MC: Gabriele Rippl: Intermediality and Literature

Masterclass with Prof. Dr. Gabriele Rippl

Part I:

G. Rippl’s talk and discussion (the talk will be English, but the discussion can take place in either English or German)

„Intermediality and Literature: Central Concepts and New Approaches“

Over the last three decades intermediality has become an important field of research in literary and cultural studies. It investigates the relationships between media, thus paying tribute to the fact that media do not exist disconnected from each other. The popularity and increasing importance of intermediality studies and other related fields can be attributed to the fact that in our digital age many works of art, cultural artifacts, literary texts and other cultural configurations either combine and juxtapose different media, genres and styles or refer to other media. Many contemporary Anglo-American as well as Anglophone postcolonial and transcultural literary texts are no exception here: they transgress their own medial boundary – writing – in many creative ways by including pictures and illustrations or by referring to absent (static and moving, analog and digital) pictures, by imitating filmic modes or by mimicking musical structures and themes, thus fostering intermedial relationships and networks.

The talk will first touch upon central concepts developed in intermedial studies and briefly refer to the first generation of intermediality researchers such as I. Rajewsky and W. Wolf. Their theoretical input has shaped the way we understand intermediality today and their typologies of intermedial phenomena – intramediality and intermediality, multi- and plurimediality, intermedial reference and transmediality – help us to chart the huge field of intermedial phenomena. We will then move on to a discussion of new developments, new concepts and approaches in the field of intermediality studies (L. Elleström, W. Hallet, B. Herzogenrath, J. Schröter et al.) and scrutinize the notion of media boundaries on which much intermediality research builds. Against the backdrop of debates about the impact of today’s digital culture on ‘literature’ – the term has undergone a considerable change in meaning and has come to include not only relatively stable literary texts which exist in oral or printed form, but also hypertextually encoded fictions – a few literary examples will be discussed.

Part II:

Presentation and discussion of doctoral projects (English or German)

Preparatory reading (optional, not obligatory):

Irina O. Rajewsky, “Border Talks: The Problematic Status of Media Borders in the Current Debate about Intermediality.” Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality. Ed. Lars Elleström. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 51–68.