Handbook

of Intermediality
Handbooks of
English and American Studies
____
Edited by
Martin Middeke, Gabriele Rippl, Hubert Zapf
Advisory Board
Derek Attridge, Elisabeth Bronfen, Ursula K. Heise, Verena Lobsien,
Laura Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, Martin Puchner

Volume 1
ISBN 978-3-11-030836-5
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-031107-5
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039378-1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in
the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available
in the Internet at dnb.dnb.de.
© 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Satz: fidus Publikations-Service GmbH, Nördlingen
www.degruyter.com
Editors’ Preface
This De Gruyter handbook series has been designed to offer students
and researchers a compact means of orientation in their study of
Anglophone literary texts. Each volume – involving a particular
historical or theoretical focus – introduces readers to current concepts
and methodologies, as well as academic debates by combining theory
with text analysis and contextual anchoring. It is this bridging between
abstract survey and concrete analysis which is the central aim and
defining feature of this series, bringing together general literary history
and concrete interpretation, theory and text. At a time when students
of English and American literary studies have to deal with an
overwhelming amount of highly specialized research literature, as well
as cope with the demands of the new BA and MA programs, such a
handbook series is indispensable. Nevertheless, this series is not
exclusively targeted to the needs of BA and MA students, but also
caters to the requirements of scholars who wish to keep up with the
current state of various fields within their discipline.
Individual volumes in the De Gruyter Handbook series will typically
provide:
– knowledge of relevant literary periods, genres, and historical
developments;
– knowledge of representative authors and works of those periods;
– knowledge of cultural and historical contexts;
– knowledge about the adaptation of literary texts through other
media;
– knowledge of relevant literary and cultural theories;
– examples of how historical and theoretical information weaves
fruitfully into interpretations of literary texts.
Internationally renowned colleagues have agreed to collaborate on this
series and take on the editorship of individual volumes. Thanks to the
expertise of the volume editors responsible for the concept and
structure of their volumes, as well as for the selection of suitable
authors, HEAS not only summarizes the current state of knowledge in
the field of Anglophone literary and cultural studies, but also offers
new insights and recent research results on the most current topics,
thus launching new academic debates.
We would like to thank all colleagues collaborating in this project as
well as Dr. Ulrike Krauss at De Gruyter without whose unflagging
support this series would not have taken off.
The first volumes include:
Gabriele Rippl (ed.): Handbook of Intermediality
Hubert Zapf (ed.): Handbook of Ecocritiscm and Cultural Ecology
Julia Straub (ed.): Handbook of Transatlantic North American Studies
Ralf Haekel (ed): Handbook of British Romanticism
Martin Middeke and Monika Pietrzak-Franger (eds.): Handbook of the
English Novel, 1830–1900
Christoph Reinfandt (ed.):Handbook of the English Novel, 1900–2015
Timo Müller (ed.): Handbook of the American Novel, 1900–2015
Martin Middeke
Gabriele Rippl
Hubert Zapf
May 2015
Contents
Gabriele Rippl
0 Introduction
Part I Text and Image

Ekphrasis

James A. W. Heffernan
1 Ekphrasis: Theory

Andrew James Johnston

2 Medieval Ekphrasis: Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale

Margitta Rouse
3 Text-Picture Relationships in the Early Modern
Period

David Kennedy
4 Ekphrasis and Poetry

Sylvia Karastathi
5 Ekphrasis and the Novel/Narrative Fiction

Johanna Hartmann
6 Ekphrasis in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Gabriele Rippl
7 Postcolonial Ekphrasis in the Contemporary
Anglophone Indian Novel

Literature
and Photography

Julia Straub
8 Nineteenth-century Literature and Photography
Astrid Böger
9 Twentieth-century American Literature and
Photography

Danuta Fjellestad
10 Nesting – Braiding – Weaving: Photographic
Interventions in Three Contemporary American
Novels

Jan Baetens
11 The Photographic Novel

Literature and the Moving Image

Laura Marcus
12 Film and Modernist Literature

Barbara Straumann
13 Adaptation – Remediation – Transmediality

Christine Schwanecke
14 Filmic Modes in Literature

Elisabeth Bronfen
15 War Literature into War Film: The Aesthetics of
Violence and the Violence of Aesthetics

Eckart Voigts
16 Literature and Television (after TV)

Literary Visuality and Intermedial Framing

Guido Isekenmeier
17 Literary Visuality: Visibility – Visualisation –
 Description

Renate Brosch
18 Images in Narrative Literature: Cognitive
Experience and Iconic Moments

Michael Meyer
19 Intermedial Framing

Intermedial Narration: Text-Picture

Combinations

Peter Wagner
20 The Nineteenth-century Illustrated Novel

Johanna Hartmann
21 Intermedial Encounters in the Contemporary
North American Novel

Daniel Stein
22 Comics and Graphic Novels

Jan-Noël Thon
23 Narratives across Media and the Outlines of a
Media-conscious Narratology
Part II Music, Sound and Performance

Werner Wolf
24 Literature and Music: Theory

Philipp Schweighauser
25 Literary Acoustics

Erik Redling
26 The Musicalization of Poetry

Birgit Neumann
27 Intermedial Negotiations: Postcolonial Literatures

Claudia Georgi
28 Contemporary British Theatre and Intermediality

Christina Ljungberg
29 Intermediality and Performance Art

Maria Marcsek-Fuchs
30 Literature and Dance: Intermedial Encounters

Britta Neitzel
31 Performing Games: Intermediality and Videogames
Part III Intermedial Methodology and Intersectionalities

Wolfgang Hallet
32 A Methodology of Intermediality in Literary
Studies

Crispin Thurlow
33 Multimodality, Materiality and Everyday
Textualities: The Sensuous Stuff of Status

Wolfgang Hallet
34 Non-verbal Semiotic Modes and Media in the
Multimodal Novel

Endnotes

Index of Subjects

Index of Names

List of Contributors
Gabriele Rippl

0 Introduction

1 Why Intermediality?
This Handbook of Intermediality introduces the vast field of
intermediality research which has been ever-expanding since the
1980s. Paying tribute to the fact that media do not exist disconnected
from each other, the handbook aims at familiarizing its readers with
the diverse – affirmative as well as critical – approaches to theoretical
concepts such as intermediality, multi- and plurimediality, intermedial
reference, transmediality, intermedial methodology and related
concepts such as visual culture, literary visuality, the musicalization of
fiction and poetry, literary acoustics, remediation, adaptation, and
multimodality etc. Generally speaking, the term ‘intermediality’ refers
to the relationships between media and is hence used to describe a
huge range of cultural phenomena which involve more than one
medium. One of the reasons why it is impossible to develop one
definition of intermediality is that it has become a central theoretical
concept in many disciplines such as literary, cultural and theater
studies as well as art history, musicology, philosophy, sociology, film,
media and comics studies – and these disciplines all deal with different
intermedial constellations which ask for specific approaches and
definitions.
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 in a plethora of ways. The
focal nodes of this handbook are intermedial relationships and
networks between Anglo-American as well as Anglophone postcolonial
literary texts and other media. Intermedial literary texts 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. In the face of the sheer
number of Anglophone literary texts which participate in intermedial
interfaces – a few recent examples are Charles Simic’s Dime-Store
Alchemy (1992), David Dabydeen’s Turner (1994), Salman Rushdie’s
The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), John Updike’s Seek My Face (2002) or
Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved (2003) – literary scholars today have
come to accept that media and art forms cannot be analyzed in
isolation and instead have to be discussed against the backdrop of their
medial networks, what Bernd Herzogenrath calls their “arch-
intermediality” (2012, 4). Literature’s role and function must hence be
appraised in a cultural field characterized not only by the competition
and collaboration of different media, but also by medial interfaces. Our
digital age also has an impact on how we think of ‘literature’ today: 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 such as Michael
Joyce’s Afternoon: A Story (1990), Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden
(1991), Simon Biggs’s The Great Wall of China (1996) and Caitlin
Fisher’s hypermedia novella These Waves of Girls (2001), all of which
exist only in an electronic medial form. Hyperfiction’s interactive and
multimedial form reminds us that any concept of a purely verbal art
does not work and invites us to investigate intermedial configurations.
As a central notion in the analysis of the arts, the media and their
border-crossing, the concept of intermediality allows for a reading of
literary texts against the backdrop of their cultural and medial contexts
from systematic and historical perspectives. Taking into account the
network of medial connections and the collaboration of media
throughout history (even if today with digital media these
collaborations and fusions have dramatically increased), scholars of
intermediality investigate how meaning is generated in/by inter-,
multi- and transmedial constellations and cross-medial references.
This task asks for interdisciplinary engagement, which is why any
study of literary texts or other cultural phenomena should be – as
Mieke Bal puts it –
interdisciplinary, at least in its framework of interpretation. […] We live in a world in
which we are surrounded by images but, more crucially, in which images and language
jointly participate in a much wider and more ‘mixed’ cultural life. […] The question of
words and images is not, therefore, a matter of definitions of essences and separation of
practices, but of how people communicate: with one another, with the past, with others.
 (Bal 1999, 169)

The fact that over the last twenty years, literary departments have
fostered teaching in the field of intermediality, and that even centers
for intermediality research have been established to great success – for
instance at the Austrian University of Graz (cf. CIMIG, the Centre for
Intermediality Studies in Graz, which also publishes the successful
book series Word and Music Studies), at the Swedish Linnaeus
University (Forum for Intermediality Studies) and at the Canadian
Universities of Montreal and Quebec (Centre de recherche sur
l’intermédialité, CRI) – proves, together with the steadily growing
International Society for Intermedial Studies (ISIS), that
intermediality has indeed become “one of the most vital and
invigorating developments within the humanities today”
(Herzogenrath 2012, 2).

2 Historical Perspectives: Sister Arts to

Intermediality
Literary texts have always had close ties with music and images: While
poetry, due to its rhythmic qualities, has a natural link to music and,
due to the arrangement of its lines, can show iconic qualities, narrative
literary texts, too, may foster close relationships with other media and
art forms, e.g. through formal and stylistic imitation of musical genres
and styles (cf. e.g. Wolf 1999; Balestrini 2005; Redling forthcoming;
26 The Musicalization of Poetry). Steven Paul Scher has presented a
triadic distinction between ‘literature in music,’ ‘music and literature’
and ‘music in literature’ (Scher 1968; 24 Literature and Music:
Theory), long before intermediality studies emerged. The investigation
of text-music relationships is a vibrant one; however, to date more
research has been undertaken on text-image relationships, which is
probably due to the fact that for a long time visuality has been taken as
modernity’s signature, while more recently the field of literary
acoustics has proven that this is not necessarily the case ( 25 Literary
Acoustics; Schweighauser 2006).
In intermedial studies, relationships between words and images in
particular have become a central field of investigation, which is
reflected in the space dedicated to the topic in this handbook. There is
a plethora of text-image interactions to be found in Anglophone
literary texts which fall into at least three major categories (cf. Pfister
1993): (a) the inclusion of images such as cover pictures and
frontispieces, miniature paintings in medieval texts or illustrations
such as the woodcuts in Virginia Woolf’s short story “Kew Gardens”
(1919); there are also genres based on text-picture combination such as
the popular early modern emblem or postmodern graphic narratives
like Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli’s adaptation of Paul Auster’s
City of Glass (2004); (b) typographical experiments, where text and
image are simultaneously present and actually form a unit; this is the
case in so-called figure poems or technopaignia, a genre which dates
back to antiquity but has been successful throughout literary history
(one famous seventeenth-century example is George Herbert’s
metaphysical poem “Easter-Wings,” and a later example of
typographical experimentation is Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close published in 2005); and (c)
ekphrasis, i.e. the description of paintings, drawings, photographs and
sculptures in texts (cf. Rippl 2005, 2012, 2014).
In accordance with W. J. T. Mitchell, who claims that there is no
such thing as a ‘pure’ medium – “all arts are ‘composite’ arts (both text
and image); all media are mixed media” (1995, 94–95) – this
handbook’s premise is the insight that all media and art forms are
interconnected and that intermedial qualities always inhere in cultural
phenomena. Referring back to Gilles Deleuze, Bernd Herzogenrath
states that “rhizomatic intermedia[lity] is the quasi-ontological plane
underlying all media, out of which the specific media that we know
percolate […] there is one intermedia[lity] that comes first, which is
the quicksand out of which specific media emerge, and a second
intermedia[lity] that focuses on the various interconnections possible,
from the very perspective of these specific media forms.”
(Herzogenrath 2012, 3) To speak of specific media forms does not
imply that ‘medium’ is understood in an essentializing way, but rather
underlines the fact that when we speak of individual media we refer to
conventional conceptualizations, material restrictions, and affordances
of individual media. Already in 1999, Wolf underscored that
delimitations of media and the idea of medial distinctness are nothing
but a convention: “Intermediality can […] be defined as a particular
relation (a relation that is ‘intermedial’ in the narrow sense [cf. 3.2])
between conventionally distinct media of […] communication” (Wolf
1999, 37). Not only questions concerning the specific material qualities
of words, images, sound and music, but also investigations into their
interfaces, the ways different media interact with one another and the
role they have in the communication processes of postmodern societies
have transformed literary studies into a more interdisciplinary field.
It is important to note, however, that questions of intermediality and
the relationship between art forms are not wedded to modernity. In
fact, they reach back to the time of ancient Greece and Rome (cf. Webb
2009) when structural similarities between text and image as well as
functional analogies were foregrounded. In his Ars poetica, Horace
(65–8 BCE) referred to an influential formula ascribed to Simonides of
Ceos (late 6th century BCE), ut pictura poesis, which has been
translated: ‘as in painting so in poetry.’ This formula was still
influential in the Renaissance, when painting and poetry were first
referred to as sister arts (cf. Hagstrum 1958). However, the term sister
arts hides the fact that the different art forms were increasingly
understood as competitive ones: Clearly, the story of medial
purification and the idea of separating the arts arose in the
Renaissance, when Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and others engaged
in the paragone, the competition between the arts, by lifting the visual
arts from their status as crafts to independent art forms which surpass
poetry (cf. Rippl 2005b; Klarer 2001). In the eighteenth century,
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing compared the artistic media painting and
poetry, examining their strengths and limitations. In his essay
Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1984 [1766])
Lessing attempted to differentiate between words and pictures on a
semiotic and medial basis. He separated the two sign systems as two
radically different and independent modes of representation. Whereas
language follows the rules of arbitrariness, successivity and time,
images adhere to the laws of simultaneity and space. While Lessing’s
essay was widely read and accepted at the time, the succeeding
generation of Romantics began to blur Lessing’s neat line of
demarcation between the two arts. The late Romantic writer Walter
Pater, for instance, stated in his essay on “The School of Giorgione”
(1877) that
although each art has thus its own specific order of impressions, and an untranslatable
 charm, while a just apprehension of the ultimate differences of the arts is the beginning of
aesthetic criticism; yet it is noticeable that, in its special mode of handling its given
material, each art may be observed to pass into the condition of some other art, by what
German critics term as Anders-streben – a partial alienation from its own limitations,
through which the arts are able, not indeed to supply the place to each other, but
reciprocally to lend each other new forces. (Pater 1986, 85)

While Pater is positive about the arts’ Anders-streben, in his New

Laokoon (1910) Irving Babbitt accused Romantic writers of
‘eleutheromania,’ i.e. of not respecting medial borderlines between the
arts, and thereby distorting and perverting them; consequently, he
asked for a new art, a modern art, which would develop a new generic
and medial purity and accept the uniqueness of the different arts. In
the same vein, in his 1940 essay “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” leading
American art critic Clement Greenberg insists on the specificities and
unique nature of individual media and rejects hybrid forms. According
to him, discussions about the purity and boundaries of media help to
stop the confusion of the arts: “Purity in art consists in the acceptance,
willing acceptance, of the limitations of the medium of the specific art.”
(Greenberg 1993, 32) When we turn to see how modernist writers
addressed the question of mediality, Ezra Pound is an interesting
figure. In his essay “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” (1911–1912), Pound
elaborates on the medial differences between the arts:
The reasons why good description makes bad poetry, and why painters who insist on
painting ideas instead of pictures offend so many, are not far to seek.

I am in sympathy equally with those who insist that there is one

art and many media, and with those who cry out against the
describing of work in any particular art by a terminology borrowed
from all the others. This manner of description is objectionable,
because it is, in most cases, a make-shift, a laziness. We talk of the
odour of music and the timbre of a painting because we think we
suggest what we mean and are too lazy to understand the analysis
necessary to find out exactly what we do mean. There is, perhaps,
one art, but any given subject belongs to the artist, who must
know that subject most intimately before he can express it through
his particular medium.
Thus, it is bad poetry to talk much of the colours of the sunrise
[…] in the matter of the actual colour he [the poet, GR] is a
bungler. The painter sees, or should see, half a hundred hues and
varieties, where we see ten; or, granting we are ourselves skilled
 with the brush, how many hundred colours are there, where
language has but a dozen crude names? Even if the poet
understands the subtleties of gradation and juxtaposition, his
medium refuses to convey them. […]
I express myself clumsily, but this much remains with me as
certain: that any given work of art is bad when its content could
have found more explicit and precise expression through some
other medium, which the artist was, perhaps, too slothful to
master. (Pound 1973, 36–37)
Although Pound’s poems are saturated with spatial and iconic
strategies, he seems to accept medial boundaries and to have a clear
understanding of the problems a metaphoric use of ‘painterly’
language in connection with poetry and music can trigger:
We go to a particular art for something which we cannot get in any other art. If we want
form and colour we go to a painting, or we make a painting. If we want form without
colour and in two dimensions, we want drawing or etching. If we want form in three
dimensions, we want sculpture. If we want an image or a procession of images, we want
poetry. If we want pure sound, we want music. […] A painting is an arrangement of colour
patches on a canvas, or on some other substance. (Pound 1980, 6)

Lessing, Pater, Babbitt, Greenberg and Pound all present examples of

the different ways of defining the relationship between art forms and
media. But no matter how such a relationship is conceived, words have
always been measured against images and music and vice versa. This
attests to the flexible and ever-changing positions and borders of art
forms and media within the medial networks. To be informed of these
very different eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century voices
helps us to understand the new insights intermediality studies has to
offer. While the sister arts paradigm, together with the so-called
Interart Studies or Comparative Arts, dealt with a range of contacts
between literature and the ‘high arts’ such as music and painting
throughout the twentieth century (Wolf 2005, 252), basically
contending that the different arts are alike and function according to
the same rules, intermediality studies are more ‘democratic’ since they
not only deal with art forms and high brow cultural products
exclusively, but with all kinds of cultural configurations, be they
performances, products of popular culture or the new media. What has
also become clear is that intermedial configurations and medial border
blurring are not at all novelties, but of course “new aspects and
problems have emerged especially with respect to electronic and digital
media” which have boosted “different views on medial border-
crossings and hybridization” and have led to “a heightened awareness
of the materiality and mediality of artistic practices and of cultural
practices in general” (Rajewsky 2005, 44). The diverging views on
medial border-crossings and hybridization are reflected in the many
different terms and concepts that describe intermedial phenomena
such as multi- and plurimediality, medial border-crossing,
transmediality, remediation, media-fusion, hybridization and
multimodality. In what follows, a range of theories and concepts will
be discussed.

3. Theories and Concepts

3.1 Medium
Intermediality is a semantically contested, inconsistent term whose
various definitions refer to a general problem centered around the
term ‘medium,’ which itself has accumulated a wide range of
competing definitions (cf. Rippl 2012 for a more detailed discussion of
different concepts of ‘medium’ and ‘mediality’; cf. also Jäger, Linz, and
Schneider 2010). Clearly, media allow for the production, distribution
and reception of signs, hence they enable communication, but in spite
of the many definitions on offer, there is not one definition of ‘medium’
which scholars working in the field of literary, cultural and media
studies would agree on. Etymologically, the term ‘medius’ in Latin
means ‘middle’ and ‘intermediate,’ ‘Vermittler’ in German. It entered
the English language around 1930 to designate channels of
communication; however, since then, it has become a highly
ambiguous term. In the plural form, “media,” it is often equated with
mass and popular culture:
Ask a sociologist or cultural critic to enumerate media, and he will answer: TV, radio,
cinema, the Internet. An art critic may list: music, painting, sculpture, literature, drama,
the opera, photography, architecture. A philosopher of the phenomenological school
would divide media into visual, auditory, verbal, and perhaps gustatory and olfactory (are
cuisine and perfume media?). An artist’s list would begin with clay, bronze, oil,
watercolor, fabrics, and it may end with exotic items used in so-called mixed-media
works, such as grasses, feathers, and beer can tabs. An information theorist or historian of
 writing will think of sound waves, papyrus scrolls, codex books, and silicon chips. ‘New
media’ theorists will argue that computerization has created new media out of old ones:
film-based versus digital photography; celluloid cinema versus movies made with video
cameras; or films created through classical image-capture techniques versus movies
produced through computer manipulations. The computer may also be responsible for the
entirely new medium of virtual reality. (Ryan 2004, 15–16)

This quote demonstrates the wide range of the term ‘mediality’ and its
different uses in various contexts. One influential definition of the
term was given by Marshall McLuhan: Media are in a very general way
a sort of prosthesis, “any extension […] of man” (1964, 3) be it of the
body or the consciousness. Aleida Assmann (1993, 1996) and Horst
Wenzel (1995) also understand ‘medium’ in an encompassing way,
including not only technical media but also non-technical ones such as
spoken language, writing, painting, the human body etc., while
Friedrich A. Kittler, a literary scholar who has worked on the history of
material media and developed a hermeneutics of media technologies,
uses the term ‘medium’ exclusively when talking about technical
channels, and acoustic and optic media for transmitting and storing
information such as the typewriter, film, television etc. (cf. Kittler
1985, 1986). In German-speaking literary departments discussions of
the ‘materiality of the sign,’ the ‘media of communication’ and the
interrelationship between meaning and materiality in literary texts
have been topical since the 1980s (Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer 1988). In
this tradition, ‘medium’ refers in a very general sense to the material
side of the sign, i.e. its carrier (Rippl 2005) – it is that which mediates
– and the focus is on the question of how this material side of the sign
/ semiotic system is involved in the production of narrative meaning.
To talk about mediality means to question the applicability of verbal
models to all cultural manifestations. Whereas semiotics and a post-
Saussurean logo-centrism believe in language as the master discourse
of all media, scholars working with concepts like mediality and
intermediality use interdisciplinary approaches and consider problems
encountered when attempting to apply the rules of language to
pictures and music. In her influential book Philosophy in a New Key
(1942), Susanne Langer summarizes the differences between words
and images by referring to the differences of their medial or material
basis in the following way:
[a]ll language has a form which requires us to string out our ideas even though their
objects rest one within the other; as pieces of clothing that are actually worn one over the
other have to be strung side by side on the clothesline. This property of verbal symbolism
 is known as discursiveness; by reason of it, only thoughts which can be arranged in this
peculiar order can be spoken at all […].

Visual forms – lines, colors, proportions, etc. – are just as

capable of articulation, i.e. of complex combination, as words. But
the laws that govern this sort of articulation are altogether
different from the laws of syntax that govern language. The most
radical difference is that visual forms are not discursive. They do
not present their constituents successively, but simultaneously, so
the relations determining a visual structure are grasped in one act
of vision. Their complexity, consequently, is not limited, as the
complexity of discourse is limited, by what the mind can retain
from the beginning of an apperceptive act to the end of it.
Photography, therefore, has no vocabulary. The same is
obviously true of painting, drawing, etc. There is, of course, a
technique of picturing objects, but the law governing this
technique cannot properly be called a ‘syntax,’ since there are no
items that might be called, metaphorically, the ‘words’ of
portraiture.
Since we have no words, there can be no dictionary of meanings
of lines, shadings, or other elements of pictorial technique. We
may well pick out some line, say a certain curve, in a picture,
which serves to represent one nameable item; but in another place
the same curve would have an entirely different meaning. It has
no fixed meaning apart from its context. (Langer 1942, 81, 93, 95)
Whereas language consists of a certain vocabulary and follows more or
less fixed semantic and syntactical rules, according to Langer this is
not the case with pictures. What would be the equivalents of the
phonological, morphological, syntactical and semantic elements of
language when it comes to pictures? If one talks about the ‘pictorial
text’ or the ‘imagetext’ and the ‘sculptural text’ or ‘sculpture text’ as
semioticians do, what then would be the ‘grammar’ of these ‘texts’?
Structural and cognitive semioticians such as Ferdinand de Saussure
and Louis Hjelmslev have often focused almost exclusively on the
content, the signifié or cognitive side while neglecting the material
signifiant-side. This is why the linguist Ludwig Jäger speaks of a
displacement or repression of the problem of mediality, i.e. the
sensuous side of a sign, in semiotics (1999, 13).
 According to Marie-Laure Ryan, different media such as oil painting,
music, digital photography, and film “are not hollow conduits for the
transmission of messages but material supports of information whose
materiality, precisely, ‘matters’ for the type of meanings that can be
encoded” (Ryan 2004, 1–2). Instead, “a medium is a category that truly
makes a difference about what stories can be evoked or told, how they
are presented, why they are communicated, and how they are
experienced” (2004, 18). Ryan distinguishes between at least three
different approaches to media: (1) semiotic approaches such as that of
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1984 [1766]) and Werner Wolf (1999,
2002), who have looked into codes and sensory channels that support
various (verbal, visual, and musical) media; (2) material and
technological approaches that focus on how the semiotic types are
supported by media (Ryan 2005, 15); and (3) cultural approaches that
are interested in social and cultural aspects of the media as well as in
the network of relations among media. While many scholars in media
theory today disregard semiotic categories when discussing media and
prefer to call them ‘modes’ and a combination of modes ‘multimodal’
(cf. 3.4), Ryan points out that semiotically based media such as music
and two-dimensional images cannot be ignored and that ‘modes of
signification’ play a major role in distinguishing media from each
other. There is no way to build a media system without taking semiotic
criteria into consideration and, moreover, “‘mode’ is as difficult to
define as medium is” (2014, 28). Like Ryan, Werner Wolf (2011) has
argued for a flexible concept of medium. He accounts for the material
effects of a medium and “thus mediates between the positions of media
determinism and media relativism” (Fludernik and Olson 2011, 16).
To solve some of the terminological dilemmas of the term ‘medium,’
Harry Pross also argues for a more systematic approach to media by
subdividing three different types of media according to their degree of
technological saturation: (1) ‘primary media’ such as the human voice,
body language etc., with no technology involved; (2) ‘secondary media’
such as a flute (here technology is needed for the production of sound,
but not for its reception, cf. Pross 1996, 36); and (3) ‘tertiary media’
such as analog television, radio, cinema and television (technology is
needed for production and reception, cf. Pross 1972). A fourth
category, “quaternary media” (i.e. media which require digital
technology such as computer, multi-media, e-mail, WWW), has been
added by Werner Faulstich (2002, 25). Siegfried J. Schmidt, too,
developed a typology which helps to chart a diffuse field. He has
argued that media systems consist of four components: (1) a semiotic
instrument of communication, the prototype being natural oral
language; (2) a media technology (since the development of writing
examples of media technologies have included print, film, both kinds
of “notebooks”); (3) a social system, that is, institutions on which
technologies are based, such as schools or TV stations; and (4) media
products or offerings such as literature or music that provide the
opportunity to study aspects like production, distribution, reception,
and processing (Schmidt 2008). In addition, the entry for “medium” in
Webster’s Ninth Collegiate Dictionary (1991) is enlightening. It
includes two definitions of ‘medium,’ a ‘transmissive’ and a
‘communicative’ one: (1) a channel or system of communication,
information, or entertainment [transmissive definition], and (2)
material or technical means of artistic expression [communicative
definition; communicative media are not simply conduits and hollow
pipes, but also carry out configuring action. Obviously, each medium
has certain constraints and possibilities, i.e. built-in properties, which
shape the message they encode]. Of the two definitions of the term
“medium” given by Webster’s Dictionary listed above, the first one,
medium as channel of communication, has been far more influential in
Anglo-American media studies, where scholars commonly concern
themselves with technologies of mass communication and cultural
institutions developed in the twentieth century. The second definition
of the term medium, material means of expression, has become more
relevant for German media studies from the 1980s onwards as
discussed above (cf. Voigts-Virchow 2005).
This short overview of terminology has demonstrated that the
meaning of the term ‘medium’ is notoriously shifting and ambiguous;
what constitutes a medium depends very much on the scholarly
background and purpose of the investigator. However, it seems that
the narrow use of the term medium, which focuses solely on
technological and sociological aspects and highlights media differences
and specificities, is now passé. It has been replaced by a broad
understanding of the term which triggers an investigation of how
meaning is generated by cross-medial references and allows for a
systematic analysis of inter-, multi- and transmedial constellations.
While for a long time, media scholars investigated individual media,
they now agree that the specific characteristics of media can only be
reconstructed through a comparative analysis of media that takes into
account the history and collaborations of all media, their network of
connections. Likewise, literary scholars also concur that literature’s
role in a cultural field characterized by networks of media and of
artistic constellations has to be investigated and questions concerning
literature’s ‘mediality,’ i.e. its status as verbal or written text, as printed
(cf. Eisenstein 1979; Giesecke 1991) or digitally encoded document (cf.
Landow 1992; Segeberg and Winko 2005), are crucial to the
understanding of how meaning is produced.

