Old Stories, New Media: Transmedia Adaptation of Chinese Antiquity

My dissertation explores transmedia adaptations of Chinese antiquity, including the fictional, televisual, musical, and video adaptation of China’s dynastic past in modern China. My dissertation intervenes into the field of media studies by breaking up the border between different media genres via the twofold implications of the “transmedia adaptation”: the translation of the same stories from one medium platform to another and the transgression of the medium convention in the process of adaptation. Accordingly, the four chapters of my dissertation are divided according to the established genres—televisual drama, fan fiction, cover songs, and fan video remakes—to investigate how each genre translates the stories of the past to fit into the artistic context of its specific medium. However, my dissertation also addresses each genre’s transgression of its own medium convention by incorporating the aesthetic signature of the source text from which it is adapted and anticipates the target text into which it will be adapted. The first chapter studies the extensive use of side light in historical TV drama to construct perceptual depth, yet it also occasionally frames its image as a pictorial scroll of a traditional Chinese painting that refutes light and shadow for surface effect. The second studies the negative recursion of online fan fiction, as opposed to the linear narration in TV drama from which it was adapted, yet its emphasis on the light and shadow in descriptive passages exceeds the convention of verbal narration and betrays the influences of televisual aesthetics. The third chapter explores cover songs adapted from online fan fiction, with the looping structure that dominates musical composition and lyrical prose, and its melodramatic tonality and love motif made it readily adaptable to fan videos. The last chapter studies fan videos made to reassemble the footage found in TV dramas, combined with a cover song as its background music, to narrate the plot of a work of fan fiction. As an aggregation of heterogeneous medium components, the fan video does not create its medium specificity via a coherent definition but rather establishes its potential of self-differentiation in its transgression of medium convention