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Hoaxing the Media: 1920s Film Ballyhoo and an Archaeology of Presence
- Author(s):
- Fabrice Lyczba (see profile)
- Date:
- 2016
- Subject(s):
- Advertising, Culture--Study and teaching, Mass media--Study and teaching
- Item Type:
- Book chapter
- Tag(s):
- film marketing, paratexts, Cultural studies, Film studies, Media studies, Reception studies
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6ZZ40
- Abstract:
- This chapter looks at 1920s ballyhoo stunts routinely deployed in the exploitation of cinema in the US, a set of uniquely ephemeral paratexts that exist only during performance. Yet despite this inherent ephemerality, these media paratexts matter for the historically resilient mode of media presence that they propose. By analyzing these stunts and their modern variants, I show that media paratexts have a a meta-ability to frame not merely the narrative or the text, but the text-reading activity itself. The transactional nature of such paratexts is essentially playful, self-reflexive, and participatory—a mode of media reception that has opened up, and continues to open up the spaces of everyday life to the presence of media fictions. Clearly, such meta-ability to receive media as an engaging game must form a key aspect to a project of understanding how audiences inhabit and enjoy the spaces of “cinematic heterotopia,” and imposes to reconsider the experience of presence not as illusion, but as game.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Book chapter
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 6 years ago
- License:
- All Rights Reserved
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article-final-f-lyczba.pdf