3.2 Intermediality – Plurimediality –

Transmediality
After the preceding discussion of the wide range of meaning of the
term ‘medium’ which has accumulated a whole plethora of competing
definitions, it comes as no surprise that intermediality, too, is a
semantically contested, inconsistent term (cf. Mahler 2010) and that
intermediality studies covers an extremely diverse field: praxis-wise
and discourse-wise. Since ‘medium’ etymologically means ‘middle,’
‘intermediate’ and ‘between,’ and since ‘inter’ means ‘between’,
intermediality “can very literally be described as between the between”
(Herzogenrath 2012, 2). In spite of the fact that the term intermediality
is charged with all kinds of problems inherited from the debates
around the term ‘medium,’ some widely accepted definitions of
intermediality as well as typologies of intermedial configurations have
been developed. Since the 1980s the term intermediality has become
strikingly successful in German-speaking academic debates and,
subsequently, gained recognition in various disciplines (cf. Caduff et al.
2006; Todorow 2011). Dick Higgins published a pioneering article
called “Intermedia” in 1966, where he describes the rich
interdisciplinary and intermedial activities that occur between genres
that became prevalent in networks of artists such as Fluxus in the
1960s. Higgins stated that ‘intermedium’ is the “uncharted land that
lies between” (Higgins 1984, 22) different media and that he had come
across the term ‘intermedium’ in Samuel Taylor Coleridge who used it
in a lecture on Edmund Spencer in 1812 to explain functions of
allegory (cf. Friedman 2005, 51; Müller 2009, 31). It was Aage Hansen-
Löve, a scholar of Russian literature, who introduced the German term
“Intermedialität” in a 1983 article. Whereas he applied it to text-
picture relations such as modern Russian pattern poems, where both
media, i.e. writing and pictures, are co-present, today intermediality is
considered an umbrella term which also includes ekphrastic
phenomena, where only one medium, writing, is present. Although
intermediality as a field of research requires interdisciplinary
approaches and collaboration between literary scholars, art historians,
musicologists, film and media scholars, etc., literary scholars initially
tended to understand intermediality as a neglected extension of
intertextuality, which was a central field of research in the 1970s and
1980s. In German-speaking literary and cultural studies, some of the
early influential scholarly publications on intermediality were Eicher
and Bleckmann 1994, Wagner 1996, Wolf 1996, Helbig 1998, and
Griem 1998; in film and media studies Paech 1994, Müller 1996,
Spielmann 1998; and in communication theory Luhmann 1995. Today
intermediality research is also increasingly recognized internationally.
Major theoreticians of intermediality like Werner Wolf and Irina O.
Rajewsky have presented definitions and typologies which help to
differentiate a wide range of intermedial phenomena. As Rajewsky
points out, “researchers have begun to formally specify their particular
conception of intermediality through such epithets as transformational
[Spielmann 1998], discursive, synthetic, formal, transmedial,
ontological [Schröter 1998], or genealogical intermediality [Gaudreault
and Marion 2002], primary and secondary intermediality [Leschke
2003], or so-called intermedial figuration [Paech 2002]” (Rajewsky
2005, 44–45 fn. 4). For Rajewsky, intermediality is an umbrella-term
and hypernym for all kinds of phenomena that take place between
media:
– “intermedial” designates those configurations which have to do
with a crossing of borders between media;
– “intramedial” phenomena do not involve a transgression of medial
boundaries;
– “transmedial” phenomena are, for instance, the appearance of a
certain motif or style across a variety of different media.
Intermedial phenomena can be studied from a synchronic research
perspective, which allows scholars to develop typologies of specific
forms of intermediality, and a diachronic perspective, which
investigates the history of the media and their intersections and
collaborations. According to Rajewsky, the current debate reveals two
basic understandings of intermediality: “a broader and a narrower one,
which are not in themselves homogeneous. The first concentrates on
intermediality as a fundamental condition or category while the
second approaches intermediality as a critical category for the
concrete analysis of specific individual media products or
configurations” (Rajewsky 2005, 47). Rajewsky’s literary conception of
intermediality in the latter and more narrow sense encompasses three
subcategories, but single medial configurations will also match more
than just one of the three subcategories:
– Firstly, media combination (also called multi-media, pluri-media as
well as mixed media); the examples she gives are opera, film,
theater, performances, illuminated manuscripts, comics, computer
installations etc. In this subcategory, intermediality is “a
communicative-semiotic concept, based on the combination of at
least two medial forms of articulation” (Rajewsky 2005, 52).
– Secondly, medial transposition, including, for example, film
adaptations, novelizations etc. This category is production-
oriented, the intermedial quality “has to do with the way in which a
media product comes into being, i.e., with the transformation of a
given media product (a text, a film, etc.) or of its substratum into
another medium” (Rajewsky 2005, 51).
– Thirdly, intermedial references (Rajewsky 2005, 52), for instance
references in a literary text to a piece of music (the so-called
‘musicalization of fiction’), the imitation and evocation of filmic
techniques such as dissolves, zoom shots, montage editing etc.;
descriptive modes in literature which evoke visual effects or refer to
specific visual works of art (‘ekphrasis’). Intermedial references
contribute to the overall signification, like the first category, they
are of a communicative-semiotic nature, but they involve “by
definition just one medium” (Rajewsky 2005, 53). It is important to
note that the mere mention of another medium or medium-product
does not justify the label intermedial, but only such media-products
 which evoke or imitate formal and structural features of another
medium through the use of their own media-specific means (the “as
if” character and illusion-forming quality of intermedial references;
they create the illusion of another medium’s specific practices;
Rajewsky 2005, 54–55).
In addition to Rajewsky, Wolf is a literary scholar and narratologist
who has published widely on intermediality. Intermediality applies in
its broadest sense to any transgression of boundaries between
conventionally and culturally distinct media and thus is concerned
with ‘heteromedial’ relations between different semiotic complexes
and how they communicate cultural content. Media in this sense are
specified principally by the nature of their underlying semiotic
systems, i.e. verbal language, pictorial signs, music, etc., or in cases of
‘composite media’ such as film, a combination of several semiotic
systems; their technical or institutional channels are merely secondary.
There are four main intermedial phenomena (Wolf 2005, 253–255):
– “transmediality” (an extracompositional variant), which describes
such transmedial phenomena that are non-specific to individual
media (motifs, thematic variation, narrativity) and which appear
across a variety of different media;
– “intermedial transposition” (an extracompositional variant), the
‘transfer’ of the content or of formal features from one medium to
another, e.g. a film adaptation of a novel;
– “intermedial relations / references” (an intracompositional
variant), where the involvement with the other medium may take
place explicitly, “whenever two or more media are overtly present
in a given semiotic entity” (Wolf 2005, 254), or covertly, i.e.
indirectly (e.g. musicalization of fiction, or ekphrasis, i.e.
visualization of fiction/poetry). Mere thematization of another
medium is not enough, the term should be reserved for an
evocation of certain formal features of another medium;
– “multi- or plurimediality” (an intracompositional variant), or
combination of media (ballet, opera, film, comic strips, radio plays)
(Wolf 2005, 253–255).
Obviously, the typologies developed by Rajewsky and Wolf ( 24
Literature and Music: Theory) are similar attempts at charting the vast
field of intermedial relations. Discussions of examples for each of their
categories can be found in the three parts of this handbook. As in all
classifications there are borderline cases hard to classify, and multiple
labeling of one and the same phenomenon is sometimes necessary.
This is why Rajewsky as well as Wolf point out the heuristic value of
their typologies and underline the importance of analyzing individual
intermedial constellations.
Jens Schröter (2012), a media scholar, also suggests a typology, but
his typology is one of (at least) four types of discourse on
intermediality. He does not intend to define what intermediality
“‘really is,’ but to describe what ways of talking about intermediality, in
a most general sense, there are” (Schröter 2012, 16; he explains that
his last two models are different sides of the same phenomenon rather
than two completely different categories):
– Synthetic intermediality: In this discursive field “intermediality is
discussed as the process of a (sexually connoted) fusion of several
media into a new medium – the intermedium – that supposedly is
more than the sum of its parts” (Schröter 2012, 16); synthetic
intermediality is associated with some artistic movements of the
1960s such as Happening and Fluxus and is rooted in Wagner’s
nineteenth-century artistic synthesis of a Gesamtkunstwerk;
‘monomedia’ are condemned and more holistic intermedial
approaches and art forms favored, for instance by Dick Higgins (a
Fluxus artist), which break up habitualized forms of perception and
support utopian impulses for the reunification of individuals in a
classless society (here the mix of multimedial and utopian-holistic
ideas is problematic since intermediality becomes ubiquitous); one
inescapable problem of this model is, however, the differentiation
of intermedia/intermedial forms such as ‘visual poetry’ (where a
conceptual fusion occurs) and mixed media (regarded by the viewer
as separate).
– Formal or transmedial intermediality: This discursive field is built
on the concept that there are transmedial structures (such as
fictionality, rhythmicity, compositional strategies, seriality) that are
not specific to one medium but can be found in different media.
Models utilizing transmedial intermediality have the problem that
‘media specificity’ is hard to conceptualize.
– Transformational intermediality: This discursive field deals with
the representation of one medium through another medium (what
Bolter and Grusin 1999 term ‘remediation’); here the question
arises whether transmedial intermediality is an intermedial
category at all, since a representation of a medium is no longer a
medium but a representation; nevertheless, “one would obstruct an
interesting perspective if, with this argument, one would skip
representation. […] if photography can point or relate to a written
text then we are already dealing with a relation between two media.
One medium refers to another – thereby it can comment on the
represented medium, which would allow one to make interesting
inferences to the ‘self-conception’ of the representing medium.”
(Schröter 2012, 27) Schröter suggests the term “intermedial
representation” for “a representation that explicitly refers to the
represented medium” (Schröter 2012, 27). Since a transformation
cannot be observed without knowledge “of what the represented
medium (allegedly) is […] as well as what the representing medium
(allegedly) is,” the descriptions of transformations always have
“ontological implications” (Schröter 2012, 27–28).
Transformational intermediality is therefore the reverse side of
Schröter’s fourth category.
– Ontological intermediality or ontomediality, which highlights the
fact that media always already exist in a medial network and never
in splendid isolation. The question that has to be asked is this: “Do
the clearly defined unities that we call media and that are
characterized by some kind of media-specific materialities precede
the intermedial relation, or does a sort of primeval intermediality
exist that conversely functions as a prerequisite for the possibility
of such unities?” (Schröter 2012, 28) Ontological intermediality
does not follow the specificities of given and defined media, but
rather precedes them; the concept of ontological intermediality or
ontomediality undermines the idea of clearly separated media, and
“we have to recognize that it is not individual media that are primal
and then move toward each other intermedially, but that it is
intermediality that is primal and that the clearly separated
‘monomedia’ are the result of purposeful and institutionally caused
blockades, incisions, and mechanisms of exclusion” (Schröter 2012,
30).
It is notable that for Schröter media always already exist in relation to
other media, never in isolation: “Intermediality is rather the
ontological conditio sine qua non, which is always before ‘pure’ and
specific media, which have to be extracted from the arch-
intermediality.” (Herzogenrath 2012, 4)

3.3 Future Fields of Intermediality Research

Some very interesting intermedial constellations in the field of
literature are to be found in postcolonial, transcultural and
cosmopolitan Anglophone literatures. Unfortunately, these
postcolonial intermedial texts have been largely neglected so far, even
if aspects like work-image intersections, ekphrasis and visual culture
have raised some academic interest (Kortenaar 1997; Döring 2002;
Emery 2007; Meyer 2009; Mendes 2012). In her pioneering article in
this handbook, Birgit Neumann not only explores the multifaceted role
of intermedial configurations in postcolonial literatures, she also
debates the applicability of the concept of intermediality to
postcolonial literatures. Since intermediality as a concept touches upon
notions of hierarchy, superiority and legitimacy in the field of cultural
representation, it is predestined to discuss the politics of symbolic
forms in postcolonial literatures. As Neumann states, the field of
“intermediality is one of the most promising and invigorating research
areas within postcolonial studies today. And yet, despite the
prominence of intermedial constellations in postcolonial literatures, to
date there have been only few attempts to systematically introduce the
concept into the field.” ( 27 Intermedial Negotiations: Postcolonial
Literatures) She opens up numerous fruitful intermedial perspectives
for the interpretation of postcolonial literatures and discusses the
constitutive and dynamic role of media in construing forms of sociality
and perpetuating cultural knowledge, including concepts of
identification, alterity and power in postcolonial contexts. Since
postcolonial literatures are often concerned with renegotiating
imperial legacies and the ensuing predominance of Eurocentric
epistemologies, the concept of intermediality, by opening up a space of
semiotic and material in-between-ness, may intervene in the social
fabric of existing medial configurations, reworking them in a way that
allows readers to experience, see and imagine the world differently. By
unsettling colonial epistemologies, which typically promote notions of
cultural purity, the intermedial strategies of postcolonial literatures
may bring to the fore “the heterogeneity and plurality of meaning-
making and, in a wider sense, reflect the essential impurity and – to
use a central concept of postcolonial studies – hybridity of all cultural
formations.” ( 27 Intermedial Negotiations: Postcolonial Literatures,
514) Postcolonial writers are often preoccupied with countering the
colonial gaze, intervening in the existing relationship of visuality and
power by, for instance, delivering subversive ekphrases of colonial
painting, thus using ekphrasis’ transformational potential to discuss
colonial legacies. Chapter 7 on postcolonial ekphrasis also contributes
to the field of postcolonial intermedial studies. It expounds on the fact
that Anglophone postcolonial literatures testify to visuality as a
battleground on which colonial legacies are negotiated at a time when
increasing globalization is accountable for today’s conspicuous
transnational and transcultural dimensions of the lives and works of so
many Anglophone writers. This handbook hopes to augment efforts at
bringing together postcolonial studies and intermediality studies more
closely.
Among the areas of intermediality research which are of special
interest in our times of media hybridization, and hence likely to be
further developed in the future, are also transmediality research and
inter-/transmedial narration. As a theoretical framework,
transmediality research seems to be a central category for
understanding our media-saturated world characterized by media
transposition, adaptation and ‘remediation’ (cf. 3.4; also 13
Adaptation – Remediation – Transmediality). In intermediality
research, transmediality is a category that refers to phenomena that
crop up across a variety of media, for instance fictionality, rhythmicity,
seriality, motifs, thematic variations and narrativity. One of the most
productive fields of transmediality research is inter- or transmedial
storytelling (cf. Grishakova and Ryan 2010; Schwanecke 2012; Thon
2014, 2016 forthcoming). As comparatively recent concepts, inter- and
transmedial storytelling made their first prominent appearance in the
early 2000s (cf. Rippl and Etter 2013 for a more detailed discussion).
Werner Wolf triggered the debate with a groundbreaking article in
2002 that systematically investigated the narrative potential of music,
paintings, and picture series by bringing together the findings of
intermediality studies and literary narratology, thus developing a new
intermedial narratology. On the basis of formal (chronology,
repetition, teleology, causality/cohesion) and thematic indicators
(tellability and singularity; cf. Wolf 2002, 47–51), Wolf has
discriminated genuinely narrative genres such as novels that are
based on predominantly verbal media (written and oral text) from
works that indicate narration, such as picture series and mono- or
polyphase pictures. The narrative potential is low whenever a
considerable input to the production of narrativity is required from the
recipient (cf. Wolf 2002, 96). In other words, prototypical narration in
a novel requires a minimal narrativizing activity on the part of the
recipient, whereas instrumental music demands a maximum (cf. Wolf
2002, 95); comic strips hold a middle position on Wolf’s scale (cf.
Hoppeler, Etter, and Rippl 2009, 96). Thus, intermedial narration is
based on the insight that narrativity is a transmedial cognitive frame.
While most classical narratology has “disregarded the interrelation
between narrativity and media, […] [p]ostclassical narratology has
started to dismantle th[e] hegemony of narrator-transmitted
narratives and has emphasized the transmedial nature of narrativity as
a cognitive frame applicable to ever ‘remoter’ media and genres” (Wolf
2011, 145). In 2011, Wolf defined transmedial narratology as the study
of narrativity in works of art outside the literary text, such as painting,
sculpture, instrumental music (cf. Wolf 2011, 158). If narratology
leaves behind concepts such as that of the narrator and the
preoccupation with the verbal medium and focuses instead on
prototypical and cognitive aspects of narrativity, a transmedial
reconceptualization of narrative becomes possible. While narrative,
like all cognitive macro-frames, can be realized in more than one
medium, it is to a large extent (but never completely) medium-
independent and hence a transmedial phenomenon. But this does not
imply that transmedial narration does not take into account the
material specificities of the respective medium in which an idea or
story is expressed (cf. Wolf 2002; Ryan 2004; Walsh 2006). Generally
speaking, transmedial narratology contends that the tellability of any
given narrative depends intimately on the resources and the
constraints of a given medium, just as each medium has particular
affinities for certain themes and certain types of plot: “You cannot tell
the same type of story on the stage and in writing, during conversation
and in a thousand-page novel, in a two-hour movie and in a TV serial
that runs for many years” (Ryan 2004, 356).
3.4 Critical Voices and Alternative
Conceptualizations
Media-fusion, media transposition and a general tendency towards the
dissolution of medial boundaries are central features of contemporary
digital culture, which explains why more recently the question whether
it makes sense at all to investigate individual media on their own and
to contend that categorial media borders exist has become a crucial
one. As a consequence, the concept of intermediality itself has come
under scrutiny since it presupposes media borders that are then
transgressed (cf. Weingart 2010). Researchers such as Wilhelm
Voßkamp and Brigitte Weingart warn against essentializing media
borders and media purism; they claim the constructedness and
historicity of any conception of medium. Referring to W. J. T. Mitchell
and Jacques Derrida, text, picture and music are not conceived as
different media with clear-cut borders, and instead a principal
permeability between media is stated (cf. Weingart 2001; cf. also
Voßkamp and Weingart 2005). Precisely because intermedial artifacts
and phenomena aim at dissolving and transcending media borders,
rigid and essentializing conceptions of media borders as well as media
purism have to be challenged in favor of an understanding of media as
relational constellations and situational incidences. Theories and
typologies of intermediality can hence never be anything but heuristic
instruments.
In spite of this criticism, researchers such as Marie-Laure Ryan
(2005), Irina O. Rajewsky (2010) und Werner Wolf (2011) find it
problematic to give up the concepts of media borders, “border zones”
(Rajewsky 2010, 65) and media specificities altogether. They instead
refer to the heuristic potential of these terms in analyses of various
intermedial conceptions and specific intermedial manifestations:
Currently, efforts are being made to strengthen common and crossover features […] in
intermediality studies […]. Contrary to this tendency, I have advanced the thesis that
medial differences and the notion of media borders play a crucial and extremely
productive role in the context of intermedial practices. […] thus starting from the objects
of investigation as such, it is precisely the concept of the border which can be
strengthened. In my view, the concept of the border is the precondition for techniques of
crossing or challenging, dissolving or emphasizing medial boundaries, which can
 consequently be experienced and reflected on as constructs and conventions. […] My
thesis thus encompasses the idea of fostering a process of rethinking the notion of
boundaries: it should be shifted from taxonomies to the dynamic and creative potential of
the border itself. (Rajewsky 2010, 63–65)

Rajewsky talks about individual media without, however, conceiving of

them as ‘pure’ media: Referring to Wolf (1999, 37), she underscores
that media are only “conventionally perceived as distinct from other
media” (Rajewsky 2010, 66 fn. 7). For the analysis of concrete
intermedial configurations and intermedial practices in the arts,
“media borders and medial specificities are indeed of crucial
importance,” as are their basic material and operative conditions
(Rajewsky 2010, 53).
In addition to the controversial debates about the concept of media
borders versus that of ‘arch-intermediality’ and the unsolved problem
of a clear differentiation between media and art forms, there exists
another striking problem within intermediality studies, that of the
diverging terminologies used in different disciplines and fields. An
example is Henry Jenkins’s concept of “transmedia storytelling,” which
he defined in his book-length study Convergence Cultures (2006, esp.
95–134) as “[s]tories that unfold across multiple media platforms” and
“a more integrated approach to franchise development than models
based on urtexts and ancillary products” (Jenkins 2006, 334).
Transmedia storytelling is interested in the circulation of media
content across different media systems, favoring an integrated
approach to franchise products which ignores older models based on
categories like ‘the original’ or the ‘source text/urtext’ and later
(supposedly aesthetically less valid) derivative texts. While according
to Jenkins, during the nineteenth century and throughout the
twentieth media differentiation took place, today we encounter the
convergence of media in the form of digital code and computer
processing which renders investigations into individual media
anachronistic. Although Jenkins implicitly agrees with Ryan’s stance
that every medium has its idiosyncratic ways of shaping a narrative, he
has more in mind for the term “transmedia” than the switching from
one medium to another while telling one and the same story: He is
interested in how a certain narrative is spread simultaneously over a
field of several media. The new media product – the one that,
according to him, merits the term “transmedia” – can be observed in
those cases where the ‘travels’ across media are planned and laid out
right from the start (cf. also Mittell 2012). Jenkins’s main focus is on
the franchising strategies of cultural products in our highly mediatized,
digital world characterized by a convergence culture with its “flow of
content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between
multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media
audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of
entertainment experiences they want” (Jenkins 2006, 2).
Digitality and the computer as a new hyper-medium play pivotal
roles in all attempts at defining intermediality. As a result, media
scholars have asked whether the concept should be restricted to the
analog arts and media, because only there is the materiality of a
medium actually present (Paech and Schröter 2008). Intermediality’s
role as sole player in today’s theoretical landscape in the discussed
field is challenged by scholars who consider Jenkins’s term
‘convergence culture’ and related concepts such as ‘culture of
remediation,’ ‘postmodern culture of recycling’ and ‘adaptation’ to
open up better approaches to and explanations of today’s cultural
products.
While Jenkins has introduced the term ‘convergence’ to describe the
series of intersections between different media systems in our
digitalized world, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin also discuss
inter- and transmedial relationships in connection with digital media;
however, they use a different term, namely ‘remediation,’ a metaphor
from media ecology which has replaced McLuhan’s vision of media as
network. Bolter and Grusin claim that in current (digital) media, “all
mediation is remediation” (Bolter and Grusin 1999, 55), understanding
the concept of ‘remediation’ as a particular kind of intermedial
relationship undergoing processes of medial refashioning. They define
remediation as “the formal logic by which new media refashion prior
media forms” (Bolter and Grusin 1999, 273), as “the mediation of
mediation: Each act of mediation depends on other acts of mediation.
Media are continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing
each other, and this process is integral to media. Media need each
other to function as media at all” (Bolter and Grusin 1999, 55):
[New] visual technologies, such as computer graphics and the World Wide Web […] are
doing exactly what their predecessors have done: presenting themselves as refashioned
and improved versions of other media. Digital media can best be understood through the
ways in which they honor, rival, and revise linear-perspective painting, photography, film,
television, and print. No medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do
 its cultural work in isolation from other media, any more than it works in isolation from
other social and economic forces. What is new about new media comes from the particular
ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion
themselves to answer the challenges of new media. (Bolter and Grusin 1999, 14–15)

Remediation can easily be aligned with concepts like adaptation,

especially when the adaptation is to a different medium, which is the
case with filmic adaptations of texts, and here remediation may serve
as a synonym for adaptation (Hutcheon 2006, 3; 13 Adaptation –
Remediation – Transmediality). Rajewsky comments on Bolter and
Grusin’s concept of remediation as “a defining characteristic of the new
digital media” (Bolter and Grusin 1999, 45) and a basic trait of all
medial practices. While their concept of remediation is a subcategory
of intermediality in the broad sense, it is nevertheless “hardly
reconcilable with conceptions of intermedial subcategories like medial
transformation, media combination, or medial references” for the very
reason that remediation “necessarily implies a tendency to level out
significant differences both between the individual phenomena in
question and between different media with their respective materiality;
differences that come to the fore as soon as detailed analyses of specific
medial configurations, their respective meaning-constitutional
strategies, and their overall signification are at stake” (Rajewsky 2005,
64).
Another important related field of intermediality research
investigating visual phenomena and networks is ‘visual culture studies’
(cf. Mirzoeff 1999; Rimmele and Stiegler 2012). Visual culture plays an
important role in different disciplines such as American Studies (cf.
Böger and Decker 2007; Decker 2010; Hebel and Wagner 2011),
English Studies (cf. Brosch 2004, 2011) and Germanic Studies
(Benthien and Weingart 2014; cf. also Stiegeler 2014). In addition, the
relatively new field, literary visuality, investigates the role of
literature(s) in visual culture(s): The approach is the result of a “fast-
developing dialogue of textual studies with visual culture studies”
(Harrow 2013, 1) and “constitutes an alternative or complementary
paradigm to intermediality studies in that it posits the larger
framework of visual rather than media culture as the context in which
to analyse the visualities of literature.” (cf. Isekenmeier 17 Literary
Visuality, 325) Intermediality studies, and ekphrasis research in
particular, have been criticized by scholars working in the fields of
visual culture and literary visuality for being mainly concerned with
pictures and their media. Because of their understanding of cultures as
semiotic systems, which combine social practices, material artifacts
and conventional codes, literary visuality’s range – according to Guido
Isekenmeier – extends beyond (the) media and questions their
centrality in or for visual culture(s) by putting visuality, i.e. vision,
sight and seeing, center stage. A literary studies approach to visuality
in particular “has to look or read beyond (the) media in order to
elucidate literature’s participation in visual culture at large” ( 17
Literary Visuality, 326). While it seems logical to underline the
embeddedness of pictures and visual media in visual practices,
scholars of intermediality would reply that all practices of looking and
scopic regimes presented in literature are exclusively accessible
through the medium in which the text is encoded, hence the question
of medium cannot be foregone.
A last concept that needs introduction is ‘multimodality.’ Werner
Wolf distinguished between ‘covert intermediality,’ which refers to the
transformation of another medium into a literary verbal text, and what
he terms ‘overt intermediality’ (cf. Wolf 1999, 37–44), which goes by
the name of ‘multimodality’ in social semiotic approaches ( 34 Non-
verbal Semiotic Modes and Media in the Multimodal Novel). Examples
of overt intermediality are opera or film, which both combine
language, music, sound etc.: “As a rule, such conventionalized forms of
the co-presence of different media in one work of art constitute literary
or aesthetic genres of their own with a very specific and
conventionalized interrelation between the different media and have
therefore also been termed ‘plurimediality’ (as in the case of the
theater play […]), or the ‘multimodality’ of film […] or of novels” (cf.
Hallet 32 Methodology of Intermediality in Literary Sudies, 606).
Multimodality as a theoretical framework in the humanities has been
developed to account for the shortcomings of monomodal disciplinary
approaches in linguistics as well as literary studies, where “language
was (seen as) the central and only full means for representation and
communication” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001, 45). Kress and van
Leeuwen have first developed the notion of an intrinsic combination of
‘different codes’ and ‘modes’ in acts of signification and
communication. They define mode as any semiotic resource that
produces meaning in a social context (for a critical discussion of Kress
and van Leeuwen cf. Elleström 2010b, 13–17; 40 fn 7 and 8). With the
emergence of new multimedia technologies and electronic multimedial
environments, linguistic theories of communication as well as literary
theories of symbolic representation need to account for the
combination of different media and symbolic forms. In its most basic
sense, multimodality is a theory of communication and social
semiotics, it describes communication practices in terms of the textual,
aural, linguistic, spatial, and visual resources – or modes – used to
compose messages. In social semiotics, media are defined as merely
physical and material resources “used in the production of semiotic
products and events, including both the tools and the materials used
(e.g. the musical instrument and the air; the chisel and the block of
wood)” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001, 22). Wolfgang Hallet (2009) is
a preeminent literary scholar who – in reaction to the fact that since
the 1990s a new kind of Anglophone novel has emerged which
integrates a wide range of non-linguistic symbolic forms and non-
narrative modes such as visual images, diagrams, maps, screenshots,
drawings, handwritten letters and e-mails into the narrative discourse
– has adapted multimodality theories from social semiotics and
discourse analysis in linguistics to discuss the sub-genre of the
multimodal novel and to describe how the combination of various
semiotic modes and forms of symbolization serves signifying and
communicative purposes.
It is not easy to bring the two fields, intermediality studies and
multimodality research, together, since the concepts of media are
diverging ones. As Hallet succinctly summarizes, a semiotic mode is
always tied to a specific material or medial carrier, but media in themselves do not
produce meaning. This is a substantial conceptual difference between intermediality
theories and multimodality theories. Whereas in the former the verbal text and a visual
image are regarded and described as different, interrelated media, text-image relations in
the multimodal novel (as in multimodal texts in general) are not conceptualized as
intermedial relations, but as an interplay of two distinct semiotic modes (textual entities)
in the same ‘medium,’ i.e. the printed book, which jointly contribute to the production of
one whole meaning in a single act of communication […]. ( 34 Non-verbal Semiotic
Modes and Media in the Multimodal Novel, 642)

An interesting and promising attempt at discussing multimodal and

intermedial approaches and their conflicting terminologies together
has recently been put forward by Lars Elleström who claims that “all
kind of sign systems and also specific media productions and works of
art must be seen as parts of a very wide field including not least the
material, sensorial, spatiotemporal and semiotic aspects” which
Elleström calls “the four ‘modalities’ of media,” and which allow him to
pinpoint the commonalities and differences between art forms, media,
etc. (Elleström 2010a, 4). He also distinguishes between “three aspects
of the notion of medium. Basic media are simply defined by their
modal properties whereas qualified media are also characterized by
historical, cultural, social, aesthetic and communicative facets.
Technical media are any objects, or bodies, that ‘realize’, ‘mediate’ or
‘display’ basic and qualified media.” (Elleström 2010a, 5; for a critique
of Elleström’s model 31 Performing Games) These three types of
media are not separate ones, but “complementary, theoretical aspects
of what constitutes media and mediality” (Elleström 2010b, 12); the
modalities of media build “a medial complex integrating materiality,
perception and cognition” (Elleström 2010b, 15). The material
modality is defined as “the latent corporeal interface of the medium”;
the sensorial modality is “the physical and mental acts of perceiving
the present interface of the medium through the sense faculties”; the
spatiotemporal modality of media covers “the structuring of the
sensorial perception of sense-data of the material interface into
experiences and conceptions of space and time”; and finally, the
semiotic modality is “the product of a perceiving and conceiving
subject situated in social circumstances” (Elleström 2010b, 17–18, 21).
A few years before Gunter Kress and Theo van Leeuwen published
their influential book-length study Multimodal Discourse: The Modes
and Media of Contemporary Communication in 2001, W. J. T.
Mitchell claimed in Picture Theory that “all media are mixed media,
combining different codes, discursive conventions, channels, sensory
and cognitive modes” (Mitchell 1995, 94–95). In this vein, Elleström,
too, explains that “[a]ll media are mixed in different ways. Every
medium consists of a fusion of modes that are partly, and in different
degrees of palpability, shared by other media. Every medium has the
capacity of mediating only certain aspects of the total reality”
(Elleström 2010b, 24). There is no doubt that in the future, the
concepts of intermediality, transmediality, multimodality, etc. will be
further discussed and refined as new inter- and transmedial
manifestations are encountered in our digital and globalized culture.
* * * * *
The Handbook of Intermediality: Literature – Image – Sound –
Music is the first volume in the new De Gruyter series Handbooks of
English and American Studies: Text and Theory. This handbook has a
theoretical focus; however, theory is brought together with concrete
interpretation of literary texts against the backdrop of literary and
cultural history – which is the programmatic idea behind the series. As
an attempt to chart the rich field of intermediality research in literary
studies and related fields, editor and contributors are aware that this
cannot be a comprehensive undertaking: there are so many additional
issues which ask for more in-depth discussion (cf. the Further Reading
section of this Introduction). In the thirty-four chapters of this
Handbook of Intermediality that follow, a range of crucial concepts of
intermediality will be discussed in connection with literary examples
from different centuries and Anglo-phone cultures. In its three parts –
I Text and Image, II Music, Sound and Performance, and III
Intermedial Methodology and Intersectionalities – the handbook
reflects the different areas of intermediality research relevant to the
study of Anglophone literatures. The three parts are of different length
long and thus reflect the expertise of the editor in the field of text-
picture intersections. The longest, Part I Text and Image, consists of
five subsections: Ekphrasis; Literature and Photography; Literature
and the Moving Image; Literary Visuality and Intermedial Framing; as
well as Intermedial Narration: Text-Picture Combinations. Part II
Music, Sound and Performance includes chapters on musico-literary
relationships, literary acoustics, postcolonial intermedial negotiations,
theatrical intermediality, literature-dance encounters, as well as
intermediality and video games. Part III Intermedial Methodology and
Intersectionalities offers a chapter on a methodology of intermediality
in literary studies, a field which has so far been neglected, but is of
course of great importance for students. Part III also offers two
chapters on multimodality and how to operationalize the concept in
analyses of ‘texts’ which include visual material such as pictures and
maps: Chapter 33 is authored by a linguist and communication
scholar, chapter 34 is provided by a specialist of teaching English as a
foreign language (TEFL) and literary scholar. In all contributions, the
choice of approaches and literary examples inevitably reflects
individual preferences, however not to the disadvantage of the project,
but rather as an indication of the vibrant and diverse field of
intermediality studies and its neighboring research fields. Paying
tribute to the broad range of scholarly backgrounds and the wide
spectrum covered, the chapters vary in their use of British and
American English and spelling. At the end of the handbook, the reader
finds two index lists covering subjects and names which will assist
efficient use of the handbook.
This handbook would not have materialized without the
indefatigable commitment of my team members at the University of
Bern, Dr. des. Lukas Etter, Ryan Kopaitich, Sofie Behluli and Rahel
Braunschweig, the generous and indispensible advice of Dr. Ulrike
Krauss, Katja Lehming and Lena Ebert at De Gruyter, and the support
of all contributors – a big thank you goes to all of them. Special thanks,
however, go to Markus Haas who has been incredibly patient with me
over the last two years.

