From Literary Journalism to Transmedia Worlds: Into the Wild and Beyond
(2020) Literary Journalism Studies — Vol. 12, n° 2, p. 34-60 (2020)
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- Authors
Vanoost, Marie 
- Abstract
- This study explores literary journalism’s potential to create transmedia worlds through a salient example—the narrative world that has slowly grown around the news story recounting the discovery of Christopher McCandless’s body in a remote Alaskan camp in 1992. The study describes how the news story has grown into a larger and richer storyworld scattered across different media and details how readers have found and created various opportunities to engage in this storyworld. The expansion from news story to transmedia world, the study argues, was made possible because author Jon Krakauer became interested in the story and turned it into two pieces of literary journalism: “Death of an Innocent,” a 1993 article published in Outside magazine and, more importantly, his 1996 book, Into the Wild. Those pieces of literary journalism provided full, vivid, and emotionally charged accounts of McCandless’s story with strong impact and resonance. Other authors expanded Krakauer’s narrative into a larger and richer world, dispersed across different media, thereby engaging larger audiences in the storyworld. The study concludes with a discussion of a few other examples of literary journalism that to varying degrees expand into transmedia worlds and argues for literary journalists to consider transmedia storytelling when conceiving their narratives.
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Citations
Vanoost, M. (2020). From Literary Journalism to Transmedia Worlds: Into the Wild and Beyond. Literary Journalism Studies, 12(2), 34-60. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/110259 (Original work published 2020)