Characters of Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Magical Food in Cooking Reality Shows: The Intersection of Literary Culture and Media Communications

Abstract

Themed cooking reality shows emerge and develop at the intersection of media communications, literary culture and leisure. They are also based on intertextual, transmedia connections, simultaneously and masterfully using heterogeneous languages, ranging from artistic, social-ideological to commercial. This is a new type of intermediate territory (J. Mukarzowski), which is filled with, and exists due to the meeting and interaction of heterogeneous languages, memory, signs, and associations, fragmentary hints, which are united into a coherent whole by the tasks, meanings and language of media. Such a culinary media text that uses the game with fashionable works of art, holidays, and heroes and makes them fashionable by this game should be easily read as explicit, well-known, universally understood quotes, allusions, puzzles, and signs. It to be accepted and in demand, must speak the equally significant language of mass culture, art, and everyday life, which is quickly perceived. Magical heroes, characters, and magical food also actively and naturally fit into these processes through the means and possibilities of literary culture and media communications. As a result, new urgent places of existence of collectively, socially, and ideologically significant meanings are created and consolidated, and literary culture contributes to this as much as possible, helping to form and manifest new aspects of truth and authenticity. In addition, thematic cooking reality shows also reveal qualitatively new dimensions of transmedia, intertextual transformations of folklore, literature, and cinema texts, as well as aesthetic, ideological, and socio-cultural functions. In this regard, the ideas and methods proposed by J. Mukarzowski in his works of the 1930s and semiotics are relevant.