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4.2 Further Reading

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547.
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 und des multimodalen Romans: Von der Schrift-Kunst zum
multimodalen Design.” Medialisierung des Erzählens im
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172.
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Intermedial Exploration. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002.
Heffernan, James A. W. Museum of Words. The Poetics of Ekphrasis
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Johnston, Andrew James, Margitta Rouse, and Philipp Hinz, eds. The
Medieval Motion Picture: The Politics of Adaptation. New York:
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Johnston, Andrew James, Ethan Knapp, and Margitta Rouse, eds. The
Art of Vision: Ekphrasis in Medieval Literature and Culture.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015 forthcoming.
Kennedy, David. The Ekphrastic Encounter in Contemporary British
Poetry and Elsewhere. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.
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über die Schriftbildlichkeit unter Berücksichtigung von
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 Ed. Thorsten Hoffmann and Gabriele Rippl. Göttingen: Wallstein
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The Point of View of Semiotics.” The Role of Comparative
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2014).
Paech, Joachim. “Intermedialität: Mediales Differenzial und
transformative Figurationen.” Intermedialität: Theorie und Praxis
eines interdisziplinären Forschungsgebiets. Ed. Jörg Helbig. Berlin:
Erich Schmidt, 1998.
Plett, Heinrich F. “Intermedial Rhetoric.” Rhetoric and Renaissance
Culture: Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture. Berlin: De Gruyter,
2004. 295–412.
Rajewsky, Irina O. Intermedialität. Tübingen and Basel: Francke,
2002.
Rajewsky, Irina O. “Intermedialität – Eine Begriffsbestimmung.”
Intermedialität im Deutschunterricht. Ed. Marion Bönnighausen
and Heidi Rösch. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag Hohengehren,
2004. 8–30.
Reulecke, Anne-Kathrin. Geschriebene Bilder: Zum Kunst- und
Mediendiskurs in der Gegenwartsliteratur. Munich: Wilhelm Fink,
2002.
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amerikanischer Literatur und Fotografie (1945–2000). Munich:
Wilhelm Fink, 2003.
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Der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Allgemeine und Vergleichende
Literaturwissenschaft, Potsdam, 18.–21. Mai 2005. Heidelberg:
Synchron, 2008.
Schneider, Ralf. Narrative and Media Awareness: Transmedial
Narratology and the History of British Prose Fiction. Forthcoming.
Simonis, Annette, ed. Intermedialität und Kulturaustausch:
Beobachtungen im Spannungsfeld zwischen Künsten und Medien.
Bielefeld: transcript, 2009.
Stein, Daniel. Music Is My Life: Louis Armstrong, Autobiography and
American Jazz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012.
Straub, Julia. “Diaphanous Angels: Julia Margaret Cameron’s and
Walter Pater’s Go-Betweens.” Textus 21 (2008): 261–278.
Straumann, Barbara. “Noise and Voice: Female Performers in
Meredith, Eliot and Dinesen.” Unlaute: Noise/Geräusch in Kultur
und Medien seit 1900. Ed. Sylvia Mieszkowski and Sigrid Nieberle.
Bielefeld: transcript, 2016 forthcoming.
Teukolsky, Rachel. The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and
Modernist Aesthetics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 2009.
Thon, Jan-Noël. “Subjectivity across Media: On Transmedial
Strategies of Subjective Representation in Contemporary Feature
Films, Graphic Novels, and Computer Games.” Storyworlds across
Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology. Ed. Marie-Laure
Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2014. 67–102.
Thurlow, Crispin, and Kristine Mroczek, eds. Digital Discourse:
Language in the New Media. New York and London: Oxford
University Press, 2011.
Torgovnick, Marianna. The Visual Arts, Pictorialism and the Novel.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Tripp, Ronja. Mirroring the Lamp: Literary Visuality, Strategies of
Visualization, and Scenes of Observation in Interwar Narrative.
Trier: wvt, 2013.
Weisstein, Ulrich. “Literature and the (Visual) Arts: Intertextuality
and Mutual Illumination.” Intertextuality: German Literature and
Visual Art from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century. Ed.
Ingeborg Hoesterey and Ulrich Weisstein. Columbia: Camden
House, 1993. 1–17.
Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the
Realist Novel. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2008.
____
Part I Text and Image
Ekphrasis
Literature and Photography
Literature and the Moving Image
Literary Visuality and Intermedial Framing
Intermedial Narration: Text-Picture Combinations
James A. W. Heffernan

1 Ekphrasis: Theory
Abstract: As a literary genre, ekphrasis ranges from ancient rhetorical
exercises in description through art criticism to poetry and fiction.
Furthermore, since digital technology and cinema have animated
visual art itself, the verbal representation of visual representation has
become more fluid than ever before. While traditional ekphrasis
generates a narrative from a work of art that is still in both senses,
silent and motionless, cinematic ekphrasis exploits the metamorphic
power of film to conjure a dream world that rivals and contests the
order of realistic fiction. In all of these cases, the verbal version of a
work of visual art remakes the original. The rhetoric of art criticism
aspires to make the work of art “confess itself” in language that is
always that of the critic; ekphrastic poetry turns the work of art into a
story that expresses the mind of the speaker; and ekphrastic fiction
turns the work of art – whether still or moving – into a story that
mirrors the mind of a character. Finally and simply, then, ekphrasis is
a kind of writing that turns pictures into storytelling words.
Key Terms: Art criticism, ekphrastic poetry, ekphrastic fiction,
cinematic ekphrasis, pregnant moment

1 Ekphrasis: Definition and History

Ekphrasis is an ancient rhetorical term that has now been revived in
academic studies of art and literature. After languishing in obscurity
until 1967, when Murray Krieger published a notable essay on it,
ekphrasis is commanding major attention. As of August 2013, the
online International Bibliography of the Modern Language
Association lists 859 studies of it, including 33 books. For more than
twenty years, it has been a regular topic at the triennial meetings of the
International Association of Word and Image Studies, and at various
other meetings devoted to ploughing the inexhaustibly fertile ground
where literature meets visual art.
 Unfortunately, this new thicket of academic studies and sessions
springs from no common ground of agreement on what the term
ekphrasis means. From the ancient Greek rhetoricians who gave us the
term we inherit a range of meanings. What is probably the earliest
definition comes from Ailios Theon of Alexandria, generally assigned
to the first century of our era, who defined ekphrasis simply as a way of
describing just about anything visible:
Ekphrasis esti logos periegematikos, enargos hup’ upsin agon to deloumenon.
(qtd. in Webb 1992, 35)
Ekphrasis is exhibitionistic (literally ‘leading around’) speech, vividly leading the subject
before
the eyes. (Translation mine)

By the fifth century, ekphrasis had come to denote the description of

visual art, but both the general and the particular meanings remain
very much alive in current critical discourse, which has at once
preserved and amplified them. On the one hand, the Oxford Classical
Dictionary defines ekphrasis as “the rhetorical description of a work of
art” (Denniston 1970, 377), and Jean Hagstrum, who traces ekphrasis
to its Greek roots ek (out) and phrazein (tell, declare, pronounce), uses
it even more restrictively to denote poetry that makes the silent work
of visual art “speak out” (1958, 18n). At the other extreme, a handbook
of rhetorical terms that appeared in 1968 – just after Krieger’s essay –
makes no reference to art in defining ekphrasis, calling it simply “a
self-contained description, often on a commonplace subject, which can
be inserted at a fitting place in a discourse” (Lanham 1968, 39).
In his book on ekphrasis, subtitled The Illusion of the Natural Sign,
Krieger oscillates between these extremes. Though he approvingly cites
Leo Spitzer’s definition of ekphrasis as “the poetic description of a
pictorial or sculptural work of art” (Spitzer 1962, 72), Krieger’s book
has very little to say about poetry that represents such works. Instead,
he treats ekphrasis chiefly as the verbal counterpart of visual art. For
Krieger, ekphrasis is “word-painting.” As “the sought-for equivalent in
words of any visual image, in or out of art,” it “include[s] every
attempt, within an art of words, to work toward the illusion that it is
performing a task we usually associate with an art of natural signs”
(Krieger 1967, 9). Ekphrasis thus gratifies our lust for natural signs –
for the immediate presence of the object signified – by defying the
“arbitrary character and […] temporality” of language (Krieger 1967,
10). It offers us a verbal icon, “the verbal equivalent of an art object
sensed in space” (Krieger 1967, 9).
In defining ekphrasis as a poetic genre modeled after what he calls
“an art of natural signs,” Krieger presupposes that pictorial signs are
natural, or at the very least naturalized: models of apparently
immediate expression, transparent windows on the objects they
represent. This assumption has been widely shared. Art historians as
well as literary theorists have long believed that literature differs from
visual art chiefly because words are conventional and pictures natural:
because words are supposed to represent things by convention alone
while pictures are supposed to represent them by natural resemblance.
Even E. H. Gombrich, who has written at great length about the role
that convention plays in art, declares that “images of Nature […] are
not conventional signs, like the words of human language, but show a
real visual resemblance, not only to our eyes or our culture but also to
birds or beasts” (Gombrich 1981, 12). Likewise, Jonathan Culler firmly
locates pictures outside the domain of semiotics – the science of
signification – because, he says, semiotics cannot account for “natural
resemblance” (Culler 1975, 16).
On the other hand, the notion that painted images can be naturally
recognized has been sharply attacked by critics such as Norman
Bryson, who has not only assailed what he calls Gombrich’s “doctrine
of Perceptualism” – the idea that painting re-creates what the artist
has actually seen – but has also firmly defined painting as “an art of
signs, rather than percepts” (Bryson 1983, xii–xiv). In light of this
claim, which we might regard as distinctively contemporary, we do
well to remember that a similar claim was long ago made in the most
famous of all essays on the difference between literature and visual art:
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön, first published in 1766.
Since Lessing’s Laocoön is a landmark in the history of theorizing
about the relations between literature and visual art, it is likewise
central to the history of theorizing about ekphrasis, and must be
closely examined. In his own time, Lessing took arms against what he
saw as literary pictorialism, drawing or painting with words. To make
pictures with words, Lessing thought, is to ignore the essential
difference between poetry and painting. They differ not because
arbitrary verbal signs differ from naturally recognizable images, for
according to Lessing, “figures and colors in space” are “signs,” just as
words are. But, he argues,
if these signs must indisputably bear a suitable relation [bequemes Verhältnis] to the
thing signified, then signs existing in space can express only objects whose wholes or parts
coexist, while signs that follow one another can express only objects whose wholes or parts
are consecutive. (Lessing 1984 [1766], 78)

For Lessing, then, poetry and painting each work with signs, which we
normally take to be arbitrary or conventional. Paradoxically, however,
they differ because the signs of each are naturally suited to represent
different things. Just as Lessing considers painted objects “natural
signs” of real ones, he believed that poetry “must try to raise its
arbitrary signs to natural signs; only that way does it differentiate itself
from prose and become poetry” (Letter of 1769 to Friedrich Nicolai,
qtd. in Krieger 1968, 48). Since poetry uses words – verbal signs – that
come one after another, it “can express only” things that “follow one
another,” which is to say “actions” played out in time. Likewise, since
painting uses forms and colors that coexist in space, it “can express
only” bodies (Lessing 1984 [1766], 78).
Yet just as soon as Lessing makes this fundamental distinction, just
as soon as he declares that painting and poetry can express “only”
bodies or actions, he complicates the opposition. While the “true
subjects of poetry” are “actions,” poetry can nonetheless suggest the
body that performs an action. Conversely, while the “true subjects of
paintings” are “bodies,” painting can represent the body in action by
choosing the “single moment of an action” that is “most suggestive” or
most pregnant (prägnantesten), the moment “from which the
preceding and succeeding actions are most easily comprehensible”
(Lessing 1984 [1766], 78).
While Lessing never used the term ekphrasis, his concept of the
“most suggestive” or most pregnant moment suggests what might be
called an obstetrical theory of ekphrasis: it delivers from the pregnant
moment of arrested movement the narrative – the sequence of actions
– which this moment recalls and anticipates. Using this point to help
construct a theory of ekphrasis does not require that we accept
Lessing’s deeply problematic concept of the “natural sign,” which is
almost self-contradictory, for insofar as a natural sign is a sign, it must
artificially differ from what it signifies. But an obstetrical theory of
ekphrasis definitely swerves from Krieger’s claim that ekphrasis feeds
our craving for “the spatial fix” which “asks for language – in spite of
its arbitrary character and its temporality – to freeze itself into a
spatial form” (1967, 10).
If works of art “are structures in space–time” rather than either
spatial or temporal, as W. J. T. Mitchell argues (1986, 103), ekphrasis
must allow for both elements in the works it represents. For this
reason I have defined ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of visual
representation” (Heffernan 1993, 3). This definition makes room for
descriptions of paintings and sculptures that represent anything at all,
whether someone or something in motion or a still object like
Magritte’s famous pipe.

2 Ekphrasis and Art Criticism

Thus defined, ekphrastic writing invites comparison with art criticism,
and specifically with its rhetoric. This move may seem a detour from
the high road of literature – especially if art criticism entails art
history, the compilation of facts about painters and paintings and
schools of painting and the sequence of pictorial styles. But the line
between literature and art criticism starts to blur as soon as we
consider the kinship between Homer’s description of the shield
sculpted for Achilles in the 18th book of The Iliad – the founding
instance of ekphrasis in Western literature – and the Eikones of
Philostratus, the father of art criticism. A Greek-born teacher of
rhetoric who flourished in the third century BCE, Philostratus
demonstrates for his students the rhetorical art of description by
describing a number of paintings that he claims to have seen in a
luxurious seaside villa outside Naples. But Philostratus’s descriptions
of the paintings are actually interpretations of a distinctly literary kind:
exfoliations of the stories they implicitly tell.
Typically, Philostratus interprets a painting by turning it into a
narrative: not the story of its making, as in Homer’s account of
Achilles’s shield, but the story suggested by its shapes, which are
identified with the figures they represent. Though he never explains
just how the episodes of a story are depicted or arranged in a painting,
he aims to make the work “confess itself” – in Leo Steinberg’s phrase
(Steinberg 1972, 6) – through the inferred speech of its characters. He
sometimes tells us what painted figures are saying to each other and
what sounds they signify, such as shouting and piping. As Leonard
Barkan has recently observed, the Eikones “do everything that pictures
cannot do by themselves. […] They exploit picture to create words. All
the non-pictorial experiences that the ekphrases elicit from paintings
are linguistic” (Barkan 2013, 22–24).
To see how Philostatus generates words from a picture, consider his
commentary on a painting of Narcissus standing over a pool.
Philostratus treats this painting as a metapicture, a painting about
painting. In so doing, he anticipates Alberti, who later calls Narcissus
“the inventor of painting,” and who asks, “What else can you call
painting but a similar embracing with art of what is presented on the
surface of the water?” (Alberti 1966, 64) Philostratus likewise begins
by reading the reflected image of the youth as a painting within a
painting. “The pool paints Narcissus,” he writes, “and the painting
represents both the pool and the whole story of Narcissus”
(Philostratus 1931, 89). Unlike Alberti, however, Philostratus does not
consider Narcissus himself a painter. On the contrary, he sharply
distinguishes Narcissus from the painter and – just as importantly –
from the viewer of the painting that represents him.
Philostratus first praises the verisimilitude of the painting in
traditional terms: a bee shown settling on flowers looks so realistic that
we cannot tell “whether a real bee has been deceived by the painted
flowers or whether we are to be deceived into thinking that a painted
bee is real” (Philostratus 1931, 89–91). Leaving this question open –
perhaps only a risky fingering of the bee could decisively settle it – he
continues:
As for you, […] Narcissus, it is no painting that has deceived you, nor are you engrossed in
a thing of pigments or wax; but you do not realize that the water represents you exactly as
you are when you gaze upon it, nor do you see through the artifice of the pool, though to
do so you have only to nod your head or change your expression or slightly move your
hand, instead of standing in the same attitude; but acting as though you had met a
companion, you wait for some move on his part. Do you then expect the pool to enter into
conversation with you? Nay, this youth does not hear anything we say, but he is immersed,
eyes and ears alike, in the water and we must interpret the painting for ourselves.
(Philostratus 1931, 91)

Philostratus treats the painting as a study in illusion. For him

Narcissus could hardly be the inventor of painting because he does not
even know how to look at a painting, or in this case at a visible
metaphor for painting: a reflected image. As the bee (if real) mistakes
painted flowers for real ones, Narcissus mistakes the natural “artifice”
of his reflected image for another person. And instead of moving his
own head or body to view this picture-like image from various angles,
he waits – transfixed – for the other to move.
Consider now the viewpoint of Philostratus himself. In viewing this
painting of Narcissus, Philostratus does not simply receive its
illusionistic effects. He assumes a position of dominance and judges
those effects. He sees only too clearly how Narcissus is deceived.
Almost contemptuously, he asks of the painted figure gazing on his
reflection: “Do you then expect the pool to enter into conversation with
you?” Yet this very question destabilizes Philostratus’s critical stance.
The speaker’s question is “rhetorical” in presupposing its answer, and
the speaker clearly sees that “this youth does not hear anything we
say.” Yet to interpret the painting, Philostratus must embrace the
illusion that he can converse with it. If “we must interpret the painting
for ourselves,” we must also, paradoxically, enlist the help of our
painted companion.
This is what Philostratus does in the rest of his commentary – with a
curious combination of confident inference and hesitant speculation.
The spear held by the painted figure shows that he has “just returned
from the hunt” and he is said to be “panting” (Philostratus 1931, 89,
91). But not everything about the figure speaks to the viewer clearly:
Whether the panting of his breast remains from his hunting or is already the panting of
love I do not know. The eye, surely, is that of a man deeply in love, for its natural
brightness and intensity are softened by a longing that settles upon it, and he perhaps
thinks that he is loved in return, since the reflection gazes at him in just the way that he
looks at it. […] The youth stands over the youth who stands in the water, or rather who
gazes intently at him and seems to be athirst for his beauty. (Philostratus 1931, 91–93)

Sliding from assertion to tentative inference, from “surely” to

“perhaps” and “seems,” Philostratus hears and transmits as much as he
can of the painting’s confession. He not only tells the story it implies (a
youth just returned from the hunt stands entranced by his own
reflection in a pool); he also articulates the feelings signified by the
silent figure, and in so doing, he inevitably imputes to it a conscious,
sentient life. So the Narcissus wrought by this commentary is
considerably more than the deceived “Other” exposed as such by the
knowing, sophisticated Self of the viewer (cf. Mitchell 1986, 333).
Though not the inventor of painting, he is, if anything, a figure for the
interpreter of it. Like Narcissus, art critics gaze on a still and silent
image to which they impute an independent life and from which they
seek to solicit a voice, to hear a confession. But no matter how
attentively they listen, the voice is inevitably their own, a product of
their own reflections.
It could be objected that art criticism – like art itself – has
undergone major changes since the time of Philostratus. Until
photographic reproductions became widely available in the twentieth
century, art criticism had to reproduce paintings in words, as Denis
Diderot did in the later eighteenth century for subscribers to his
Salons, where he describes the paintings regularly exhibited at the
Louvre and often generates elaborate stories from them. But now, we
might say, art criticism no longer needs description, and storytelling is
surely irrelevant to much of modern art – especially abstract art.
What sort of story, after all, can be told about an art that seems to
turn its back on representation, on reference to any object or figure
that we might recognize from our experience of the world outside the
painting, and that might thus give us something to talk about? Modern
art has been charged with declaring war on language itself. Yet if
modern art ever aimed to silence the viewer, it has conspicuously
failed. Its very renunciation of what we commonly take to be subject-
matter intensifies our need to talk about it. What Harold Rosenberg
says of Minimalism applies to all abstract art: “The less there is to see,
the more there is to say.” (Rosenberg 1968, 306) Viewers of abstract
art thus recall in a way the condition of Diderot’s subscribers, who
could see the Salon paintings only through the screen – or grid – of his
words. Though reproductions and frequent exhibitions give us ready
access to the works of abstract art, most of us need words in order to
see what these works are, what they do, what they “announce,” what it
any sense they represent. So far from silencing the critic, then, abstract
art provokes and demands at least as much commentary as any of its
precursors.
Consider what a late renowned art historian had to say about a
notable American painting of the last century: one of the works with
which Jasper Johns launched Postmodernism in the late nineteen
fifties, Shade (1959). “I keep looking,” writes Leo Steinberg,
 […] at his black-and-white painting called Shade. But for a narrow margin all around, its
entire surface is taken up by an actual window shade – the cheap kind; Johns had to
fortify it to keep it flat. It’s been pulled down as if for the night, and obviously for the last
time. Over all the visible surface, shade and ground canvas together, spreads the paint
itself, paint unusually atmospheric and permissive of depth. It makes a nocturnal space
with bursts of white lights that radiate from suspended points, like bursting and falling
fireworks misted over.

An abstracted nightscape? You stare at and into a field whose

darkness is Absolute, whose whites brighten nothing, but make
darkness visible, as Milton said of infernal shade.
Or a scene of nightfall: far lights flaring and fading move into
focus and out, like rainy nights passed on a road. Are we out inside
the night or indoors? A window, with its cheap shade pulled down,
is within reach, shutting me out, keeping me in? Look again. On a
canvas shade lowered against the outside we are given to see
outdoor darkness: like the hollow shade our closed eyes project
upon lowered lids. Alberti compared the perspective diaphanes of
the Renaissance to open windows. Johns’ Shade compares the
adiaphane of his canvas to a window whose shade is down.
(Steinberg 1972, 309)
Just as Jasper Johns’s Postmodernism returns us to the world of
tangible objects that Modernism had renounced – to objects such as
flags, targets, and shades – Steinberg returns us to the world of
literature that Modernism had supposedly silenced. Steinberg uses
both Milton and Joyce to help him say what he sees in this painted
shade. “[D]arkness visible” describes Hell in the first book of Milton’s
Paradise Lost (2011 [1667], 7), and in the opening paragraph of
chapter 3 of Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus uses “adiaphane” to
mean opacity, “the limit of the diaphane” (Joyce 1986 [1922], 31).
Steinberg also reactivates most of the rhetorical strategies that have
permeated art criticism from Philostratus onward. This passage is
driven by a series of narratives. The Homeric story of how Johns made
the painting grounds two other stories about what is represented or
signified here. The quotidian tale of a day ending (the shade “has been
pulled down as if for the night”) becomes the quasi-apocalyptic story of
darkness immutable (“and obviously for the last time”) and then the
art-historical narrative of what Johns does with Alberti’s master trope:
the open window of Renaissance art, with its sunlit three-dimensional
vistas, becomes the impenetrably occluded window of modern or
Postmodern art, with its resolutely flattened opacity.
But Steinberg’s commentary deconstructs this opacity even while
seeming to affirm it. With a series of rhetorical questions, he prompts
us first to see the painted shade-on-canvas as an abstracted
nightscape, then as the representation of nightfall with its own depth
(“far lights flaring and fading”) or of a window that cannot help
signifying the two worlds it constitutes by separation – inside and
outside.
Like Philostratus and Diderot, Steinberg uses rhetorical questions to
make us share his experience of painting, his insistently interrogative
mood, his acts of repeated looking. But unlike his precursors,
Steinberg aims his questions at the reader rather than the painting,
and from the painting he elicits not a single answer but a variety of
them. The painting may represent a nightscape, a nightfall, a window
or a screen on which we project outdoor darkness just as we may
project shade on our lowered eyelids. Thus the story about lowering a
shade becomes a story of closing one’s eyes – just as Joyce’s Stephen
Dedalus tests the limits of the diaphane when he says to himself: “Shut
your eyes and see” (Joyce 1986 [1922], 31).
Unapologetically literary, Steinberg’s response to Johns’s painting
clearly shows how much we can learn about the art of ekphrasis by
studying it in what might be called its purest form—as art criticism. Art
criticism works so close to the border of ekphrastic poetry that it
sometimes crosses that border. In one of the most remarkable
ekphrastic poems of the twentieth century, John Ashbery’s “Self-
Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Ashbery quotes not only from Giorgio
Vasari’s sixteenth-century Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and
Architects but also from Sydney Freedberg’s Parmigianino (1950) – a
modern scholarly monograph. Though Ashbery – who has written a
great deal of art criticism himself – surely knows the difference
between that and poetry, he also demonstrates how much the first can
feed the second (for a detailed reading of this poem, cf. Heffernan 1993
, 169–189).

3 Ekphrastic Poetry
Nevertheless, ekphrastic poetry differs from art criticism (almost but
not quite equivalent to ekphrastic prose) in some important ways.
Typically, I have argued, the art critic delivers from a painting or
sculpture some kind of story about what it represents. At the same
time, art criticism draws our attention to the medium of representation
– oil, watercolor, stone, wood – and the technique of the artist, who is
himself (or herself) a major part of the story told by the critic. In other
words, art criticism typically operates on three major components: the
work of art, the thing it represents, and the artist who represents it. In
some cases, of course, one or more of these three components is
suppressed. Philostratus makes no reference to any of the painters who
produced the works he describes, and in explaining the painting of
Narcissus, he nearly elides the difference between the work and what it
represents.
Ekphrastic poetry may likewise blur this difference, as when John
Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” addresses the sculpted figures on the
urn as if they could think and feel and pant and move. On the other
hand, in repeatedly reminding them that they are fixed and frozen, the
poem highlights their difference from the figures they represent, thus
reckoning with both the work and the world it signifies. At the same
time, Keats elides any reference to the sculptor who stands behind the
urn. In spite of all the art historical questions he raises about the
figures on the urn – “what men or gods are these?” (Keats 1982 [1820],
282) – he never asks the first question typically posed by art history:
who made it? This is largely because the work of sculpture described in
the poem is imaginary or “notional,” as John Hollander (1988) calls it,
made up in words by the poet himself.
While many other ekphrastic poems likewise ignore the artist, this is
hardly a defining feature of ekphrastic poetry, which – as in Ashbery’s
“Self-Portrait” – may have plenty to say about the creator of the work it
contemplates. What truly differentiates an ekphrastic poem from a
piece of art criticism is that the poem demands to be read as a work of
art in its own right. So while art criticism treats the painter, the
painting, and the object represented, the critic of ekphrastic poetry
must also reckon with the poet and the poem. Here too some elements
may be suppressed. In his ode on the urn, Keats says nothing explicit
about himself; just as he elides the sculptor, he seems to edit out the
poet. But in the final stanza the poet – or rather speaker of the poem –
creeps in as one of the observers of the urn, which teases “us out of
thought,” thus making explicit his presence as one who is both
struggling to grasp what the urn represents and shaping his own work
of art in the process (Keats 1982 [1820], 282).
Consider what W. H. Auden does with the five components of poetic
ekphrasis in his “Musée des Beaux Arts,” written in 1938. The museum
of the title is the Brussels Musée des Beaux Arts, which houses most of
the paintings that Auden refers to in the poem. His poem thus reveals
not so much his knowledge of art criticism and art history as his
experience of what typically frames our experience of art: the museum.
To see paintings in a museum, which is where most of us typically find
them, is to see them in relation to each other, which partly explains
why it takes Auden more than half the length of his poem to get to the
painting that chiefly concerns him: Peter Breughel’s Landscape with
the Fall of Icarus (ca. 1558). This poem thus gives approximately equal
weight to the painting and its maker—or rather to a whole group of
makers:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking
along[.]
(Auden 1976 [1938], 146)
The poem begins by defining the Old Masters in terms of what they
understand about the world we live in: not the visible shapes of things
(which is what painters are supposed to understand much better than
the rest of us) but the incoherence of the human condition, which
juxtaposes high drama and indifferent spectators, tragedy and trivia, a
miraculous birth with children skating, or the massacre of the holy
innocents with dogs leaping about in the snow. Curiously enough, this
opening passage stresses actions so much that it might be read as
applying to great storytellers; only the phrase “Old Masters,” along
with the “Musée” of the title, tells us that Auden is writing about
painters.
A further curiosity about the opening passage is that it makes a
questionable generalization. If the Old Masters were “never wrong”
about the juxtaposition of suffering with signs of indifference to it,
what would Auden say of Breughel’s Parable of the Blind (1568), which
depicts a row of blind men tumbling miserably into a ditch while not a
single animate creature – neither man nor beast – is shown anywhere
else in the picture, let alone shown displaying indifference to their
plight? Viewed in light of the museum where this poem is nominally
set, and more specifically of the paintings to which it alludes, Auden’s
grand generalization about the Old Masters is at best idiosyncratic. We
should read it not as a universal truth – which it certainly is not – but
as a clue to the state of mind that Auden’s speaker brings to the
viewing of Breughel’sLandscape with the Fall of Icarus. Here, the
speaker tells us,
[…] everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. (Auden 1976 [1938],
147)
The point of view implicitly imputed to the painting as a whole might
be that of the sun, mirror of the viewer’s eye: the sun resting on the
horizon at the vanishing point and gazing dispassionately – like an
appreciative connoisseur – at the vivid flash of white legs against green
water. Moreover, as Michael Riffaterre observes, the ship is “the most
exemplary passerby in the indifference sequence” (1986, 8), for in
abandoning the drowning man to his fate, it breaks one of the most
fundamental laws of the sea. But how far does this indifference to
Icarus’s plight extend? If the splash and forsaken cry that the
ploughman may have heard did not signify “an important failure” for
him, is this also the attitude implied by the painting as a whole, or by
the poem? The question moves from one ekphrastic component to
another, from the action imputed to the real world, to the painting of
that action, and then to the poem about the painting. The poem thus
leads us to see how the painting pretends to subordinate the disaster to
other sights, or actually does subordinate it by making it far less
conspicuous than the ship and the ploughman. But above all, the poem
makes us see how the moral meaning of the painting – the meaning it
is said to illustrate – is largely constructed by the words of the title
with which the museum has labeled it. The title is the verbal bridge
between the painting and the poem, which reconstructs not only the
painting but also its literary source – the story of Icarus in Book 8 of
Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In Auden’s hands, the story of Daedalus’s
anguish at the loss of his son becomes a story of the suffering of Icarus
alone – a verbal narrative of suffering willfully ignored (Heffernan
1993, 146–152).

4 Ekphrasis in Prose Fiction and Cinematic

Ekphrasis
Besides taking the form of poetry, ekphrasis can also be found in works
of prose fiction. In a recent novel called Underworld (1997), Don
DeLillo links the destructiveness of the atomic bomb to Peter
Breughel’s The Triumph of Death (ca. 1562, Museo del Prado, Madrid).
While J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime Director of the United States
Federal Bureau of Investigation, is attending a legendary baseball
game in October 1951, right after the Soviet Union had just exploded a
second atomic bomb, he is struck by pictorial fallout when the two
halves of a reproduction of Breughel’s painting––torn from a magazine
and thrown down from above him – descend on his head. Fitting
together the two halves, Hoover thoroughly examines all the details of
the painting – “a census-taking of awful ways to die” (DeLillo 1997, 50)
– and is then prompted to think of the bomb just detonated by the
Soviets. In this case, as is typical of ekphrasis in fiction, the painting is
verbally represented in such a way as to reveal the mind of a central
character in the novel.
Ekphrastic fiction can represent not only painting, still photography,
and sculpture but also film. In Manuel Puig’s novel Kiss of the Spider
Woman, one prisoner describes to another a series of films that are
mostly imaginary or “notional” but often composed of elements drawn
from actual films. Cinematic ekphrasis, which I have discussed at
length elsewhere (Heffernan 2015 forthcoming), radically challenges
the notion that ekphrasis deals only with pictures that are still in every
sense, silent and motionless. In the world of art itself, quite apart from
film, digital technology is already making pictures that move, as does
Ori Gersht’s Pomegranate (2006); when examined for more than a few
seconds, this would-be still life of a pomegranate, a cabbage, and a
pumpkin turns out to be a High-Definition film of the pomegranate
struck by a bullet and then exploding its seeds in slow motion.
Whatever verbal story might be told about this picture, the stories told
about the films described in Puig’s novel are much more elaborate, but
they strongly suggest that cinematic ekphrasis exploits the inherently
dreamlike character of film, its metamorphic fluidity. In the infancy of
film, metamorphosis emerged as one of its most distinctive features.
Its transforming power was discovered by accident one day in 1898 by
George Méliès, the great French pioneer of filmmaking, when his
camera briefly jammed while he was filming traffic outside the Paris
Opera. The camera stopped, but the vehicles and the pedestrians kept
moving, so when he started cranking the camera again, he got a new
sequence of images that was discontinuous with the previous
sequence. When he projected the film, therefore, he saw “a bus
changed into a hearse, and men changed into women” (qtd. in
Heffernan 1977, 140). Here is metamorphosis: precisely what we
experience in the irrepressibly fluid world of dreams.
Hence the metamorphic character of film evokes a particular kind of
embedded narrative to be found in literature well before the advent of
cinema: the story of a dream, which can all too easily become a
nightmare. In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (first published
1818), which has inspired more than two hundred films, Victor
describes the dream that he had right after animating the monster. In
telling his own story to a character named Walton, Victor says that at
the moment of animation, his dreams of glory at creating life dissolved
in the face of the monster’s ugliness. “[T]he beauty of the dream
vanished,” he says, “and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart”
(Shelley 1999 [1818], 85). Soon afterwards, when Victor falls asleep, he
dreams that he sees Elizabeth – his fiancée – walking down a city
street. But as soon as he embraces and kisses her, she turns into the
worm-ridden corpse of his long-dead mother. In turn, this ghastly
nightmare prefigures a later, real-world event. By the time Victor gets
around to actually embracing Elizabeth on their wedding night, she
has just been killed by the monster.
In his dream of kissing a young woman who turns into a corpse,
Victor anticipates what happens to the psychiatrist in the first of the
films that Molina describes in Kiss of the Spider Woman. As a
descendant of the cat people of medieval Europe, Irena will turn into a
panther if any man kisses her. So when Dr. Judd kisses her, she turns
into a panther and kills him. Desire is once again frustrated by death.
The story of this cinematic episode is recalled and reconstructed in
the final pages of the novel, where the cinematic and the oneiric – the
world of film and the world of dreams – converge with the world of
politics, which has up to now been cast as the antithesis to both film
and dreams. To this point, the sole source of the stories told about
films in this novel has been Molina, the gay window dresser serving
eight years for seducing a minor. His cellmate, Valentin, is a Marxist
firmly committed to his radical comrades in their fight against the
government of Argentina. So, the authorities try to use Molina to
seduce Valentin psychologically, and with deliveries of tasty food and
the promise of an early release, they set Molina to spy on Valentin and
to extract from him information about the whereabouts and plans of
his comrades.
All of the stories that Molina tells about films, therefore, could be
seen as a means to the end of steering Valentin away from politics and
into the world of dream, fantasy, and erotic arousal – as in the Nazi
propaganda film about the singer who falls in love with the German
officer, who is recruited by the resistance to spy on him, and who is
finally shot down by a member of the resistance. Obviously this film
prefigures the fate of Molina, who is likewise shot down by the
Argentine radicals whom he was trying to serve. But in general, the
medium of film in this novel is represented as something feminine,
seductive, and erotic as well as metamorphic, always threatening to
soften and melt the links binding Valentin to the masculine world of
politics. For the most part, Valentin disdains the aesthetic value of
film. Though he keeps wanting to hear Molina tell him the stories of
films, the one about the singer and the German officer strikes him as a
piece of “Nazi junk” (Puig 1991, 56). But for Molina it’s a purely
apolitical love story, “a work of art” (Puig 1991, 56) that makes him
think of his boyfriend Gabriele, the married waiter who obsesses him.
Molina loves a straight man because he feels himself to be a woman,
and he plays a woman to the hyper-masculine Valentin so as to seduce
him psychically: at one point he tells the authorities that he thinks he
can soften up Valentin because he’s a bit “attached to me” (Puig 1991,
198). Valentin himself knows the dangers of this. Near the end of the
novel, when Molina asks Valentin to kiss him just before the two men
part for good, Valentin says he’s afraid to do so lest Molina turn into a
panther “like with the first movie you told me,” he says. Then, when
Molina denies he’s the panther woman, Valentin says, “no, you’re the
spider woman, who traps men in her web” (Puig 1991, 260). Of course
the spider woman will re-appear in Valentin’s dream, but it’s
important to realize that by the time he leaves Valentin, Molina is
wholly committed to the radical cause. “I’ll do whatever you tell me,”
are his very last words to Valentin (Puig 1991, 263). Before he is shot
by the radicals, he does everything he can to reach them with
Valentin’s message while eluding the government agents sent to follow
him – to use him one last time in tracking down the radicals.
On the other hand, even as Molina is politically radicalized through
the influence of Valentin, Valentin is softened and feminized through
the influence of Molina and all his stories of films. Right after calling
Molina “the spider woman,” a phrase Molina loves, Valentin says, “I
learned a lot from you Molina” (Puig 1991, 261), and on their last night
together, the two men make love and then kiss. After that, and after we
learn that Molina has been killed and Valentin tortured almost to
death by the prison authorities, Valentin is caught up in a final dream
that is not only called a “silvery […] film […] in black and white” (Puig
1991, 280) but is also steeped in scenes and images drawn from the
movies that Molina has narrated for him. Molina thus embodies for
Valentin the enchanting power of film and dreams, which is then
refigured by the masked, silver-dressed woman “trapped in a spider’s
web” (Puig 1991, 280), the woman who has been virtually
metamorphosed into a spider. Like Molina in their cell, the spider
woman offers Valentin sex and luscious food. But since Valentin has
already linked Molina to the panther woman of the film, has already
called him “the spider woman,” and has kissed him before they parted
for the last time, this is a dream or nightmare of Molina’s end. As the
spider woman, Molina weeps for both himself and Valentin, caught
behind the mask of his spying and within the web of his conflicting
services to both sides in the government’s persecution of radicals.

