Introduction & Definitions (Rippl) Flashcards
Medium by Aleida Assmann
Aleida Assmann (1993; 1996) and Horst Wenzel (1995) on ‘medium’:
technical media as well as non-technical ones such as spoken language, writing, painting, the human body, etc.
Medium by Friedrich A. Kittler
Friedrich A. Kittler on ‘medium’
technical channels and acoustic and optic media for transmitting and storing information such as the typewriter, film, television etc. (1986)
In German-speaking literature departments topics such as the ‘materiality of the sign,’ the ‘media of communication’ and the interrelationship between meaning and materiality in literary texts have been going on since the 1980s (Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer 1988).
→ ‘medium’ refers in a very general sense to the material side of the sign, i.e. its carrier (Rippl 2005) – it is that which mediates
4 aspects of the medium
- a semiotic instrument of communication, the prototype being natural oral language
- a media technology (since the development of writing examples of media technologies have included print, film, both kinds of “notebooks”)
- a social system, that is, institutions on which technologies are based, such as schools or TV stations
- media products or offerings such as literature or music that provide the opportunity to study aspects like production, distribution, reception, and processing
Marie-Laure Ryan on ‘medium’ and ‘media
- different media such as oil painting, music, digital photography, and film “are not hollow conduits for the transmission of messages but material supports of information whose materiality, precisely, ‘matters’ for the type of meanings that can be encoded” (2004).
- “a medium is a category that truly makes a difference about what stories can be evoked or told, how they are presented, why they are communicated, and how they are experienced” (2004).
- For Marie-Laure Ryan, different media have different affordances, and their materiality influences how a certain content can be addressed, communicated, and experienced
Ryan distinguishes between at least three different approaches to media
- semiotic approaches such as that of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1984 [1766]) and Werner Wolf (1999, 2002), who have looked into codes and sensory channels that support various (verbal, visual, and musical) media
- material and technological approaches that focus on how the semiotic types are supported by media (2005)
- cultural approaches that are interested in social and cultural aspects of the media as well as in the network of relations among media. (2014)
Mediality
- literary scholars: investigate literature’s role in a cultural field characterized by networks of media and of artistic constellations and questions concerning literature’s ‘mediality,’ i.e. its status as oral, written, printed or hypertextually encoded text
- Mediality is crucial to the understanding of how meaning is produced in literary texts
Intermediality
- intermediality has indeed become “one of the most vital and invigorating developments within the humanities today” (Herzogenrath 2012)
- an umbrella term that refers to the relationships between media
- a central theoretical concept in many disciplines such as literary, cultural and theatre studies as well as art history, musicology, philosophy, sociology, film, media and comics studies – and these disciplines all deal with different intermedial constellations which ask for specific approaches and definitions.
- W.J.T. Mitchell: there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ medium – “all arts are ‘composite’ arts (both text and image); all media are mixed media” (1995)
Werner Wolf on “media” and “intermediality”
- Wolf underlined that delimitations of media and the idea of medial distinctness are nothing but a convention: “Intermediality can […] be defined as a particular relation […] between conventionally distinct media of […] communication” (1999).
→ While the sister arts paradigm together with the so-called Interart Studies or Comparative Arts dealt with a range of contacts between literature and the ‘high’ arts such as music and painting throughout the twentieth century (2005), basically contending that the different arts are alike and function according to the same rules, Werner Wolf points out that intermediality studies are, firstly, ‘democratic’ since they not only deal with art forms and high-brow cultural products exclusively, but with all kinds of cultural configurations, be it performances, products of popular culture or the new media, and that they are, secondly, interested in the conventional differences between the media and their functions across cultures and through history. - Wolf defines intermediality “as a particular relation […] between conventionally distinct media of […] communication,” highlighting the fact that, while the borders we draw between media are helpful for our critical practices, they nevertheless remain conventional distinctions.
What are the four main intermedial phenomena by Wolf?
- transmediality: describes such transmedial phenomena that are non-specific to individual media (motifs, thematic variation, narrativity) and which appear across a variety of different media
- intermedial transposition: the ‘transfer’ of the content or of formal features from one medium to another, e.g. a film adaptation of a novel
- intermedial relations and references: here the involvement with the other medium may take place explicitly, “whenever two or more media are overtly present in a given semiotic entity” (2005), or covertly, i.e. indirectly (e.g. musicalization of fiction, or ekphrasis, i.e. visualization of fiction/poetry). Mere thematization of another medium is not enough, the term should be reserved for an evocation of certain formal features of another medium)
- multi- or plurimediality: combination of media (ballet, opera, film, comic strips, radio plays)
Irina Rajewsky on intermediality
Intermedial configurations and medial border blurring are not at all novelties, but of course “new aspects and problems have emerged especially with respect to electronic and digital media” which have boosted “different views on medial border-crossings and hybridization” and have led to “a heightened awareness of the materiality and mediality of artistic practices and of cultural practices in general” (Rajewsky 2005)
According to Rajewsky, the term “intermediality” gathers “all phenomena that transgress medial boundaries involving at least two conventionally distinct mediums.” She also proposes three categories of intermediality: Media combination, Medial transposition, Intermedial reference
Intramediality
- phenomena which exist within one medium, i.e. no transgression of boundaries takes place
Intermediality
- hyperonym for all phenomena that transgress medial boundaries involving at least two conventionally distinct mediums
Intermediality as an umbrella term can be subdivided into three categories (Rajewsky)
- combination of media, “Medienkombination”, i.e. a “mediales Zusammenspiel, Medien-Fusion, Multi-, Pluri- oder Polymedialität” (2002); examples: opera, film, theatre etc.
