A Companion to Media Authorship E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1285

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

A Companion to Media Authorship

“Gray and Johnson have brought together a stellar group of authors whose works deftly explicate the complexities of negotiating ‘authorship’ across a range of cultural production sites. This definitive collection is an important and long-overdue contribution to contemporary media studies.”
Serra Tinic, author of On Location: Canada’s Television Industry in a Global Market

“Wide-ranging and global, historical and contemporary, brimming with insights enlarging our understanding of media production and reception, this book is an important contribution to the study of authorship.”
Michael Z. Newman, author of Indie: An American Film Culture

While the idea of authorship has transcended the literary to play a meaningful role in the cultures of film, television, games, comics, and other emerging digital forms, our understanding of it is still too often limited to assumptions about solitary geniuses and individual creative expression. A Companion to Media Authorship is a ground-breaking collection that reframes media authorship as a question of culture in which authorship is as much a construction tied to authority and power as it is a constructive and creative force of its own.

Gathering together the insights of leading media scholars and practitioners, 28 original chapters map the field of authorship in a cutting-edge, multi-perspective, and truly authoritative manner. The contributors develop new and innovative ways of thinking about the practices, attributions, and meanings of authorship. They situate and examine authorship within collaborative models of industrial production, socially networked media platforms, globally diverse traditions of creativity, complex consumption practices, and a host of institutional and social contexts. Together, the essays provide the definitive study on the subject by demonstrating that authorship is a field in which media culture can be transformed, revitalized, and reimagined.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Notes on Contributors

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter Summaries

Authoring a Book about Authors…With Many Authors

Notes

Part I: Theorizing and Historicizing Authorship

Chapter 2: Authorship and the Narrative of the Self

Introduction: Three Acts

Act I. God—or is it Mammon?—is an Author

Act II. No-One is an Author

Act III. Everyone is an Author

Notes

Chapter 3: The Return of the Author

Fraught Authorship and its Ethical Implications

Birth of the Author

Death of the Author

Postmodern Subjects and Why Identities Matter

Hipster Racism and “Other Asians”

“Woman's Work” and Squaring Up

Pseudonyms and Online Identities

Authority and Gender in Fan Texts

Fan Reader/Writer Interaction

Authorial Ethos

Notes

Chapter 4: Making Music

Musical Visions: Sacralization and Changing Nineteenth-Century Conceptions of Creation

Sacralization, Copyright Conceptions of Creativity, and the Rise of African-Based Music

Copyright, Borrowing, and the Blues

Conclusion

Notes

Chapter 5: When is the Author?

A Recent History of the Author

Many Authors

Incomplete Authorship

Many Readers or Many Authors?

Clusters of Authorship

Cluster Flux: A Conclusion

Notes

Chapter 6: Hidden Hands at Work

Introduction

The Author's Intentional Flux: A Low Altitude Theory

Preliminary Stances: Bresson's Precompositional Commitment to Visual Austerity

Bresson and Burel: Problems and Solutions in “Stripping the Wires”

Conclusion: The Intentional Flux Model at the Intersection of Film and Media Studies

Notes

Part II: Contesting Authorship

Chapter 7: Participation is Magic

Everypony is an Author?

From the Glue Factory to the TV Factory

Authorship Straight from the Horse's Mouth

Taking the Reins

Conclusion: Horse Power

Notes

Chapter 8: Telling Whose Stories?

Self-Representational Media Production

The Research Setting

Levels of Analysis in Self-Representational Media Production

Self-Representational Media Authorship

Notes

Chapter 9: Never Ending Story

Streaming Seriality as Cultural Form

Irna Phillips and the Perils of Serial Authorship

The Organization of Authorship

Herding Cats—Invisible Cats

Defining and Defending Radio Authorship

The Consolidation of Authorship

Notes

Chapter 10: From Chris Chibnall to Fox

Tactical Authorship: Chris Chibnall as Showrunner “Tenant”

Author Pseudonyms in Industry Counter-Discourse: Introducing Amos Crumpsall, Stone D. McFerris, and Webley Wildfoot

The US-UK Torchwood that Wasn't: Fox as “Evil”/“Lovely”

Conclusion

Notes

Chapter 11: Comics, Creators, and Copyright

Moral Rights of Authorship

Economic Rights of Authors

Shaping Associations

Conclusion

Notes

Part III: Industrializing Authorship

Chapter 12: “Benny Hill Theatre”

Situating the Burden of Representation

The Politics of British Asian Theatre Production

“Benny Hill Theatre” and the Commercialization of Asian Theatre

Authorship and Cultures of Production

Conclusion

Notes

Chapter 13: Cynical Authorship and the Hong Kong Studio System

Authorship in a Wider Spectrum

Li Hanxiang as Model of the Cynical Author in Cinema

Li and the Studio: Whose Authorship?