5 Conclusion
As a literary genre, therefore, ekphrasis ranges from ancient rhetorical
exercises in description through art criticism to poetry and fiction.
Furthermore, since digital technology and cinema have animated
visual art itself, the verbal representation of visual representation has
become more fluid than ever before. While traditional ekphrasis
generates a narrative from a work of art that is still in both senses,
silent and motionless, cinematic ekphrasis exploits the metamorphic
power of film to conjure a dream world that rivals and contests the
order of realistic fiction. In all of these cases, the verbal version of a
work of visual art remakes the original. The rhetoric of art criticism
aspires to make the work of art “confess itself” in language that is
always that of the critic; ekphrastic poetry turns the work of art into a
story that expresses the mind of the speaker; and ekphrastic fiction
turns the work of art – whether still or moving – into a story that
mirrors the mind of a character. Finally and simply, then, ekphrasis is
a kind of writing that turns pictures into storytelling words.

6 Bibliography

6.1 Works Cited

Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting. Trans. John R. Spencer. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1966.
Auden, W. H. “Musée des Beaux Arts.” Collected Poems. 1938. Ed.
Edward Mendelson. New York: Random House, 1976. 146–147.
Barkan, Leonard. Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2013.
Becker, Andrew Sprague. The Shield of Achilles and the Poetics of
Ekphrasis. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995.
Bryson, Norman. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.
Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics,
and the Study of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975.
DeLillo, Don. Underworld. 1997. London: Picador, 1998.
Denniston, John Dewar. “Ekphrasis.” The Oxford Classical Dictionary.
Ed. Nicholas G. L. Hammond and Howard Hayes Scullard. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 21970. 377.
Gombrich, E. H. “Image and Code: Scope and Limits of
Conventionalism in Pictorial Representation.” Image and Code. Ed.
Wendy Steiner. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981. 11–
42.
Hagstrum, Jean. The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary
Pictorialism From Dryden to Gray. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1958.
Heffernan, James A. W. “Looking at the Monster: Frankenstein and
Film.” Critical Inquiry 24.1 (1977): 133–158.
Heffernan, James A. W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis
from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993.
Heffernan, James A. W. “Lusting for the Natural Sign.” Semiotica
98.1/2 (1994): 219–228.
Heffernan, James A. W. “Notes Toward a Theory of Cinematic
Ekphrasis.” Fictional Movies. Ed. Massimo Fusillo. Göttingen: V&R
unipress, 2015 forthcoming.
Hollander, John. “The Poetics of Ekphrasis.” Word & Image 4 (1988):
209–219.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. 1922. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. New York:
Random House, 1986.
Keats, John. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Complete Poems. 1820. Ed.
Jack Stillinger. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. 282–
 283.
Krieger, Murray. “Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry; or
Laokoon Revisited.” The Poet as Critic. Ed. Frederick P. W.
McDowell. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967. 3–26.
Krieger, Murray. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
Lanham, Richard. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1968.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of
Painting and Poetry. 1766. Trans. and ed. Edward Allen
McCormick. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. 1667. Ed. Matthew S. Stallard. Macon:
Mercer University Press, 2011.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. Frank Justus Miller. Rev. ed. by G. P.
Goold. Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 31916–1977.
Philostratus. Imagines (Eikones). Trans. Arthur Fairbanks. Loeb
Classical Library. London: Heineman, 1931.
Puig, Manuel. Kiss of the Spider Woman. Trans. Thomas Colchie. New
York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1991.
Riffaterre, Michael. “Textuality: W. H. Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux
Arts.’” Textual Analysis: Some Readers Reading. Ed. Mary Ann
Caws. New York: Modern Language Association, 1986. 1–13.
Rosenberg, Harold. “Defining Art.” Minimal Art: A Critical
Anthology. Ed. Gregory Battcock. New York: Dutton, 1968. 298–
307.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus. 1818. Ed. D.
L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. Peterborough: Broadview Press,
1999.
Spitzer, Leo. “The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ or Content vs.
MetaGrammar.” Essays on English and American Literature. Ed.
 Anna Hatcher. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962. 67–97.
Steinberg, Leo. Other Criteria. London: Oxford University Press,
1972.
Steinberg, Leo. Michelangelo’s Lost Paintings. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1975.
Webb, R. H. The Transmission of the Eikones of Philostratus and the
Development of Ekphrasis from Antiquity to the Renaissance.
Dissertation submitted to the Department of Classics, King’s
College. London, 1992.

6.2 Further Reading

Keefe, Anne. “The Ecstatic Embrace of Verbal and Visual: 21st
Century Lyric beyond the Ekphrastic Paragone.” Word & Image 27.2
(2011): 135–147.
Mitchell, W. J. T. “Ekphrasis and the Other.” Picture Theory.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 151–181.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994.
Andrew James Johnston

2 Medieval Ekphrasis: Chaucer’s

Knight’s Tale
Abstract: This article offers a sketch of medieval approaches to
vision, to the relations between text and image and to ekphrasis, before
moving on to a reading of the way Geoffrey Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale
critiques attempts to essentialise and keep separate different media
and genres, especially the verbal and the visual.
Key Terms: Middle Ages, Chaucer, The Knight’s Tale, ekphrasis,
power

1 The Problem of the Middle Ages

A variety of reasons render a discussion of medieval intermediality in a

handbook like this problematic. After all, the European Middle Ages
lasted a thousand years, comprising an astonishing number of
different ethnic, linguistic and political communities all displaying a
vast degree of cultural diversity and change. Moreover, the very
concept of the ‘Middle Ages’ has become increasingly questionable.
Medievalists have long been criticising the principles of periodisation
that have led to the consistent marginalisation of the medieval and a
concomitant simplistic celebration of the early modern as the birth of
all that (post)modernity has desired to praise itself for. The rise of
postcolonial and queer paradigms in medieval studies has helped to
intensify this critique. Then there is the issue of what and whom to
include in the category of the ‘medieval’: traditional notions of a
uniformly Christian Middle Ages, for instance, look increasingly
unconvincing before the backdrop of the many Muslim and Jewish
communities to be found on the European continent, a continent
whose boundaries would have looked very different from a medieval
point of view, if, indeed, the notion of ‘Europe’ had existed. The mere
idea of a uniformly Christian Middle Ages looks odd in the light not
only of the breadth and inclusiveness of Western medieval Christianity
but also of its internal variety, its constant development and its
tendency towards internecine conflict. Even if, for purely heuristic
reasons, we stick to the concept of the ‘Middle Ages’ the problems only
multiply. If we are intent on periodising, then what criteria should
determine the beginning of the Middle Ages? The rise of Christianity?
That was well in place in the Roman Empire before the Middle Ages
started. The decline and fall of the Roman Empire? The rise of Islam?
The birth of the first precursors of the European nation states? And
what events mark the end of the Middle Ages? The era of discoveries?
The invention of the printing press? The Reformation? The beginning
of the Counter-Reformation? The Battle of Bosworth? Or, perhaps, the
supersession of an episteme of resemblance by the taxonomic
discourses of what Michel Foucault calls the ‘Classical Age’? None of
these criteria are particularly satisfying (the least satisfying being the
well-worn cliché of the rediscovery of Antiquity in the Renaissance).
At first glance, this by no means exhaustive list of typical criteria has
little to do with intermediality, except perhaps for the printing press,
and to a certain extent the Reformation. As far as media are concerned,
the differences between the Middle Ages and Antiquity, on the one
hand, and the Middle Ages and the Renaissance or Early Modern
Period, on the other, are not nearly as great as the tiredly teleological
histories of the rupture-ridden progress of Western modernity tend to
assume: Even after the invention of the printing press, important texts
were still circulated in manuscript form, and for a long time texts were
still very much experienced in aural form, while early modern
intellectual exchange was still strongly informed by the academic
genres, both written and performative, that had developed at the
medieval universities.
Things become still more messy when we narrow down the problem
of intermediality to questions of text and image or turn our attention to
the even more specific problem of ekphrasis, which serves as an
important focal point in the second part of this article, where it will
primarily be understood in terms of James A. W. Heffernan’s
definition as “the verbal representation of visual representation”
(Heffernan 1993, 3).
With regard to ekphrasis – whichever of its many definitions one
might prefer – the Middle Ages is not vastly different from the
previous, nor from the following, period. Yet again, it probably
depends on which Middle Ages one actually has in mind. In this article,
special attention will be paid to Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340–1400), an
author who, in the English-speaking world and especially in the eyes of
non-medievalists, epitomises the medieval, even though from a
continental European perspective this sounds odd, given that his
principal works were written at a time when both Petrarch and
Boccaccio were already dead.
I have chosen Chaucer, and his Knight’s Tale in particular, for
various reasons: First, because his works betray a consistent
fascination not only with the relations of the verbal and the visual but
also with media in general. I have chosen Chaucer also because his
literary activity was situated at a cultural crossroads where a number
of different discourses intersected; I shall mention only the ones
relevant to the topic of this article: the classical traditions of literary
ekphrasis as they survived in the poetry of Virgil and Ovid, for
instance; early humanist discussions of visual art; the intensely visual
culture and aesthetic exuberance of King Richard II’s splendidly
flamboyant court; specifically medieval literary traditions as
exemplified in the dream vision and other poetic allegories;
contemporary state-of-the-art scientific discourses on vision, optics
and the workings of the human mind; and, last but not least,
contemporary heretical iconoclasm as championed by the Lollards.

2 The Visual and the Verbal in the Middle Ages:

Some General Remarks
Before zooming in on Chaucer, I will make a few general observations
on medieval relations between the visual and the verbal, observations
which do not claim to be exhaustive by any means. Because of its
illuminated manuscripts, its stained glass windows, its embroidered
tapestries, its pageants both religious and secular and its culture of
conspicuous ritual and display – e.g. the elevation of the host during
mass, reliquaries, the triumphal entries and public processions –
medieval culture is often described as a particularly visual one. At the
same time, the Middle Ages are just as frequently portrayed as
possessing a strong affinity to textuality: This is because of its
fascination with complex hermeneutics, manifest, for instance, in the
fourfold sense of scripture, but also because of its general obsession
with a type of philosophy and learning that was language-centred;
moreover, because the Middle Ages venerated the privileged authority
of canonical corpora, e.g. the Bible, the works of Aristotle, as well as
established commentary traditions such as the Glossa ordinaria; and
because of the medieval tendency to read the world as a book, as a
space that was not merely material but semiotic. Hence, if we see the
verbal and the visual in some kind of fundamental binary and seek to
chart the Middle Ages’ position somewhere between these two poles
we reach an impasse: Despite the fact that even medieval theorists
could be prone to conceiving of the relation between the verbal and the
visual in starkly oppositional terms, textuality and visuality were both
deeply rooted in medieval intellectual and aesthetic practices and
tended to engage in complex forms of interaction. The problem is
exacerbated by the fact that the verbal/textual experience of the
Middle Ages is often described in terms of a binary of the oral vs. the
literate, so that, from a medieval perspective, the ‘verbal’ would not
necessarily cover the same type of phenomena as nowadays. Over
about the last three decades, this particular medieval media problem
has been conceptualised in increasingly sophisticated ways, giving rise,
for example, to the notion of ‘aurality’, a concept that shifts attention
from the production of texts to the way an audience would have
received them. But again, this is only part of the story: medieval poets
were not the innocent or passive victims of their media contexts, be
they oral or aural. They developed sophisticated means of creatively
integrating conceptions of their media into their meaning-making
activity. For instance, feigned orality, the artful imitation of poetic
forms associated with supposedly ‘oral’ literature, was frequently used
for the purpose of highlighting the literariness of the literary discourse
or of exploring notions of fictionality.
Writing and literacy, too, meant something very different in the
Middle Ages from what they mean today. We witness, by way of an
example, an intense medieval concern with the materiality of the
linguistic sign, a concern which seems to have vanished from
(post)modern experience. This interest in the material aspects of
linguistic signification is evinced, amongst other things, in the playful
and self-consciously enigmatic composition of the dual-language
inscriptions on the Franks Casket, an early eighth-century Anglo-
Saxon whale’s bone box adorned both with images and writing, just as
much as it is evidenced in the Anglo-Saxon riddle of the bookworm, a
species presented as actually ‘eating’ words. This interest in the
materiality of linguistic signification can be traced in Chaucer’s
allegory of the House of Fame (House of Fame) standing, as it does, on
a block of ice from which the great names of history are constantly
erased due to the block’s melting surface.
The question of what constitutes media may thus take very different
forms in the Middle Ages from what it does today. If, for instance, a
Gothic cathedral displays beautifully coloured stained glass windows
that illustrate biblical narratives, then surely those windows constitute
a visual medium like a picture or a series of pictures. Yet again, this
type of imagery easily introduces sequential narrative into the
equation; and the changing of light during the course of the day
inevitably affects the visual experience, an experience that does not
remain confined to the window itself but also has to do with the blurs
of brilliant colour dancing on the walls, pillars and floors of a building
itself covered in polychrome murals and frescoes. And how, in terms of
media theory, to conceive of the church windows’ symbolic status as
embodied in the light streaming through the glass without damaging it,
just as, according to Christian belief, Jesus was conceived without
impairing Mary’s virginity? In what way do these windows bear a
message; what kind of media-situation do they imply when it is not the
imageon the glass but the materiality of the glass itself that provides
the visual symbolism that matters?
The very issue of what constitutes an image in the Middle Ages is not
as straightforward as one might think. The Latin term imago, rather
like the Modern High German word Bild, refers both to pictures and
statues, as well as to images in a wider cultural and especially mental
and conceptual sense. Images were discussed in a broad variety of
cultural contexts. For instance, according to the ventricular model of
the brain, a model still very much in use in the Renaissance, images
played a fundamental role in fixing and processing the products of
sense perception so that they could be turned into rational ideas and
thoughts. Without images, thinking was considered to be impossible.
Moreover, in the form of visions, images featured prominently in
medieval mystical discourse which provided access to religious truth in
ways different from the more rational theology. Then there was the
problem of religious imagery: Pope Gregory the Great (590–604)
endorsed images in churches as a way to educate the illiterate and to
acquaint them with Christian doctrine. But soon the problem of the
image’s cultic status reared its head, and in the eighth and ninth
centuries the Byzantine empire was repeatedly riven by conflict over
iconoclasm. Indeed, when believers prayed before the image of Christ
or the Virgin Mary, were they, in fact, venerating the image, thereby
committing an act of idolatry, or were they merely using the image as a
commemorative prop so as to better focus their attention on the
religious truths represented in the picture? And what if there actually
were miracles associated with particular images, such as statues that
bled or icons that wept? The problem of images within the cultic
context of a monotheistic religion is part of the Judeo-Christian
heritage, and considerably affected medieval Islam, too. In Chaucer’s
England, the Lollards, a heretical movement initiated by John Wycliffe
(1320–1384), launched an energetic attack on religious images, as on
the Eucharist and pilgrimages. Iconoclasm later became a hallmark of
the English Reformation, whereas post-Reformation nostalgia for
medieval England often included a hankering for the beautiful
frescoes, statues and altarpieces that had adorned churches before a
violent iconoclasm swept them away (cf. Simpson 2002).
Textual interpretation, too, involved particular attention to the
visual. During the Western Middle Ages, the dominant exegetical
method was that of the fourfold sense of scripture which distinguished
between the literal sense and the three allegorical senses of the Bible.
This hierarchical model has often been seen as evidence of the way
medieval minds tended to prefer the symbolic and abstract over the
material and concrete, but even within this system of biblical
interpretation, it was possible to stress the importance of the sensus
literalis (the literal/historical sense) as opposed to the other three
allegorical or mystical senses. The twelfth-century Victorine school of
monastic mystical theology was especially fascinated by the aesthetic
qualities of biblical texts but also by the physical beauty of and in the
world: To Hugh of St. Victor, visible beauty was an image of God’s
invisible beauty (cf. Eco 1986, 58). Moreover, biblical exegesis is
important for discussions of medieval intermediality not least because
the relation between the biblical text and religious truth was itself
conceptualised in terms of visual metaphor. In 1 Corinthians 13:12, St.
Paul states that the divine could not be beheld directly but merely
indirectly: per speculum in enigmate – “through a glass in a dark
manner”. Religious truth was always hidden behind a semi-
transparent veil (cf. Akbari 2004).
Besides, medieval notions of the visual as a scientific phenomenon
differed from their modern counterparts. From the twelfth century
onwards, sophisticated Arab optics entered the horizon of Western
knowledge, and hence the question of what actually constituted sight
was hotly debated. Western interest in optics was partly fuelled by
what was considered the spiritual nature of light, but that did not
preclude an interest of a kind we would consider scientific from a
modern point of view: On the contrary, the two went hand-in-hand. By
the mid-fourteenth century, both Oxford and Cambridge had adopted
perspectiva, the study of optics, into their arts courses; in other words,
a basic amount of scientific knowledge on optics had become part of
every educated person’s standard intellectual toolkit. Within the
narrow space of this handbook article an overview of the different
theories and their development cannot be provided, so I shall offer
merely the briefest and most superficial sketch of what, in Chaucer’s
day, was considered established knowledge, i.e. what was to be found
in the familiar authorities on optics, especially the Arab Alhacen (Ibn
al Haytham, c. 965–c. 1039) whose Kitab-al-Manazir was translated
into Latin as De aspectibus (‘On visual appearances’), and the Silesian
Witelo, whose book Perspectiva (c. 1274) became the prime agent of
disseminating Alhacen’s views in Europe. In the Squire’s Tale, Chaucer
actually mentions both authorities as ‘Alhazen’ and ‘Vitulon’.
According to Alhacen, every point on the surface of a physical object
emitted rays of light that streamed into the eye. The eye in turn
admitted rays only if they hit its surface at a right angle, with the rays
converging at the centre of the eye. This is important amongst other
things because Alhacen’s intromission theory of vision superseded the
Euclidian model which, in the Platonic tradition, posited that in the
process of human vision the eye itself emitted rays. Although, by the
mid-fourteenth century, Alhacen and Vitulon’s ideas had very much
become the standard account of optical theory, they were by no means
uncontested; or rather, there were alternative accounts, such as Roger
Bacon’s (c. 1220–c. 1292). Despite Bacon’s by and large following in
Alhacen’s footsteps, there were some crucial differences to his model.
Bacon assumed the existence of so-called species, likenesses or images
of the object seen, that emanated from the object itself and were
transported to the eye by the object’s adjacent medium, air. But in
order to successfully complete the operation of sight the eye, too, had
to emit species and, consequently, Bacon’s theory managed to merge
aspects of intromission with aspects of extramission. In order to make
sight possible, the eye and the species of an object had to enter into a
process of communication. To put it very crudely, vision in Bacon’s
world required the air to be full of little images moving towards the eye
and being actively met rather than merely passively received by it (cf.
Brown 2007, 47–68).
Furthermore, the material forms of medieval written textuality
differed from modern ones in as much as books were aesthetic objects
which frequently stressed various aspects of the visual to a degree that
has become uncommon in modern books. The codex, i.e. the bound
volume with turnable pages present-day Western human beings
automatically identify as the material referent of the word ‘book’, was
an invention of late antiquity and, in the West, superseded the scrolls
that, in classical antiquity, had been the dominant physical bearers of
texts. A codex had obvious advantages over a scroll, not least for the
ease with which it made possible, through turning the pages, to move
backwards and forwards through the text. In the Middle Ages, this
potential was exploited enthusiastically through the development of
complex systems of referencing and cross-referencing, of schemata
and tables which could guide a reader through a text and its
complicated arrangements. (Coloured) rubrics and capitalisation,
marginal glosses, and marginal commentaries often set in blocks
around an authoritative work turned the writing into a kind of visual
map that made it easier to understand the structure and meaning of
the text as a whole.
There is an interesting moment in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde
(c. 1385) when, as a go-between for Troilus, Pandarus for the first time
comes to visit his niece Criseyde. He enters a room of considerable
public status, a paved parlour, and sees Criseyde and her ladies
engaged in a communal reading of a book on the history of Thebes.
Not knowing what it is that Criseyde and her company are reading, he
asks, as an opening gambit, whether their reading matter dealt with
love. Criseyde points to the book’s “lettres rede” (Troilus and Criseyde,
II, l. 103), thus referring to the coloured markers that help to visualise
the work’s structural make-up and explaining where exactly in their
reading of the narrative the ladies have been interrupted. Here,
textuality is considered to be a highly visual form of experience.
Rubrics and coloured initials constitute only one aspect of the visual
potential inherent in the medieval manuscript. Illumination is another
aesthetic practice associated with the medieval codex. And here again
we encounter forms of aesthetic experience that defy modern
conventions. If, as W. J. T. Mitchell has argued, the “impulse to purify
media” is “one of the central utopian gestures of Western modernity”
(Mitchell 1994, 5), then the medieval manuscript is, indeed, ideally
suited to provide a radical contrast to this specifically modern drive. In
the illuminated manuscript, writing/text and visual imagery
ineluctably merge, as letters, especially initials, turn into foliage or
become part of a larger decorative design, frequently containing small
images set into the letter itself. Or, in other cases, letters become
entirely hidden in a whole page covered by an image, as to be
witnessed, for instance, in the Book of Kells (c. 800), a famous Irish
manuscript, where the lettering of the first two words of the Gospel of
St. John (“In principio”) is so completely and seamlessly integrated
into an elaborate decorative design that it is only from “-pio” onwards
that the inexperienced viewer realises that she is actually dealing with
script. From there, it is only a short step to the ‘carpet pages’ found in
early medieval Christian, Jewish and Islamic manuscripts – pages
containing no script at all, but covered entirely in highly elaborate
geometrical designs. In a Christian context, the intricacy of these
designs could be seen as an aid to meditation or to the rumination on
scriptural texts that was typical of monastic theology and spirituality.
Instances such as these show the image shedding all mimetic qualities
and turning into an instrument of a particular spiritual epistemology
that has little in common with modern notions either of the visual or
the textual.
A final comment on the term ‘ekphrasis’ seems in order. In the
ancient and medieval rhetorical tradition ‘ekphrasis’ referred to any
detailed and, especially, to any vivid description, with enargeia as the
key term to describe the quality of lifelikeness that was associated with
a successful ekphrasis (cf. Webb 2009). But whereas in antiquity,
lifelikeness referred to the illusionistic quality of the representation in
both verbal descriptions and in images – the verbal representation’s
ability to conjure images in the mind, the visual representation’s ability
to appear as though it were real – in many medieval texts, the
lifelikeness of a statue or a painting was about giving the impression of
the image’s either being alive or coming to life. This lifelikeness applies
less to the question of mimetic representation than to an artifact’s
ability to magically or miraculously overcome its own nature as a mere
material object. In the Middle Ages, an apparently representational
problem thus turns into an epistemological or even a metaphysical
one. Such a lifelikeness does not depend on the illusionistic quality of
the work of art, it might just as well occur in an artifact marked by
stark hieratic stylisation (cf. Camille 1991, 44–47).

3 The Politics of the Visual in Chaucer’s

Knight’s Tale
Whereas the previous remarks primarily stressed the degree to which
medieval media-experience could considerably differ from its modern
counterpart, the following discussion focuses on the way in which
Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale negotiates the degree to which the visual and
the verbal are separable or not. In other words, it is my aim to show
how modernity’s supposed desire to keep different media apart, a
desire so perceptively dissected by W. J. T. Mitchell, already was a
medieval concern, though not necessarily one that was dealt with in
the same fashion as in the modern period. Hence, it is important that
we understand the Knight’s Tale not merely as a story about chivalric
love and violence or about Boethian ethics and monarchical statecraft,
but also as one about the way the visual and the verbal interact,
intersect and, in so doing, become politically relevant. As I have
already hinted at, the Knight’s Tale seems deliberately to be mixing, on
a verbal level, various medieval approaches to the visual. At the same
time, the tale is also interested in the poetic competition between the
visual and the verbal. Yet despite its evident fascination with the verbal
representation of visual representation, the Knight’s Tale should not
simply be seen as a conventional exercise in the time-honoured game
of the paragone, but rather as a shrewd meditation on the ideological
impulses involved in the paragone itself.
The Knight’s Tale is a chivalric romance with conspicuously epic
features, though one could just as well call it a shortish epic with
romance-like characteristics. In any case, it is an epic-cum-romance
with a twist, since its ultimate solution is arrived at by narrative means
more closely resembling those of the fabliau, i.e. the medieval comic
tale, than those of the two genres the tale ostensibly appears to be
combining (Vaszily 1997). In purely generic terms, the tale betrays a
marked interest in mixing and merging aesthetic phenomena
otherwise considered to be distinct in medieval literary culture. An
original and highly self-conscious adaptation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s
Teseida – which draws on Statius’ epic Thebaid – the Knight’s Tale
relates the story of Palamon and Arcite, two Theban princes captive in
Athens, who, after spotting from their dungeon window the Amazon
princess Emilye, sister-in-law to their captor, Duke Theseus of Athens,
fall in love with her. They each manage to escape in a different way,
return to Athens and begin fighting a mortal duel for an Emilye
entirely oblivious of their desires. After happening upon them by
coincidence, Theseus arranges a grand tournament at which, aided by
a hundred volunteers each, the princes once more, but this time
publicly, struggle for Emilye in a Theatre specially built for that
purpose. Before the battle, the princes and Emilye all pray to their
respective tutelary deities, with Emilye unsuccessfully imploring the
goddess Diana to let her remain unmarried. Arcite, who asked Mars to
grant him victory, wins. As he approaches to claim his prize, his horse
is startled by a fury sent from hell and throws him off. He breaks his
neck, so that eventually his cousin Palamon, to whom Venus had
promised the hand of Emilye, is free to marry the princess a year after
Arcite’s death. This turn of events is the result of a squabble between
Mars and Venus, who each promised to fulfil the wishes of their
respective champions. In a typically fabliau-like manner, Saturn solves
the conflict by strictly adhering to the exact wording of the prayers,
rather than their implicit meaning. Since Arcite asked only for victory
in battle, this is exactly what he gets, while Palamon begged for the
woman and, consequently, wins her hand despite having been
defeated.
The tale contains a number of important scenes which problematise
the visual in one form or another, ekphrasis in Heffernan’s sense being
only one of them. I shall briefly discuss these scenes in the order they
occur in the narrative, first the traditional variety of ekphrasis found in
the Knight’s Tale, i.e. Chaucer’s description of the frescoes in the
temples, then the voyeuristic scene in the temple of Diana, and finally
the exotic pageant staged in the vast Theatre where the tournament is
held before an audience that comprises the entire population of
Athens.
Chaucer’s adaptation of the Teseida is marked by a number of
significant changes vis-à-vis his source, many of which matter with
respect to visual issues. First, whereas Boccaccio’s Theatre – a circular
building resembling a Roman amphitheatre like the Coliseum – was
already standing, Chaucer has Theseus specially erect it for the event.
Second, while Boccaccio’s temples are not related to the Theatre, in the
Knight’s Tale the temples to the three deities are built into the theatre.
Marijane Osborn (2002) has shown that the Theatre’s design has
marked affinities to a medieval astrolabe, thus providing the tale with a
visual context both astrological and astronomical. So, even as it
purports to be an archaeologically consistent imitation of classical
architecture, Chaucer’s fictional building constitutes a grandiose
scientific fantasy. At the same time, the Theatre is a complex space
where different forms both of visual art – most importantly the
ekphrases in the temples – and of the visual in general are represented.
For instance, by vastly expanding the Theatre’s size, Chaucer creates a
sense of total vision: As all the world becomes a stage in Athens – after
all the building’s dimensions make it capable of holding some 200,000
spectators – the narrator stresses that all of the viewers are granted
perfect vision since, due to the seats rising in concentric circles, no-
one’s view can be impeded. Everybody sees – but, just as important,
everybody can be seen (cf. Johnston 2008, 100).
The temples themselves offer typical instances of paragone-like
ekphrastic description. The temple of Mars, for instance, contains a
fresco depicting a temple of Mars from the outside, but then the
narrator takes the readers right into that temple, i.e. into an edifice
described as a mere two-dimensional representation, logically possible
to be viewed only from the outside. There, the narrator embarks on an
elaborately detailed description of the frescoes inside that building. As
the reader’s gaze is thus impossibly directed inside the temple, the
narrator himself, the Knight, seems to lose control of his narratorial
power, referring to the images as though he had seen them himself –
“there saugh I” (Canterbury Tales, Fragment I, l. 2011). On the one
hand, this rhetorical tour-de-force invokes the traditions of ‘notional
ekphrasis’ (cf. Hollander 1995), the detailed poetic description of
purely fictional works of art, a literary tradition beginning with the
shield of Achilles in Book XVIII of the Iliad. In so doing, Chaucer
appears to be participating in the aesthetic competition of the
paragone, in this case the rivalry between visual and verbal art. And,
as is to be expected of a poet, he seems to claim victory for verbal art in
as much as he verbally depicts imagery which, in purely physical
terms, no human eye would ever be capable of seeing: such as frescoes
supposedly inside a building existing only as a two-dimensional
painting.
In the temple of Diana, Chaucer takes his ekphrastic fantasies one
step further by showing us an image of a woman in childbirth. In her
seminal study on the visual object of desire in late medieval England,
Sarah Stanbury discusses this final ekphrastic scene within the context
of lifelikeness. This is a context that takes us close to the original
classical meaning of the rhetorical term ‘ekphrasis’, i.e. a detailed
description and the particular ideal of lifelikeness, of pictorial
vividness, associated with this concept:
The image might be said to illustrate the drama of life-likeness, but also – in the picture of
the woman trapped in childbirth – a terrible stasis, the place of the undead, the inability
to bring to life. This final ekphrasis bespeaks a number of very different responses, highly
ambivalent, toward images as it resolves on an image, lodged between life and death, of
death-dealing nascent life. (Stanbury 2008, 105)

