| Digital technologies have changed the way readers approach, experience, and respond to texts. In our hyper-mediated culture, images and texts converge and disseminate across multiple media platforms, changing once-passive readers and spectators into active agents in the intellectual and creative process of interpretation. This thesis examines the multimodal world of Hugo Cabret--the hybrid graphic novel, the film adaptation, and the novel's official website--in an effort to better understand how intertextuality, convergence culture, and remediation play with media forms, represent an ideological shift toward participatory culture, and rework older, traditional media in the creation of new media and new media users. The Invention of Hugo Cabret and its surrounding paratexts are but one example of how our construction of childhood is slowly changing to acknowledge the skills and abilities fostered by our digital age as readers synthesize, seek out, and interact with multiple forms of media. |
