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One of the most singular narrative strategies in Supernatural –especially from the second season onwards– is the rupture of the illusionistic mirror that characterizes traditional fiction. Such a rupture, encapsulated by the term “metafiction”, conforms to an aesthetic mode that, at different levels and purposes, reflects the functioning of the very same fictitious discourse: the author’s identity, critical issues at the reception and production process, or the narrative at the moment of realization. Grounded in the work of metafiction theorists such as Waugh, Dallenbach or Stam, this article attempts to explain how several episodes of Supernatural fracture the illusionistic glass and reveal the conventions that characterize artistic realism. In order to achieve this, we will sketch an exhaustive cartography of the reflexive strategies that the creators of the series employ: the juxtaposition of diegetical worlds, playful narration, televised narcissism, the self-consciousness of the story, and the breaking down of the fourth wall. We will start by analyzing the apposition of fiction and reality within Supernatural: narratives that still maintain their formal illusionistic skeleton while implicitly questioning the boundaries of a fantasy world in confrontation with diegetical “reality”. Dean’s daydream in “What is, and What Should Never Be” or Sam’s in “When the Levee Breaks” are examples of this type of narrative. Afterwards, we will examine another kind of formula, still underdeveloped, which involves breaking the illusionistic mirror in order to make clear that the spectator is being confronted by a constructed story, and narrators that twist the plot, as occurs with the recounting and focalization games in “Tall Tales”. Next, keeping in mind the narrative exhaustion described by Barth, we will see how the television device turns back on itself in a search for originality via stories that employ the world behind the screen as the thematic seed for innovative story-telling. Thus, “Hollywood Babylon” unveils how the shooting of a horror movie works, “Monster Movie” explicitly recycles the referents of the genre, and “Changing Channels” satirizes other TV-series competitors. Following the metafictional gradation, the illusionistic glass definitely distorts its own reflection when self-consciousness is brought into play. The capacity that an artistic work has for recognizing its own existence as a fabricated artifice offers the most fruitful and important metafictional ramifications in Supernatural. Consequently, we will detail the semantic overload provided by the intertextual relations (the presence of the cylon Tricia Helfer in “Roadkill”, the allusions to Gilmore Girls, the multiple re-readings of horror movies), the ludicrous cameos (Linda Blair, Paris Hilton), and, lastly, the mise en abyme of the self-same Winchester stories in the borgesian “The Monster at the End of this Book” and the self-parody of “The Real Ghostbusters”. Finally, we will analyze the breaking down of the fourth wall, the highest degree of metafiction that Supernatural has afforded itself, yet nothing like the aggressive reflexivity described by Wollen. Supernatural uses two strategies to achieve this effect: leeching the format in “Ghostfacers”, where an enunciative device (televised fiction itself) feigns to be something different (a reality show); and the direct appeal to the audience in the extratextual coda in “Yellow Fever”, in which Jensen Ackles parodies his own fictional character.
2022 •
Supernatural is a TV series which ran from 2005 to 2020 created by Erik Kripke that follows the journey of two brothers who hunt monsters, ghosts and creatures from different urban legends, folklore and mythological tales. This paper intends to explore the Supernatural universe as a transmedia product. First, it analyses the expansion of the show, as it not only consists of the fifteen-season show but also in several different media in which the story has been developed. Secondly, it explores the use of fanfiction and its implementation in the narrative of the show, making use of the prosumer's creations so as to further broaden the plot of the show. After this, it develops an analysis of the use of metafiction which has become a central feature throughout the fifteen seasons the show has run. Additionally, this paper goes deeper into the concept of Expansion by analysing the idea of spin-offs, taking into account the one already in development by the company in charge of the show and the one which was not picked up by the network. Lastly, this paper dwells on the use of music as a possibility for the expansion of the story. Finally, in every section of this paper, it is shown how Supernatural integrates the result of such expansion into the narrative of the main story itself. All of the aspects mentioned before are the ones that contribute to the transformation Supernatural into a Transmedia product by expanding its universe through different media and inside the show itself.