Part of the ambivalence Stanbury perceptively identifies here derives, I

argue, not from the problem of lifelikeness as discussed in ancient and
medieval rhetorical handbooks. Rather, Chaucer is ironically
commenting on the problem of visual art’s supposed inability to depict
narrative. He is giving poetic expression to a binary the eighteenth-
century German writer and literary theorist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
would famously conceive of as the opposition of Raumkunst, the
supposedly spatial and entirely non-narrative visual art, vs. Zeitkunst,
i.e. verbal art defined as purely temporal. By trapping the pregnant
woman and her scream in a neverending static image, by forcing her to
cry out forever, Chaucer seems not only to anticipate but already to
question Lessing’s concept of the ‘pregnant moment’. The notion of the
‘pregnant moment’ was meant to conceptualise painting and
sculpture’s supposedly unsatisfying substitute for narrative
temporality. According to Lessing, if visual art sought to achieve an
effect similar to narrative, then, because of its fundamental limitations,
it was forced to choose a particular point in the action so central to the
narrative development that viewers could perfectly imagine what had
gone before and what must follow after. In the labouring woman’s
ever-lasting pain one senses, I suggest, a sarcastic dismissal of the
aesthetic essentialism inherent in paragonal discourse, an essentialism
rendered all the more painful, but also more ridiculous by being
associated with a victimised woman. Precisely because Chaucer’s
discussion of the relations between the verbal and the visual takes such
an exaggerated and hauntingly cruel turn, because he so obviously
seems not to be taking seriously the very principles of the paragone, of
which he appears to be producing a cynical caricature, do we realise
that there is more to his exploration of the verbal and the visual than
meets the eye. In the Knight’s Tale, I argue, the aesthetic is always
already embedded in questions of power, hence there is always a
political angle to anything that may resemble an essentialising attempt
to fix categorically what specific media are supposedly capable of and
what not (cf. Johnston 2014, 188–192).
This becomes particularly clear in the Knight’s Tale’s second
instance where Chaucer deals with the relations between word and
image, between telling and seeing. This moment occurs when Emilye
engages in the ritual ablutions she has to undergo before praying to
Diana:
This Emelye, with herte debonaire
Hir body wessh with water of a welle.
But hou she dide hir ryte I dar nat telle,
But it be any thing in general;
And yet it were a game to heeren al.
To hym that meneth well it were no charge;
But it is good a man been at his large.
(The Canterbury Tales, Fragment I, ll. 2282–2288)
This is a highly complex situation, with the narrator deliberately
turning the reader into a voyeur by making him conjure in his mind a
pornographic fantasy which the narrator himself seemingly refrains
from elaborating. An image is evoked in the mind’s eye but not actually
depicted. Supposedly for reasons of decorum, that image is relegated
to the realm of that which had better not be described. Led on by a
seemingly innocuous narrative voice, the audience is drawn step by
step into a trap making them visualise a scene the Knight’s
paradoxically prurient modesty ostensibly denies them. In executing
this narrative ploy, the narrator not only emphasises his privileged
voyeuristic perspective, but also creates a stark contrast, first, to the
sense of visual totality/total vision the amphitheatre seemed initially to
be promising, and second, to the Knight’s feigned narratorial
ineptitude as noted by Lee Patterson (1991); an ineptitude which
seemed to have reached its apogee in the temple ekphrases when the
narrator appeared to be sucked into his own story. Far from being a
bumbling amateur, when it comes to his strategies of visual
entrapment, this narrator proves to be fully in control of the narrative
(cf. Johnston 2008). And this has political consequences, since, as Lee
Patterson famously demonstrated, the Knight’s Tale’s conspicuous
narratorial naivety stands for the chivalric classes’ ideologically-driven
denial of subjectivity (cf. Patterson 1991).
There is one final scene in the Knight’s Tale where Chaucer explores
once more the relations of the verbal and the visual. This is shortly
before the great tournament, when the two armies of volunteers arrive.
They are led by Lygurge, King of Thrace, and Emetrius, King of India,
respectively, and both monarchs are depicted in flam-boyantly exotic
costumes. This is the description of Lygurge:
Ther maistow seen, comynge with Palamoun,
Lygurge hymself, the grete kyng of Trace.
[…]
Ful hye upon a chaar of gold stood he,
With four white boles in the trays.
In-stede of cote-armure over his harnays,
With nayles yelewe and brighte as any gold,
 He hadde a beres skyn, col-blak for old.
His longe heer was kembd bihynde his bak;
As any ravenes fethere it shoon for blak;
A wrethe of gold, arm-greet, of huge wighte,
Upon his hed, set ful of stones brighte,
Of fyne rubyes and of dyamauntz.
(The Canterbury Tales, Fragment I, ll. 2128–2129, ll. 2138–2144)
Emetrius is depicted in a very similar way:

With Arcita, in stories as men fynde,
The grete Emetreus, the kyng of Inde,
Upon a steede bay trapped in steel,
Covered in clooth of gold, dyapred weel,
Cam ridynge lyk the god of armes, Mars.
His cote-armure was clooth of Tars
Couched with perles white and rounde and grete;
His sadel was of brent gold newe ybete;
A mantelet upon his shulder hangynge,
Bret-ful of rubyes rede as fyr sparklynge;
His crispe heer lyk rynges was yronne […]
(The Canterbury Tales, Fragment I, ll. 2155–2165)
By introducing his description with the words “Ther maistow seen”, as
though the readers themselves were actually present in the theatre, the
narrator is repeating a performance we already witnessed in his
ekphrastic depiction of the temple. While his description of the
paintings ostentatiously collapses the distance between his own
narratorial role and the tale he is telling, here we witness him taking a
step further by seeking to erase the boundaries between the tale and
the reader/listener. The reader/listener is addressed as though s/he,
too, were a part of the fictional theatre’s audience, sitting on one of the
circular tiers, excitedly looking forward to the battle. Once again, this
can be seen as an effect of the description’s lifelikeness, of a visual
impression represented through words so vivid that it erases the very
boundaries between the narrative and the reader/listener. But here, as
in the previous moments of heightened visuality and ekphrastic
intensity, there is a political slant to what we are experiencing, and this
political slant is reinforced through, amongst other things, a reference
to an intermedial context not encountered before: that between words
and sounds. For some fifteen lines at the beginning of the battle
proper, Chaucer draws heavily on alliteration, thus producing not only
an intensely evocative soundscape of martial brutality but also an
astonishingly uncharacteristic nod to the tradition of an alliterative
poetry he otherwise ignores or (in one instance) ridicules:

In goon the speres ful sadly in arrest;
In gooth the sharpe spore into the syde.
Ther seen men who kan just and who kan ryde;
There shyveren shaftes upon sheeldes thikke;
Her feeleth thurgh the herte-spoon the prikke.
Up spryngen speres twenty foot on highte;
Out goon the swerdes as the silver brighte;
The helmes they tohewen and to shrede;
Out brest the blood with stierne stremes rede […]
(Canterbury Tales, Fragment I, ll. 2602–2610)
Quite obviously, Chaucer is not attempting to accurately reproduce the
poetic and metrical conventions of traditional English alliterative
poetry, a highly artistic and in some respects deliberately archaic
insular poetic tradition that formed a powerful aesthetic alternative to
the more continental, French-and-Italian-inspired poetic style Chaucer
preferred. Chaucer gestures towards the alliterative mode only to a
degree that makes us understand what he is alluding to, but he does no
more: Instead of the real thing, this is a mere caricature of alliterative
poetry.
 He employs this pseudo-alliterative style in order to present a
moment of both political and aesthetic chaos right at the heart of the
building apparently standing for supreme order – cosmological,
aesthetic and political. By a shrill appeal to both the visual and the
auditory senses, the deliberately stylised classicism and scientific
modernism of the Theatre is undercut in a manner almost as violent as
the action taking place at its very centre. First, there are the two kings,
portrayed as a lurid Oriental fantasy, and then there is the alliterative
brutality of the fight itself, replete with shivering shafts, springing
spears and bursting blood. Despite not adhering to the actual rules of
traditional Middle English alliterative poetry, Chaucer nevertheless
exploits that poetry’s ability to let the audience hear the brutality of the
violence depicted, a brutality more than familiar to readers from texts
such as the Alliterative Morte Arthure, for instance. In a fashion
similar to the one Shannon Gayk observed in the context of the
anonymous Middle English poem Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede,
Chaucer here combines the “sensuous qualities of alliterative verse and
ekphrasis” (Gayk 2010, 30) so that the two varieties of aesthetic
sensuousness mutually reinforce each other.
In the Knight’s Tale Chaucer thus offers us a political allegory that
creates a striking parallel between Duke Theseus’ magnificent but
ultimately futile attempt to harness chivalric violence to a superior,
rational statecraft – as embodied by the classical and scientific
aspirations of his theatrical architecture – and the classicising
attempts to keep apart the different media and establish, in the
manner of the paragone, a strict hierarchy between them, one where
the cards are very much stacked in favour of the verbal (cf. Johnston
2014). In The Knight’s Tale’s grand battle scene we witness Chaucer
delivering a scathing critique of any attempt to either essentialise and
concomitantly hierarchise artistic media; instead, by collapsing the
verbal, the visual and the auditory in one great aesthetic turmoil he
pays homage to the ultimate inseparability of the different media and
artistic genres long before modernity supposedly embarks on its grand
mission to rend them asunder once and for all.

4 Bibliography
4.1 Works Cited
Akbari, Suzanne Conklin. Seeing through the Veil: Optical Theory and
Medieval Allegory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
Brown, Peter. Chaucer and the Making of Optical Space. Oxford etc.:
Peter Lang, 2007.
Camille, Michael. The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in
Medieval Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Eco, Umberto. Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. Transl. Hugh
Bredin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986 [Italian original:
Sviluppo dell’estetica medievale. Milan: Marzorati, 1959].
Gayk, Shannon. Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-
Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Heffernan, James A. W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis
from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993.
Hollander, John. The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works
of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Johnston, Andrew James. Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf
to Othello. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008.
Johnston, Andrew James. “Ekphrasis in the Knight’s Tale.”
Rethinking the New Medievalism. Ed. R. Howard Bloch, Alison
Calhoun, Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, Joachim Küpper, and
Jeanette Patterson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2014. 180–197.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994.
Osborn, Marijane. Time and the Astrolabe in the Canterbury Tales.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.
Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.
Simpson, James. Reform and Cultural Revolution. The Oxford English
Literary History, Vol. 2, 1350–1547. Oxford: Oxford University
 Press, 2002.
Stanbury, Sarah. The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval
England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
Vaszily, Scott. “Fabliau Plotting Against Romance in Chaucer’s
Knight’s Tale.” Style 31 (1997): 523–542.
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient
Rhetorical Theory and Practice. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.

4.2 Further Reading

Barbetti, Claire. Ekphrastic Medieval Visions: A New Discussion of
Interarts Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Biernoff, Suzannah. Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Bridges, Margaret. “The Picture in the Text: Ecphrasis as Self-
reflexivity in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowles, Book of the Duchess
and House of Fame.” Word and Image 5 (1989): 151–158.
Campbell, Emma, and Robert Mills, eds. Troubled Vision: Gender,
Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Collette, Carolyn P. Species, Phantasms and Images: Vision and
Medieval Psychology in the Canterbury Tales. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2001.
Denery, Dallas G. II. Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval
World: Optics, Theology and Religious Life. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005.
Dimmick, Jeremy, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman. Images,
Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and
the Visual Image. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Epstein, Robert. “‘With many a florin he the hewes boghte’:
Ekphrasis and Symbolic Violence in the Knight’s Tale.” Philological
Quarterly 85 (2006): 49–68.
Hilmo, Maidie. Medieval Images, Icons, and Illustrated English
 Literary Texts: From the Ruthwell Cross to the Ellesmere Chaucer.
Farnham: Ashgate, 2004.
Holsinger, Bruce. “Lollard Ekphrasis: Situated Aesthetics and Literary
History.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35 (2005):
67–89.
Klarer, Mario. Ekphrasis: Bildbeschreibung als Repräsentationstheorie
bei Spenser, Sidney, Lyly und Shakespeare. Tübingen: Max
Niemeyer, 2001.
Wandhoff, Haiko. Ekphrasis: Kunstbeschreibungen und virtuelle
Räume in der Literatur des Mittelalters. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003.
Margitta Rouse

3 Text-Picture Relationships in the

Early Modern Period
Abstract: Giving a brief overview of different types of text-picture
relationships in the early modern period, the theoretical part of this
chapter focuses on the concept of the paragone, that is, a Renaissance
discourse that proclaimed a rivalry between the visual and the verbal
arts. The paragone is a major theoretical concept that has traditionally
been employed to discuss early modern text-image encounters. The
chapter argues that in their engagement with text-picture relationships
critics have privileged learned discourse such as the paragone-debate
due to an implicit ideological agenda: to verify the supposedly (early)
modern qualities of the texts under discussion. This had the effect that
alternative, and potentially contradictory, views of text-image
encounters offered by the artworks themselves have been given less
attention than they deserve. The second part of this chapter offers a
reading of Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece that aims to move
beyond the paragone-paradigm.
Key Terms: Ekphrasis, paragone, periodisation, Shakespeare, The
Rape of Lucrece

1 Conceptual, Historical and Theoretical

Aspects

Intermediality is a term which has enjoyed particular currency since

the 1990s – in its most common use the concept designates
phenomena which transgress boundaries between media that are
conventionally perceived as distinct, such as pictures and texts
(Rajewsky 2002, 13). Relatively recent though the academic interest in
intermediality may seem, many of the aesthetic and theoretical
concerns that are currently being addressed under this notion are
much older than the concept. Rajewsky distinguishes between three
basic forms of intermediality that are not mutally exclusive: multi-
mediality, media transposition or transfer, and intermedial
intertextuality (2002, 19), and all three forms enjoyed popularity in the
early modern period (cf. Rippl 2005a).
Emblem books, featuring pictures and texts that were combined to
convey a moral message, are typical examples of multi-medial works,
that is, works which combine different media while keeping them
ostensibly distinct. In emblems, pictures and texts form an aesthetic
whole but its components can be regarded in isolation from one
another (cf. also Rippl 2005b, 50–53, for a general classification of
text-picture relationships). The earliest emblem book, Emblematum
Liber, published in 1531 by the Italian jurist Andrea Alciato, is a
collection of Latin poems, each accompanied with a woodcut
illustration and an evocative motto. Quite often, the relationship of the
three elements is so obscure it poses an intellectual challenge not only
to a present-day readership, but was also enigmatic for the book’s first
readers. Alciato’s book was hugely successful and prompted a veritable
emblem craze. As Michael Bath (2006, 275) points out, “[b]y the end of
the seventeenth century more than two thousand emblem books had
been published in just about every European language, and this type of
word-image construction had come to influence whole areas of the
visual, material, and literary culture across Europe and beyond.”
A different type of multi-medial work combines media to form an
inseparable unit. When visual and verbal elements are combined in
this way, no picture would be discernible if all textual elements were
removed, and vice versa. An example of this type of artwork is the
pattern poem, which, too, was a thriving genre in the early modern
period. Pattern poems originated in antiquity where they were referred
to as technopaignia. Now better known as concrete poems, they are
arrangements of words on a page forming a concrete, rather than a
random, visual pattern. Perhaps the best known early modern example
is George Herbert’s poem “Easter Wings” (1633), in which the poem’s
words are arranged to depict two pairs of wings: the wings of a human
soul as it ascends to heaven. Thus, the poem’s visual shape supports
the spiritual content of the words.
Rajewsky’s second category, that is, media transposition or transfer,
often discussed under the rubric of “adaptation” and associated more
often than not with present-day film adaptations of novels and plays, is
likewise a common phenomenon in early modern culture. A play such
as Timon of Athens, believed to be a collaborative effort by William
Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton, could be regarded as an example;
the play adapts the subject matter presented within a certain source
medium (i.e. prose texts by Plutarch or Lucian) to a different target
medium or media (i.e. script and performance on stage), which, in the
case of the theatre, is also a multi-medial art form.
Finally, the literary device of ekphrasis, in the words of James
Heffernan (1993, 3), “the verbal representation of a visual
representation”, is an example of Rajewsky’s third category of
intermediality: a category which includes instances where a work of art
evokes other media within the scope of its own medium. This form of
intermediality, which Ulrich Weisstein (1993, 8) calls “intermedial
intertextuality”, typically aims at recreating the aesthetic conventions
of one medium within the other; with regard to text-picture
relationships this would mean that pictural and verbal elements are
not present within the same artwork. Intermedial intertextuality such
as ekphrasis has had its special appeal for writers of any given period (
2 Medieval Ekphrasis: Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale; 1 Ekphrasis:
Theory; 4 Ekphrasis and Poetry). As the device seems more effective
than any other for exploring the meta-medial views on text-picture
relationships a literary text may offer, the second part of this chapter
will zoom in on a particularly famous early-modern example: Lucrece’s
contemplation of a painting of the fall of Troy in Shakespeare’s
narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece.
Since the focus on Lucrece will follow more general thoughts on the
theory and history of text-picture relationships in the early modern
period, it ought to be stressed at this point already that early theory
that gauges the perceived boundaries between media is developed not
only in academic treatises but also in the aesthetic texts themselves. A
claim such as this might appear superfluous in our poststructuralist
day and age, which has long questioned the idea that learned discourse
and aesthetic product (text, artifact, performance, or act) are
conceptually opposed to one another. However, when it comes to
assessing the theoretical achievements of a given period, critics still
tend to privilege learned discourse, looking for a conceptual match
between it and aesthetic discourse, rather than focusing on the
alternative or complementing conceptual ideas a given artwork might
develop in and through its very medium. Let me illustrate this claim
with an often discussed scene from Timon of Athens.
The play’s opening scene engages a poet and a painter in dialogue.
As both poet and painter apply for Timon’s patronage, they ostensibly
extol the virtues of the painter’s art as superior to life – “mocking of
the life” (I.1.35) and “livelier than life” (I.1.38):

PAINTER You are rapt, sir, in some work, some dedication

To the great lord?
POET A thing slipped idly from me.
Our poesy is as a gum which oozes
From whence ’tis nourished; the fire i’th’ flint
Shows not till it be struck, our gentle flame
Provokes itself and, like the current, flies
Each bound it chases. What have you there?
PAINTER A picture, sir. When comes your book forth?
POET Upon the heels of my presentment, sir.
Let’s see your piece.
PAINTER ’Tis a good piece.
POET So ’tis; this comes off well and excellent.
PAINTER Indifferent.
POET Admirable! How this grace
Speaks his own standing! What a mental power
This eye shoots forth! How big imagination
Moves in this lip! To th’ dumbness of the gesture
One might interpret.
Painter It is a pretty mocking of the life;
Here is a touch – is’t good?
POET I will say of it
It tutors nature; artificial strife
Lives in these touches, livelier than life. (Timon of
Athens, I.1.18–38)

Critics interested in the ways in which Shakespeare comments on

aesthetic theory in his plays have pointed out how the scene draws on
the classical topos of enargeia, a premodern aesthetic ideal of life-
likeness, as well as to the ways in which painting is presented here as
the art form capable of creating the most life-like effects. A second,
similarly important discourse on the differing merits of texts and
pictures was discovered as relevant to the scene, a discourse whose
beginnings are usually traced back to Simonides of Ceos, of which
Leonardo da Vinci is its most famous proponent (cf. Farago 1992; Plett
2004, 298–300), and which has lost little of its critical appeal today:
the paragone, or rivalry, between poetry and painting. Contrasting the
visual with the literary arts, da Vinci questioned the status of painting
as a mere craft in order to establish it as an art form that ought to be
valued even higher than poetry. Ever since Anthony Blunt (1939)
discovered that Timon included an implicit reference to the paragone
discourse, critics have tended to privilege this discourse in their
interpretations of the scene (cf. Merchant 1955 and Hunt 1988 for
further influential readings).
In the context of critics’ interest in various performances of a
supposed rivalry between poetry and painting, it has often been argued
that Shakespeare set up the contest between painter and poet in Timon
to stage another paragone, one that demonstrates the superiority of
theatrical performance over both poetry and painting, since drama is
“a multi-media form far more complex than a poem, given the material
realities of performance – a painted playhouse, multiple acts of
spectator-ship, literal pictures, stage properties, and live performers”
(Tassi 2005, 179). As the theatre includes live acting with visible props,
the playwright evidently also has a clear advantage over both painter
and poet when it comes to creating lifelike scenes. Shakespeare is
presented here as an early advocate of the theatre as the superior
multi- and intermedial art form, as a point of origin as it were, leading
quite naturally to our present-day fascination with multi-medial
performance art, on- and offline.
Persuasive though such an argument is, not least because it appears
to be backed by established classical and early modern aesthetic
theory, it comes with a number of theoretical pitfalls. Firstly, it does
not take into account the play’s very own contribution to the theory of
text-picture relationships as performed on stage. As spectators of the
scene, we might only see the back of the painting while we hear the
words with which it is being praised. And even if we were able to catch
a glimpse of the painted image, we could theoretically be viewing the
scene with such distance to the actors that we would need to rely on
words in exercising our “mental power” (I.1.32) and “imagination”
(I.1.33) (cf. Meek 2009, 15). This suggests that the scene does not
necessarily present the dramatic arts as contributing more to our
visualisation of the picture than other art forms. Although the painting
is physically present, we are still viewing it in our mind’s eye. This is
important because the poet has just told us that the painter was able to
express those very mental abilities we need for seeing the picture in the
sitter of the portrait – abilities that seem most naturally represented
within a piece of visual, rather than verbal, art. This, in fact, was one of
the chief claims early modern defenders of the visual arts made: It is
not poetry’s domain, alone, to show the inner workings of the mind but
especially also that of painting. But how does one “see” strong “mental
power” and “imagination” in the features of a face? As the poet in
Timon points out: “One might interpret” (I.1.35) what we see.
It has been argued that the verbal is presented by Shakespeare as
ultimately surpassing the visual in its effectiveness, since we have to
trust the poet’s words. Several commentators have drawn attention to
the paradox that both poet and painter use language – words – to extol
the virtues of the painter’s art. A commonplace of earlier
Shakespearean research is: “Wherever we observe Shakespeare
observing the figurative arts, it is as if he wanted us to become
witnesses to a paragone between poesis and pictura from which poesis
would emerge as the predictable winner” (Heckscher 1970–1971, 8).
We need to remember, however, that the words we are given in this
scene to be able to imagine the picture are sparse. We receive little
more information about the painted image than that it can be carried
and that it features expressive eyes and lips. This suggests that a
portrait – presumably one of Timon – is being presented, or perhaps a
miniature; all else is left to the imagination. Rather than showing or
describing an actual painting, the dramatic scene highlights the
spectators’ involvement in creating what we see. What is more, our
perception of the picture (if we are able to catch a glimpse of it), may
contradict the poet’s exaggerated and possibly insincere praise of it;
our understanding of what constitutes an excellent picture might differ
from the poet’s. In other words: In more senses than one, we might see
an entirely different image from the one poet and painter are
discussing. Painting (colour and shape on a canvas) and image (the
mental component of what we see) are presented as different entities.
If we pay more than lip service to the idea that aesthetic texts
develop their own theoretical approaches, as opposed to simply
mirroring or commenting on the ideas of learned discourse the poet
may or may not have direct access to, we might begin to understand
the scene less in terms of a model debate demanding an ultimate
winner, be it poetry, painting, or the dramatic arts, but rather as a
tentative engagement with the various mental, as well as physical,
processes that are involved in creating and seeing images. We could
claim that Shakespeare’s play showcases an argument not unlike that
of German art theorist Hans Belting, who posits that
Images are neither on the wall (or on the screen) nor in the head alone. They do not exist
by themselves, but they happen; they take place whether they are moving images (where
this is so obvious) or not. They happen via transmission and perception. (Belting 2005,
202–203)

Timon of Athens’ opening scene draws attention to the ways in which

images – whether they are conjured by words, made up of colour and
form arranged on a physical surface, or prompted by the imagination –
are inextricably linked to our “mental power” (I.1.32); the play thus
exploits the theatrical context to first exhibit, and then question, an
ontological difference between the visual and the verbal. W. J. T.
Mitchell has called this questioning of boundaries “the moment of
resistance or counterdesire that occurs when we sense that the
difference between the verbal and visual representation might
collapse”, a “moment in aesthetics when the difference between verbal
and visual mediation becomes a moral, aesthetic imperative rather
than […] a natural fact that can be relied on” (Mitchell 1994, 194). This
is a crucial point leading us to the second of the theoretical problems
that arise from regarding Shakespeare’s theatre as the leit-genre of a
multi-medial (early) Modernity.
Scholars have traditionally argued that the rise of Modernity is
accompanied, if not motivated, by the buttressing of the verbal-visual
binary as put forward in the paragone-discourse (cf. Johnston et. al.
2015 forthcoming). If the most canonical of early modern English
dramatists does not promote but dilute the verbal-visual divide, this
very questioning renders problematic the periodisation of English
literature as it is traditionally taught. If aesthetic texts are capable of
undermining, contradicting and expanding on learned arguments, as
well as developing their own theories, an incongruous, multi-
perspectival view of text-picture relationships is created, and it
becomes all the more problematic to pin down what precisely is
modern in early modern intermediality, both in theory and aesthetic
practice ( 2 Medieval Ekphrasis: Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale).
Put in more general terms, the concept of Modernity relies on the
notion of a cultural rift between the Renaissance and the previous
period that allegedly turned its back on the values of antiquity: the
Middle Ages (cf. Johnston 2008, 1–11). That Modernity is a construct
dependent on a problematic Othering of the Middle Ages has been
examined especially by medievalists, but has also begun to interest a
steadily rising number of early modernists (cf., e.g., Simpson 2002, as
well as the essays collected in Summit and Wallace 2007, and
McMullan and Matthews 2007). The wider field of intermediality
research is currently contributing to this reassessment of traditionally
accepted pillars of periodisation. Longstanding truisms of intellectual
and social history, such as the idea that the early modern period can be
regarded as particularly visual and intermedial because of the
invention of the printing press (as still claimed, for example, by Emich
2008, 50), have begun to appear shaky, even if there is little doubt that
the Gutenberg press allowed for a greater distribution of texts and
images. There is no denying that illustrated pamphlets, for instance,
could be circulated in greater numbers, reaching a wider audience with
more diverse social backgrounds than before. Yet many historians of
print culture call for a revision of the narrative of modernisation that
has Johannes Gutenberg at its centre, a narrative that was most
influentially put forward in 1979 by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein in The
Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural
Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (cf. Baron et al. 2007, 1–6).
Kai-Wing Chow for instance criticises what he calls a “profoundly
logocentric approach” (2007, 170) to the study of the history of
printing. Appreciating the role of woodblock printing in Europe and
Asia, he posits:
Conventional accounts of the history of printing in Europe systematically privilege
movable-type printing as a major factor in creating conditions of modernity: the spread of
the Enlightenment, the dissemination of scientific knowledge, the rise of national
languages and literatures, and the growth and spread of nationalism, as well as the
 expansion of critical publics that were crucial to the development of representative form of
government […]. (Chow 2007, 170)

Art historians, too, point out that the revolutionary social changes
attributed to the printing of books were released gradually by the late
medieval demand for woodcuts and engravings. Not only was the
woodcut a crucial precursor of movable type; it is also of great social
relevance that the late medieval image prints were not as costly as
paintings and could be afforded by a comparatively larger number of
people.
This is not to say that the invention of the printing press was not an
immense cultural achievement. It is problematic, however, if a singular
world view is based on the ways in which a particular artistic and/or
technological medium is invented and used. In intermediality studies,
the questioning of technological and media determinism is now an
important concern, especially with regard to the medieval/early
modern divide (cf. Johnston and Rouse 2014, 4–8). The role of the
printing press is but one of many examples that are relevant in this
context; similar effects can be seen with regard to the role the
invention of linear perspective has played for art history. Here too, an
artistic technique with obvious relevance to a particular discipline has
influenced a host of other disciplines, among them literary studies.
There have been many attempts at seeking the effects of linear
perspective realised in other media, especially in early modern drama.
Again, this is not to say that the theatre did not change profoundly
while adapting to the new ways of perceiving space. But as Kristen
Poole has pointed out, linear perspective came to be associated with
intellectual enlightenment, mathematical harmony and a devotion to
naturalism, to such a degree that modern critics have come to write off
the supernaturalism of the early modern stage as self-consciously
theatrical and a mere function of farce. As a result, alternative,
supernatural modes of perception “do not participate in what has
become our normative visual field” (Poole 2011, 62).
A last example may suffice to show how the chief domain of
intermediality studies, that is, artworks that transgress the boundaries
of media commonly perceived as distinct, have been deployed to
establish, as well as dissolve, the boundaries of periodisation. It
appears to be another longstanding given of intellectual history that
the period’s preoccupation with visuality and intermediality served its
heightened interest in the teachings of antiquity. The bimedial emblem
has been seen as the ideal literary form for the sixteenth-century
humanist because it could be used for didactic purposes, presenting
the attractions of classical learning to a lesser educated audience. The
juxtaposition of word and image within the emblem facilitated an eye-
catching mix of the old and the new, of the popular and the academic,
of literary and scientific ideas from classical sources with new
empirical findings (Visser 2005, xvii). At the same time, the emblem
has been regarded as an instrument for “the expression of humanist
mentality”, or as a means to “chart the cultural history of the early
modern Republic of Letters” (Visser 2005, xvii). However, this positive
view of emblems is relatively new. When Huston Diehl reviewed the
literature on emblem art in the late 1980s, emblematic techniques
were associated with a dark version of the medieval; the genre was
viewed as profoundly conservative and reactionary, even vulgar; rather
than being understood as a pioneering genre, it was seen as one “which
collects and preserves images of the past” (Diehl 1986, 50). Currently,
it is precisely this contribution of intermedial artworks to transforming
and preserving images of and from the past as well as the artworks’
potential to enact, comment on, as well as question their own
temporality, that is coming into the focus of critical enquiry (cf.
Johnston et al. 2015 forthcoming).
Within literary studies, the literary device of ekphrasis has been an
important object of study within the various criticisms of grand
narratives, of which the interrogation of (early) Modernity’s self-image
as more progressive, enlightened, and self-reflexive than previous
periods is an important recent example ( 2 Medieval Ekphrasis:
Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale; Part I: Text and Image, section on
Ekphrasis). It is the particular advantage of the device that it can throw
into relief ideas about (self-)representation since it places
representation at its very centre – yet the meta-aesthetic ideas coming
into focus through the figure of ekphrasis are anything but neat and
tidy. This does not, however, mean that the notion of untidiness cannot
be used to bolster the modern-early modern divide.
Mario Klarer, one of the most prominent students of early modern
ekphrasis, has pointed out that the device flourishes in a paradoxical
intellectual climate (cf. Klarer 2001, 23): While drama, emblem and
masque thrive as particularly visual genres, there is, simultaneously, a
tendency towards iconoclasm that has its roots in an iconophobic
protestant state ideology. Klarer argues that verbal evocations of visual
works of art are used more than ever before in early Modernity as
intellectual signposts, signaling the desire to continue the traditions of
antiquity as well as to oppose the catholic traditions of the continent,
and to probe the generic boundaries between literary genres at the
same time. Pointing towards a well-known passage by Ben Jonson,
Klarer argues that it is precisely a very contradictory view of the
perceived divide between the visual and the verbal that characterises
early modern ekphrasis. Here are the words of Ben Jonson:
Poetry, and picture, are arts of a like nature, and both are busy about imitation. It was
excellently said of Plutarch, poetry was a speaking Picture, and picture a mute poesy. For
they both invent, feign, and devise many things, and accommodate all they invent to the
use and service of nature. Yet of the two, the pen is more noble, than the pencil; for that
can speak to the understanding, the other, but to the sense. They both behold pleasure
and profit as their common object […]. Whosoever loves not picture, is injurious to truth,
and all the wisdom of poetry. Picture is the invention of heaven: the most ancient and
most akin to nature. It is itself a silent work, and always of one and the same habit; yet it
doth so enter and penetrate the inmost affection – being done by and excellent artificer –
as sometimes it o’ercomes the power of speech and oratory. (Jonson [printed 1641] 2012,
550)

Klarer points out that Jonson evokes and honours the earliest known
discourse of text-picture relationships when he refers to Simonides’
and Plutarch’s understanding of poetry as “speaking painting” and of
painting as “mute poetry”. Simultaneously, Jonson undermines this
notion of the “sister arts” by assigning greater significance to the
verbal. Such a logocentric approach towards the verbal-visual divide,
argues Klarer, is an effect of the iconoclastic undercurrents of the
English Reformation.
While it is true that Jonson’s approach towards the different media
is paradoxical, it must disconcert us that a sense of untidiness, and a
contradictory, supposedly protestant mindset towards certain media,
is used as the new intellectual paradigm that characterises early
modern literature, not least because iconoclasm is not an early modern
invention ( 1 Ekphrasis: Theory; 2 Medieval Ekphrasis: Chaucer’s
Knight’s Tale). Using Jonson to establish the text-image encounter as
paradoxical and early modern at the same time is problematic in that
the figure of paradox then becomes the aesthetic choice to be verified
in the implicit theories of representation that early modern texts
communicate. In other words: It is only when critics question their
own assumptions as to what constitutes (early) Modernity that literary
texts may be appreciated for their multi-faceted responses to text-
image encounters that are less restricted to serving the implicit
ideological agenda of periodisation.

