Intermediality and the City Text: Towards an Analysis of a “City Picture”

Abstract

This paper attempts to examine a specific type of text, called the “city picture”, by use of intermedial methodology. Firstly, it distinguishes between the “city text” and the “city picture”: the latter is understood as a particular type of urban text, which structural and semantic element is represented in a text, or its fragment, by the image of the city. The urban text is defined as both a system of signs (“the city as text”, in a semiotic perspective) and as a semantically connected group of texts about the city. Then follows an analysis of the main approaches to the intermedial study to identify the tools for further work. The prerequisites for the study of the urban text in the perspective of intermedial approach are the interdisciplinary nature of the urban text and the inclusion of the visual component both in the concept of the “city picture” itself and in the selected texts. On the example of the works Ch. Baudelaire, A. Bertrand, L.-S. Mercier, É. Verhaeren, G. Rodenbach the author tries to analyze different types of intermedial connections that the “city picture” can create. This includes an analysis of the relationships between literature and painting in selected works, then in the illustrated editions, as well as a “reverse” medial transition into the field of visual art. In the end it concludes that the described approach is applicable for the analysis of urban texts.