Week 8 Questions

3. To what extent can narratology, translation and adaptation studies aid us in understanding cosplay ?

According to Onega and Landa (2014), narratology is the science of narrative. Formerly restricted to the structure and analysis of narrative, it now encompasses gender studies, psychoanalysis, reader-response criticism and ideological critique. Narratology is a multi-disciplinary study of narrative which compromises and integrates the creative text of many discourses and critiques that involve narrative forms of representation that are both literary and non-literary such as advertisement, merchandises, lyrical poems, films, history and dramas (Onega, S., & Landa, J., 2014). In relation to cosplay, according to Mountfort et al. (2018) cosplay is the “dressing up and performing as characters from popular media” translating and adapting their costumes into our world and thus creating a new narrative text.

Using narratology in relation to cosplay, “Fan cultures […] contain many material practices that use the text as a starting point for new forms of play and productivity” (Lamerichs, N., 2018), meaning that both material and text used by Cosers is often used in conjunction to understanding and interpreting their popular media texts. From this combination of creative text and material, the Cosers are crafting their own stories or fabula, and opening discourse among the wider communities through Costume and Role play, broadening the narrative texts of their individual medias and even combining them with other fandoms of their choosing as their Cosplay characters meet and interact both with other Cosplay characters as well as “real world” fans of their creative texts.

Through understanding Cosplay through narratology, translation and adaption, Cosers are able to take their creations to new realms, adapting popular characters, concepts or models from one fandom and into another as “creative reinterpretation[‘s]” (Mountfort et el., 2018) via producing “Hello Kitty Darth Vaders, steampunk Bobba Fetts, and zombie Jedi” (Mountfort et el., 2018).

References

Lamerichs, N. (2018). Productive fandom: Intermediality and affective reception in fan cultures. Amsterdam University Press.

Mountfort, P., Peirson-Smith, A., & Geczy, A. (2018). Planet cosplay: Costume play, identity and global fandom. Blackboard. https://blackboard.aut.ac.nz/

Onega, S., & Landa, J. (2014). Narratology: An introduction. Routledge.