2 Text-Image Encounters in Shakespeare’s The

Rape of Lucrece
If the previous section emphasised the relevance, power, and the
limitations of the paragone-discourse for the analysis of early modern
text-picture relationships, the following analysis of Shakespeare’s The
Rape of Lucrece aims at moving beyond the paragone-paradigm and
the related concept of iconoclasm. This is not to say that a rivalry
between poetry and painting cannot be detected in the poem. See, for
example, Richard Meek’s claim that ekphrasis in the poem “serves as
an opportunity for Shakespeare to explore the competition – or
paragone – between poetry and painting, and as such it represents the
culmination of the poem’s preoccupation with the relationship
between visual and verbal modes of representation” (Meek 2006, 290).
Catherine Belsey has shown in her review of previous criticism on the
poem that scholars have generally tended to “reiterate the belief that
Shakespeare’s invocation of the visual arts is designed to affirm the
superiority of the writer, aligning the poet-playwright with the
traditionalists, rather than with Derrida and Mitchell” (Belsey 2012,
188). She argues further that the role of ekphrasis is misunderstood if
“Reformation iconophobia is brought in to generate suspicion of the
painting Lucrece constructs at such length” (Belsey 2012, 177); this
would leave readers with the impression that “Shakespeare created a
picture in the course of more than two hundred lines with the project
of declaring its deficiencies” (Belsey 2012, 177). She goes on to insist
that a “quarter of a century after Mitchell unmasked the metaphysics
of presence that pervaded traditional theories of art, we could afford to
consider it duly unmasked and move on, unburdened by the obligation
to turn every verbal reference to a visual image into a war zone”
(Belsey 2012, 191).
Sharing Belsey’s view, I wish to claim that an all too narrow focus on
the early modern paragone-discourse has marginalised a political
understanding of how Shakespeare explores the ways in which spheres
of verbal and pictorial violence intersect and complement one another
in the images of public art. Mitchell posits that all ekphrasis tends to
“expose the social structure of representation as an activity and a
relationship of power / knowledge and desire – representation as
something done to something, with something, by someone, for
someone” (180), and this is what can be observed particularly well in
The Rape of Lucrece, since the poem’s narrative examines the political
thrust of pictorial violence.
Mitchell distinguishes between three basic forms of violence in the
images of public art that all play a role in Shakespeare’s poem:
(1) the image as an act or object of violence, itself doing violence to beholders, or
‘suffering’ violence as the target of vandalism, disfigurement, or demolition; (2) the image
as a weapon of violence, a device for attack, coercion, incitement, or more subtle
‘dislocations’ of public spaces; (3) the image as a representation of violence, whether a
realistic imitation of a violent act, or a monument, trophy, memorial, or other trace of past
violence. (Mitchell 1994, 381)

The three forms of violence intersect in Lucrece as if to comment on

one another: Towards the end of the narrative, the poem’s focal
character Lucrece, raped during the previous night by the Roman
crown prince Tarquin, engages with “a piece / Of skilful painting” (ll.
1366–67) that represents the events of the fall of Troy. Before Lucrece
stabs herself, she violates the painting which she mistakes to represent
reality for a brief moment. As the image of the sack of Troy, itself
representing past acts of violence, is damaged by Lucrece, the spoilt
painting becomes a metaphor for the raped woman. Crucially,
Lucrece’s subsequent suicide is another violation of an image: an
image whose destruction ultimately incites political change. It is the
violation of her image that is ultimately used to bring down the present
form of state government.
But it is not the ekphrastic passage (ll. 1366–1526), alone, that
establishes the nexus of representation and (state) violence. That this
nexus is one of the poem’s central concerns is already revealed in the
“Argument”, a prose summary of the poem’s plot that precedes the
actual verse narrative. The “Argument” explains briefly how during the
siege of Ardea, Tarquin and his principal military men boast about the
virtues of their wives, that is, create public representations of them.
The men decide to surprise their women that same night to see for
themselves whether the wives live up to the images their husbands
painted of them. All ladies except Lucrece, Collatine’s wife, are found
merrymaking. Spinning in her bedchamber in the company of her
maids, Lucrece appears to be the only virtuous woman. The
“Argument” details how word about Lucrece’s unrivalled beauty and
chastity incite Tarquin’s lust; he secretly leaves the camp to rape her.
The following morning the desolate Lucrece summons her father
Lucretius as well as her husband who arrive accompanied by Brutus.
Demanding her revenge she names the aggressor, then stabs herself.
The circumstances of her death move the Roman people to exile the
Tarquins and end the monarchy.
Rather than foregrounding the action that is summarised in the
argument, the poem’s actual verse narrative presents a slow
meditation on the theme of how representation may be to blame for
Lucrece’s demise. Early on this focus is established:

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.
What needeth then apology be made,
To set forth that which is so singular?
Or why is COLLATINE the publisher
Of that rich jewel he should keep unknown
From thievish ears, because it is his own?
Perchance his boast of Lucrece’ sovereignty
Suggested this proud issue of a king,
For by our ears our hearts oft tainted be.
Perchance that envy of so rich a thing,
Braving compare, disdainfully did sting
His high-pitched thoughts, that meaner men should vaunt
That golden hap which their superiors want. (The Rape of
Lucrece, ll. 29–42)
Collatine is critised for having “unwisely” (l. 10) praised his wife’s
beauty. Figuring him as an “orator” (l. 30) and “publisher” (l. 33) of
beauty, the narrator represents him as a verbal artist who has turned
something that should have remained private into a public object of
desire. Without Collatine’s publicising act, Tarquin would not have
heard of the “clear unmatched red and white” (l. 11) of Lucrece’s face
which he so admires, and which the narrator describes as “[t]his
heraldry” in her face, “[a]rgued by beauty’s red and virtue’s white” (ll.
64–65). If he had not heard Collatine’s words, Tarquin’s sense of pride
might not have been roused either, since, as Collatine’s superior, he
must also lay claim to her superior beauty.
Significantly, the power of Collatine’s rhetorical gift is ultimately
mirrored in the poet-narrator’s who extensively describes the way in
which Tarquin observes “the silent war of lilies and of roses […] / in
her fair face’s field” (ll. 71–72). Collatine’s boastful words (and not
sight) do not only provoke Tarquin’s lust, which is figured here as both
sexual and political, but they also objectify Lucrece: She is made an
ekphrastic object herself, a work of private-turned-public art worthy of
(male) verbal representation. As the narrative develops, Lucrece is not
merely described in terms of the traditional blazon that involves the
itemised praise of individual body parts from head to toe (ll. 419–420),
but she is also associated with a city under siege. Her heart is likened
to a “poor citizen” (l. 465), and when Tarquin is about to rape her, he is
described as intending “[t]o make the breach and enter this sweet city”
(l. 469); the narrative thus establishes a metaphorical association of
Lucrece’s image, as created by Tarquin’s gaze, with the painting of Troy
with which she is to engage later (cf. Belsey 2012, 178).
In justifying the rape he is about to commit, Tarquin, it appears, is
the greatest critic of the rhetorical arts when he states that: “All orators
are dumb when beauty pleadeth” (l. 268). Here, too, the narrative
voice is implicitly included. After he has seen Lucrece for the first time,
Tarquin suggests that sight, alone, does justice to beauty:

Now thinks he that her husband’s shallow tongue,
The niggard prodigal that praised her so,
In that high task hath done her beauty wrong,
 Which far exceeds his barren skill to show.
Therefore that praise which COLLATINE doth owe
Enchanted TARQUIN answers with surmise,
In silent wonder of still-gazing eyes. (The Rape of Lucrece, ll.
78–84)
If this passage might prompt us to detect a paragonal argument, in that
the visual seems to outdo the verbal, we must understand that
Shakespeare does not contrast two forms of representation at this
point. It is Lucrece’s beauty that surpasses a specific type of
representation, that is, Collatine’s verbal boast. Marion A. Wells (2002,
102) holds that the narrative establishes Tarquin as a rival artist, in
that Collatine’s “[v]erbal portraiture gives way to a more complete
visual portrait construed within Tarquin’s enchanted gaze.”
Importantly however, the “silent wonder”, the possibility of simply
viewing beauty, does not gratify Tarquin. When he gazes on Lucrece
asleep in her chamber, he could, in fact, go on penetrating her with his
gaze until he was satisfied, unnoticed by her. However, sight only
softens his aggression for a moment, and does not reverse his intention
to ravish her also physically:

As the grim lion fawneth o’er his prey,
Sharp hunger by the conquest satisfied,
So o’er this sleeping soul doth Tarquin stay
His rage of lust by gazing qualified
Slacked, not suppressed; for standing by her side,
His eye which late this mutiny restrains
Unto a greater uproar tempts his veins. (The Rape of
Lucrece, ll. 421–427)
Whereas the words of beauty Tarquin hears arouse his sexual desire,
the beauty he sees (and evaluates as superior to the verbal image of
her), cannot restrain him – in fact his “eye” ultimately tempts him to
even “greater uproar” (l. 27). One could argue that one level of the
poem not only criticises Tarquin’s “eye” but also the visual artwork
that is Lucrece, in that it fails to incite virtue in her onlooker. The
juxtaposition of the verbal and the visual in the poem appears to serve
as a general critique of representation, insofar as the representation of
beauty seems potentially deceptive. An artwork in which beauty and
virtue coincide ought to have a positive effect on the viewer, as
Lucrece’s sleeping body does on Tarquin to some degree, but
ultimately her virtuous beauty only “qualifies” (l. 424) his rage and
fails to prevent his assault.
Shakespeare’s analysis of the ethical thrust of the arts appears to
come close to that of W. H. Auden developed in his collection of essays
The Dyer’s Hand: Pointing towards the conflicting potential of the arts
to provide both an escape from, and an exposure to painful historical
truths, Auden declared that beauty is “evil to the degree that beauty is
taken, not as analogous to, but [as] identical with goodness”. If “the
pleasure of beauty [is] being taken for the joy of Paradise”, he argued,
“the conclusion [might be] drawn that, since all is well in the work of
art, all is well in history. But all is not well there” (Auden 1963, 71).
That the concurrence, in fact “silent war” (l. 71), of beauty and virtue
playing out in Lucrece’s face – as seen by Tarquin – is somewhat
problematic, is highlighted early on in the poem through words such as
“bragging” and “boasting”, used to describe the questionable acts
Collatine was accused of earlier in the poem. Furthermore, in stressing
the competitive energies of virtue and beauty, the poem implicitly
insists that they should not be confused with one another: “When
virtue bragged, beauty would blush for shame; / When beauty boasted
blushes in despite / Virtue would stain that o’er with silver white” (ll.
54–56). If, in Auden’s words, “beauty is evil” in that it might brag of
virtue when “not all is well” in history, the critique of beauty and its
representation also extends to the poem itself. For example, the
description of Lucrece’s face is deceptive, too; as Katherine Eisaman
Maus observes,
there is nothing natural, inevitable, or even stable about either the correspondences or the
rivalries. Initially white is associated with virtue, red with beauty. Later red becomes
virtue’s color, white becomes beauty’s. […] The colors of Lucrece’s complexion seem to
‘stand for’ her important qualities as the devices on a heraldic shield represent the traits of
its owner; but the relationship between symbol and substance is mutable and apparently
arbitrary. (Maus 1986, 78)

This idea of the – almost arbitrary – deceptiveness of representation –

especially when it comes to the representation and interpretation of
political events, is developed in Shakespeare’s poem when Lucrece
eventually engages at length with the painting of the fall of Troy. As
Belsey remarks, the painting is not, and somewhat astonishingly, “a
high-Renaissance, fixed-point perspective painting of a single dramatic
moment” (Belsey 2012, 192). In its extensive, narrative, non-
chronological evocation of several episodes of the Troy story,
Shakespeare’s representation of the picture is reminiscent of medieval
ekphrasis: Geoffrey Chaucer had used the matter of Troy as ekphrasis
in several of his dream visions, most strikingly in The House of Fame.
The nod towards Chaucer seems less surprising if we regard the
lengthy ekphrastic passage as an engagement with the problems of
historical representation. For Chaucer, the passage serves to contrast
Ovidian and Virgilian versions of the Dido-Aeneas story. The narrator
refuses to side clearly with either version, thus bringing into the
foreground the instability of the signifier itself.
Lucrece turns to the painting at the height of her emotional suffering
“[t]o find a face where all distress is stelled” (l. 1444), hoping to chance
on a representation of pain that equals her own. As Maus explains,
Lucrece initially “turns to a representation of the Trojan war for relief,
not because it offers her the possibility of consolation, but because its
novelty inspires her with new ways to describe and understand, and
thus to experience her despair” (Maus 1986, 73). None of the depicted
faces Lucrece views, however, seem to match her misery, except for the
Trojan queen Hecuba’s: “In her the painter had anatomized / Time’s
ruin, beauty’s wrack and grim care’s reign / […] / Of what she was no
semblance did remain” (ll. 1450–1453). It seems here that Hecuba’s no
longer beautiful face speaks true, yet Lucrece complains that the
painter has given her no voice: “And therefore LUCRECE swears he did
her wrong / To give her so much grief and not a tongue” (ll. 1462-
1463). In Lucrece’s eyes the depiction of Hecuba is a “[p]oor
instrument […] without a sound” (l. 1464); thus the narrative links
Hecuba’s predicament (and Lucrece’s own) with the Philomela-myth
(cf. Heffernan 1993, 47–52). As the poem suggests a narrative
connection between Lucrece and Philomela at several junctures, it
assigns the painting a similar function as Philomela’s tapestry has in
Ovid: Both visual artworks are instruments to express unfathomable
pain. Again, this could be, and has been, construed as a Shakespearean
engagement in the paragone-debate, where the verbal appears to
surpass the visual, since Lucrece complains about Hecuba’s missing
speech. What is often ignored in this context, however, is that where
Hecuba lacks a voice, Lucrece lacks adequate looks – and the poem
grants her a voice only at the moment when she is confronted with
Tarquin’s violence (cf. Maus 1986, 73). Commenting on the characters
depicted in the painting, “[s]he lends them words, and she their looks
doth borrow” (l. 1498). If the scene allows for a paragonal reading, it
also clearly points towards the deceptive nature of aesthetic
representation – or of any kind of representation – since Lucrece’s
“looks” do not suit the emotional state within.
Strikingly, as Lucrece considers using her knife to “scratch out the
angry eyes” of Hecuba’s enemies, she refuses to empathise with Helen,
a rape victim like herself. In fact, Lucrece blames Helen for inciting the
Trojan war: “Show me the strumpet that began this stir, / That with
my nails her beauty I may tear” (ll. 1471–1472). As Lucrece holds
Helen’s beauty responsible for Paris’ aggression, she implicitly blames
her own looks for her own fate. And in Sinon, the Greek whose
ostensible innocence persuaded the Trojans to take the wooden horse
filled with Greek soldiers into their city, she finds the pictorial
counterpart of her rapist.

In him the painter laboured with his skill
To hide deceit, and give the harmless show
An humble gait, calm looks, eyes wailing still,
A brow unbent that seemed to welcome woe,
Cheeks neither red nor pale, but mingled so
That blushing red no guilty instance gave,
Nor ashy pale the fear that false hearts have. (ll. 1506–1512)
The stanza is semantically ambiguous in that the painter is shown here
as not only hiding Sinon’s deceit, but also his own skill. It appears that
the artwork adds to the credibility of Sinon’s innocence by concealing
its artfulness. Crucially, the motif of colours signalling the rivalry of
beauty and virtue in a face recurs here and contrasts Sinon’s deceit
with Lucrece’s virtuous looks. Lucrece cannot comprehend that “such a
face [as Sinon’s] should bear a wicked mind” (l. 1540). The depiction of
his face fools her again, in much the same way as she was unable to see
through Tarquin’s “outward honesty” and detect his “inward vice”. She
concludes: “As Priam him did cherish / so did I Tarquin, so my Troy
did perish” (ll. 1544–1547). The painted image of Sinon enrages her to
such a degree that she sinks her nails into it, forgetting for a moment
that it is only a representation. Realising her error she reminds herself
that her action will not have wounded Sinon: “[F]ool, fool, his wounds
will not be sore” (l. 1568), she reprimands herself. It is at this moment
that her engagement with the painting ends, while the narrator
surmises that empathising with the painted grief of others has eased
some of her pain, “but none it ever cured” (l. 1581). Belsey argues that
at this point the text “finds itself thrown back on the signifier in the
process: the substance remains not only as far as ever out of reach but
at two removes, doubly deferred by the representation of a
representation. In that respect the invocation of the painting tests the
powers of the signifier to their limits – and finds them ultimately
wanting, as it must” (Belsey 2012, 196).
As Lucrece understands that Sinon’s seeming innocence is that of a
picture, and that the Sinon she sees cannot feel the pain she wants to
inflict on him, the entire exercise of lending words to a face where “all
distress is stelled” becomes deceitful, too, and the ekphrastic moment
loses its conciliatory thrust – the narrative turns from what Mitchell
calls “ekphrastic hope, […] the phase when the impossibility of
ekphrasis is overcome in imagination or metaphor” (1994, 152), to
utmost despair – the realisation that ekphrasis cannot make us “see”.
The only true action Lucrece can envisage to overcome the deceit of
her own image is to reach for the only reliable truth before the
signifier: She ends her life. In one of the most ironic scenes at the
poem’s close it becomes apparent that her suicide does not mean that
she was able to control her image beyond death. Lamenting her
demise, her husband Collatine and her father Lucretius compete as to
“[w]ho should weep most, for daughter or for wife” (l. 1792). Lucretius
argues he gave her the life she took (l. 1800) whereas Collatine replies
that he “owed her, and ’tis mine she hath killed” (l. 1803).
Ironically, Lucrece’s image continues to be judged against the roles
of daughter and wife; it continues to be controlled by the same men
whose “publishing act” at the beginning of the poem set the tragedy in
motion. Ultimately, father and husband “conclude to bear dead
Lucrece thence, / To show her bleeding body through Rome / And so
to publish Tarquin’s foul offence” (ll. 1850–1852). In ending her life,
Lucrece may have turned her body into a trustworthy image of the
crime committed against her, yet as her violated body is carried
through the streets of Rome for all to see, it becomes apparent that
Lucrece remains objectified beyond death. In its uneasy stance towards
representation, the poem ends on a very pessimistic note, even if
Lucrece’s death resulted in the just punishment of her aggressor.

3 Bibliography

3.1 Works Cited

Auden, Wystan Hugh. The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. London:
Faber and Faber, 1963.
Baron, Sabrina Alcorn, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin.
“Introduction.” Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies After
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. Ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N.
Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin. Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2007. 1–12.
Bath, Michael. “Emblem Books.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of British
Literature. Vol. 2. Ed. David Scott Kastan. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006. 275–279.
Belsey, Catherine. “Invocation of the Visual Image: Ekphrasis in
Lucrece and Beyond.” Shakespeare Quarterly 63.2 (2012): 175–198.
Belting, Hans. “Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology.”
Critical Inquiry 31.2 (2005): 302–319.
Blunt, Anthony. “An Echo of the ‘Paragone’ in Shakespeare.” Journal
of the Warburg Institute 2.3 (1939): 260–262.
Chow, Kai-Wing. “Reinventing Gutenberg: Woodblock and Movable-
Type Printing in Europe and China.” Agent of Change: Print Culture
Studies After Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. Ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron,
 Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin. Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2007. 169–192.
Diehl, Huston. “Graven Images: Protestant Emblem Books in
England.” Renaissance Quarterly 39.1 (1986): 49–66.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change:
Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early–Modern
Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Emich, Birgit. “Bildlichkeit und Intermedialität in der Frühen
Neuzeit: Eine interdisziplinäre Spurensuche. ” Zeitschrift für
Historische Forschung 35 (2008): 31–56.
Farago, Claire J. Leonardo da Vinci’s “Paragone”: A Critical
Interpretation with a New Edition of the Text in the Codex
Urbinas. Leiden: Brill, 1992.
Heckscher, William S. “Shakespeare in His Relationship to the Visual
Arts: A Study in Paradox.” Research Opportunities in Renaissance
Drama 13–14 (1970–1971): 5–71.
Heffernan, James A. W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis
from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993.
Hunt, John Dixon. “Shakespeare and the Paragone: A Reading of
Timon of Athens.” Images of Shakespeare: Proceedings of the
Third Congress of the International Shakespeare Association, 1986.
Ed. Werner Habicht, D. J. Palmer, and Roger Pringle. Cranbury
etc.: Associated University Presses, 1988. 47–63.
Johnston, Andrew James. Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf
to Othello. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008.
Johnston, Andrew James, and Margitta Rouse. “Introduction:
Temporalities of Adaptation.” The Medieval Motion Picture: The
Politics of Adaptation. Ed. Andrew James Johnston, Margitta
Rouse, and Philipp Hinz. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 1–18.
Johnston, Andrew James, Ethan Knapp, and Margitta Rouse.
“Introduction: The Dynamics of Ekphrasis.” The Art of Vision:
Ekphrasis in Medieval Literature and Culture. Ed. Andrew James
Johnston, Ethan Knapp, and Margitta Rouse. Columbus: Ohio State
 University Press. 2015 forthcoming.
Jonson, Ben. “Discoveries.” 1641. Ed. Lorna Hudson. The Cambridge
Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson. Vol. 7. Ed. David Bevington,
Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012. 481–596.
Klarer, Mario. Ekphrasis. Bildbeschreibung als Repräsentationstheorie
bei Spenser, Sidney, Lyly und Shakespeare. Tübingen: Niemeyer,
2001.
Maus, Katharine Eisaman. “Taking Tropes Seriously: Language and
Violence in Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece.” Shakespeare
Quarterly 37.1 (1986): 66–82.
McMullan, Gordon, and David Matthews, eds. Reading the Medieval
in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007.
Meek, Richard. “Ekphrasis in The Rape of Lucrece and The Winter’s
Tale.” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 46.2 (2006):
389–414.
Meek, Richard. Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare. Farnham:
Ashgate, 2009.
Merchant, W. M. “Timon and the Conceit of Art.” Shakespeare
Quarterly 6.3 (1955): 249–257.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1994.
Plett, Heinrich F. “Intermedial Rhetoric.” Rhetoric and Renaissance
Culture: Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture. Berlin: De Gruyter,
2004. 295–412.
Poole, Kristen. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare’s England:
Spaces of Demonism, Divinity, and Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011.
Rajewsky, Irina O. Intermedialität. Stuttgart: UTB, 2002.
Rippl, Gabriele. “Literatur und (visuelle) Medien in der Frühen
Neuzeit.” Kulturgeschichte der englischen Literatur. Ed. Vera
Nünning. Tübingen and Basel: Francke/UTB, 2005a. 36–47.
Rippl, Gabriele. Beschreibungs-Kunst: Zur intermedialen Poetik
angloamerikanischer Ikontexte (1880–2000). Munich: Wilhelm Fink,
2005b.
Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s Poems: Venus and Adonis, The
Rape of Lucrece and Shorter Poems. The Arden Shakespeare: Third
Series. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen.
London: Bloomsbury, 2007.
Shakespeare, William. Timon of Athens: William Shakespeare and
Thomas Middleton. The Arden Shakespeare: Third Series. Ed.
Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton. London: Bloomsbury,
2008.
Simpson, James. Reform and Cultural Reformation. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002.
Summit, Jennifer, and David Wallace, eds. Medieval/Renaissance:
After Periodization. Special Issue of Journal of Medieval and Early
Modern Studies 37 (2007).
Tassi, Marguerite A. The Scandal of Images: Iconoclasm, Eroticism,
and Painting in Early Modern English Drama. Selinsgrove:
Susquehanna University Press, 2005.
Weisstein, Ulrich. “Literature and the (Visual) Arts: Intertextuality
and Mutual Illumination.” Intertextuality: German Literature and
Visual Art from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century. Ed.
Ingeborg Hoesterey and Ulrich Weisstein. Columbia: Camden
House, 1993. 1–17.
Wells, Marion A. “‘To Find a Face Where All Distress Is Stell’d’:
‘Enargeia,’ ‘Ekphrasis,’ and Mourning in ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ and
the ‘Aeneid.’” Comparative Literature 54.2 (2002): 97–126.
Visser, Arnaud S. Q. Joannes Sambucus and the Learned Image: Forms
and Functions of a Humanist Emblem Book. Leiden: Brill, 2005.

3.2 Further Reading

Adler, Jeremy, and Ernst Ulrich. Text als Figur. Wolfenbüttel: Herzog-
August-Bibliothek/Weinheim: Acta humanoria, 1987.
Hagstrum, Jean H. The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary
Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Henkel, Arthur, and Albrecht Schöne, eds. Emblemata: Handbuch zur
Sinnbildkunst des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts. 1967. Stuttgart:
Metzler, 1996.
David Kennedy

4 Ekphrasis and Poetry

Abstract: The ekphrastic poem, like its close cousin the elegiac poem,
is more a mood or method of working than a mode with a set of
distinctive, clearly defined characteristics. This chapter aims to
complement the chapter on theory by James Heffernan by surveying
some features of ekphrastic poetry. To do this, it proposes an
ekphrastic canon comprising poems by Keats, Auden and Ashbery. The
chapter proposes that the ekphrastic poem is a matter of making
judgements and of using the ekphrastic object work as a means of
justifying its own existence as a separate work in its own right. The
second half of the chapter offers a detailed discussion of Maggie
O’Sullivan’s sequence Tonetreks as a way of understanding how this
works in practice.
Key Terms: Ekphrastic poem, critical ekphrasis, ekphrastic
encounter, body, desire

1 The Ekphrastic Poem: Key Features

The ekphrastic poem, like its close cousin the elegiac poem, is more a
mood or method of working than a mode with a set of distinctive,
clearly defined characteristics. In the late modern period – that is,
post-Keats and particularly post-Auden – this mood and method are
the products of a curious, often unstable, mixture of iconophilia and
iconoclasm or, to put this another way, of representation and criticism.
Indeed, as James Heffernan observes elsewhere in the present volume
( 1 Ekphrasis: Theory), the distinctions between ekphrastic writing
and more traditional art criticism have become increasingly blurred.
The passionately rhetorical questions that Keats addresses to the
Greek vase are at once a Romantic yearning for plenitude and a casting
of the poet and the reader in the role of critic. The questions are in fact
aimed as much at the reader as they are at the urn. The reader is being
encouraged to come up with the answers. This is because, in the words
of Thierry de Duve, all art invites us to pose a question about its
intentions: “what heuristic model of man does it propose?” (qtd. in
Best 2011, 139).
The ekphrastic poet’s critical impulse can certainly be read as a
manifestation of the classical paragone (from the Italian word for
‘comparison’) between word and image. As Jerzy Jarniewicz reminds
us:
In the Renaissance, this rivalry of the supposed sister arts […] engaging such masters as
Leonardo and Michelangelo, was not a purely theoretical issue. It reflected the conflicting
interests of painters and poets, the former grouped into guilds and treated as
underprivileged craftsmen […] but aspiring to the nobler group of the seven liberal arts,
artes liberales, whose scope was at that time extended to also include poetry. (Jarniewicz
2013, 15)

This historically close relationship perhaps goes some way to

explaining the attractive ease of James Heffernan’s “simple in form but
complex in its implications” definition of ekphrasis: “the verbal
representation of visual representation” (Heffernan 1993, 3).
Heffernan adds four key features to his definition. He argues that four
things can be found
permeating ekphrasis from Homer onwards: the conversion of fixed pose and gesture into
narrative, the prosopopeial envoicing of the silent image, the sense of representational
friction between signifying medium and subject signified, and overall the struggle for
power – the paragone – between the image and the word. (Heffernan 1993, 136)

But, as I have argued in The Ekphrastic Encounter in Contemporary

British Poetry and Elsewhere (Kennedy 2012), in the contemporary
world the paragone also speaks to a desire not to let a work of art
speak to us on its own terms. We might recall here what the late Leslie
Scalapino wrote about poetry nearly twenty years ago: “Poetry in this
time […] is doing the work of philosophy – it is writing that is
conjecture.” (Scalapino 1980, 25) A work of art’s value for the
contemporary audience or readership is dependent on having a
message added to it. Whether this is because we are overwhelmed or
underwhelmed by fine art is a moot point as is whether or not this
message is the result of conjecture. It is, of course, possible to interpret
this as being overwhelmed and to do so psychoanalytically. The art
historian Griselda Pollock writes in the wider context of subjectivity
that there is “an anonymous anxiety […] the dread of unravelling
entirely as a subject” and that we are saved from this “void” by
“representation”. She writes that
[w]e need the intervention of the signifier even at its most aniconic and non-sensical to
 […] deliver us into its signification. Thankfully, representation ‘castrates’, that is,
separates us from the overwhelming non-verbal intensities lined with fear of
disintegration or annihilation, and thus delivers us from anxiety by structuration[.]
(Pollock 2006, 52)

It is clear from this that art may overwhelm us with its own non-verbal
intensities. The ekphrastic verbal representation is, we might say, what
‘saves’ us from its power. Several commentators have commented on
the otherness of art in the ekphrastic encounter. Stephen Cheeke in
Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis (2008) observes that in
the ekphrastic encounter words come up against a medium which is
“best thought of not in terms of sisterly bonds at all but rather as one
of radical difference and alterity” (Cheeke 2008, 6). Elizabeth Bergman
Loizeaux makes a similar point in her important study Twentieth
Century Poetry and the Visual Arts (2008). She argues that “[t]he
ekphrastic poem is all about that otherness, and about how one
engages it. […] Ekphrasis often stages an engagement with the
foreign.” (Loizeaux 2008, 9–11) Conceiving of the ekphrastic art object
as foreign or other goes some way to explaining why ekphrasis can be
said to converge in interesting ways with the practices of translation.

