Immersive Transmedia Storytelling and Embodied Urban Experiences of Psychogeographical Works
Immersive Transmedia Storytelling and Embodied Urban Experiences of Psychogeographical Works

Summary/Abstract: According to critics such as James Dalby, Matthew Freeman and Renira Rampazzo Gambarato, immersive transmedia storytelling encourages recipients’ participation and changes their ontological beliefs regarding social issues. Recent psychogeographical works, which can be used as tools to foreground class-based discrimination and address social inequalities in capitalist cities, are increasingly presented through transmedia means. Using Iain Sinclair’s London Overground (2016) and John Rogers’s documentary of the same title (2016) as exemplary texts, this article shows how British literary psychogeography utilizes transmedia properties to prompt recipients to question the authenticity of their experiences of the highly curated urbanscape and undergo self-transformations. With reference to new approaches pertaining to embodied cognition in both film and cognitive literary studies, the article shows how the use of complementary and clashing textual affordances within and across media can trigger embodied responses to increase transportation into the storyworld, sustain engagement across texts and encourage recipients’ participation in the re-imagination of hidden London spaces. As demonstrated via a flesh and blood recipient’s report, the discursive techniques in the transmedia presentation of London Overground also spur recipients’ meaningful reconsideration of their class-related beliefs, as well as raise their awareness of the hegemonizing effects of capitalist-driven gentrification projects in cities such as London.

• Details
• Contents