How to Remediate; or, Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’sFour Saints in Three Acts

Abstract

In this article, I explore the art form of opera as a process of remediation, a particular type of intermediality in which one medium is represented in another. Focusing on the visual domain, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin argue that remediation dominates digital media today. The Stein–Thomson collaboration is a fascinating precursor not only because of the writer’s and composer’s shared attentiveness to experimentation within and across media but also because of their mutual interest in complicating presumptions about aurality. By investigating Four Saints in Three Acts as remediation, we learn how the media of language (visual, oral, and aural) and sound (musical and performed live) participate in intermedial negotiations – and how, when media are combined for and in performance, they act on each other.