Guest: Thomas Leitch - "Escapism vs. Analysis: Some Ways of Discussing Our Immersion in Fictional Storyworlds"

This week we are visited by literature-, cinema- and adaptation scholar Thomas Leitch, Professor of English, University of Delaware (member of IMS Expert Panel).

Leitch will give a talk on: “Escapism vs. Analysis: Some Ways of Discussing Our Immersion in Fictional Storyworlds".

About the seminar:

The recent rise in different kinds of immersive fiction—videogames, Massive Multiplayer Online Games, Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, escape rooms, 3-D movies, theme parks, virtual-reality chambers—raises with new urgency questions about the relations between storyworlds intended to immerse their target audience in the escapist experiences they offer and storyworlds intended to provoke their audience to greater reflection, metacognition, and critical synthesis, and between audiences’ search for, and resistance to, immersion. This presentation considers a wide array of different ways of thinking about the relation between escapist immersion and critical analysis. Its goal is not to promote some of these approaches over others, but to provoke discussion that may lead to more fruitful ways of addressing the age-old question of how, when, and why audiences want to submit to storyworlds and how, when, and why they don’t.

Recent Monographs of Thomas Leitch:

• The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies. OUP, 2017. Editor.
• Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age. John Hopkins University Press, 2014.
• Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

Read more about Thomas Leitch here.

The seminar is Wednesday 20 May, 3-5 pm CEST (OBS TIME) on zoom. The seminar is open for distance participants, contact us at ims@lnu.se, if you want to participate and need the zoom room number.

Photo: 'Aurora - Connecting Senses’, Cristina Pop-Tiron & Signe Kjær Jensen