This essay, co-written with my colleague, Bri Lafond, was a delve into both of our teaching practices using the lens of Linda Hutcheon’s adaptation theory. The full article is titled “Modes of Meaning, Modes of Engagement: Pragmatic Approaches of Adaptation Theory to Teaching Multimodal Composition” and can be found in The Routledge Handbook of Digital Writing and Rhetoric (2018) edited by Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes. This excerpt focuses on defining the last of Hutcheon’s “modes of engagement.” This example is written mostly by myself and shows my subject-matter knowledge, writing style, and how I complied with editor and publisher requirements for tone, style, and formatting. The full transcript can be accessed upon request.

Hutcheon’s final mode of engagement—the interactive mode—is the mode most closely associated with digital media; this is the mode in which “as audience members, we interact with stories… from virtual reality to machinima” (22).  Interactivity emphasizes individual audience agency by allowing the individual to shape their experience of the narrative. In a video game, for example, the player controls where their avatar goes, how s/he moves, how s/he engages with conflict, etc. While the individual player shapes his/her path through this kind of narrative and controls how an avatar engages in gameplay, the range of choices—though seemingly rhizomatic—is in fact controlled by the game designer.

One example of this can be found in the video game No Man’s Sky. Promising infinite worlds to explore, unlimited lifeforms to discover, and endless opportunities to do whatever you might desire as a space explorer, the game ultimately is limited by the capabilities and imaginations of the designers. Take the unlimited lifeforms, for instance. Although a multitude of combinations of creatures can be found among the limitless planets, each individual species is actually a finite combination of models of one head, two sets of legs, a torso, and a possible tail and/or wings. Once players have explored half a dozen planets in this supposedly infinite universe, they begin to realize that the same lifeform parts keep appearing thus breaking the illusion and highlighting the rhetorical constraints of what it truly means for a text to be interminable. Video games, though large and oftentimes engaging an audience for much longer stretches of time than other texts, are still subject to the restraints of the designers, budget, and technology. While the technology now exists for students to create their own video games without much expertise, students are limited by the material constraints of video game design software complicating the process of creating what they have envisioned.

Allowing that the various modes of engagement create different dynamics in audience reception, this does not mean that the same narrative can be plugged into different media without essential changes taking place in what the narrative is and what it means. Moreover, Hutcheon writes that

the lines of differentiation [between various modes] are not as clear as we might expect. The private and individual experience of reading is, in fact, closer to the private visual and domestic spaces of television, radio, DVD, video, and computer than it is to the public and communal viewing experience in a dark theater of any kind… our level and kind of engagement are different. (27)

Hutcheon, again, emphasizes the reception element, taking into consideration the audience experience as an element of how the text is interpreted. Whether the reception experience is “private” and “domestic” or “public” and “communal” ultimately affects how an individual absorbs and, thus, interprets a text. Further, Hutcheon reminds us that “ways of engaging with stories do not… take place in a vacuum. We [audiences] engage in time and space, within a particular society and a general culture. The contexts of creation and reception are material, public, and economic as much as they are cultural, personal, and aesthetic” (28). Again, Hutcheon does not use rhetorical terminology, but what she describes here is undoubtedly rhetorical context: the textual composer must take into account their target audience, their own exigence, the particular kairos, and the affordances and constraints of their chosen medium in order to best craft their message.

For students, awareness of the ways in which their audience will experience their texts can give them further insight into their composing processes. If a student knows that her final video project will be presented to the rest of her class as part of the evaluation process, she may decide to incorporate subtitles into her video to increase accessibility for her international student classmates who have indicated that they comprehend more from reading a text than hearing one, or she may choose to add a moment’s pause after a joke to allow for potential audience laughter. Considering the experiential level of the text can be highly context-dependent, and awareness of this textual dimension can definitely shape both the multimodal composing process as well as the end product.

The act of adapting a text to a new context automatically necessitates change. If one were to take a novel and transmediate it into an audiobook, this action would seemingly not require any adaptive consideration. Someone would merely have to record themselves reading aloud: what adaptation is necessary? However, taking into consideration Hutcheon’s articulation of modes of engagement, one can see that there are, in fact, many adaptive choices to be made in this scenario and one ought to take into account the particular affordances and constraints of the new context. Since the performance now takes place beyond the written word, we have exited the “realm of imagination” and entered the “realm of direct perception.” Thus, the adaptation must concretize the novel’s narrator and characters. For example, the novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline was recently adapted into an audiobook read, not by the author, but by actor Wil Wheaton. Wheaton did not just get into the recording booth and read the book directly, but instead he and the director made choices based upon the situated audience. He had to decide whether or not to do different voices for each character, where to put intonations, and how loud or soft to speak certain lines. One particularly interesting decision was whether to read aloud the scores of the characters which are presented as visual tables in several chapters in the written novel. In the audiobook version, Wheaton does not describe the visual accoutrements to these tables. This choice means a loss of the visual experience included in the original written text, but the increased clarity makes sense for the listening audience. The questions we might consider in order to make this “simple” adaptation happen are extensive. While we don’t necessarily want to bog our students down with an unending stream of questions, getting student-writers to question their base-level assumptions promotes both critical thinking and creativity.

(Lafond and Macias, pp. 374-376)