Intermedial Studies

An Introduction to Meaning Across Media

Jørgen Bruhn, Beate Schirrmacher, Jørgen Bruhn, Beate Schirrmacher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032004549
• eBook ISBN: 9781000513974
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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. PartI 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 befamiliar 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.

Part I

Introducing intermedial studies

DOI: 10.4324/9781003174288-1

1 Intermedial studies

Jørgen Bruhn and Beate Schirrmacher

DOI: 10.4324/9781003174288-2

Even if you have never heard the term intermediality before, you may still be familiar with the phenomenon. You have no doubt often compared a film adaptation with the novel it is based on, and you probably listen to audiobooks. On social media, you sometimes create and share memes or GIFs with your friends, and as a child your parents perhaps read picture books to you.

Intermedial studies is interested in the interaction of similarities and differences between media and the changes that may occur in communicative material when it is transported from one media type to another. It is also interested in how the differences between media types are bridged by similarities on other levels. The strange thing is that despite having no knowledge of or training in intermedial studies most people are very good at using and understanding intermedial relations, though of course not many of them would be able to use academic terminology to describe what they are doing, nor would they be interested in doing so.

One of the reasons why people navigate effortlessly in these communicative environments is that all communicative situations and all media types are multimodal: they draw on different forms of resources for meaning-making. When we speak to someone face-to-face, we not only understand the words they use but draw on intonation, body language, speech rhythm and the surrounding context to make sense of what we hear – and we do this without even thinking about it. This is not just true concerning face-to-face communication: even when we communicate across temporal and spatial distances when studying scientific articles, reading novels, or watching movies, there is never only one form of meaning-making involved. As you are reading this very text, in a print version or online, you are not only responding to the meaning of the written words, but the layout and typography also provide you with various kinds of visual information that facilitate reading and following the line of argument. If you are reading a printed copy, you are evaluating tactile and auditory information, and the weight distribution between your hands informs you that you are at the beginning of a longer text. If you are reading an e-book, the physical information found in a printed book has to be replaced by visual indicators. Thus, as media scholar W.J.T. Mitchell has pointed out, all communication involves all our senses. There are no purely visual, textual, or auditory media. All media products are, therefore, mixed and heterogeneous rather than ‘monomedial’. Intermedial studies explores this heterogeneous relation between different forms of meaning-making, either within a particular media product or between different media types. A summary of the main terms used in intermedial studies is provided in Box 1.1.

Box 1.1 Terms to get you started

Media: the material-based tools that are needed to communicate across time and space.

Intermedial studies analyses the interaction within and between different media; traditionally, the research objects have been artistic phenomena.

Multimodal studies is, like intermedial studies, interested in the internal mix of modes inside each media product.

Media studies has traditionally been more focused on mass media, journalism and pedagogical contexts – and its approach is often closer to a social scientific approach.

Media product: a specific communicative object or event, for example, a Penguin copy of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, an article on global warming in The Guardian or a letter, an email or a spoken remark to a friend.

The technical medium of display refers to the material object or entity that allows access to basic and qualified media types.

Basic media types such as text, organized sound, or images are used as the communicative ‘building blocks’ in many different media

Qualified media types: when we speak of the news media, the arts, or genres such as the novel and the documentary, we are talking about media types in a way that is qualified and is defined by context, convention and history and by our experience of many individual media products.

Defining intermedial studies

The term intermediality has gained popularity and influence despite the confusion about whether the term ‘intermediality’ denotes an object of study, a method of study, or a theory about a category of objects. The concept of intermediality opens up for all three of them. In the following, however, we will be careful to distinguish between intermedial studies as the method and theory of study and intermediality of media products as the object of study.

Historically, intermedial research has been particularly interested in artistic media products and focusing on relations between media types such as texts and images, words and music, or on media transformations that in some way or other cross and challenge conventional media borders. Intermedial studies has been very good at demonstrating these relations – but perhaps not so good at demonstrating how to analyse them in practical ways. In order to compare and analyse intermedial relations within particular media products, this book presents different kinds of medial relations, and tools to analyse them, which will allow you to describe, analyse and compare a huge variety of different media products in relation to each other. Our perspective is different from the classic intermedial approach, which deals mostly with artistic objects in that it is not only relevant for artistic media products but offers a method that can be applied to all forms of communication and analysis. Throughout this book, the choice of case studies and topics demonstrates that an intermedial perspective is not only relevant for artistic media products.

But what is the point of such an intermedial perspective? As previously mentioned, we can read and understand picture books, we can resend a funny GIF in an online thread, and we can apprehend the relation between words and photographs in newspapers without knowing anything about intermediality. But if you want to discuss, understand and compare these intermedial relations, terminology and useful analytical tools are needed. These should allow you to address similarities and differences and see how they relate to each other.

