From Âventiure Novels to Adventure Games: Adventure Narratives in Popular Images and Texts (München / online)

How popular was adventure?

Medieval âventiure built a model of heroes traversing limits and journeying to wonderful and dangerous encounters. In many European languages, the term adventure has since referred to complex motifs and structural patterns that have sedimented in various genres, but are documented to have existed at least since early antiquity, with the effects of these traditions continuing to the present day. As we bring together historically remote phenomena under the paradigm of adventure, we may discover dimensions of similarity beyond structural analogies: the always already transmedial diversity in linguistic, pictorial, performative, and interactive forms of communication; the appeal of adventure that shifts between an explicit address to broad audiences and an implicit commitment of audiences to episodic arrangements and serial continuities; and the recognisability, transformability and recombinability of certain episodes, motifs, and mythologies in ever newly continued and retold series of adventurous confrontations and experiences.

The interdisciplinary conference Adventure Narratives in Popular Images and Texts at the research unit Philologie des Abenteuers (Philology of Adventure) aims to fathom the comparative potential of this heuristically broad spectrum. We want to open up for discussion some cultural and historical concepts whose scope might have been too hastily limited in previous research: extending the concept of the popular beyond long European modernity; taking heed of the multimodal communication as well as the transmedial relations always already involved in adventure narrative; and tracing the recombinations, performances, and interactions that move and assemble adventure motifs in various media and genres. We want to explore these and other questions in an interdisciplinary discussion between the medieval and the modern and between philologies, art history and media studies.

Registration: adventure-narratives@lrz.uni-muenchen.de

The access link to the Zoom meeting will be sent to all registered participants shortly before the conference.

Programme

Thursday, May 12th

Chair: Michael Waltenberger

14:30               Commencement

                        Stephan Packard: Introduction

15:15               Laura Moretti (Cambridge):
                        Engineering Adventure.
                        The Curious Case of A Revenge Story in Quick-Change Format

16:00               Break

Chair: Manuel Mühlbacher

16:30               Ian Horton (London):

                        Recontextualising The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire:
                        Cultural History and the Adventure Comic Strip

Stephan Packard (Cologne):
            Post-Adventure: Veteran Super-Heroes Turning Homewards

18:00               Break

Chair: Stephan Packard

19:00               Keynote I
                        Dani Filc (Ben-Gurion):
                        The European Adventurer in the Comics,
                        Between Center and Periphery:
                        from Tintin to Corto Maltese

Friday, May 13th

Chair: Riccardo Nicolosi

14:00               Christina Meyer (Braunschweig):

                        Adventure Serials of the 1920s

Anke Hennig (Munich):
            Lev Kulešov’s Film Adventures:
            Avant-gardist Versus Stalinist Agendas of Popularity

15:30               Break

Chair: Stephan Packard

16:00               Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (Lausanne):
                        War as Adventure: Violence, Pleasure and Masculinity

Miriam Borham-Puyal (Salamanca):
            Monsters and Monstrous Societies:
            Adventurous Heroines against Gender Discrimination

17:30               Break

Chair: Michael Waltenberger

19:00               Keynote II
                        Jutta Eming (Berlin):
                        Adventure and the Marvellous as Popularity Factors:
                        Dynamics of (de)escalation

Saturday, May 14th

Chair: Philip Reich

14:00               Henry Keazor (Heidelberg):

                        The Adventure Reloaded: “Star Wars” and “The Matrix”

Jan-Niklas Meier (Bielefeld):
Instruction – Narration – Inspiration?
On the Ludonarrative Function of Adventure Modules in Pen-and-Paper Role-playing Games

15:30               Break

Chair: Oliver Grill

16:00               Philip Reich (Munich):

                        The Adventure of the Holy Grail
                        in the Age of (Mechanical) Reproduction

Hans Rudolf Velten (Siegen):
            The Adventure Model of the Quest in
            A. Sapkowski’s Transmedia Fantasy Series “The Witcher” 

17:30               Break

Chair: Stephan Packard

18:00               General Discussion 

19:00               Conclusion