Transmedia Narratology and transmedia storytelling

Abstract

The term fransmedia storytelling has gone viral in media studies. But to what extent does it label a truly new phenomenon, different from the older concepts of adaptation and transfictionality? What does it really mean to tell a story through different media and under what conditions is it desirable? In this article, I examine several types of projects that could be considered as ‘transmedia storytelling’, without necessarily fitting within the paradigm of ‘West Coast’ (i.e. Hollywood) fransmedia, and I look at three types of discourse associated with the phenomenon - the industry discourse, the fan discourse and scholarly discourse - in the hope of distinguishing scholarly discourse from the other two and defining some of its goals.