Beyond Media Borders, Volume 1
January 3, 2023
Intermedial Studies
An Introduction to Meaning Across Media
About the book
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.
Topics
Humanities, Language & Literature
Publication Year
2021
Edition
1
Chapters
17
No. of pages
354
Table of Contents
Intermedial studies - Jørgen Bruhn, Beate Schirrmacher
Intermedial studies explore this heterogeneous relation between different forms of meaning-making, either within a particular media product or between different media types. Like media studies, intermedial studies are interested in the aesthetic and philosophical aspects of media. With an intermedial toolbox we will have a useful perspective and terminology that we can use to understand text–image relations in comics or in newspaper articles, or the relations between the lyrics and a melody in both pop music and opera. When thinking about media and intermedial relations, it is important to remember the relation between relative structural stability versus historical change, both when it comes to each and every media type and when it comes to the interrelations between media and media aspects. Technical media of display are the very material bases of mediation: they provide access to the media products. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
Media and modalities – Film - Signe Kjær Jensen, Niklas Salmose
Film is an integrated medium but also a qualified medium. Throughout the history of film, different technical media have been developed that has altered the quality of both sounds and images and the possibilities for what content can be displayed. Even if the media types of film are integrated, it can be necessary to keep them apart during parts of an analysis, and we will explore how they individually draw on different modes in the modalities. An educational film is thus based on the same combination of filmic media types as the cinematic film but diverges in its qualifying aspects. Film qualifications can be technical, ideological, aesthetic, political, and commercial and are referred to as contextual qualifying aspects. Operational qualifying aspects construct ‘media types on the ground of expected communicative tasks’. To account for the qualifying aspects of moving images and auditory media types, one needs to take the history of film and the development of filmic genres into consideration.
Media and modalities – Literature - Pedro Atã, Beate Schirrmacher
This chapter considers the basic traits and activities that define literature, such as the reading and writing of text and how text and images can be integrated. Text and static images have a lot in common in the material and sensorial modalities: they appear on flat surfaces, are perceived visually and are primarily spatial in the material modality. The use of technical media and basic media types, whether we use text or speech, publish a printed book or share texts in social media, shapes our understanding of what kind of stories can be told and which kind of experiences and memories and feelings can be expressed. Telling stories and appealing lyrically to an audience is something that people do in stand-up comedy shows and spoken poetry, or during professional storytelling. These are all contemporary qualified media types of oral traditions with its own social contexts, conventions, festivals and prizes.
Media and modalities – Music - Signe Kjær Jensen, Martin Knust
This chapter discusses the characteristics and communicative conventions that qualify Western art music, popular music and folk music. Despite major differences in the traditions of these qualified media types of music and the emphasis they put on musical notation and performance, they all share certain characteristics that relate to technical media of display and their basic media types. When we listen to sounding music, the technical media of display are sound waves that are realized via instruments and singers in a live performance or via electric speakers. The sounding music that is performed and the written sheet music both play an important part in this qualified media type of music. Where auditive text and organized sound really differ in terms of modalities is in the semiotic modality. The listener responds physically to the sounds and at the same time responds to them in the semiotic modality and transforms them into some form of subjective meaning.
Media and modalities – Computer games - Péter Kristóf Makai
This chapter discusses video games, also known as computer or digital games, as a distinct form of meaning-making. It explores the production process of games, accounting for how other media leave their mark on the creation of new games, followed by a survey of the basic media types and their role in generating meaning in games. The qualifying aspects of computer games shed light on how different service models, development stages, player modes and platforms affect their form and reception. If the computing machine is the technical medium for delivering the experience, then code is its basic medium in the production of computer games. Game design can be the work of a single person or a vast collaborative studio. Digital games make use of all available media modalities to create a gaming experience. The chapter concludes with how the four media modalities can be apprehended in video games, and what each contributes to the joys of gaming.
Media and modalities – News media - Kristoffer Holt, Beate Schirrmacher
News media highlight in a nearly paradigmatic way how our idea of any media depends on the ways they are produced and disseminated. News has been a crucial aspect of human life for as long as we have organized ourselves in societal structures. This chapter explores the role of mass media as technical media of display. So far, we have identified the intrinsic quality of novelty and how it is supported by the rapid distribution of mass media as technical media of display. The quality of news as stories of recent events also influences how audiences interact with the basic media types of news media in the various modalities. The chapter also explores these qualifying aspects of news and discusses how the way they are produced and used characterizes what news is. The news tells stories to provide information about an event.
