“Play, Pause Re-play: Performing the Classics”

This paper offers a bird’s-eye view of various forms of literary remediation, including gamebooks, seen as intersections between narrative or discursive systems which are brought into being through a performative structure that both revitalises and exceeds the boundaries of the book’s materiality. Indeed, the process of digital remediation and, in particular, gamebooks can open up new, extraordinary possibilities regarding the ways stories are experienced. Here, the theatrical/narrative event appears to take place in a totally transformed and fluid dimension. “But how can we recognise or deal with the new?” (Waugh 1984: 7): the question that Patricia Waugh posed in her study of the theory and practice of metafiction has not lost its relevance today, prompting us to wonder whether a core of paradigmatic plots might actually be deconstructed, remodelled and still be called ‘classic’. Focusing on a number of Shakespeare’s retellings across media, my paper aims to stimulate a general reflection on some aspects of the contemporary ‘literature-scape’ and its performative turn.