstract for chapter: " Jennifer Egan’s work traces shifting perceptions of time, memory and technological change in the contemporary era, offering keenly observed and often prescient insights into American culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Egan’s reference to ‘tingling awarenesses’ sparked by possible stories indicates a crucial aspect of her literary approach: the tendency to unlayer characters’ lives by offering a series of brief, intense glimpses of significant moments. In moments of narrative anticipation and recollection, Egan uses descriptions of shared objects recurring across time to draw connections between events and characters. Egan’s use of PowerPoint and Twitter explores the creative possibilities of new technological media, in her most formally experimental pieces of writing to date. By combining nostalgic sentimentality with pitilessly direct declarations of character’s fates, Egan’s writing demonstrates how the ‘anticipation of retrospection’ can be rendered bittersweet by a reader’s foreknowledge of impending disaster."
The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9781315168968Publication Date: 2019The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation brings together a variety of different voices to examine the ways that Shakespeare has been adapted and appropriated onto stage, screen, page, and a variety of digital formats. The thirty-nine chapters address topics such as trans- and intermedia performances; Shakespearean utopias and dystopias; the ethics of appropriation; and Shakespeare and global justice as guidance on how to approach the teaching of these topics. This collection brings into dialogue three very contemporary and relevant areas: the work of women and minority scholars; scholarship from developing countries; and innovative media renderings of Shakespeare. Each essay is clearly and accessibly written, but also draws on cutting edge research and theory. It includes two alternative table of contents, offering different pathways through the book - one regional, the other by medium - which open the book up to both teaching and research. Offering an overview and history of Shakespearean appropriations, as well as discussing contemporary issues and debates in the field, this book is the ultimate guide to this vibrant topic. It will be of use to anyone researching or studying Shakespeare, adaptation, and global appropriation.
Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9780262083560Publication Date: 2007Game designers, authors, artists, and scholars discuss how roles are played and how stories are created in role-playing games, board games, computer games, interactive fictions, massively multiplayer games, improvisational theater, and other "playable media." Games and other playable forms, from interactive fictions to improvisational theater, involve role playing and story--something played and something told. In Second Person, game designers, authors, artists, and scholars examine the different ways in which these two elements work together in tabletop role-playing games (RPGs), computer games, board games, card games, electronic literature, political simulations, locative media, massively multiplayer games, and other forms that invite and structure play. Second Person--so called because in these games and playable media it is "you" who plays the roles, "you" for whom the story is being told--first considers tabletop games ranging from Dungeons & Dragons and other RPGs with an explicit social component to Kim Newman's Choose Your Own Adventure-style novel Life's Lottery and its more traditional author-reader interaction. Contributors then examine computer-based playable structures that are designed for solo interaction--for the singular "you"--including the mainstream hit Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and the genre-defining independent production Façade. Finally, contributors look at the intersection of the social spaces of play and the real world, considering, among other topics, the virtual communities of such Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) as World of Warcraft and the political uses of digital gaming and role-playing techniques (as in The Howard Dean for Iowa Game, the first U.S. presidential campaign game). In engaging essays that range in tone from the informal to the technical, these writers offer a variety of approaches for the examination of an emerging field that includes works as diverse as George R.R. Martin's Wild Cards series and the classic Infocom game Planetfall. Appendixes contain three fully-playable tabletop RPGs that demonstrate some of the variations possible in the form.
The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9780262034999Publication Date: 2016How memetic media--aggregate texts that are collectively created, circulated, and transformed--become a part of public conversations that shape broader cultural debates. Internet memes--digital snippets that can make a joke, make a point, or make a connection--are now a lingua franca of online life. They are collectively created, circulated, and transformed by countless users across vast networks. Most of us have seen the cat playing the piano, Kanye interrupting, Kanye interrupting the cat playing the piano. In The World Made Meme, Ryan Milner argues that memes, and the memetic process, are shaping public conversation. It's hard to imagine a major pop cultural or political moment that doesn't generate a constellation of memetic texts. Memetic media, Milner writes, offer participation by reappropriation, balancing the familiar and the foreign as new iterations intertwine with established ideas. New commentary is crafted by the mediated circulation and transformation of old ideas. Through memetic media, small strands weave together big conversations. Milner considers the formal and social dimensions of memetic media, and outlines five basic logics that structure them: multimodality, reappropriation, resonance, collectivism, and spread. He examines how memetic media both empower and exclude during public conversations, exploring the potential for public voice despite everyday antagonisms. Milner argues that memetic media enable the participation of many voices even in the midst of persistent inequality. This new kind of participatory conversation, he contends, complicates the traditional culture industries. When age-old gatekeepers intertwine with new ways of sharing information, the relationship between collective participation and individual expression becomes ambivalent. For better or worse--and Milner offers examples of both--memetic media have changed the nature of public conversations.