- change of the medium, also called “medial transfer”, “medial transformation” and “medial transposition”, for instance film adaptations of books
- intermedial references, that is the reference within a literary text or piece of music to another medium. Examples: musicalization of fiction, visual modes of writing such as ekphrasis (i.e. the verbal description of works of art), etc.
Example for media combination
–Paul Auster And Spencer Ostrander: Bloodbath Nation (2023)
– Rachel Eliza Griffiths: Seeing The Body (2020)
– Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch” (2013)
Example for change of the medium / medial transfer / medial transformation / medial transposition
– Great Gatsby (book to movie)
– Games of Thrones (books to series)
– Star Wars (movie to graphic novels)
What are some examples for ‘intermedial references’ (Rajewsky)?
–Henri Matisse’s Still Life with Books and a Candle (1890)
– Albert Anker’s Die Lesende (1883)
–Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
–Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927)
What are some examples for ‘intermedial transposition’ (Rajewsky) specifically from painting to literature and vice versa?
–The Abduction of Europa (1632) by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE)
–Ophelia (1851–52) by Sir John Everett Millais, based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet (ca. 1599)
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: “Laocoön, or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry” (1766)
- “I reason thus: if it is true that in its imitations painting uses completely different means or signs than does poetry, namely figures and colors in space rather than articulated sounds in time, and if these signs must indisputably bear a suitable relation to the thing signified, the signs existing in space can express only objects whose wholes or parts coexist, while signs that follow one another can only express objects whose wholes and parts are consecutive.”
- “Objects or parts of objects which exist in space are called bodies. Accordingly, bodies with their visible properties are the true subjects of painting. Objects or parts of objects which follow one another are called actions. Accordingly, actions are the true subjects of poetry”
- language follows the rules of arbitrariness, successivity, and time
- images adhere to the laws of simultaneity and space
Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione” (1877)
“[…] each art may be observed to pass into the condition of some other art, by what German critics term as Anders-streben – a partial alienation from its own limitations, through which the arts are able, not indeed to supply the place to each other, but reciprocally to lend each other new forces” (Pater 1986).
Irving Babbitt: New Laokoon (1910)
- Romantics did not respect medial borders between the arts; consequently, he asked for a new art, a modern art, which would develop a new generic and medial purity and accept the uniqueness of the different arts
- American art critic Clement Greenberg: “Towards a Newer Laocoon” (1940)
“Purity in art consists in the acceptance, willing acceptance, of the limitations of the medium of the specific art” (1993).
What do Rajewsky and Wolf say about media borders? Do they exist? Is there such a thing as media purism? Or are all media ‘mixed media’ as Mitchell claims?
“Currently, efforts are being made to strengthen common and crossover features […] in intermediality studies […]. Contrary to this tendency, I have advanced the thesis that medial differences and the notion of media borders play a crucial and extremely productive role in the context of intermedial practices. […] it is precisely the concept of the border which can be strengthened” (Rajewsky 2010)
What is the paragone?
Comparison/debate of two mediums (traditionally painting and sculpture, but also painting and literature)
When was the term intermediality first introduced and by whom?
Aage Hansen-Löve introduced the German term ‘Intermedialität’ in an article in 1983.
What two art forms are considered ‘sister arts’? And when were they first coined as such?
Poetry and painting are considered ‘sister arts’, first referred to as such in the Renaissance
Give an example for Typographical Experiments and Pattern/Figure Poems, also called ‘technopaignia’
- George Herbert’s “Easter Wings” (1633)
- John Hollander “Swan and Shadow” (1969)
- Jonathan Safran Foer “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” (2005)
Give an example for Co-presence of Word and Image
word and image are simultaneously present in a work, but as separate parts
* Emblems –> Scripta Manent (1586)
* Illustrated texts –> Charles Dickens “Oliver Twist”
* Texts with photographs –> Teju Cole “Everyday is for the Thief” (2007/2014)
* Graphic novels –> Neil Gaiman “Sandman Series” (1989-1992) & Paul Karasik’s and David Mazzucchelli’s graphic novel-adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass (2004)
Define Ekphrasis
James A. W. Heffernan’s widely accepted definition has to suffice: ekphrasis is “the verbal representation of visual representation.” Ekphrasis is an intermedial reference.
What is hypertext according to George Landow?
“text composed of blocks of words (or images) linked electronically by multiple paths, chains, or trails in an open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality described by the terms link, node, network, web, and path”
What is hyperfiction?
(quasi-)interactive features which persistently question and challenge traditional notions of “text”, “author” and “reader”.
Explain media combination (Rajewski)
occurs when two or more media are explicitly combined within a single work. This combination creates a multi-medial product, where the different media coexist and function together in an integrated manner –> E.g. opera, theatre
Explain media transposition (change of media) (Rajewski)
refers to the process by which a work is transferred from one medium to another, resulting in a new work that adapts and reinterprets the content and characteristics of the original –> e.g. film adaptations of books
Explain intermedial references (Rajewski)
refers to the way one medium evokes, imitates, or alludes to another medium without directly incorporating it. Unlike media combinations, where multiple media coexist within a single work, intermedial reference remains confined to one medium but establishes a connection to another through suggestion or imitation
–> e.g. ekphrasis or musicalization of fiction
