Abstract
In the first, and longest, part of this chapter I offer an introduction to the field of intermediality studies, as well as major concepts in the field such as the concepts of medium/media and mediality/medialities; basic, technical, and qualified artistic medialities; and media combination and media transformation. Furthermore, I describe some of the crucial terms necessary for conducting a mediality analysis of narrative literature. I even delimit my study toward other media-sensitive approaches to literatur.
In the second and shorter part of the chapter, I refer to basic analytical ideas behind my interpretation of literary texts (the use of case studies, the question of medialities as motif, and other questions), and finally describe my three-step model of mediality analysis, consisting of a register, a suggested structure, and a contextualization.
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Notes
- 1.
As specified by Nina Møller Andersen (private correspondence), “Heteroglossia is a term made up by the translators Holquist and Emerson on the background of two (or three) Russian terms (Bakhtin 1981) connected to three different language levels […]: the linguistic level (raznoiazychie), the pragmatic level (speech act level) (raznorechie) and the level of voice, positioning and ideology (raznogolositsa).”
- 2.
For a thorough discussion of the communicative basis of intermedial studies (or the intermedial basis of communication), see the productive perspectives discussed by Lars Elleström in his unpublished manuscript A Medium-Centred Model of Communication, with numerous references.
- 3.
Quoted in and translated by Clüver 2007, 30f.
- 4.
- 5.
As a recent example of a multimodal approach (focused on literacy), I here refer to Maagerø and Seip Tønnessen (2014, 41).
- 6.
- 7.
Discussed, for instance, in Hayles and Pressman (2013).
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
Derrida’s consistent denial that “deconstruction” should be regarded as a method is another example, and so is, more recently, Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht’s attempt to deprive interpretation from being the only epistemological goal of the humanities in his influential Production of Presence (2004). There are, perhaps, two recent, and partly related, approaches to literary criticism that are more methodologically than theoretically inclined (if this crude dichotomy can be permitted for a moment). Franco Moretti’s (2013) idea about “distant reading” as opposed to the conventional close reading is one strong position in contemporary thinking about the possibilities of comparative literature. Related to this are aspects of so-called Digital Humanities, in particular when it comes to Digital Humanities’ attempts to mine data from large cultural archives in a kind of “digital-distant” reading.
- 11.
See Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, wherein she quotes Panofsky’s discussion of a “circulus methodicus” (182).
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Bruhn, J. (2016). What is Mediality, and (How) does it Matter? Theoretical Terms and Methodology. In: The Intermediality of Narrative Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57841-9_2
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