This paper offers an analysis of the effect of the supernatural within the genre of the fictional document, how the artist (usually a writer, or filmmaker) reconciles the incorporation of the fantastic into a seemingly realistic medium and any resultant narrative disruption therein, and how the genre has evolved during contemporary technological history to intricately simulate and also provide commentary on the various forms of media imitated. This paper will argue that the fictional document is a prescient genre – often taking the form of official documents, video diaries, documentaries, or websites (sometimes devoid of context) - and how its shape as an objective 'artefact' differs from its more literary predecessors such as the frame story, the discovered manuscript, and the epistolary, by foregrounding its authentic form first and then 'presenting' the supernatural through the form's befitting stylistic conventions and limitations. By focussing in-depth on four specific texts (two works of literature: Robert Aickman's Pages From a Young Girl's Journal (1975) and China Miéville's Reports of Certain Events Around London (2005), and two two motions pictures: REC (2007) and Troll Hunter (2010)) this paper will present how the significance of supernatural phenomena, used metaphorically, can be utilised in multiple ways to alter and sometimes obscure any received narrative, causing the often pedestrian familiarity of the document's form to become uncanny and alienating. Such occurrences provide commentary not only on contemporary media-fixated concerns arising from taking mass information for granted (and any subsequent misunderstanding arising), but also the risks of desire for knowledge and clarification, especially within the synthetic hyperreality of digital media, and the effect of assumptions and preconceptions in the pursuit of such understanding.
Detective Fiction and Popular Visual Culture. Trier: WVT.
The Allure of the Supernatural: Twin Peaks and the Transformation of the Detective Story2013 •
The goal of this paper is to trace elements of detective fiction in the TV series Twin Peaks. In order to learn about the reconfigured narrative coordinates of detective fiction in Twin Peaks, a brief discussion of what Samuel Taylor Coleridge (181) coined “the willing suspension of disbelief” is necessary with regard to viewer expectations on one side and a closer look at supernatural elements in the series on the other. This paper proceeds from the assumption that Twin Peaks reverses the classical detective-as-reader analogy by teaching the viewer to become a reader, a creator of meaning, to begin with. This view is supported by media studies’s interest in discussing Twin Peaks with regard to narrative complexity and features of ‘quality TV.’ Both elements thus have to be included in this brief study. As will be shown, David Lynch’s and Mark Frost’s cooperative production introduces generic conventions of classic detective fiction in the beginning of the series and then proceeds to manipulate the latter on the level of the TV series’s narrative form. This paper then will proceed to study the ways Twin Peaks aims at establishing a secondary belief system within the semiotic coordinates of its narrative and will identify the TV series’s various narrative excursions into both classical detective fiction and the American literary tradition of hardboiled fiction. The main objective of this paper, then, is to explore the transition of detective fiction into what this paper identifies as ‘incipient detection’ for the narrative device of Twin Peaks. In order to study the value of this transformation of detective fiction then, this paper aims at determining the correlation between classic narrative norms, their transformed elements, and the form of the TV series. It argues that both the narrative device of ‘incipient detection’ and the recurrent focus on supernatural elements in particular elevated the TV series to a forerunner of the above mentioned narrative strategems of contemporary mysteries and crime narratives on the TV screen.
It may seem counterintuitive to examine an audiovisual medium through its dialogue alone, but some linguists have been doing just that. Using a freeware concordance toolkit and other computer programs, I analyzed the dialogue of the first 10 seasons of the American television program Supernatural (2005-present) through several facets in an attempt to demonstrate originality, variety, and how language contributes to character individuation.1 Using fan-made transcripts, I created three main corpora for the study: the SPN Corpus, which includes all dialogue from the first 218 episodes, and the DEAN and SAM Corpora, comprised of all of the dialogue of each of the two main characters. The SUBTLEX US corpus of American film and television dialogue was used as a reference corpus. A sampling of Supernatural episodes was also compared to that of other contemporary genre shows.