2 Present Challenges: Critical Ekphrasis

The critical impulse also chimes with wider impulses in contemporary
mainstream poetry in English to have a poem ‘turn’ on a quizzical
observation or the discovery of something previously unseen in the
object of the poem. This presents challenges for both the ekphrastic
poet and his or her critic. The ekphrastic poet is often engaged in
mounting a species of critical discussion which must nonetheless stand
as a work of art in its own right. The ekphrastic critic must avoid the
temptation of judging the poem’s faithfulness to its source object and
must to some extent try to look past the critical project to the poem
beneath or behind it. These are of course generalizations, but the
search for quirky details in an image is now a well-established aspect of
creative writing teaching and practice. Textbooks encourage students
to imagine a painting as a frame from a movie, to imagine what is just
out of shot or to imagine the frame that comes before or after. The
critical search for destabilising or deconstructing quirky details is
therefore combined with a strong narrativizing impulse. This raises
important questions beyond the scope of the current chapter as to
whether an image is in fact a story in the conventional sense.
As this suggests, talking about ekphrasis as a verbal representation
of the visual will only get us so far. Indeed, it is more correct to say that
the ekphrastic poem is a critical discussion of a visual representation.
Samuel Johnson’s two hundred and fifty year old definition of literary
criticism is useful here. Johnson wrote that “[i]t is […] the task of
criticism to establish principles” and “to improve opinion into
knowledge” (Johnson 1979 [1751], 122). There is a strong sense in
which each ekphrastic poem seeks to do precisely this: to establish
principles and to improve opinion into knowledge. Such principles
have a double function: by establishing themselves as a means of
discussing the ekphrastic object they simultaneously establish the
principles by which the ekphrastic poem itself asks to be judged and
evaluated as a work of art in its own right. So while the ekphrastic
poem might appear to represent its object, it also represents a set of
judgements about it which might range from the aesthetic to the
moral. And it is not the case that the source work legitimates these
judgements but rather the reverse: the fact that the source work makes
such judgements possible is what makes it worthy of our renewed
attention.
We can test this out by looking briefly at three poems which can be
said to constitute something of an ekphrastic canon: Keats’ “Ode on a
Grecian Urn”, W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” and John
Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”. These three poems are, of
course, quite distinct from one another. Keats’ “Ode”, ultimately,
values the static, unchanging form-as-message of the urn. Auden’s
poem finds that meaning is to be had in the large, active scenes of
Breughel. For Ashbery, the ‘breathless speeds’ that surround us are the
speeds of modernity that were already in play when Parmigianino
made his self-portrait. This is why Ashbery’s similes often fail: we don’t
need to say what art is ‘like’ because it is as much a part of what we are
as anything else. So, where Keats found desire in the urn and Auden
found suffering in paintings, in Ashbery’s poem desire and suffering
are part of our experience of modernity. It is inevitable that we will
reproduce them when we contemplate a work of art. This connects
with something else the three poems have revealed: a more and more
strongly emphasised movement away from art as a habitable space.
 Something else we can say about the poems by Keats, Auden and
Ashbery is that they are all to some extent ‘fantasmatic’, a term coined
by the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark and glossed thus by the art historian
Susan Best. The fantasmatic is “something that is not reducible to
visibility. [It is] a term that covers the sense of experiencing something
without a real or identifiable referent” (Best 2011, 140). Common sense
might protest that an ekphrastic poem always has a clearly identifiable
referent but it is important to note that the referent that the ekphrastic
poem creates and represents is never the same as the initial ekphrastic
object. It is a story imagined around the context of the original.
To expand on this a little more, Keats’ poem is where critical
ekphrasis can be said to begin. The passionately rhetorical questions
are unanswerable but still represent a rush to judgement. The
questions are attempts to form opinion into knowledge or rather they
are opinion desperate to become knowledge and judgement. Desire is
the only thing that can start to provide something like a set of answers.
The scenarios it makes possible amount to a series of aesthetic
judgements about the urn and these, in turn, work to convince us of
the poem’s own solidity. The poem’s desire becomes the urn’s desire –
it is almost a matter of projection. So desire becomes in part the
principle that the poem seeks to establish and by which it seeks to be
judged as a work of art in its own right. And the need to complete art’s
apparent ‘lack of fit’ with the barbarity that surrounds it can be heard
in the poem’s famous conclusion. Returning, admittedly at a slight
tangent, to Lygia Clark’s conception of the fantasmatic, we can see that
the stories that Keats’ poem allows desire to construct function in
precisely this way. They are without obvious and clearly visible
referents.
Auden’s poem begins with what looks like a definitive statement, an
authoritative communication, about fine art and about medieval art
specifically: “About suffering they were never wrong, / the Old
Masters” (Auden 1976 [1938], 146). The poem collages a number of
Breughel paintings in order to support this opening assertion and it
continues in this vein. The poem’s chain of increasingly inappropriate
and improbable adjectives and adverbs – “doggy”, “calmly” – work to
support the idea that suffering is somehow always taking place slightly
to one side, out of sight (Auden 1976 [1938], 147). In the poem, the
process of forming opinion into knowledge has already taken place
before the poem gets under way. Nonetheless, we have to search the
large, active scenes of Breughel’s paintings to uncover their true
meaning and this is partly what the adjectives and adverbs help us to
do. They seem to undermine and underline the message that the poem
finds in the paintings. In Griselda Pollock’s terms, they save us from
being overwhelmed by the power of the non-verbal. So by the end of
the poem and its well-known revelation, the paintings are to some
extent undone. Auden’s poem also functions fantasmatically because it
is a collage of several Breughel paintings.
Undoing is crucial to Ashbery’s methods in “Self-Portrait in a
Convex Mirror”. Ashbery’s poem contains clear echoes of both Keats’
and Auden’s poems but plunges itself and the reader into the whirl of
modernity. It is able to do this because its subject work is always in the
process of being produced. What we see is Parmigianino in the process
of making his self-portrait. We see something in the moment of its
happening. So what principles of judgement does Ashbery’s poem seek
to establish? The poem becomes a large discussion about how we are to
find our bearings in the world and whether art can be of any help to us.
The poem is constantly accumulating and decreating itself before the
eyes of the reader. However, it does this so very deftly that it appears to
be accumulating solidly. The overall effect is that the poem, more than
Keats’ and Auden’s, functions almost entirely fantasmatically in the
sense that it starts to become its own referent. We might almost say
that the poem asks to be judged by its lack of clearly established
principles. Its continual emphasis on the breathless speeds of
modernity throws into question the very possibility of judgement and
of opinion being formed into knowledge. It is Ashbery’s poem, perhaps
more than any other ekphrastic work, that engages directly with the
difference, alterity, otherness and foreignness of the source work
suggested by Stephen Cheeke and Elizabeth Bergman Loizeaux. As the
poem says, Parmigianino’s self-portrait confronts us with “This
otherness, this / ‘Not-being-us’” (Ashbery 1994, 202).

3 A Case Study: Maggie O’Sullivan’s Tonetreks

I now want to turn to a contemporary ekphrastic sequence by one of
Britain’s leading experimental poets Maggie O’Sullivan. Tonetreks was
originally written in 1975-77 but was not published in book form until
2006 in the retrospective volume Body of Work. O’Sullivan’s subjects
are paintings by Munch, Malevich, Van Gogh, Monet, Gorky and
Rothko and a sculpture by Giacometti but she eschews the usual
ekphrastic strategies of, say, giving an image a voice or deducing a
narrative from a gesture. These eleven poems focus on aspects of art
that are generally of little interest to ekphrastic poets: for example, the
spatial impact of a sculptural form and the organisation and play of
colour within the picture plane. At its most extreme, this focus
produces four Monet poems which parallel paintings in concrete poetic
form as in “ an oblong of pink” (O’Sullivan 2006, 17) or a poem about a
Giacometti figure made of one word lines snaking down over one and a
half pages (O’Sullivan 2006, 20–21).
The sequence begins with a poem entitled “Melancholia” which can
be read as a fairly oblique account of Munch’s The Scream. The poem’s
emphasis is on colour and it opens with a “hemorrhage [sic] of carnival
colour” before going on to detail a “purpled” sea, “yellow hands” and,
at the end of the poem, a “twisting jagged lilac” sea. The poem is intent,
then, on catching colours with some precision. The figure in the
painting is given a “knife-textured face”, a violent image which, as we
shall see, is echoed in other poems in the sequence. The face is a “gaunt
stain” which seems to contradict the violent image of the knife. But this
is part of the point, part of the principle that the poem establishes: that
is, the painting to some extent draws its dynamic power from precisely
these sorts of contradictions, from the fact that the sea can, for
example, be purple and “jagged lilac”, an adjective which echoes the
earlier “knife-textured”. These sorts of words underline that, in the
poem’s view, the painting is an assault on the vision of the spectator.
The next poem in the sequence, titled with the painter’s surname, is
a very different matter. It focuses on Konstantin Malevich’s white
paintings. Here we get a necessarily strong contrast between
deconstructionist and incarnational impulses. The poem is full of
whiteness and replaces the absence of colour with sound. Phrases are
repeated, reversed and reworked in order to mirror how “nothing
reveals nothing”. The next poem in the sequence “Van Gogh” appears
to be about a specific painting although this remains unidentified. One
assumes it is one of the Arles cafe paintings. The poem focuses on the
bodies within the painting. Here we have more conventionally
ekphrastic representations of light and colour: “vinegar smoke”,
“amber”, “supperglow” and “olivedark”. The poem is concerned to
reproduce a dynamic of light and shade and to some extent it moves
between those two poles. Sound is again also important and the scene
of the painting is imagined as a living one where sound has an impact
on movement and colour: “a cough or a voice”, “sounds crowd the
table”, “the stray whine of a dog”. The poem contains another violent
image: “A draught razors in”. Here the principle seems to be how
sound can be imagined to be at work in an image and what it captures
as well as capturing a night scene in words.
We have already noted how the four Monet poems use a postcard
form to portray schematic diagrams of colour disposition. These poems
are about as literally ekphrastic as one can get in their portrayal of, say,
“An ARC JAPANESE” or the word “Petals” repeated some thirty or
forty times. As with the Munch poem, we can probably guess what
paintings some of the postcard formats refer to. The next poem in the
sequence is devoted to a sculpture by Giacometti. The thin spindly
form of the poem mimics the form of the sculpture and thus
establishes a principle of comparison and convergence. The form itself
is, then, a species of judgement, of opinion made into knowledge about
the work. There is, again, an emphasis on nothing and there is too a
violent image: “his / whittled / almost / no- / thing / face / bayonets
our glance”. As with the Munch poem, O’Sullivan is intent on capturing
the work’s impact.
The “Elegy” for American painter Ashile Gorky is perhaps the most
important poem in the ekphrastic sequence. It ends with a stark image
of his suicide by hanging. The preceding weight of the poem does some
of the usual work of elegy through a careful accumulation of largely
pastoral images taken from the painter’s body of work. The poem, as it
were, provides a pastoral container for the fact of the suicide. Again,
small pieces of language link the poem to others in the sequence. A
reference to Gorky’s medium – “naked paper” – echoes the “nothing
nakedness” of the earlier Malevich poem. There are also references to
bodies. These fit in with the way the poem luxuriates sensually in its
descriptions of what O’Sullivan imagines Gorky loved and of what he
loved to paint.
However, the poem contains a passage which is not only crucial to
the ekphrastic sequence as a whole but also, crucially, to
understanding how ekphrasis works. Verse three appears to quote the
painter directly:

You said,
Permit me my making, there is no meaning here.
Meaning is the spectator’s privilege.
The fetish
to invent a camouflage. (O’Sullivan 2006, 23)
The passage is so clear that it requires little in the way of a critical
gloss. What we can say is that it speaks to how ekphrasis is founded on
a need to interpret. The search for meaning is presented here as
something that gets in the way of the actual activities of making art
which may in fact have little to do with making meaning. It also
suggests that the artist may have little conception of what the meaning
of a specific work might be. The passage also serves to remind us how
rare it is to encounter an ekphrastic poem that talks about a work of art
as either an exploration of media and materials or as an effect in time
and space.
The two part poem “Rothko” which closes the sequence, to some
extent continues and develops what is articulated in the key passage
from the Gorky elegy. Part 1 of the poem is set in an exhibition space:
part 2 appears to be set in the artist’s New York studios. Rothko, like
Gorky, committed suicide but this is not made an explicit part of the
poem. The first part of the poem presents the poet experiencing the
effects of Rothko’s works. The principle of judgement established here
is that of an encounter with the works in which they appear to change
as they are contemplated. There is also a sense of the speaker being
overwhelmed by the works: “I hurry on / not wanting to get involved /
in the drama of objects”. There is perhaps a distant echo of the end of
Auden’s poem and the ship that sails “calmly on” at its close. But this
may also mean that the speaker does not want to get involved in what
the Gorky poem calls ‘the spectator’s privilege’ of attaching meaning.
The works may suggest objects but it is their effects that are more
important. The poem uses procedures seen elsewhere in the sequence:
language is reworked, repeated and resequenced. Indeed, in this poem
and others – like the Malevich – it is almost as if O’Sullivan has set out
to demonstrate what James Longenbach recently argued about poems
in his essay “Poetic Compression”: “[Poems are] the simultaneous
construction and dismantling of a pattern of sounds.” (Longenbach
2011, 172) The construction and dismantling of sound is certainly to
the fore in the Malevich poem and reminds us that O’Sullivan’s
practice is an experimental one. Construction and dismantling
converge with what Romana Huk identifies in other experimental
poetry of the 1970s as an “attempt to fuse deconstructive impulses with
revised incarnational ones” (Huk 2011, 45). The play of colour in the
picture plane mimics a broadly deconstructionist view of the play of
meaning in language forever escaping the immobilization of
interpretation. But incarnation also means embodiment in flesh, and
Tonetreks is particularly focused on bodies. Body words are used
throughout the sequence and the Munch and Van Gogh poems are
focused almost exclusively on the bodies the painters portray.
Similarly, Ashile Gorky’s palette both “unfurls […] a tenderness of
breasts” and produces “liver-red roses”. (O’Sullivan 2006, 22) This
implies that an encounter with a work of art reanimates bodies: the
physical body of the work and the body or bodies it portrays. And
when bodies feel the world they do so traumatically. The face of the
figure in Munch’s Scream is “knife-textured”; “[a] draught razors in”
on Van Gogh’s lamplit scene; and the “almost / no- / thing / face” of
Giacometti’s sculpture ‘bayonets our glance’ (O’Sullivan 2006, 13, 15,
21). At the same time, it is O’Sullivan’s words that are weapons, adding
this violence to the works she describes. Representation is an after-
image of violence or trauma because it is itself a kind of violence.
Looking back over the poems that comprise Tonetreks we can see
that O’Sullivan has resisted the urge to interpret and add meaning to
the paintings she has chosen to write about. The Monet postcards can
be said to represent an extreme version of this, an intention to
represent the work as literally and as plainly as possible. The sequence,
at first sight, gives us what can be termed a form of pure ekphrasis, and
because Tonetreks lacks the commonly found interpretative element it
stands at some considerable distance from how ekphrastic poems
usually function in practice. The principles of judgement it establishes
are just those of the works themselves. O’Sullivan’s sequence can
therefore stand as an interesting comparator for other ekphrastic
writing: by not doing the expected, it underlines the expected
dynamics of much ekphrastic poetry.
Returning to an earlier point, what O’Sullivan’s Tonetreks sequence
therefore reveals is something that is hardly discussed if at all in
accounts of ekphrastic poetry: the importance of the body in conveying
the ekphrastic meaning of an individual poem. The body, as we have
seen, is important in the Edvard Munch, Vincent Van Gogh, Ashile
Gorky and Mark Rothko poems of Tonetreks. The meanings of these
poems are clustered around the body – even the Malevich poem refers
to ‘nakedness’. But, crucially, the body is also important in the
ekphrastic canon of Keats, Auden and Ashbery.
In Keats’ poem, it is what is imagined about the bodies on the urn
that makes the poem what it is. The bodies on the urn become the
carriers of the poem’s desire and, ultimately, of its slightly confused
message about truth and beauty. In Auden’s poem, it is the suffering
that bodies experience that is crucial to the poem’s meaning. We do, of
course, have to do a little bit of research to uncover all the paintings
that Auden refers to, such as The Massacre of the Innocents. And the
poem ends with an unnoticed body falling into the sea as an image of
disregarded suffering. In Ashbery’s great poem of postmodernity, the
body of the painter forever in the moment of portraying itself becomes
an image of the contemporary body forever in the process of creating,
decreating and recreating its presence and position in the breathlessly
whirling post-modern world.

4 New Perspectives: The Ekphrastic Body

These are not isolated examples. One can point to a huge range of
contemporary ekphrastic poems where the body is central. Poems by
James Fenton, Adrian Clarke, Pauline Stainer, Frances Presley, and
Kelvin Corcoran all have the body at the centre of their meanings and
judgements. What this suggests is that there is a strong case for
studying what might be termed the ekphrastic body. I am not
suggesting that we could track and trace the same physical features
across a range of ekphrastic poems. What I am suggesting is that
ekphrastic criticism might be able to reinvent itself beyond the usual
representational models. It is the physicality of many contemporary
ekphrastic poems, the bodily presences within them, that ought to
concern the 21st century critic. We are living, after all, through a period
when what is done to bodies has become central to global politics.
If a new focus on the body in ekphrastic poetry is one way of
introducing a new ‘turn’ in critical responses to ekphrasis, then
another is, as I have suggested elsewhere, the idea of the encounter. It
is clear from O’Sullivan’s Tonetreks that her poems stage encounters
between text and image. The idea of an encounter between different
cultures – in this case visual and textual – is a way of allowing both
sides of the meeting to preserve their integrity while at the same time
enabling an exploration of what happens when elements of both
cultures meet. An encounter is, after all, a meeting that can result in a
change of direction for the parties concerned, and as contemporary
poets become more and more literate in contemporary fine art, we can
see them moving beyond mere representation. Intersemiotics and
intermediality are also useful in understanding the ekphrastic
encounter. Both approaches are concerned with hierarchies of
elements within different orders of representation and with what
happens when translation occurs between those orders. And, like
translation, inter-semiotics and intermediality are essentially utopian
because they assume that such a translation between orders is both
possible and effective.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Ashbery, John. “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Selected Poems.
London: Paladin, 1994. 188–204.
Auden, W. H. “Musée des Beaux Arts.” Collected Poems. 1938. Ed.
Edward Mendelson. New York: Random House, 1976. 146–147.
Best, Susan. Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-
garde. London: I. B. Tauris, 2011.
Cheeke, Stephen. Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008.
Heffernan, James A. W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis
from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993.
Huk, Romana. “Maggie O’Sullivan and the Story of Metaphysics.” The
Salt Companion to Maggie O’Sullivan. Cambridge: Salt Publishing,
2011. 36–70.
Jarniewicz, Jerzy. Ekphrasis in the Poetry of Derek Mahon. Piotrków
Trybunalski: Naukowe Wydawnictwo Piotrkowskie Filii UJK, 2013.
Johnson, Samuel. The Rambler. 1751. Vol. 3. Ed. W. J. Bate and
Albrecht B. Strauss. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
Keats, John. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The Poetical Works of John
Keats. Ed. H. W. Garrod. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.
260–262.
Kennedy, David. The Ekphrastic Encounter in Contemporary British
Poetry and Elsewhere. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.
Loizeaux, Elizabeth Bergman. Twentieth-Century Poetry and the
Visual Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Longenbach, James. “Poetic Compression.” New England Review 32.1
(2011): 164–172.
O’Sullivan, Maggie. Body of Work. London: Reality Street, 2006.
Pollock, Griselda. “A Very Long Engagement: Singularity and
Difference in the Critical Writing on Eva Hesse.” Encountering Eva
Hesse. Ed. Griselda Pollock and Vanessa Corby. Munich: Prestel,
2006. 23–55.
Ricks, Christopher. Poems and Critics: An Anthology of Poetry and
Criticism from Shakespeare to Hardy. London: Fontana, 1972.
Scalapino, Leslie. “The Cannon.” American Poetry Review 27.3
(1998): 9–12.

5.2 Further Reading

Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003.
Sylvia Karastathi

5 Ekphrasis and the Novel/Narrative

Fiction
Abstract: This chapter offers an overview of the theoretical and
conceptual aspects of ekphrasis in narrative fiction, in order to
establish connections between the ancient and modern uses of the
term. It argues for the need of a differentiation within the concept of
“contemporary ekphrasis” so as to identify its particular modalities
within prose writing and especially the novel. This chapter also
explores the specific function and qualities of ekphrastic description in
prose fiction, analysing examples from the nineteenth and twentieth
century. The aim is to situate ekphrasis in narrative fiction in a
different line of texts and in a tradition separate from the one
operating in poetry, which has so far dominated the theoretical
discussions of the term in Anglo-American contexts.
Key Terms: Prose ekphrasis, contemporary ekphrasis, framing,
spatialisation, de -celeration, focalisation, art novel

1 Prose Ekphrasis: Definition and Conceptual

Aspects
During the last 30 years the term ekphrasis has undergone a critical
revival with recent word and image criticism contemplating its
extension and redefinition (cf. Yacobi 1995; Clüver 1997; Rippl 2005;
Louvel 2011; 0 Introduction; 1 Ekphrasis: Theory; 4 Ekphrasis
and Poetry). The modern theorisation of the term ekphrasis and the
subsequent analyses of the poetics of the ekphrastic act have been
mainly dictated by the long-lived sister arts analogy between painting
and poetry as expressed in the Horatian ut pictura poesis credo. This
sister arts rhetoric with emphasis on the paragone, and the creation of
an aesthetic equivalent, has sidelined the presence of ekphrasis in
narrative fiction, particularly in the novel, where it has a long history
in the workings of storytelling.
 Stephen Cheeke in an extensive study on the topic, Writing for Art:
The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis (2008), differentiates between modern
ekphrasis and the classical tradition, signalling that although the term
is useful in designating a specific poetic genre, it is also in need of
urgent renewal, in order to account for the many and newly-conceived
ways in which verbal representations address visual representations.
Cheeke insists on stretching “what we are actually prepared to think of
as ekphrastic writing”, including in his discussion not only poems
written for photographs but also famous literary prose descriptions of
artworks (Cheeke 2008, 7). Despite the constant acknowledgement of
the impossibility of the ekphrastic act, contemporary practice in poetry
and fiction does not shy from the task, confirming Cheeke’s
observation that “writing for art exists and thrives under the
knowledge of failure” (Cheeke 2008, 2). Other critics such as Elizabeth
Bergman Loizeaux, writing on twentieth-century poetry, put forward
the view that in contemporary texts “ekphrasis offers a means of
revision” (2008, 108), an observation that holds true for its use in
fiction. Indeed, ekphrasis in prose fiction is worth our attention as it
stages a re-vision of modes of participation and apprehension of the
visual; it also provides a space for collective contemplation between
author/narrator and reader.
This chapter will offer an overview of the theoretical and conceptual
aspects of ekphrasis in narrative fiction, in order to establish
connections between the ancient and modern uses of the term, and
ultimately argue for the need of a differentiation within the concept of
“contemporary ekphrasis”, so as to identify its particular modalities
within prose writing and especially the novel. This chapter also seeks
to explore the specific functions and qualities of ekphrastic description
in prose fiction and approach it in a tradition separate from the one
operating in poetry, which has so far dominated the theoretical
discussions of the term in Anglo-American contexts.

2 Ekphrasis: A Historical Overview

For anyone interested in exploring the notion of ekphrasis, one of the
major stumbling blocks in the field is the two-sided existence of the
term and the break between its meaning in the ancient and modern
world. In the classical tradition, ekphrases were extended descriptions
of people, landscapes, battles, places and objects. They were
elementary rhetorical exercises (progymnasmata) training the
rhetorician in bringing a subject before the audience’s eyes. In aiming
at “making the listener ‘see’ the subject in their mind’s eye” the
practice of ekphrasis is closely associated with enargeia, oral discourse
and the impact of immediacy on the listener (Webb 2009, 2; cf. Rippl
2005, 63–72). Ruth Webb maps the transformation of the term and
identifies a moment in which it is used for “those ancient examples of
ekphrasis that happen to describe works of art” (Webb 2009, 6). Our
contemporary understanding of ekphrasis as descriptions of artworks
comes from its specific practice in the work of fifth century CE
sophists, where description is targeted specifically at artworks. For
instance, descriptions of artworks from Philostratus’ Eikones have
bequeathed to us knowledge of ancient paintings – it is unknown
whether they are imaginary or not, but they are certainly now lost, and
only known via his descriptions. It is in the Hellenistic period that
Michel Beaujour identifies an association of the ekphrastic act with
frivolity:
Such gratuitous uses of ekphrasis always were tainted with the dubious reputation of
sophistry: a profitable but somehow undignified display of skill, an ungentlemanly
indifference to usefulness, truth, justice, wisdom and the common good. Demonstrative
oratory was a self-serving art that idly aroused emotion with word-pictures, all to no
praiseworthy civic purpose. (Beaujour 1981, 30)

From a powerful device of oratory, ekphrasis becomes an ornament

and a display feature. It was frustration with the tiresome descriptive
poetry of the eighteenth century that prompted Lessing’s famous essay
on the limits of painting and poetry in Laokoön (1766). In Lessing’s
treatise Homeric description, and especially that in the famous chapter
eighteen of the Iliad, becomes the exemplary case of description.
Homer’s language animates the various parts of the shield of Achilles
at exactly the time they are being forged by Hephaestus. He thus
introduces a justifiable order that follows the process of production,
adding a temporal and narrative dimension within the descriptive act.
In comparison with this dynamic description, static descriptions have
been found wanting. In Philippe Hamon’s survey of attitudes to
description and the descriptive in literature, it is presented as
“awkward”, an “inconvenience for the Rhetoricians”, in “persistent
association with the negative” (Hamon 1981, 2, 4, 7). The descriptive in
literary discourse is accorded the status of a problem that has to be
managed, and the work it does is treated with suspicion; at best it is
considered an ornament granted decorative and accessory functions, at
worst an intrusion that needs to be excused; its excesses controlled
through plausible motivation and neutralisation.

3 Ekphrasis in Narrative Fiction

Although there is a plethora of ekphrastic passages in prose fiction, the
association of ekphrasis with poetry (Spitzer 1955), and its theorisation
for some time as a poetic genre, has somewhat disregarded its
presence and function in storytelling. Ekphrasis in the novel can be
approached more as a textual fragment; a detachable unit that can be
isolated and studied independently. Claus Clüver has put forward that
the term ekphrasis is in need of redefinition since “contemporary
ekphrastic practices have subverted the traditional relation of the
representational visual text to its verbal representation, even to the
point of discontinuity” (Clüver 1997, 30) but the great elasticity of the
term makes it unusable if it is not somewhat circumscribed. For the
purposes of the analysis that follows, the typology used by Liliane
Louvel in her recent study The Poetics of Iconotext (2011) to establish
the degrees of pictorial saturation in prose fiction is employed. What is
designated as ekphrasis in fiction is: a demarcated description of a
work of visual art, either real or imaginary, and not a mode of
descriptive writing that is infused with pictoriality, which can be
evident in moments throughout the whole text (Rippl 2005, 56–100).
In this view the explicit reference to an artwork, real or fictitious,
needs to be differentiated from moments of description in a text which
suggest a painting-effect or a painterly style (as for example in the
impressionist novel or the invocation of the still life genre). Louvel’s
study focuses significantly on ekphrasis in narrative fiction, calling it “a
different kind of ekphrasis altogether” (Louvel 2011, 48). She supports
the emphasis on “the dynamic quality of ekphrasis”, which resists
viewing it as a frozen and inert moment in a text; instead the
ekphrastic moment, because it enacts a re-representation, is “a place of
aesthetic over-saturation” (Louvel 2011, 48).
Far from being a mere ornament, ekphrasis, as a descriptive device,
enriches narrative fiction by inviting an already extant image, which
has its own historical and theoretical associations, into the fictional
discourse. The insertion of reproductions of actual paintings raises
queries about narrative fiction’s capabilities to achieve a reality effect
(Smith 1995). In other instances the ekphrasis of a work of art in
narrative fiction functions as an assertion of the novel’s aesthetic
provenance, a distinctive characteristic of the art novel in the wake of
Henry James’ “Art of Fiction” (Matz 2012, 544). Ekphrasis also
launches debates about representation in the novel; what Goldhill
suggests for the function of ekphrasis in poetry of the Hellenistic era
could be true for the novel as well: What is dramatised in ekphrastic
passages “is the moment of looking as a practice of interpretation”
(Goldhill 2007, 2). In other cases ekphrasis provides the space for
aesthetic treatises or an opportunity to educate the reader, with some
texts exhibiting a programmatic and almost didactic tendency in their
ekphrastic passages (see discussion of Byatt in the next section), as
they advocate a particular way of looking through the ekphrastic act.
Another major function of ekphrasis in the novel that contributes to its
intermedial character is the spatialisation of narrative fiction. As
Louvel demonstrates in her discussion in Poetics of the Iconotext: “The
insertion or inclusion within the flux of the narration of a spatial object
– shield, urn, painting – spatialises narrative, and blurs the sharp
distinctions made by Lessing between painting as a spatial art and
narrative as a temporal art” (Louvel 2011, 45–46).
In the novel and the short story the ideal of an aesthetic equivalent
between painting and poem is not sustainable or even a desirable
effect. As Tamar Yacobi (1995) argues, the insistence on the one-to-one
correspondence between textual and visual artwork, in the paragonal
manner, has sidelined attention to the function of ekphrasis in the
novel (for a discussions of the functions of ekphrasis cf. Rippl 2005,
85–96). What Yacobi terms the “work-to model” mode of ekphrasis
might select multiple visual sources for “verbal remodelling”, with A. S.
Byatt’s Still Life, discussed below, being a good example of this
different type of narrative ekphrasis (Yacobi 1995, 603). Usually
ekphrastic passages are but moments in a longer narrative and are very
much affected by the surrounding text, producing the ‘freeze-time
effect’. According to Louvel, “ekphrasis slows down the pace of the text
[…] either in terms of the relationship between the time of the story
and the time of the text or in terms of speed” (Louvel 2011, 99). In the
novel, ekphrasis constitutes “an abrupt shift in the flow of the novel’s
discourse” (White 2005, 22). It is rather the place, where ekphrasis is
embedded, that generates the powerful arresting effect of the
ekphrastic encounter in fiction, often functioning as a proleptic device
that suggests aesthetic and narrative priorities. This significant
moment of ekphrastic contemplation raises important questions on
plot and characterisation, often functioning as a comment on the act of
viewing.
In the novel ekphrasis is often used for focalisation. Revealing the
identity of the narrator, it helps “to produce a viewing subject”
(Goldhill 2007, 2). Ekphrastic passages in the novel afford access to
multiple narrative voices or focalisers, whose descriptive musings
might be mingled in a common encounter which juxtaposes different
levels of aesthetic judgment or varied interpretations and viewpoints;
such are descriptive moments in gallery visits, which are cardinal
moments in establishing aesthetic priorities in works such as Brontë’s
or Byatt’s. Such a moment occurs in the “Cleopatra” chapter in
Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) where Lucy Snow, after a prolonged
ekphrasis, pronounces the baroque painting depicting Cleopatra “an
enormous piece of claptrap”, thus voicing a proto-feminist disdain for
Western narrative painting’s tendency to depict a heavily sexualised
female body clad in the vestiges of moral allegory. Reading such
gendered ekphrastic moments in nineteenth-century prose fiction,
Antonia Losano has inquired how it could “be possible to rethink the
traditional gendering of ekphrasis?” A first step, according to Losano,
would be to “uncover a canon, so to speak, of women’s ekphrasis, in
which women occupy any or all of the possible subject positions
involved in ekphrasis: viewer, describer, author or producer, or the art
object itself” (Losano 2008, 10). Today, after much work by feminist
scholars, there is an awareness of such an, albeit restricted, canon,
with Virginia Woolf’s Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse (1927) and Kate
Chopin’s Edna Pontellier in The Awakening (1899) being notable
examples. Some of the novels examined in the last section (by Ch.
Brontë and Byatt especially) are texts in which women occupy all the
above positions.
3.1 Ekphrasis in Classical Prose Texts
Contemporary studies on ekphrasis, by attending primarily to the
poetic examples, sideline a rich genealogy and a diverse tradition in the
prose works of the Hellenistic and Byzantine grammatology. There
could be a different lineage of the term in prose works, including
Eikones by Philostratus (beginning of third century CE) or Ekphraseis
of statues by Kallistratus (beginning of fourth century CE), where
ekphrasis emerges as an independent short prose genre. Further, the
rhetoric manuals of the second sophist period such as the
prognymnasmata of Ailios Theon – where we have the definition of
ekphrasis as “ ἔκφρασις ἐστί λόγος περιηγηματικός ἐναργώς ὑπ’ ὄψιν
ἄγων τό δηλούμενον [Ekphrasis is descriptive (periēgēmatikos)
speech which brings (literally ‘leads’) the thing shown vividly
(enargōs) before the eyes]” (Webb 2009, 51) – sit somewhat
uncomfortably with the limited modern conception of “descriptions of
artworks”. There is also no connection to the function of ekphrasis in
the modern novel with the ekphrastic descriptions in the ancient novel,
such as the framing prologue to Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe (second
century CE) or the multiple and extended descriptions of art objects in
Leukippe and Kleitophon (ca. second century CE) by Achilles Tatius,
where the ekphrases play an integral role in the narrative and are not
merely decorative, as are the extensive ekphrastic descriptions in
Heliodorus’ Aithiopika. The Byzantine ekphrastic tradition is also little
discussed, since, in relation to the classical examples, it is seen as
derivative. The architectural ekphrasis of the floor mosaic in the Great
Palace at Constantinople by Constantine Manasses (Ἔκφρασις
εἰκονισμάτων ἐν μαρμάρῳ κυκλοτερεῖ /Ekphrasis of cyclical marble
images) and the ornate garden descriptions by Ioannis Geometris
(Ἐπιστολαὶ κήπου ἐκφραστικαί/ Epistolary garden ekphrasis) attest to
the epideictic character of the ekphrastic act that continues in the
Byzantine Era. Therefore, whereas in recent studies on ekphrasis in
poetry one sees a need to connect contemporary ekphrasis to its
ancient history and highlight the endurance and aesthetic importance
of the genre, there is a leap in its genealogy, as it goes from Homer
directly to Shakespeare and the Romantics, and largely ignores the
tradition in prose.
3.2 Contemporary Ekphrasis
That ekphrastic writing today occurs in a cultural sphere inundated by
images, is what gives critics a strong impetus to explore authors’
insistence on ekphrastic description. Contemporary readers are
accustomed to the wide availability of images and their easy
accessibility in either online sources or in cheap reproductions. In the
literature of art authors’ descriptions of artworks take account of that
“easy visibility”, previously absent in earlier visual cultures, where
description had been to an extent a replacement of the image, and was
performed in the absence of the image (e.g. descriptions in Anna Riggs
Miller Letters from Italy, 1777, and Hester Lynch Piozzi Observations
and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France,
Italy and Germany, 1789). Art historian Michael Baxandall indicated
Heinrich Wölfflin’s descriptions as the first in art history to be directed
to an image present in the text. He declares that “we now assume the
presence and availability of the object, and this has great consequences
for the workings of our language” (Baxandall 1985, 9). When writing
about real and well-known artworks or reproduced images of them,
contemporary authors acknowledge, and contend with, this easy
visibility that renders description if not redundant, then surplus;
definitely not a source of information, but one of interpretation.
Contemporary ekphrasis has, through acts of selective interpretation
or intentional differentiation, distanced itself radically from the use of
the term in ancient rhetorical tradition and ancient poetry. As Simon
Goldhill (2007) has suggested, pursuing the different concerns of each
era with regard to the ekphrastic mode can open up avenues of
enquiries in the mode of perception and aesthetic priorities of each era.
This is already the approach adopted by some scholars; Michael
Davidson when discussing the postmodern painter poem,
differentiates it from the well-wrought urns of the romantic paradigm
in that it does not seek “to signal its internal self-sufficiency, autonomy
and contextual unity”, but rather “activates strategies of composition
equivalent to but not dependent on the painting” (1983, 70, 72). Other
critics, like Valentine Cunningham, attribute the special character of
contemporary ekphrasis to the fact that it more often addresses
existing works of art, unlike the imaginary object encountered in
ancient ekphrasis. More recently David Kennedy in his study The
Ekphrastic Encounter in Contemporary British Poetry and Elsewhere
(2012) has proposed a different order of priorities for the ekphrastic
act putting forward that ekphrasis should move from paragon to
encounter, and that the ekphrastic poem attends to an encounter with
the event of art.
Indeed today the locations that enable ekphrastic writing, such as
the art gallery and the museum above all, indicate that the described
artworks – real, observable objects introduced in an imagined world –
have broken free from their specific spaces of display to enter a
fictional world and pose aesthetic and moral questions about the
nature of visual representation and the value of its rendering in
language. In these contexts, art about which much is written gathers a
textual life that extends its influence and reception in contexts beyond
the museum or gallery. As Cunningham argues, this ekphrastic
encounter, as he names it, reinforces the deictic qualities of the literary
work, which seeks to relate its world with the tangible reality outside of
it “by pointing at an allegedly touchable, fingerable, thisness”
(Cunningham 2007, 61). It seems that this ekphrastic encounter of the
text with made object aims at the former acquiring something of the
latter’s undoubted real presence, its thereness.

