ABSTRACT

This chapter explores a shift from multimodality toward a recognition that writing and composing practices are fundamentally transmediated. It argues that one reason scholars sometimes struggle to theorize the trans in transmedia composition is a disciplinary focus on print-media rhetorics such as unity, coherence, and organization as the sine qua non of all compositional practice. The chapter also explores how current transmedia practices intersect with queer/trans practices of embodied composition and demonstrates how an awareness of queer rhetorics can help scholars to rethink transmediation and the compositional values that inhibit both teaching and studying of transmediation and composition. It examines some of the ways that our thinking about compositional practices has shifted through an emerging engagement with the tools, objects, and contexts of composition. The compositional practices of transmedia, however, push away from the microscopic and privilege, instead, a macroscopic or telescopic vision of complexity.