Due to an unfortunately placed public holiday on Monday, media one didn’t have a formal tute yesterday, so I thought I’d change tack a little bit and write a quick post about one of my other elective subjects that’s really fascinating me and still particularly relevant to media: Textual Crossings.

Textual Crossings falls under a literary strand, but it’s all about adaptations. As both a keen reader and  a media studies student, I find it a particularly interesting subject, but I think it’s relevant to a lot of people. I mean after all, who hasn’t spent some time complaining about how “the film wasn’t nearly as good as the book”?

As with everything at university, I’m finding that the course is not only educating me but widening my definitions and the way I think about things. Previously, I’d always thought of adaptations as being the same story told in a different medium (for example, the film versions of Harry Potter), or the re-working of a story with a different context or twist (for example, the setting of the Hamlet story in the African desert to create The Lion King).

However, in Textual Crossings, we look not just at stories but ‘story worlds’. An adaptation is defined not just as a reworking or transmedia production of a story, but anything that uses an element of the original ‘story world’ or diegesis. So if we return to the Harry Potter example, and think of the novels as the original, we can find adaptations not only in the films but also in the video games, the theme park, the merchandise and even the fanfiction. All of these use Harry Potter‘s magical world and its main characters, and so we can call them adaptations.

It’s a really interesting way of looking at adaptation, and I’m looking forward to the next few weeks when I’ll get to my in-depth discussion of a multimedia, ongoing adaptation. Look out for that one; I haven’t settled on a story yet but I’m thinking a certain deer-stalker-wearing detective would be an interesting choice, particularly looking at fanfiction . . .

Actually, fanfiction is one of the most interesting aspects of adaptation, and one I’m looking forward to discussing in my essay. In our lecture, we looked particularly at the interesting phenomenon of ‘sweding’: a short, low-budget fan-made remake of a popular film, primarily for comedy. Have a look at this Steve Seller swede of Jurassic Park for bekindrewind: