Transmediality

Practice of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats, utilizing the material affordances of each medium to enrich the narrative
Jacopo Triggiani 2025-09-24

Explication

Transmediality is a term used to refer to the condition of a narrative phenomenon manifesting through different media. The concept of transmediality is complex and pertains to the various possibilities for encoding the phenomenon itself, with definitions that emphasize, to a greater or lesser extent, the substantial adaptations and transformations that such a medial transition inherently implies. In this regard, an example could be the Lord of the Rings saga, whose primary passage from the literary medium to the cinematic one represents an effective result, reached through specific differences and meaningful additions to the original narrative object.

The first definition of the concept is attributed to Henry Jenkins (2006), who discusses the term in relation to the reproduction of the same narrative phenomenon across different media. Specifically, the author frames the term as a peculiar consequence of Convergence Culture, understood as a “cultural shift, as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content” (3). It is this cultural shift ‒ namely, the rise of Convergence Culture ‒ that gives rise to transmediality. This shift has particular characteristics, the most important being the high degree of participatory involvement from the audience. In fact, Convergence should not be understood as a passive and inevitable collapse of various media into a single device, but rather as the possibility for the user to search for a narratively significant phenomenon across different media (3). Transmediality, then, becomes the primary condition for the narrative phenomenon in the increasingly participatory era of Convergence.

This convergent turn and the resulting transmedial condition, as thus defined, prove to be fertile on a theoretical level. The first result is the definition of “transmedia storytelling” (21), understood as the creation of a narrative system extended across different media that encourages the user to move ‒ figuratively ‒ across the platforms and peculiar manifestations of the narrative object itself. Nevertheless, this definition remains highly debated, as some scholars emphasize the participatory dimension of the user in the very creation of the transmedial narrative universe and in the production of its meaning, with a pronounced semiotic approach (Scolari 2009). Alternatively, the referents of this category may change, encompassing very different narrative phenomena, ranging from literary antecedents to the ecosystem of TV series (Ryan 2013).

Furthermore, the definition of transmediality in recent decades has required a concrete distinction from the neighbouring concept of intermediality (Schröter 2012), which, by comparison, remains focused on the superficial dimension of in-betweenness among different media, without addressing the specific and contrasting transformations that the narrative object undergoes in its transition between media (Rajewsky 2018).

Ultimately, transmediality is employed as a hermeneutic concept centered on two coordinates: the contact between different media ‒ more and more frequent in the hyper-contemporary age ‒ and the high degree of participation that the user maintains within this universe of hybridizations and across-media contacts. Precisely for this reason, a concept so inclined toward hybridization and participation proves useful in addressing the concerns of fields of study that may differ widely: from media theory to aesthetics, including literary criticism and the social manifestations of literature (Murray 2018; Policastro 2021).

Works Referenced

Jenkins, Henry. Convergent Culture: Where Old and New Media collide. New York University Press, 2006.

Murray, Simone. The Digital Literary Sphere. Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018.

Policastro, Gilda. L’ultima poesia. Scritture anomale e mutazioni di genere dal secondo Novecento a oggi [The Last Poem. Anomalous Writings and Genre Mutations from the Late Twentieth Century to Today]. Mimesis Editions, 2021.

Rajewsky, Irina. Transmedia Paths. Notes on the Heuristic Potential of Transmediality in the Field of Comparative Literatures. Between, 16, 2018, pp.1-30.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. Transmedial Storytelling and Transfictionality. Poetics Today, vol. 34, no. 3, 2013, pp. 361–388.

Schröter, Jens. Four Models of Intermediality. In B. Herzogenrath (Ed.). Travels in Intermedia[lity]: Reblurring the Boundaries. Dartmouth College Press, 2012, pp. 15–37.

Scolari, Carlos Alberto. Transmedia Storytelling: Implicit Consumers, Narrative Worlds, and Branding in Contemporary Media Production. International Journal of Communication, no. 3, 2009, pp. 586–606.

Further Reading

Higgins, Dick. Intermedia: The Dick Higgins Collection at UMBC. University of Maryland, 2003, pp. 38–42.

Policastro, Gilda. Polemiche letterarie. Dai Novissimi ai lit-blog [Literary Polemics. From the Novissimi to Lit-Blogs]. Carocci Editore, 2012.

Rajewsky, Irina. Intermediality, Intertextuality and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality. Intermédialités, no. 6, Autumn, 2005, pp. 43–64.

Rajewsky, Irina. Border Talks: The Problematic Status of Media Borders in the Current Debate about Intermediality. In Lars Elleström (Ed.). Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 51–69.

Ryan, Marie-Laure & Thon, Jan-Noël. (Eds.). Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology. University of Nebraska Press, 2014.

Van Dijk, José. The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford University Press, 2013.

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