Conclusion

Notes

Chapter 14: The Authorial Function of the Television Channel

The Tensions of Authorship in the Broadcast Era

The Television Channel as Brand in the Cable/Satellite Era

The Television Channel in the Digital Era

Conclusion

Notes

Chapter 15: The Mouse House of Cards

The (Inter)Textuality of Stars and Star Brands

Reconciling Duff, Disney, and Dollar Signs

Developing Disney's Authorship Strategies

Conclusion

Notes

Chapter 16: Transmedia Architectures of Creation

Chapter 17: Dubbing the Noise

Introduction

Corporations, Globalization, Cosmopolitanism

A Developer's Self-Development: Square Enix

Square Enix's Cosmopolitan Disposition

A Spectrum of Dispositions

Conclusions

Notes

Part IV: Expanding Authorship

Chapter 18: Authorship Below-the-Line

Introduction

The Problem of Collectivity

Legal and Contractual Constraints on BTL Authorship

Economic Stimuli and BTL Authorial Discourses

Material Conditions: Forces of Authorial Disorder

Conclusion

Notes

Chapter 19: Production Design and the Invisible Arts of Seeing

Exploring the Black Hole

The Author-Auteur Conundrum

Power in the Shadows

Virtually Real

The Big Mash-Up

The Story Space Ahead

Notes

Chapter 20: Scoring Authorship

Notes

Chapter 21: #Bowdown to Your New God

Expanding Transmedia

Who Has the Right to Write? Authorship Made Visible

The Collectively Authored Transmedia Star

@mishacollins: Negotiating Power, Play, and Affect Online

Transmedia Power Struggles

Decentering Transmedia Authorship

Conclusion

Notes

Chapter 22: Collaboration and Co-Creation in Networked Environments

Notes

Chapter 23: Dawn of the Undead Author

Dawn of the Undead Author

Constructing the Fanboy Auteur

Watching the Watchmen: Authorial Paratexts and DVD Commentaries

Suckerpunching the Fanboy Auteur: Critical Reception of Sucker Punch

Conclusion (Or, What About the Fangirl Auteur?)

Notes

Part V: Relocating Authorship

Chapter 24: Authoring Hype in Bollywood

“It's All About Knowing Your Audience”

Reimagining the Audience: A Tale of Two Mahurats

Bollywood-izing MTV-India

Knowing the Audience, MBA-Style

“You Cannot Piss Off Anyone”

Conclusion

Notes

Chapter 25: Auteurs at the Video Store

Auteur Sections

Constructing Auteurs as Process

Video Store Auteurs

Conclusion

Notes

Chapter 26: Authorship and the State

Thesis: Censoring Narcocorridos

Antithesis: El Movimiento Alterado

A Brief Synthesis by Way of Conclusion

Notes

Chapter 27: Scripting Kinshasa's Teleserials

Authorship?

(In)Stability of the Script

Sacred Authors

Ownership

Creative Adaptations

Conclusion

Notes

Chapter 28: “We Never Do Anything Alone”

Notes

Index

This edition first published 2013

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A companion to media authorship / edited by Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-67096-5 (hardback)— ISBN 978-1-118-49525-4 (epub)— ISBN 978-1-118-49527-8 (epdf) 1. Arts— Authorship. 2. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) I. Gray, Jonathan (Jonathan Alan), editor of compilation. II. Johnson, Derek, 1979– editor of compilation.

NX195.C66 2013

302.23— dc23

Cover image: Main image © Katie Edwards / Getty Images; girl with laptop © wavebreakmedia / Shutterstock

Cover design by Cyan Design

Notes on Contributors

Hector Amaya is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. He writes on the cultural production of political identities and the complex manner in which cultural flows and immigration are transforming the nation-state. He is the author of Screening Cuba: Film Criticism as Political Performance During the Cold War and Citizenship Excess: Latinas/os, Transnationalism, Media, and the Ethics of Nation.

Megan Sapnar Ankerson is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. She has published in New Media and Society, NMediaC, and in collections including Convergence Media History, Web History, and Digital Confidential. She is writing a book that explores the commercial development of web design industries, production cultures, and aesthetics during the dot-com bubble.

Olufunmilayo Arewa is Professor of Law and Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. Her writing focuses on the creative industries, copyright, and technology. She has written about various topics related to African-American music and Nigeria's Nollywood film industry, and is currently working on two separate book projects on Nollywood and the global impact of African-American music.