The Gothic Tradition in Supernatural: Essays on the Television Series (McFarland)
“You can’t spell subtext without S-E-X”: Supernatural, Gothic Intertextuality, and the (Queer) Uncanny2016 •
Although “Fan Fiction” appears anomalous, the two-hundredth episode of Supernatural is in fact a synecdoche for the entire series and thus both marks and elucidates its longevity. The most striking aspect of “Fan Fiction,” and among the most salient features of the series as a whole, is self-referentiality, “the Charlie Kaufman of it all.” More subtle are the ways in which “Fan Fiction” and other meta episodes exemplify the Gothic features at the core of Supernatural, together with the relationships among these features and the program’s characteristic intertextuality. This last is itself a hallmark of the Gothic, whose earliest incarnations feature stories elaborately framed by pseudo-editorial commentaries and poetic epigraphs, and whose most recent iterations in fiction, film, and TV are thoroughly postmodern in their complex narrative structures and concern with the nature and mechanics of storytelling. The Gothic intertextuality of the meta episodes in particular and Supernatural in general is closely linked to other Gothic features—most notably the uncanny, especially as manifest in narrative doubling and in confrontations between doppelgängers. The uncanny also informs fan fiction inspired by Supernatural, in which characters and their relationships are at once familiar and, most notably in slash fiction, queerly unfamiliar. To explore how Supernatural both continues and complicates the Gothic narrative tradition, in this essay I focus on the correlation and duplication of intertextuality and the uncanny. I pay particular attention to “Fan Fiction,” “The Monster at the End of This Book” “The Real Ghostbusters,” “The French Mistake,” “Slash Fiction,” and “Meta Fiction,” together with select fan fictions and websites such as Supernatural Wiki. Both acknowledging and moving beyond the classically psychoanalytic formulation of the uncanny, I demonstrate how all the variations of the Freudian uncanny are present in Supernatural (and, indeed, in “Fan Fiction”): the automaton, the unseen, the double, and the repetition-compulsion; and I articulate how, in Supernatural as elsewhere, the uncanny emerges from the repressed. Because what the program represses is queerness, to explore its representations of uncanniness and intertextuality I draw not on Freud but on what theorists of the Gothic such as Paulina Palmer have termed the “queer uncanny,” a valuable concept that enables us, for instance, to locate Destiel and Samifer in the tradition of queer Gothic doppelgängers including Robert Colwan/Gil-Martin, William Wilson, Jekyll/Hyde, and Dorian Gray. Finally, I contend that the Gothic intertextuality and (queer) uncanniness of Supernatural are themselves narrative doubles, and consider the implications of this duplication for the program’s complex relationship to both queerness and storytelling.
2016 •
Modern stories are the product of a recursive process influenced by elements of genre, outside content, medium, and more. These stories exist in a multitude of forms and are transmitted across multiple media. This article examines how those stories function as pieces of a broader narrative, as well as how that narrative acts as a world for the creation of stories. Through an examination of the polymediated nature of modern narratives, we explore the complicated nature of modern storytelling.
Soon after its premiere in 2005, the American television show Supernatural spawned an online fandom dedicated to ‘slashing’ the show’s two protagonists, brothers Sam and Dean Winchester: that is, to writing stories in which the brothers are portrayed as lovers. Over time, the existence of these slash narratives – affectionately dubbed ‘Wincest’ by the show’s fans – has been incorporated into the series’ diagesis. Indeed, in the wake of the programme’s repeated forays into diegetic metatextuality, some Supernatural fan writers have re-incorporated Sam and Dean’s canonized awareness of slash fiction back into Wincest stories themselves - specifically, into the subgenre of metatextual Wincest, stories that recast Sam and Dean as conscious participants in Wincest fan culture. Using Della Pollock’s notion of performative writing as a guide, this essay will explore the distinctive types of encounters between reader, writer, and text that metatextual Wincest stories facilitate. Further, the appli- cation of this critical approach to three such narratives – nyoxcity’s ‘Stranger Than Fiction’, Road Rhythm’s ‘This is All Very Meta’, and Fanspired’s ‘Conversations with Head People’ – highlights fan writers’ perception of their own creative author- ity within the ongoing process of meaning-making that continues to spin around Supernatural. Ultimately, this essay will argue that what makes metatextual Wincest stories distinct is their suggestion that only by working in concert with their fans can Sam and Dean finally write their own version of a happy ending, some- thing ‘the show [itself] eternally defers’ – even if the lasting power of the ever-after they create together remains, in the end, uncertain (Tosenberger 2008, 5.12).
This paper explores the relationship between the eruptions of the abnormal which are a key part of the Gothic genre across media, and the use of the genre within mainstream television series to provide an occasional special episode that breaches the normality of that programme. Such episodes typically occur at particular parts of the year: Christmas in Britain and Hallowe’en in the US. The supernatural element of these episodes forms a wound of irrationality in series which typically depend upon an essentially rational mode, e.g. detective series like Bergerac, Castle and Hawai’i Five-O. This echoes the specialness of the time of the year in those seasonal episodes, times which have been perceived as wounds or weakenings in the boundary between the natural and supernatural worlds. But even in episodes broadcast at other times of the year these intrusions of the abnormal into the apparently normal serve to open up the normative rationality of the texts to suggest a wider universe and the existence of spiritual and supernatural possibilities. These programmes thus suggest that rationality remains the dominant and most useful way of understanding the universe, but that the possibility of the irrational should be accepted.
