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Harry Potter Assignment 1

This essay explores the role of the building of authorship as a measure of quality in

GoT’s performance in making the work behind the greater discursive quality attribution

noticeable. As Seiter and Wilson (2005) have argued about soap-operas that “Television studies

of quality debates have tended to restrict the discussion of genres (especially drama), while

others have been debated only in terms of the public” (p. 137). The latter is certainly also true of

the fantasy genre. Afterward, I look through a variety of para-texts, critical feedback, producer

comments, and special features of the DVD box set to look at how the Benioff, Weiss, and

Martin team helps create and foster the presence of a showrunner author community to facilitate

a sense of this text as a quality television story. Finally, they deliberately pursue a “cultural

upgrade” to encourage the rise from “popular fantasy” to the so-called prestige of quality TV.

Today the television author is always inherently related to the showrunner, a leading role

in the production hierarchy of a television drama, and thus, according to Newman and Levine

(2012), represents his responsibility for the “aesthetic integrity of the television texts” as Jason

Mittell (2015) assigns “author by duty” or “management” to the author’s figure of this kind.

Moreover, the identification of a single, creative individual in charge of monitoring the artistic

integrity of a television show can often be a challenging undertaking, especially in the general

talk about content and authorship on television. In general, visual media can only infer an

authorial voice or role due to the above collaborative existence. Jason Mittell describes this
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“inferred author function” as “a viewer’s production of the authorial agency responsible for a

text’s storytelling, drawing on textual cues and contextual discourses” with a friendly node to

Foucault (2015).

Therefore, I have studied three distinct loci of a potential writer’s voice, such that these

textual signals of an inferred voice can be established within the text itself and through a set of

paratexts, which in Game of Thrones may point to such a contextual expression.

As mentioned above, a written voice is most likely to find itself in the layout and

narrative structure of a display at the text level itself. With Game of Thrones, the pilot’s narrator

structure is essentially like that of George R. R. Martin's novels, as well as the subsequent GoT’s

episodes. The chapter-like sequences involve various threads in the larger story and each

chapter/thread focuses on one character and follows its progression. Instead of choosing a clear

first-person viewpoint, GoT’s points of view are realized from third persons' viewpoints, which

makes it possible to have greater identification with the protagonist of each chapter, since the

reader cannot only bear witness to the protagonist’s actions, but also his clear reactions to the

world. This style of storytelling has the effect of throwing the viewer directly into the story,

trying to understand what is happening from scene to scene. You quickly learn that this fantasy

story is a gravely realistic one, in which one finds no simple character delineations of the good

Manichean versus the bad in the tradition of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. It is an intricate story

centered on a medieval world that tells the good and the dark sides of the human being. Avid

readers of the novels feel right at home when they relate stories in the television show because

the TV producers have made sure that the basic characteristics of how Martin weaves his stories

are adapted.
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Also, Game of Thrones can be seen as an important example of how a television series

practices transmedia narrative. From George R. R. Martin’s, “A Song of Fire” and Ice Book

Series in which the first book was released nearly two decades ago on the TV show, its

surrounding paratexts and related items, including online interactions on both HBO's own HBO

GO and its official webcast, the DVD and BluRay collectors, RPG games, comic books, and

merchandises. The present discourse of writers will be intentionally emphasized through the

author's role, by various agents of various ideologies, particularly in the universe of paratexts on

the two sides of the output (e.g. features and texts generated by HBO and George R. R. Martin)

and reception (e.g. texts generated by critics and fans). Jonathan Gray (2010) quote: “Even if in

reality this value is not created equally for all viewers, the purpose of Paratexts and in particular

different types of bonus materials is to play a constituent role in generating value for a film or

TV show. To reaffirm their sense of the film or program importance, some viewers will seek

these paratexts. Others consider that the mere presence of paratexts and hype is the clearest

indication of the absence of artistic honesty, as it is like the painter who sells his work with a

gaudy neon sign in the shopping mall. In either case, the paratext helps build a sense (whether

positive or negative)” (p. 128). The collection of Paratexts here presented gives voice not only to

the DVD extras but also to the special items presented in the website of the show, to the

showrunners and the writers of the literary original series of novels which enhance the

impression that these factions are of importance.

Thus, as I hope I could demonstrate, the discursive construction in the tropes of

authorship has proved to be a very fruitful way of achieving the purpose of raising television

texts, and made promoting authorhood an important component of HBO’s marketing strategies,

and become the talk of discourse communities especially in the context of Game of Thrones.
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Work Cited

Martin George R. R. From HBO. (http://grrm.livejournal. com/164794.html) (24-10-2020).

Foucault Michel and Paul Rabinow (eds). The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books.

(2015).

Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York,

London: New York University Press. (2015).

Game of Thrones. (http://www.metacritic.com/tv/game-ofthrones) (24-10-2020).

Van Dijk, Teun A. "Critical Discourse Analysis." The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 2015,

pp. 466-485.