David Brisbin has production designed over 20 movies ranging from the fiercely independent (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, In The Cut, A Single Shot) to popular “tent-pole” fare (The Twilight Saga: New Moon, The Day The Earth Stood Still). He also directed a documentary feature about Cambodia and has taught production design at Capilano University in Vancouver and at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts.

Colin Burnett is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St Louis. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled The Invention of Robert Bresson: Auteurism and Cinephilia in Postwar France.

Kristina Busse is an independent scholar and active media fan who has published a variety of essays on fan fiction and fan cultures. She is co-editor of Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet and Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom, as well as founding co-editor of Transformative Works and Cultures, an Open Access international peer-reviewed fan studies journal.

John T. Caldwell is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His books include Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television, Production Studies: Critical Studies of Media Industries (co-edited), New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality (co-edited), and Electronic Media and Technoculture.

Mia Consalvo is Canada Research Chair in Game Studies and Design at Concordia University in Montreal. She is the author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames, and is currently writing a book about Japan's influence on the videogame industry and game culture. She has held positions at MIT, Ohio University, Chubu University in Japan, and the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

Brian Ekdale is Assistant Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. His research on new media, international mass communication, and media production has appeared in journals such as New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, and Africa Today. He also has directed and edited award-winning documentaries.

Ian Gordon is Associate Professor of History at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of Comic Strips and Consumer Culture and has edited Comics & Ideology and Film and Comic Books. Recent essays include “La bande dessinée et le cinéma: des origines au transmédia,” in La bande dessinée: une médiaculture.

Jonathan Gray is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Author of Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality; Television Entertainment; Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts; and, with Amanda Lotz, Television Studies, he is also co-editor of Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World; Battleground: The Media; and Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era.

John Hartley is Professor of Cultural Science and Director of the Centre for Culture & Technology, Curtin University, Western Australia. He is co-founder of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries & Innovation, and Editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies. Recent books include Digital Futures for Media and Cultural Studies, A Companion to New Media Dynamics (ed.), and Key Concepts in Creative Industries.

Daniel Herbert is Assistant Professor of Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan. His research is devoted to understanding relationships between the media industries, geography, and cultural identities. His essays appear in several collections and journals, including Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Film Quarterly, Millennium Film Journal, and Quarterly Review of Film and Video.

Matt Hills is Reader in Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University in the UK. He is the author of five books, including Fan Cultures and Triumph of a Time Lord. Matt has published widely on cult media and fandom, and is currently completing a study of Torchwood for I.B. Tauris publishers.

Michele Hilmes is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and Chair of the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her recent publications include Only Connect: A Cultural History of American Broadcasting (3rd edition), and Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting. Her current project is Radio's New Wave: Global Sound in the Digital Era, co-edited with Jason Loviglio.

Lindsay Hogan is a PhD Candidate in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research interests include television and new media industries, stardom and celebrity, and qualitative audience studies. Her dissertation explores the ways in which young stars mediate the relationship between teen/tween identity practices and the economic adaptations of media conglomerates.

Catherine Johnson is Lecturer in Culture, Film, and Media at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of Branding Television and Telefantasy and co-editor of Transnational Television History and ITV Cultures. Her current research examines the broader creative industry sector that produces promotional material for the screen industries.

Derek Johnson is Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where his work focuses on understanding production cultures, cultural hierarchies, and creative identities within the media industries. He is the author of Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries, and has published articles in journals including Media, Culture & Society, Cinema Journal, and Popular Communication. He is also co-editor of the forthcoming Intermediaries: Management of Culture and Cultures of Management.

Aswin Punathambekar is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. He is co-editor of Global Bollywood, and author of From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry, and of articles published in various journals and anthologies.

Katrien Pype, an anthropologist, wrote her dissertation on the production of television serials in Kinshasa, and afterwards worked as a Newton Fellow on journalism and memory in Kinshasa. She is currently a MarieCurie Fellow at MIT and KULeuven, studying media in the lifeworlds of Kinshasa's old aged. She is author of The Making of the Pentecostal Melodrama: Religion, Media and Gender in Kinshasa.

Anamik Saha is a Lecturer in Communications Studies at the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds, where he had previously held an ESRC Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship. He has also held visiting fellowships at Trinity College (Connecticut), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work has been published in journals including Media, Culture & Society, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Popular Music in Society.

Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in Occidental College's Center for Digital Learning + Research, and a board member of Transformative Works and Cultures. Her work has appeared in Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica, The Participatory Cultures Handbook, How to Watch Television, and the Anniversary Edition of Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture.

