ENGL 314 - New Media & Narrative

This class engages students in both praxis and analysis, in other words, we both create some form of new media and analyze narratives being told in new and emerging media. How does the history of the Internet interact with the recent history of new and emerging genres of storytelling? Our primary analytic focus is the contemporary media that is created and distributed online. We will begin with podcasts, and will analyze multiple types of narrative as they are practiced in digital, on-demand audio: first-person storytelling, fictional, and nonfictional, explanatory formats. We examine how technological shifts affect and govern the conventions of the forms. Each student will also choose one emerging producer, genre, or episode of new media narrative as the subject of a research project. These subjects could include but are not limited to immersive video game narratives, collective narrative art projects, podcasts and narratives for virtual reality. While we will investigate how these narratives are created, our goal will be to analyze how technology interacts with, changes and responds to the governing cultural assumptions behind genres in new media.

Pre-req: ENGL 110, 120, or permission of instructor
3 credits