Abstract
The Power of the In-Between: Intermediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis and Critical Reflection gathers fourteen individual case studies where intermedial issues—issues concerning that which takes place in between media—are explored in relation to a range of different cultural objects and contexts, different methodological approaches, and different disciplinary perspectives. The cases investigate the intermediality of such manifold objects and phenomena as contemporary installation art, twentieth-century geography books, renaissance sculpture, media theory, and public architecture of the 1970s. They also bring together scholars from the disciplines of art history, comparative literature, theatre studies, musicology, and the history of ideas.Starting out from an inclusive understanding of intermediality as “relations between media conventionally perceived as different,” each author specifies and investigates “intermediality” in their own particular case; that is, each examines how it is inflected by particular objects, methods, and research questions. “Intermediality” thus serves both as a concept employed to cover an inclusive range of cultural objects, cultural contexts, methodological approaches, and so on, and as a concept to be modelled out by the particular cases it is brought to bear on. Rather than merely applying a predefined concept, the objectives are experimental. The authors explore the concept of intermediality as a malleable tool of research.This volume further makes a point of transgressing the divide between media history and semiotically and/or aesthetically oriented intermedial studies. The former concerns the specificity of media technologies and media interrelations in socially, politically, and epistemologically defined space and time, and the latter targets formal considerations of media objects and its various meaning-making elements. These two conventionally separated fields of research are integrated in order to produce a richer understanding of the analytical and historical, as well as the aesthetic and technological, conditions and possibilities of intermedial phenomena.
Highlights
Christer Johansson and Sonya PeterssonIn the present volume, intermediality is inclusively defined as relations between media conventionally perceived as different
It is in order to better understand and describe Calle’s apparently exorbitant display of the uttermost, private experience—that at the same time, metonymically, represents each and every human being’s unavoidable death—that we suggest the application of a combination of intermediality and media theory with the concept of Bakhtin’s aesthetic object
As we were well aware of before we began thinking about this work, the aesthetic object exceeds the limits inherent in any structured analytical framework. We find this Bakhtinian intermedial framework apt to include the subjective experience of art as the core of aesthetic meaning production, as well as permitting us to understand some of the formal intermedial aspects at play in the work
Summary
One of the most intriguing questions concerning musical modernism is why Arnold Schoenberg in 1907 turned to Stefan George (or, perhaps, George’s poetry chose Schoenberg) in his urge to free himself from the restrictions of tonality. In “Ich löse mich in tönen...”: Zur Intermedialität bei Stefan George und der Zweiten Wiener Schule, Calvin Scott tries to free the conception of intermediality from both its background in literary studies and the visual dominance in much writing in the field. Since, according to Scott, language is characterized by having a reference to the outer world whereas music is self-referential, the intermedial relation between language and music is restricted to those formal arrangements that are supposed to exclude meaning Forms such as metrical schemes and specific poetic forms (sonnet, ottava rima, etc.), as well as rhythmical figurations and melodic phrasing can be mirrored in the different media. Von dem Zittern der Libellen in Gewittern, und der Lichter, deren Flimmer wandelbar.”
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