Intermedial studies is important, because academic disciplines such as literary studies, art history, musicology and even film studies do not provide the tools to analyse and interpret these intermedial relations. The analytical tools used within a discipline risk falling short when an attempt is made to analyse media products that go beyond the conventional borders of art forms and media types. And while film studies, theatre studies, comics studies, opera studies and media and communication studies have developed tools and terms to some extent to analyse their respective kinds of media, these disciplinary frameworks seldom address or discover similarities and differences between different forms of media types.

Intermediality emerged as a field of research in the late 1990s early 2000s. However, the interest in the relations between different forms of communication dates back far longer. It had previously been explored under the labels of, for instance, interart, adaptation studies, word and image studies. There has been a long debate in Western thinking, sometimes explicit, sometimes under the radar, about relations between different art forms and media, but from an institutional point of view the discussion has been scarce, and methodologies have not been developed. Innumerable artists, for example, have worked and continue to work with more than one medium, and it is probably the rule rather than the exception to do so, but traditional research in the different disciplines has not focused on this aspect. For instance, literary history abounds with writers who ‘also’ painted, who ‘also’ were skilled musicians or composers. There might have been an awareness of but not the analytical tools available to grasp how the knowledge and practice in one medium informs the work in another. Following the academic tradition of organizing study into different disciplines and therefore into different university divisions, we have left it to musicology to understand music and comparative literature departments to understand written literature, even though large portions of the history of music have to do with words and a lot of texts that are studied in literary studies are meant to be performed. For a long time, film studies as well as film directors were intensely interested in what they considered to be the ‘cinematic’ aspects of film (meaning the visual aspects) and neglected the fact that they were dealing and working with an audiovisual media type. But questions such as what makes some stories easy to narrate in many different media and why it is so difficult to make certain scientific ideas appealing to children and easy for them to understand were too seldom understood as general, intermedial questions: that is, questions with a structural similarity that could be approached by applying just one broad theory.

These are exactly the kinds of questions that intermedial studies wants to ask, though. How can we analyse translations and transformations that exist not between languages but between different media types? How can we move from a superficial value judgement of liking or disliking a film adaptation to a level where we can describe and discuss how certain aspects of the narrative were changed? Can we perhaps even start discussing why such changes are made? We could consider questions such as how does a text succeed in getting us to ‘see’ mental images and ‘hear’ mental sounds when all we have in front of us are lines of black letters on a paper or a screen? And how can still images convey a sense of movement? How can we analyse and discuss the relation between texts and images in a children’s book, comics, newspaper articles and internet memes? Can we compare multimodal communication on a theatre stage with the performance of YouTubers? Our argument is that understanding the heterogeneity of different media products increases our understanding of how medial choices shape, form and support what is communicated.

Traditions of media studies

There are various ways to define what media are and how we use them. Below is a very rough and brief outline of some of the most important ones.

The academic field of media and communication studies explores the history and effects of various media, primarily mass media, often with a focus on the content side of communication. Media and communication studies has a social scientific background – it is more interested in the role of media in relation to societal questions (news, ideologies, political impact, societal communication). The content and impact of particular media in a particular social context are explored in empirical studies or from different theoretical perspectives.

Other media-related fields focus on different forms of interrelation, mixedness and heterogeneity. Examples of such fields are media archaeology, intermedial studies and multimodal studies, which are based on some of the same assumptions – namely that communication takes place in the complex interaction between different media, mixed media and different resources. But scholars who use these different theoretical approaches seldom work together and common terms or ideas are seldom developed. This is partly because although the objects of study are quite closely related, they are approached from different perspectives and with different analytical foci.

The tradition of media archaeology originated in German cybernetical and philosophical approaches. The often controversial, even provocative, ideas of German literary and media scholar Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) played a decisive role. He mostly investigated the technical forms that support media content, demonstrating and developing Marshall McLuhan’s (1911–80) famous idea that the ‘medium is the message’. This means that all communication must be understood, at least partly, as being significantly influenced by the physical device that communicates it, the historical development of the device, and the ideologies underlying the historical conditions.

The broad field of media studies, also McLuhanesque in its approach, investigates mass media and art from the fundamental idea that all meaning has a relation to the medium’s form, which includes thinking philosophically about mediation. Mitchell and Hansen’s Critical Terms for Media Studies is an anthology of such contemporary media studies, and it discusses and exemplifies aesthetics, politics and communicative approaches (Mitchell and Hansen, 2010).

Multimodal studies tend to focus on the complexity of the integration of different modes (understood as different means of communicating such as speech, colour or typography) within media products and in relation to a social context. The oral communication that takes place during face-to-face communication involves numerous ‘semiotic resources’, such as intonation, facial expression and body language, and each can be examined and understood in greater detail. Multimodal studies often draws on insights from linguistics to understand the generation of meaning potential.

Intermedial studies touches upon similar questions. Intermedial stud...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• PART I: Introducing intermedial studies
• PART II: Intermedial analysis: The three fundamental intermedial relations
• PART III: Applying intermedial perspectives
• Index