The cooperation and collaboration between media, art forms, and cultural studies

This handbook offers students and researchers compact orientation in their study of intermedial phenomena in Anglophone literary texts and cultures by introducing them to current academic debates, theoretical concepts and methodologies. By combining theory with text analysis and contextual anchoring, it introduces students and scholars alike to a vast field of research which encompasses concepts such as intermediality, multi- and plurimediality, intermedial reference, transmediality, ekphrasis, as well as related concepts such as visual culture, remediation, adaptation, and multimodality, which are all discussed in connection with literary examples. Hence each of the 30 contributions spans both a theoretical approach and concrete analysis of literary texts from different centuries and different Anglophone cultures.

Within the last two decades “intermediality” has emerged as one of the most challenging concepts in media theory with no shortage of various taxonomies and definitions. What prompted the writing of the essays gathered in this volume, however, was not a desire for more classifications applied to the world of moving pictures, but a strong urge to investigate what the “inter-” implied by the idea of “intermediality” stands for, and what it actually entails in the cinema. The book offers in each of the individual chapters a cross-section view of specific instances in which cinema seems to consciously position itself “in-between” media and arts, employing techniques that tap into the multimedial complexity of cinema, and bring into play the tensions generated by media differences. The introductory theoretical writings deal with the historiography of approaching intermedial phenomena in cinema presenting at the same time some of the possible “gateways” that can open up the cinematic image towards the perceptual frames of other media and arts. The book also contains essays that examine more closely specific paradigms in the poetics of cinematic intermediality, like the allure of painting in Hitchcock’s films, the exquisite ways of framing and un-framing haptical imagery in Antonioni’s works, the narrative allegories of media differences, the word and image plays and ekphrastic techniques in Jean-Luc Godard’s “total” cinema, the flâneuristic intermedial gallery of moving images created by José Luis Guerín, or the types of intermedial metalepses in Agnès Varda’s “cinécriture.” From a theoretical vantage point these essays break with the tradition of thinking of intermediality in analogy with intertextuality and attempt a phenomenological (re)definition of intermedial relations. Moreover, some of the analyses target films that expose the coexistence of the hypermediated experience of intermediality and the illusion of reality, connecting the questions of intermediality both to the indexical nature of cinematic representation and to the specific ideological and cultural context of the films, thus offering insights into a few questions regarding the “politics” of intermediality as well.

A groundbreaking collection of essays looking at the concepts of 'intermediality' and 'multimodality' - the relationship between various forms of art and new media - and including case studies ranging from music, film and architecture to medieval ballads, biopoetry and Lettrism.

The 'narrative turn' in the humanities, which expanded the study of narrative to various disciplines, has found a correlate in the 'medial turn' in narratology. Long restricted to language-based literary fiction, narratology has found new life in the recognition that storytelling can take place in a variety of media, and often combines signs belonging to different semiotic categories: visual, auditory, linguistic and perhaps even tactile. The essays gathered in this volume apply the newly gained awareness of the expressive power of media to particular texts, demonstrating the productivity of a medium-aware analysis. Through the examination of a wide variety of different media, ranging from widely studied, such as literature and film, to new, neglected, or non-standard ones, such as graphic novels, photography, television, musicals, computer games and advertising, they address some of the most fundamental questions raised by the medial turn in narratology: how can narrative meaning be created in media other than language; how do different types of signs collaborate with each other in so-called 'multi-modal works', and what new forms of narrativity are made possible by the emergence of digital media.

This insightful book explores the relationship between theater and digital culture. The authors show that the marriage of traditional performance with new technologies leads to an upheaval of the implicit “live” quality of theatre by introducing media interfaces and Internet protocols, all the while blurring the barriers between theater-makers and their audience.

Intermedial Studies provides a concise, hands-on introduction to the analysis of a broad array of texts from a variety of media – including literature, film, music, performance, news and videogames, addressing fiction and non-fiction, mass media and social media. The detailed introduction offers a short history of the field and outlines the main theoretical approaches to the field. Part I explains the approach, examining and exemplifying the dimensions that construct every media product. The following sections offer practical examples and case studies using many examples, which will be familiar to students, from Sherlock Holmes and football, to news, vlogs and videogames. This book is the only textbook taking both a theoretical and practical approach to intermedial studies. The book will be of use to students from a variety of disciplines looking at any form of adaptation, from comparative literature to film adaptations, fan fictions and spoken performances. The book equips students with the language and understanding to confidently and competently apply their own intermedial analysis to any text.