Louisa Ellen Stein is Assistant Professor at Middlebury College. Her work focuses on transmedia authorship, gender, and generation in media culture. She is co-editor of Teen Television and Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom. She is a Futures of Entertainment fellow and Book Review Editor for Cinema Journal. Her current book project, Millennial Media, explores digital authorship and fandom in the millennial generation.

Stephen Teo is Associate Professor and Head of Division of Broadcast and Cinema Studies in the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is the author of Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions, Wong Kar-wai, Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film, and Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The Problem of Media Authorship

Derek Johnson and Jonathan Gray

Why write a book about media authorship when it seems that so much is already being said about it? Perhaps we would be better off turning to Facebook, for example, where our news feeds are often dominated by discussion of the creative practitioners behind popular culture and their significance to what we see on our screens. “David Cronenberg makes strange movies,” announced the first line of one article shared by one of the editors' acquaintances.1 Just two items down, a picture from another friend mapped the writing staffs of many popular American television shows back to Joss Whedon as supposed father figure. Whedon reappeared in another friend's post linking to a New York Times review of The Avengers whose title boldly announced “A Film's Superheroes Include the Director,”2 and that linked to a slide show on “The Work of Joss Whedon.” Yet, Whedon's star was dwarfed on this day—May 4th, or “Star Wars Day” to some—by many items discussing George Lucas, some of which extolled his virtues as a master storyteller, many of which expressed dismay with his “meddling” with his films, and many of which compared him to other franchise author figures such as Christopher Nolan, J.K. Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Suzanne Collins. Other posts debated or glowingly commended various newspaper columnists and media pundits' comments from the morning or the night before. Yet another linked to the latest video by online auteur and actress Felicia Day. And while clicking on these links, many of the accompanying ads used their authors to sell: one sidebar, for instance, sold The Five Year Engagement as “from the producer of Bridesmaids,” while another announced The Lucky One as being “from the acclaimed bestselling author of The Notebook and Dear John,” and another for the new Walking Dead videogame offered a more complex authorial trail by noting that it was based both on the comic book series by Robert Kirkman and on the AMC television series. In this same feed, television scholar Jason Mittell even announced that he had just published a chapter (about television authorship, no less!) of his book-in-progress, Complex TV, in an experiment in ongoing peer review, whereby Mittell encouraged readers to comment (thus, in some way becoming “co-authors”?) so that he could revise the book prior to publication in paper. Projects such as this call attention not only to the authorship of media, but also to how authorship is mediated, where the technologies and platforms that we use in the course of creativity seem to enable social and collaborative forms of cultural production. So while the news feed of a Facebook user who happens to be editing a book about authorship may certainly be shaped by a bit of self-selection, it seems reasonable to conclude at the very least that there's a vast discourse about authorship already in circulation, and that perhaps this book is thus not needed to call our attention to the importance of media authors or media authorship.

What this book can do, however, is point to what often goes unspoken in all the discourses and issues of media authorship that surround us in everyday life. To see press or marketing for almost any item of media today without seeing the invocation of at least one author figure is rare. Yet each and every item carries with it the ghosts of authors not mentioned. The Five Year Engagement might be from the producer of Bridesmaids, for instance, but who directed it? Who wrote the script? One comment on a friend's Facebook post about Star Wars Day alleged that Star Wars was taken largely from Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces,3 while another noted A New Hope's (1977) multiple borrowings from Hidden Fortress (1958). Discussions of adaptations often lead to accusations of “ruining” a pristine original and of textual infidelity, moreover, so to invoke “the acclaimed bestselling author” of The Notebook and Dear John is not only oddly to summon an author without a name, but is also to risk igniting concerns about poor adaptation, and a divergence from “the way the author intended it.” And behind each and every one of the above-mentioned texts, we could list at the least tens, and perhaps even thousands, of other faces of the author-as-hero, of individuals who contributed to the creation, envisioning, and realizing of the text, and yet whose names are not listed. If we examine Star Wars, for example, even beyond pointing out the obvious influences from Campbell and Hidden Fortress's director, Akira Kurosawa, we might ask about the authorial power of other directors, writers, producers, cast, production designers, special effects designers, matte artists, sound designers, foley artists, and so on. Some of these figures have gained authorial or pseudo-authorial status in popular culture themselves, as with John Williams, the composer of the music, Ben Burtt, the sound designer, or Carrie Fisher, a cast member who went on to become a writer and who has thus often been suspected to have written parts of the dialogue. Yet others remain untouted, except by the most loyal and informed fan and/or production communities.