Media combination, transmediation and media representation - Jørgen Bruhn, Beate Schirrmacher
Discussing the media combination means being interested in the combination and integration of media types in particular media products of qualified media types. All media transformation relies on two interrelated aspects: transmediation and media representation. The analysis of transmediation investigates the interplay between medium specificity and transmediality, asking how transmedial concepts and structures of a source media product are reconstructed in the target media products in a media-specific way. Media representation is sometimes discussed as an intermedial reference. By representing other media, media products almost by necessity draw on the history and content connected with the represented media. A literary text which focuses on visual and aural perception and frequently changes point of view is perceived as having filmic traits. A film can be analysed as transmediation if we analyse the adaptation process that turns a novel into film.
Intermedial combinations - Mats Arvidson, Mikael Askander, Lea Wierød Borčak, Signe Kjær Jensen, Nafiseh Mousavi
Media combinations of different basic media types are always, literally, intermedial combinations that involve intermedial relations between different forms of communication. This chapter looks at how words and images on pages convey a graphic narrative in comics. In the specific case of comics, scholars have attempted to categorize different types of interaction between words and images, which create different added values in the process of meaning-making. The chapter presents a few key terms and functions of sound effects, which are then put to use in an analysis of a brief segment from the animated film My Neighbor Totoro. It highlights four types of functions that sound and music have for the narrative structure in the specific radio drama The Unforgiven: sound as a visual marker, words and sound in combination, the use of diegetic and non-diegetic music and verbal descriptions of sound in combination with sound.
Transmediation - Jørgen Bruhn, Anna Gutowska, Emma Tornborg, Martin Knust
This chapter explores transmediation between qualified media types. It discusses the adaptation of a literary canonical work, Joe Wright’s 2005 novel-to-film adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice a novel that repeatedly has been adapted into new contexts and audiences. The qualified medium of opera implies certain conventions but also certain limitations of space, time and voice. The natural venue for experiencing an opera is the stage. An experienced opera or musical librettist will consider where to put such music highlights when writing the text. Both drama text and opera score are a set of directions fixed in a script but resulting in different kinds of performances. It has been our aim to demonstrate in specific analysis the very abstract idea that all media transformation is interplay or a negotiation between transmediality and medium specificity.
Media representation - Jørgen Bruhn, Liviu Lutas, Niklas Salmose, Beate Schirrmacher
The effect of structural media representation is to give the impression that the literary text imitates film, music or images. This chapter provides some examples of how structural principles of painting and photographs can be represented in Biblique des derniers gestes by the Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau. It focuses on approaches to diegetic media representation in literature and film as well as the structural media representation of film and music in literature. The characteristics of cinematic writing are a focus on audiovisual perception, sudden changes in perspective and a narrative point of view that refrains from evaluation and causal connection. Structural representation of cinematic characteristics links the reader effectively to the experience of the victim through the use of frequently changed perspectives and auditory perception and the cinematic handling of space and time, such as the effective use of montage. Representation of musical structures in literature relies on previous knowledge of conventions and contexts of the music referred to.
Introduction to Part III - Jørgen Bruhn, Beate Schirrmacher
This introduction provides an overview of the concepts discussed in Part 3 of this book. The part demonstrates in different ways how intermedial analysis can be used to understand the combinations and transformations of all kinds of media types. It takes a closer intermedial look at the workings of social media and of computer games. The part presents an intermedial approach to performance that can combine the focus on the body from performance studies with an intermedial analysis of media types. It utilizes the spatiotemporal modality as a lens to describe the interaction of different kinds of spaces and bodies in theatre and performance. The part explores several transmedial storyworlds in popular culture. It shows that understanding the social challenges of communication needs an intermedial approach and a transmedial perspective.
The intermediality of performance - Per Bäckström, Heidrun Führer, Beate Schirrmacher
This chapter looks at how different kinds of bodies and objects interact in a performance and at how the presence and emergence of an event interact with mediation and transmediation. Our intermedial approach allows us to explore the entanglement of presence and representation, of performance and media products, of performativity and intermediality. Through a combination of the perspectives of performance studies and intermedial studies, we have achieved a richer analysis, which focuses on the performer’s body as a medium and the presence it establishes. The chapter analyses the intermedial interaction between the body and different media in several different poetry performances. It highlights the importance of performative key concepts such as presence, process and entanglement in all kinds of intermedial relations by exploring performance as a qualified medium. The specific atmosphere of a live performance affects the communication between the players and the spectators of which some groups so actively participate in the performance.
