Video Player

Migratory Narratives: Why Some Stories Replicate Across Media, Cultures, Historical Eras

William C. Uricchio Thomas Pettitt Richard Howells Janet Staiger: May 6, 2005; Running Time: 1:32:56

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

True stories and their fictional spin-offs -- especially bloody ones -- occupy an enduring spot in western culture. Thomas Pettitt’s specialty, the “murdered sweetheart” tale, emerged from medieval times to seize hold of the public imagination in England and Scandinavia over several centuries. The story, involving a seduced girl, her murder by a lover, and the lover’s death, stems from some long-lost actual case. Publishers cranked out ballads based on this story, with helpfully lurid woodcut illustrations. In this “highly successful genre,” says Pettitt, “marketing strategies” distilled the “shocking and juicy story” down to the bare bones. “I sometimes wonder if the weapon of choice was a knife because it rhymes conveniently with wife,” muses Pettitt.

The sinking of the Titanic sparked a media frenzy all too familiar these days: reporters rowed out to meet survivors, so they could wire their newspapers first. Richard Howells takes stock of this tragedy and its media manipulation over time. First the Edwardians “celebrated the heroism, triumph, Anglo-Saxon pluck and courage” of the voyagers, with newsreels (including one a month after the tragedy), postcards, sheet music and records. Later, fiction films exploited the story as a fable about the emerging middle class. In our own times, with the epic James Cameron film and assorted merchandise including Titanic software, and beer, Howells sees the Titanic as an “allegory for decline, disaster, decadence and doom …and finally as kitsch-entertainment.” As a modern myth, the Titanic has become “a multimedia narrative.”

Janet Staiger finds lots of reasons for storytelling, from the anthropological to the psychoanalytical. But she emphasizes “economic explanations: the standardization of stories for a capitalist purpose.” We know that a murdered sweetheart ballad “will be a seller,” so it can be premarketed and mass-produced. Some stories get yoked to particular characters, and others can wander more freely across formulas. Staiger compares Barbie and Cinderella, stuck in their plot lines, to Batman, who can show up in detective, adventure, parody or melodrama form. The “ability to sell figures separate from a formula enhances their capacity for capitalization,” says Staiger.

Lecture Details

Location: Wong Auditorium

About the Speakers

William C. Uricchio

Co-Director, Comparative Media Studies Program and Professor of Comparative Media Studies, MIT Professor of Comparative Media History, Utrecht University, the Netherlands

William Uricchio received his Ph.D. in cinema studies from New York University in 1982 and comes to MIT from the Institute for Media and Re/Presentation at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where he was department chair. He currently directs a five-year cultural identity project in the European Science Foundation Changing Media Changing Europe initiative.

A Fulbright and Humboldt fellow, Uricchio has published widely on early television, early cinema and their emergence as cultural forms, including Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films(1993); Die Anfänge des deutschen Fernsehens: Kritische Annäherungen an die Entwicklung bis 1945 (1993); The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media (1991); and "The Nickel Madness": The Struggle to Control New York City’s Nickelodeons in 1907–1913. His most recent books include Media Cultures (2006 Heidelberg), on responses to media in post 9/11 Germany and the US, and We Europeans? Media, New Collectivities and Europe (forthcoming).

Thomas Pettitt

Associate Professor of English, University of Southern Denmark

Thomas Pettitt teaches English literary and cultural history in the late-medieval and early-modern periods. He received his Ph.d. from Odense University in 1996. His research focuses on tradition-borne texts and performances such as ballads, folksongs, legends, customs and folk drama.

He has published in such academic journals as Folklore, Journal of American Folklore, Renaissance Drama, and European Medieval Theatre.

Richard Howells

Senior Lecturer in Communications Arts and Postgraduate Research Tutor, Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds

Richard Howells is a regular contributor to BBC national television and radio discussions on media and cultural issues. In 2004, he was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Center for the Arts in Society, Carnegie-Mellon University.

Howells received his A.B. from Harvard University and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Cambridge University. His recent papers include: "Listening with the Eyes: Art and Navajo Visual Culture;" "Celebrities, Saints and Sinners: The Photograph as Holy Relic"; and "Midget Cities: Utopia, Utopianism and the Vor-schein of the 'Freak' Show" in Disability Studies Quarterly, Volume 25, Number 3, Summer 2005.

Janet Staiger

William P. Hobby Centennial Professorship in Communication, University of Texas, Austin

Janet Staiger is a theoretician and historian of American film and television. Her current work includes historiographical practices in media studies, problems in the representation of gender (masculinity and queer studies) and sexuality and violence (slasher and sexually explicit films), and theorization of emotions and genres.

She is the author of 10 books, including Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception( New York University Press, 2000); Blockbuster TV: Must-See Sitcoms in the Network Era(New York University Press, 2000); and Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema(University of Minnesota Press, 1995). She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1981.

About the Host