Cognition, Emotion, and Aesthetics in Contemporary Serial Television
Twin Peaks and the Performative Poetics of Complex Television2022 •
How might we describe an actor’s contribution to the aesthetics of complex television? It is profitable to investigate how the choices and strategies adopted by Twin Peaks’ recurring performers might stand in for broader formal developments in complex TV as a whole. Further, it is possible to identify the interest that these systematic techniques might have for cognitive theorists of complex television in general. To these ends, we can first itemize some specific impressions of the acting on Twin Peaks, and theorize why they may prove profitable to analyze carefully. Influential aspects to discuss will include: (1) the surprising degree of oratorical flatness and archetypal embodiment vs. declamatory amplification and emotional excess; (2) an elastic approach to duration, rhythm and temporality; (3) modal and generic blending; (4) musical rather than dramatic logic; and (5) abrupt affective shifts and absurdist cognitive dissonance. These distinct features will be connected to more expansive performative trends in complex TV as a whole. Some of these general conventions under discussion will include: (1) character density vs. telegraphed repetition; (2) serial consistency and episodic logic vs. the fluidity, verticality, and withholding tendencies of a complex series; (3) the privileging of an aesthetic of decipherment over the establishment of parasocial relationships; and (4) the elasticity of the televisual body. This discussion of Twin Peaks’ fascinating and paradigm-changing performance strategies should prove to be a useful taxonomy for future analysts of an equally captivating televisual mode.
In Monsters and Monstrosity in 21st-Century Film and Television, ed. by Cristina Artenie and Ashley Szanter
"The Monster at the End of This Book": Authorship and Monstrosity in Supernatural2017 •
The long-running US horror series Supernatural engages repeatedly, and in complex, sometimes inconsistent ways with questions of authorship and authority. Language—particularly written language—has long been used as a means of distinguishing the ‘human’. Joanna Bourke points to the ways in which thinkers from Aristotle to Darwin employed language as a boundary between ‘human’ and animal, ranking peoples according to “a hierarchy of language”. The monster, as a figure that defies categorisation, straddles the boundary between the ‘human’ and its others, often implicating language, or its absence. H. P. Lovecraft’s protagonists express their horror at the written language employed by his alien monsters; the silent Gentlemen of Buffy the Vampire Slayer induce horror by removing their victims’ recourse to speech. Supernatural plays frequently with the apparent humanity of its monsters, sometimes reinforcing a safe boundary between ‘human’ and monster, and sometimes refusing to do so. This chapter will argue that its treatment of writing and authority works in a similar way. Supernatural has sometimes reinforced the notion of the Godlike author, but has also challenged it, with an acute consciousness of itself as a multi-authored text, and one that lends itself to a variety of audience interpretations. Authorship is hybrid, not monolithic: perhaps monstrous. Through an examination of the episodes, “The Monster at the End of This Book” (4.18), “The Real Ghostbusters” (5.09), “Meta Fiction” (9.18), “Fan Fiction” (10.05) and “Don’t Call Me Shurley” (11.20), this chapter seeks to examine whether Supernatural’s authors are truly gods—and whether it might not be better to be a monster.
Technical and Technological Analysis of Pottery Ornamentation of the Andronovo (Fedorovka) Culture from the Nizhnyaya Suetka Burial Ground in the Kulunda Steppe
Савко И.А. Технико-технологический анализ орнамента керамики андроновской (федоровской) культуры из могильника Нижняя Суетка в Кулундинской степи // Проблемы археологии, этнографии, антропологии Сибири и сопредельных территорий. 2023. Т. 29. С. 829-837.2023 •
2019 •
1992 •
Atmospheric Measurement Techniques
An evaluation of COSMIC radio occultation data in the lower atmosphere over the Southern Ocean2015 •
River Research and Applications
Fish zonation and indicator species for the evaluation of the ecological status of rivers: example of the Loire basin (France)2007 •
Indian Journal of Agricultural Sciences
Response of bread wheat and nutrient removal with new micronutrient molecules fertilization2021 •
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
On correcting the intrusion of tracing non-deterministic programs by software1997 •
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Revista mexicana de periodontología
Periodontal diseases and their relation with systemic diseases2016 •