Truthfulness and truth claims as transmedial phenomena - Jørgen Bruhn, Niklas Salmose, Beate Schirrmacher, Emma Tornborg
This chapter explores different relations of truthfulness and discusses the truth claims of the different qualified media types. Truthfulness is a transmedial notion and when we speak of truth in different contexts, we refer to different kinds of knowledge. Truth, facts and authenticity are often used in everyday discourse as part of apparently clear-cut binaries like truth–lie, authentic–fake, fact–fiction. The truth claims of media can be employed in communication to produce a perception of truthfulness. As media products can be truthful both in relation to external perception or inner experience, another way to look at truth claims is to divide them into objective and subjective truth claims. The chapter discusses how different forms of disinformation draw on the truth claims of news media and construct a perception of truthfulness that is based more on internal coherence than on events that actually have taken place.
Media modalities of theatrical space - Heidrun Führer, Janneke Schoene
This chapter focuses on ‘theatre’ in its plural forms and its intermedial modalities. It aims to link concepts stemming from ancient philosophy and post-dramatic theatre with modern intermedial theory. The interaction of space with the material and the technological modalities also makes surprising sound effects possible. In general, theatre grants or attributes agency to both humans and non-human things taking place in between the architectural construction, the stage technology, the staged performance and the interaction with the audience. The understanding of Ancient Greek theatre and theatre in general, has been much informed by the first theoretical treatise describing and analysing the praxis of different ancient performances, namely the Poetics by Aristotle. When post-dramatic theatre gives up the unifying spatiotemporal arrangement of the proscenium theatre, it explores the medial character of the body and the performative agency of the material and spatiotemporal modalitiy of the performance differently.
Transmedial storyworlds - Mikael Askander, Anna Gutowska, Péter Kristóf Makai
Sherlock Holmes has travelled across media borders extensively: from technical to technical medium, from basic to basic medium, and from qualified to qualified medium. Through the decades, Sherlock Holmes appeared in many different forms of storytelling and media constellations, so we can analyse the character in terms of transmediality. This chapter discusses one such example: Penny Dreadful, which originated in 2014 as a television series created by the acclaimed Hollywood screenwriter John Logan. The very same processes of worldmaking that have made Welcome to Night Vale successful have enabled the creation of the transmedial worlds of the Sherlock Holmes universe and the transfiction Penny Dreadful. Following Marie-Laure Ryan’s analysis of transmedia, Jan-Noel Thon also notes that transmedial storyworlds can be varying mixtures of canonical media products and fan-produced material. In terms of media modalities, a contemporary audio drama that mimics a community radio broadcast uses a single sensory modality: all information reaches the listeners through the ear.
Intermediality and social media - Signe Kjær Jensen, Nafiseh Mousavi, Emma Tornborg
This chapter provides examples of basic analyses of macro and micro levels of intermediality in social media: YouTube entertainment, an example of a multi-layered social media practice, and GIFs, which derive from other media and migrate across different platforms on the internet. Apart from media combination and integration, even the two aspects of media transformation, transmediation and representation, are also persistent intermedial processes in social media practice as content creation. Social media entertainment stages the body, voice and personality, or persona, of a content creator outside the traditional media and acknowledges, or even addresses, the social community directly. In the authenticity discourse of social media entertainment, YouTubers pose themselves as an alternative to traditional media. The chapter looks at the Let’s Play genre and how the YouTuber PewDiePie engages with the social media entertainment dimensions and with his audiences.
A toolkit for the intermedial analysis of computer games - Péter Kristóf Makai
This chapter presents a series of research steps and sample questions that intermedial scholars will want to pursue to make sense of video games through the lens of their relationship to other media. For simplicity’s sake, we chose to include only single-player games to give prospective intermedial scholars of games a clearer idea of what a basic intermedial analysis of a game might entail. Almost all video games are animated. Whether it is via a sparkling animation of a gemstone or the elaborate motion-captured facial performance of a real actor, the worlds of computer games come alive as a result of the painstaking work of animators. Toonstruck is a graphical adventure game, which is a submedium of the qualified media type we call the video game. One shining example of how computer games adapt the conventions of literature is the textual adventure game 80 Days. 80 Days is an exquisitely crafted piece of playable literature.
Published by:
Routledge
Editor(s):
Jørgen Bruhn, Beate Schirrmacher
Language:
English
"Intermedial Studies" is available in hardcover, softcover and pdf formats*.
*This book is also available for free reading under "Open Access" license.