3.3 Ekphrasis in the Anglo-American Novel and

Short Narrative Fiction
The impulse of the novel to move beyond its own medium and extend
to the visual arts, incorporating themes, techniques and objects, has
been widely discussed with reference to the nineteenth century and
modernist novel (Torgovnic 1985; Byerly 1997; Rippl 2005; Yeazell
2008). Jeffrey Meyers, in his overview study Painting and the Novel,
argues for “a new dimension of richness and complexity to the novel by
extending the potentialities of fiction to include the representational
capabilities of the visual arts” (Meyers 1975, 1). He asserts that
artworks in the novel “evoke a new depth of meaning through
suggestive allusion” (Meyers 1975, 1). For Meyers the presence of the
artwork in the modern English novel is a locus for considering
aesthetic analogies. These can be weak or pronounced and range from
a passing allusion and reference to sophisticated and complicated
engagements. Although Meyers recognises that the use of painting
varies in degree and importance in each of his authors (his
representatives from the continent include Huysmans, Proust,
Lampedusa, Dostoyevsky, Camus and Mann), he contends that turning
our attention to the analysis of the painting can result in “a new
interpretation of the novel” (Meyers 1975, 4).
Today the corpus of ekphrastic writing in Anglo-American literature
has been extensively mapped, so as to enable critics to identify its
character, priorities and specific practices prominent in each period.
Many examples of ekphrastic description in Anglo-American prose
fiction have recently received attention in studies that examine a
particular author’s interaction with the visual arts. Modernist
novelists, such as D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, and post-war
writers such as Iris Murdoch, John Banville, Iain Sinclair and W. G.
Sebald are discussed in relation to their use of ekphrasis. Other
moments have received attention in order to account for the ways
ekphrasis in the nineteenth-century novel serves the program of
realism: from the extensive description of Pemberley focalised through
the eyes of Elizabeth Bennet in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, to
Dorothea Brooke’s visit to the Vatican Hall of Statues in George Eliot’s
Middlemarch, to the famous chapter 17 of Eliot’s Adam Bede, where
the “The Story Pauses a Little” for the reader to follow a meticulous
description of a Dutch painting ( 8 Nineteenth-century Literature and
Photography). Studies have also focused on works featuring famous
examples of fictitious paintings such as “The Oval Portrait” by Edgar
Allan Poe, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde or Lily Briscoe’s
painting in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Many ekphrastic
moments have been extracted from the work of Henry James
(Bronzino’s Portait of Lucrezia Panciatichi in The Wings of the Dove),
and his notion of realism as well as his “prose pictures” discussed
(Rippl 2005, 103–184). Likewise the art of description of Edith
Wharton (Lily Bart’s tableaux vivant in The House of Mirth), Peter
Ackroyd (Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in Hawksmoor) and A. S. Byatt
(The Darnley Portrait of Elizabeth I in The Virgin in the Garden) has
raised the interest of literary scholars, as has the work of other
contemporary writers such as Margaret Forster (Gwen John’s Artist’s
Studio in Keeping the World Away), Pat Barker (Henry Tonks’
Surgical Portraits in Life Class and Toby’s Room), or, even in the genre
of the ekphrastic short story, Rose Tremain (“Death of an Advocate”
based on James Tissot’s Holiday, discussed below).

4 Ekphrasis in the Nineteenth-century Novel

Despite the absence of book-length studies on ekphrasis in the novel,
passages of ekphrasis receive a lot of attention in studies that explore
the novel’s relation with the visual arts and artists (cf. Rippl 2005;
White 2005; Losano 2008; Yeazell 2008; Teukolsky 2009). Such
studies turn their attention to the ‘scene of painting’ and identify it as a
rich textual locus for the art novel. The figure of the woman artist as a
character in realist fiction of the Victorian period has become an
especially recognisable trope, allowing the novelist to offer aesthetic
pronouncements on the nature of representation, and the relationships
between gender, creativity and professionalism.

4.1 Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

(1848)
Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) is the key text on the
representation of the woman artist in Victorian literature, comparable
to Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye (1988) in the twentieth century. It is,
however, not a Bildungsroman as is Atwood’s novel, but a framed
narrative that introduces the figure of the woman painter as the
transgressive outsider to an English provincial town. The mysterious
tenant of Wild-fell Hall, Helen Graham, clad in black, is described by
Mr Markham, the narrator, as self-opinionated and “too hard, too
sharp, too bitter for [his] taste” (A. Brontë 1992, 38). The main theme
of the novel, articulated repeatedly by Helen’s various suitors, emerges
as the incompatibility of the heroine’s artistic vocation with her
feminine nature: “I should fall in love with her, if I hadn’t the artist
before me”, says one of her admirers (A. Brontë 1992, 157). According
to Losano, “Brontë’s novel dramatises the transition from amateur,
accomplished woman to professional female artist” (Losano 2003, 5).
She reads closely the “scenes of painting”, and the ways the various
characters interpreted Helen Graham’s work, not as simple romantic
fantasies but as works of art capable of conveying an idea. The method
of close-reading the heroine’s own ekphrases of her works, as they
appear in her diary, allows Losano to argue for a differentiation of the
painter-heroine’s own view of her work and those of her suitors who
tend to read biographically, treating the artwork as affording special
insight into the heroine’s psyche.

4.2 Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847)

The same attitude underlies critics’ approaches to the famous drawings
in Jane Eyre, as well as to the Brontës’ own artwork. Critics have long
paid attention to the ekphrastic moment of chapter thirteen in Jane
Eyre, where the heroine breaks the narrative flow and engages in a
long description of her three watercolours (cf. Kromm 1998). Jane’s
ekphrastic description fills dead time, – in terms of narrative action –
during which her work is studied by Mr Rochester. Prefaced with a
direct address to the reader – “while he is so occupied I will tell you,
reader, what they are” – the passage is self-consciously written as a
fore-grounded description that favours the artist’s own interpretations
of her work over Rochester’s viewing of them.
These pictures were in water-colours. The first represented clouds low and livid, rolling
over a swollen sea: all the distance was in eclipse; so, too, was the foreground; or rather,
the nearest billows, for there was no land. One gleam of light lifted into relief a half-
submerged mast, on which sat a cormorant, dark and large, with wings flecked with foam;
its beak held a gold bracelet set with gems, that I had touched with as brilliant tints as my
palette could yield, and as glittering distinctness as my pencil could impart. Sinking below
the bird and mast, a drowned corpse glanced through the green water; a fair arm was the
only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or torn. (Brontë 1993, 82)

Jane’s ekphrases have been traditionally interpreted as insights into

the heroine’s state of mind; as artefacts that can offer the reader and
critic a sense of Jane that is not to be found in her own verbal
construction of herself in the novel: “Brontë had already shown, in
Jane Eyre, that visual art has the power to represent an inner reality
that might otherwise remain hidden” (Byerly 1997, 93). Such uses of
the ekphrastic moment have come to be challenged by contemporary
studies which view these passages as offering more than a hint to
interiority. The current critical view holds that such references to art
provide a ground for nineteenth-century women novelists to discuss
aesthetic theories pertaining to the representation of the visual. In
addition to seeing Jane Eyre as the fictional model of the governess or
the female reader, she is nowadays likely to be interpreted as
embodying the figure of the woman artist or viewer. The opening of the
novel, with Jane reading Bewick’s book, acquires a new hermeneutic
value by introducing Jane as a seeing subject, captivated by pictures
and exercising a primarily visual kind of reading.

4.3 George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1874)

“It is strange how deeply colours seem to penetrate one, like scent”,
remarks Dorothea Brooke, the novel’s protagonist, in the opening
chapter of Middlemarch (Eliot 2000, 9). The delight Dorothea feels on
seeing her mother’s emerald ring and bracelet on her hand is a feeling
that catches her unawares, and she finds herself unable to explain it by
reasoning. This encounter with colour and later with the art of Rome,
introduce the theme of the heroine’s exposure to the sensual
excitement of the visual, one that is contrary to her confinement in the
dry wordy world of Mr Casaubon. This fleeting, synaesthetic remark,
uttered casually by George Eliot’s heroine, is revealing of the centrality
of colour and art in literary discourse. In the famous chapter in the
Vatican Galleries, as Will Ladislaw and his friend Naumann wander in
the sculpture galleries, their ekphrastic musing in front of the Ariadne
sculpture prompts a discussion of paragonal character, where painting
is contrasted with language:
And what is a portrait of a woman? Your painting and Plastik are poor stuff after all. They
perturb and dull conceptions instead of raising them. Language is a finer medium. […]
Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for being vague. After all, the true
seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection. I feel that
especially about representations of women. As if a woman were a mere coloured
superficies! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference in their very
breathing: they change from moment to moment.—This woman whom you have just seen,
for example: how would you paint her voice, pray? But her voice is much diviner than
anything you have seen of her. (Eliot 2000, 122)

Eliot seems to revisit Lessing’s dichotomy, attributing to the verbal art

the superior ability to represent temporal change and movement, as
well as to give an impression of sound. But, according to Rishin, “Eliot
undercuts rather than supports her character’s critique of the visual
arts” (Rishin 1996, 1121), as the visual arts play a significant role in the
novel. In the scene at the Vatican Galleries, Dorothea is described
against the backdrop of the classical statue of Ariadne, whose “marble
voluptuousness” is surrounded by “drapery folding around her with a
petal-like ease and tenderness” (Eliot 2000, 121). Contrasted with the
reclining sculpture Dorothea is
clad in Quakerish grey drapery; her long cloak, fastened at the neck, was thrown backward
from her arms, and one beautiful ungloved hand pillowed her cheek, pushing somewhat
backward the white beaver bonnet which made a sort of halo to her face around the simply
braided dark-brown hair. (Eliot 2000, 121)

This contrast of voluptuousness and timid appearance is enabled by

the ekphrastic moment when the expressive power of art becomes “a
catalyst for the birth of desire” (Rishin 1996, 1122). The ekphrastic
attention given to the statue amplifies the aestheticisation of
Dorothea’s figure, which is also described as a work of art. As Rishin
perceptively argues, Ladislaw “disparages painting for its inability to
represent change, yet it is through art and aesthetic experience that
Eliot registers a crucial change in him” (Rishin 1996, 1125). When
regarding Dorothea as an aesthetic object and contemplating the
injustice a painting would do to her beauty, Ladislaw’s feelings are
awakened and the romantic plot of the novel is set in motion. In
Middlemarch the visual arts are a rich source for literary
representation, “for depicting incipient romantic desire, for
anticipating narrative action, and for evoking female sexuality” (Rishin
1996, 1129).

5 Ekphrasis in Twentieth-century Fiction – The

Ekphrastic Tale

5.1 Close Looking and Ekphrasis in A. S. Byatt

The first two parts of A.S Byatt’s “Frederica Quartet”, The Virgin in the
Garden (1978) and Still Life (1985), open with visits to exhibitions that
took place in London galleries (cf. Rippl 2005, 267–331; Rippl 2000).
Both visits entail moments of ekphrasis as the characters stand in front
of famous paintings: the portrait of Elizabeth I, known asThe Darnley
Portrait , and Van Gogh’s The Poet’s Garden at Arles (1888) and Olive
Pickers (1889). These ekphrastic openings aptly frame the two novels,
which thematically explore visual perception, its description in
language, its representation in paint, and how these practices inform
each other. The function of ekphrasis as a framing device is a feature
observed in the ancient novel, such as Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, and
by proleptically emphasising its aesthetic priorities, it “indicates the
method necessary to interpret the novel” (Kestner 1973–1974, 167).
In Still Life three main characters visit the Post-Impressionist
exhibition. Alexander Wedderburn, a playwright, is the most visually
literate character, possessing a sophisticated toolbox of colour
language and an aptitude for “close looking”. In front of Van Gogh’s
The Poet’s Garden “he stared at the serenely impassioned garden made
out of a whirl of yellow brushstrokes, a viridian impasto, a dense mass
of furiously feathered lines of blue-green, isolated black pot hooks, the
painfully clear orange-red spattering” (Byatt 1995, 2; for a discussion
of ekphrasis in Still Life cf. Rippl 2005, 285– 319). Alexander as a
“connoisseur of garments” retains the same descriptive intensity even
when observing Frederica’s “fifties and post-impressionist” style of
dress. In this non-discriminatory attentiveness he speaks for Byatt,
whose lingering gaze falls with the same care on art-objects as well as
the stuff of everyday life. Frederica Potter, the quartet’s protagonist
and, by this point in the narrative, a journalist, is a creature of
language. She quotes from the exhibition catalogue, scribbles in its
margins and is quick to identify literary connections with Mallarmé,
Proust and Petrarch. Daniel Orton, the vicar, is startled by the
familiarity of Van Gogh’s images which he has seen reproduced “in
endless hospital corridors, waiting rooms, school offices” (Byatt 1995,
5). Through these extensive descriptions of artworks, the same three
central characters share a distinct visual experience. It is the power of
paint in post-impressionist painting that arouses the following
responses to The Olive Pickers (1889), painted from the asylum at St
Rémy:
Daniel looked at the pink sky, the twisted trunks, the silvery leaves, the rhythmic earth
streaked with yellow ochre, with pink, with pale blue, with red-brown. Olives, Frederica
agreed with Alexander, could not not recall the Mount of Olives, the Garden of
Gethsemane, in the day of Van Gogh the pastor’s son, the lay preacher. As the cypresses
must always, differently, mean death. (Byatt 1995, 8)
Byatt makes full use of the dynamics of the communal encounter with
paintings (real objects as well as images of visual culture) by a varied
audience marked by different levels of access to the paintings’ multiple
perceptual levels. Weaving the consciousness of three characters, Byatt
moves from Daniel’s purely descriptive surface apprehension, to
Frederica’s historically-informed iconographical notations and ends
with the acknowledgement of the iconological meaning of cypress trees
in Western culture. Following the trajectory of Erwin Panofsky’s (1955)
schema of the three stages of meaning-making in pictures as proposed
in his study on Renaissance art, Byatt personifies levels of visual
literacy. It is not Daniel, the vicar, who is keen to see religious
symbolism in Van Gogh’s olive trees; rather he represents the innocent
eye. He refuses the easy metaphors of suffering to which, as confirmed
by Alexander’s readings, Van Gogh himself objected. Byatt’s ekphrastic
writing insists on rendering Panofsky’s primary, surface apprehension
of painting: “The trees stood under their halos of pink and green
strokes, small flying things, solidified light, movements or saccades of
the eye, brushstrokes, pigment.” (Byatt 1995, 9)
Byatt, in the two prologues, provides fictional contexts for acts such
as sustained attention, the prolonged, exhaustive gaze, and the
pleasure of close looking. The ekphrastic moment in the gallery
becomes a crucial frame for Byatt’s writing, as it schools the reader in a
particular type of vision and attention to the material world, which
Byatt does not hold only for artworks, but self-consciously replicates
when describing the everyday material world of her fiction. Presenting
three varying ways of seeing that are bound to each character’s mental
landscape and professional history, Byatt is making full use of the
ekphrastic description occasioned by the gallery visit as a framing
device in which to situate a novel concerned with ways of seeing and
the psychology of visual perception. As framing scenes, gallery visits
are excluded from the narrative order of the novels. Uncertain of the
characters’ relation to each other and unaware of important events
which have taken place in the histoire of the narrative, the reader is
first introduced to the characters as perceiving subjects.
In the short-story collection Elementals, the extended descriptions
of two museum visits end with the same question: “How do you decide
when to stop looking at something? It is not like a book, page after
page, page after page, end. You give it your attention or you don’t.”
(Byatt 1998, 3) Byatt emphasises the different kinds of control of
attention available to reading and looking. The assumption here is that
when one shows evidence of having followed the text with
understanding one has paid attention. But no control of how, or of how
long, a (painterly) artwork is going to be looked at is inherent in the
artwork itself. Ekphrasis dictates a particular type of looking; page
after page the reader is asked to pay attention (or is aware of not
paying attention and skipping). This is a type of externally controlled
attention, determined by the author in its length and detail. It also
entails a visible, definite end as the pages end; yet the author’s choice
of when to end the ekphrasis is as arbitrary as is the viewer’s decision
to stop looking. The Virgin in the Garden ends with this recognition:
“That was not an end, but since it went on for a considerable time, is as
good a place to stop as any.” (Byatt 1978, 566) Byatt’s voluminous
novel with its extended descriptions and ekphrases toys with Mieke
Bal’s recognition of the possible endlessness of the novel:
“Descriptions are endless, and they betoken the endlessness of the
novel” (Bal 2006, 137). Whether in a museum, or even in a department
store or in front of the meat display at the butcher’s, the decision to
stop looking and describing is in itself arbitrary. One may wish it to
obey a realist function, but when recognised as passages where Byatt
primarily theorises on the discourse of description, one realises that
they come to an end as long as they have been going on for a
considerable period of time. For Byatt, as long as the scene, art object
or setting has been paid enough attention, it suffices as a good place to
stop.
The final story of the 1998 short-story collection Elementals is an
ekphrastic tale in which Byatt leaves the sophisticated art gallery world
and enters the low-plane reality of the kitchen. Entitled “Christ in the
House of Martha and Mary”, the story fictionalises the well-known
Velázquez painting Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha
and Mary (1618) from the National Gallery. The painting is not
reproduced as an illustration, occasioning an image-text parallel
reading; rather, a detail from the still-life with fish is selected as a
frontispiece, gesturing to the Velázquez painting. In dialogue with the
Dutch tradition, Velázquez intermingles the Spanish genre of bodegón,
that depicts kitchen or market scenes, with Luke’s account of Christ’s
visit to Martha’s house. The marginalisation of the biblical narrative to
the corner of the painting diminishes the importance of the obvious
titular theme in favour of the still-life.
Belonging to the National Gallery collection, the painting has
attracted Byatt’s attention in other contexts. In her review for the 2005
exhibition “The Stuff of Life”, she admits to being moved by “the
endlessly puzzling and wonderful Velázquez” (Byatt 2005, n. pag.).
Writing on the painting in her very different capacity as an arts
columnist for The Guardian, Byatt notes:
Martha and Mary were emblems of the material and the spiritual life – Martha in the
Bible is ‘cumbered with much serving’ and resents the contemplative Mary’s inactivity.
[…] The authority of the painting is in the mystery of the represented things. There is a
sense that this painting is a claim on behalf of the beauty – the divinity – of the stuff of
life, of Martha’s realm. (Byatt 2005, n. pag.)

In Byatt’s ekphrastic tale the cook of the Velázquez painting, also

confined in the kitchen and laden with the unnoticed necessities of
preparing and serving food, becomes the vehicle by which the author
sets up her advocacy for the compromised and paradoxical position of
Martha. “Martha’s realm” is often the realm of Byatt’s fiction, who
returns to the kitchen in her novels of the mind in order to give voice to
a generation of women who were haunted by the Martha-Mary
dichotomy. In the story Dolores, a cook in a seventeenth century
household, is trained by the unnamed painter to see the beauty and
divinity in acts of daily care. As critical analysis of the story has
stressed, the “Velázquez” figure takes up the role of Christ offering
wisdom in Byatt’s modern, secular parable (Wallhead 2001, 312). Byatt
reads in the frowning figure of the painting a woman’s frustration with
the ephemerality of her domestic labour, overlooked due to its absolute
necessity. Dolores fury is expressed in a marked feminist register, “I
want to live. I want time to think. Not to be pushed around” (Byatt
1998, 220), but is alleviated as her negative attitude to her work is
gradually shifted to an appreciation of it as creative and valuable,
because it is done well, with interest and attention.
In her fictional ekphrastic treatment of the painting, Byatt gestures
towards a synthesis or reconciliation of the material/spiritual polarity.
Her writing performs an elegy of the mundane through a descriptive
conflation of painting and cooking techniques.
She never spoke to him, but worked away in a kind of fury in his presence, grinding the
garlic in the mortar, filleting the fish with concentrated skill, slapping dough, making a
tattoo of sounds with the chopper, like hailstones, reducing onions to fine specks of
 translucent light. (Byatt 1998, 220–221)

Yet Dolores does not see her work through the translucent light of the
painter’s vision. In her view the ephemerality of the culinary creation
does not allow for contemplation of aesthetic qualities. To Dolores’
mind, “[he] was a true artist, he could reveal light and beauty in eggs
and fishes that no one had seen, and which they would then always see.
She made pastries and dishes that went out of the kitchen beautiful
and they came back mangled and mashed” (Byatt 1998, 223). By the
end of Byatt’s intermedial parable the painter has got the heroine to
understand that “a cook also contemplates mysteries” (Byatt 1998,
227). Byatt uncovers and pursues an ambiguity in the Velázquez
painting, which might centre on the cook’s frustration, but is itself
engaged in the divine contemplation of the low-plane reality in the still
life with fish.
Byatt’s ekphrastic tale effects Dolores’ aesthetic awakening, so that
Martha’s domestic order turns out not to be exclusive of Mary’s
contemplative attitude. Via ekphrastic writing, narrative fiction reflects
on alternative possibilities to the image’s established orders, and here
Byatt, through her ekphrasis, expresses a precarious feminist desire for
a life of the mind that need not be positioned in conflict with the
domestic sphere. The ekphrastic short story “Christ in the House of
Martha and Mary” captures effectively Byatt’s insistence on the
importance of attention, contemplation and looking slowly, and the
short story uses intermedial writing to fictionalise Byatt’s vexation
with the Martha-Mary, material-intellectual dichotomies. Responding
to Velázquez’s visual reworking of the biblical parable, the dichotomies
seem to be gracefully dissolved in an ideal feminist parable.

5.2 Animating the Canvas in Rose Tremain’s

“Death of an Advocate” (2005)
Rose Tremain’s short-story collection The Darkness of Wallis Simpson
(2005) includes an ekphrastic tale, a complete “image / text” that W. J.
T. Mitchell’s Picture Theory would recognise as “a site of dialectical
tension, slippage and transformation” that reveals the tensions and
communications between the verbal and the visual (Mitchell 1994,
106). Tremain’s collection offers stories that explore aging, loss and the
gaps between private and public life. These themes are encapsulated in
the titular story, which treats the failing memory of Wallis Simpson as
she senses but is unable to recollect her important place in history. The
trace of a known and accessible historical reality is felt in the periphery
of the stories’ world. “The Beauty of the Dawn Shift” takes place in the
aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and follows a border guard as he
flees to a new life in post-Communist Eastern Europe. The historical
situatedness of the story “The Death of an Advocate” is suggested
through a painterly frame. Tissot’s painting Holiday (1877) is
reproduced at the beginning of the story – albeit in black and white –
and carries its own historical and social context. The decision to frame
the story with the painting occasions a dialogue between reading and
viewing, in which the work of art is established as the location of the
real, and against which the imagined world of the story is measured.
Certain art-inspired fiction (for instance Byatt’s) does not want the
visual to co-exist with the author’s interpretation of the material, and
denies any parallel viewing of the real artwork with its description in
language. Popular novels may occasionally offer colour-plates
interspersed in the narrative in order to provide a visual
accompaniment to the text, which acts more as informative
illustration. For instance in Susan Vreeland’s Life Studies: Stories
(2005), a collection inspired by Impressionist and Post-Impressionist
painting, Vreeland does not include the paintings in colour-plates
although the stories are clearly ekphrastic tales linked with a particular
painting. Other cases like Harriet Scott Chessman’s Lydia Cassatt
Reading the Morning Paper (2004), Deborah Moggach’s Tulip Fever
(1999) and Miranda Glover’s Masterpiece (2005) include colour-plates
to help the reader identify the visual world the novel is imagining. The
reader is given a visual aid and is asked to leaf back and forth in the
novel to cross-check the accuracy of the description against the
painting, or to re-examine the painting in light of the narrative.
Tissot’s painting in the beginning of Tremain’s story constitutes a
paratextual frame, and could be seen as an epigraph. According to
Genette’s theory on paratexts, the material around the text including
the author’s name, the title, preface, illustrations and dedications,
constitute “thresholds of interpretation” that, despite their liminal
positions to the story, affect “the possibility of either stepping in or
turning back” (Genette 1997, 2). The paratext in this case has a
determining influence on the reading of the story. As the story starts
with a description that unfolds gradually, the reader is invited to leaf
back to the painting in order to see, verify, and double-check what is
explained in words. It is true that once an image has been seen, it
cannot be forgotten, and it informs the visualisation of any narrative
(the most obvious example being how film adaptation affects the
subsequent reading experience of the corresponding novel).
Let us imagine for one moment how the reading of the story would
have been affected by the absence of the image, with just the phrase
“inspired by the painting Holiday by Tissot, c. 1877” as an epigraph.
Would the frustration of not being able to “see” the real-life image
block the readers’ ability to relish the images created by Tremain? Or
would they be pleased that an illustration cannot circumscribe their
own imaginative work? The curious contemporary reader may have
searched for the painting in reference works and online galleries, but
its presence on the page as an epigraphic paratext suggests that it is
vital to the reading of the story; this is not just illustration. In his study
on illustration J. Hillis Miller questions what kind of illumination and
understanding pictures bring to a text, and cites a variety of instances
of anti-illustration such as Mallarmé’s: “‘I am for – no illustration’,
says Mallarmé, ‘everything a book evokes having to pass into the mind
or the spirit of the reader’” (Miller 1992, 67). According to Miller,
Mallarmé’s anti-illustration reasoning runs thus:
The words on the page have a performative power of evocation. They make present in the
spirit something otherwise absent. If that power is distracted, drawn off in a detour,
diverted into an illustration […], it will then not operate where it ought, on the spirit of the
reader. (Miller 1992, 67)

In this view illustration is a detour, a distraction, a diversion from the

words’ own power. In this well-rehearsed word-versus-image debate
the primacy of the image is threatening to the evocative power of
words.
In Tremain’s ekphrastic remediation of the painting, it is her story
that acts as a detour from the world of the image. The setting of
Tissot’s Holiday is given as a location with fixed meanings that are
slowly revealed through careful description. The characters acquire
identity and the relationship between the figures is gradually revealed.
The man in the centre becomes a discontented lawyer, the woman
“against whose familiar rump [the man] was reclining” (Tremain
2006, 93) becomes his wife. Ekphrastic contemplation of the pregnant
moment is disrupted when narrative animates the static image.
Suddenly the body of the man that seemed monumentally spread on
the picnic blanket breaks the pose: “Though his legs felt weak, he stood
up, brushing crumbs from his jacket, and walked towards his
daughter.” (Tremain 2006, 95) This moment of animation resembles
the cinematic dismantling of the tableau vivant. Following a long
period of contemplation in the stationary descriptive mode, the body of
the advocate becomes animated. He uses his legs that seem to have
been weakened from years of painterly stasis. The painted figure acts;
he stands up, brushes his clothes, and walks off. The moment the
character walks out of the frame of the painting, the author’s
imaginative work begins. In Tremain’s ekphrastic tale, narrative,
implying action, movement and temporality, cannot be contained
within the static tableau vivant observed at the beginning of the story.
By breaking off the pose Tremain grants the age-old ekphrastic desire
for language to animate the static image.
From the immediately recognisable visual world of impressionist
painting depicting bourgeois leisure, Tremain chooses to focus on
feelings of boredom, annoyance and middle-class ennui. The Tissot
image, pregnant with narrative potential and finished as a spectacular
surface, is an ideal vehicle for ekphrastic hopes and desires. The art of
Tissot is unique in late nineteenth-century painting as a hybrid of the
French and English schools. His paintings have been described as
“visual invitations to narrative” (Silver 1999, 137), with visual motifs
repeated throughout his work, creating a web of visual cross-references
that resembles the internal narrative organisation of a short-story
collection. The giant chestnut tree that frames and looms over the
figures in The Holiday also features in The Convalescent (1876), The
Letter (1876–1878), and The Hammock (1897), all set in the artist’s
garden in the London suburb of St John’s Wood. Tissot’s work has an
unorthodox relation to narrative sources. In contrast to the literary
pictorialism of pre-Raphaelite painting of the same period, Tissot’s
paintings do not honour classical and established textual sources but,
as Silver explains, refer to “books written by friends and
acquaintances, to ‘society’ novels and tales popular in his time and
largely forgotten in ours” (Silver 1999, 122). His watercolour series,
such as La Femme à Paris (1883–1885), are designed as a visual
prompt for subsequent stories.
Tremain’s ekphrastic story can be seen as taking up the narrative
promise of Tissot’s images. Ambiguously oscillating between being a
fashion plate and a social commentary with insights into class, gender
and taste, Tissot’s paintings are distinct in holding their meaning on
the surface of their dress, fabric, texture and finish. But it is clear that
his seductive surfaces of bourgeois leisure are not only skin deep, as
his attention is on moments of social awkwardness and the collapse of
etiquette, moments that pierce the surface of bourgeois respectability.
Not without humour, Tissot comments on the exhibitionism and
construction of the self as surface. Tremain is attuned to the elision of
surface and self in Tissot’s images. In her story, the advocate “tried to
say that it was barely the autumn of his life and that on the beautiful
surface of his existence, hardly any leaves had fallen” (Tremain 2006,
98).

6 Conclusion
Examining ekphrastic writing in the novel by the light of shifting
attitudes in the theorisation of ekphrasis brings to the foreground the
wealth of possibilities afforded to the novelists and writers of short
narrative fiction when writing about images. There is a refocusing of
attention and a deceleration of the reading process that the ekphrastic
moment in fiction enables. It is important to note that the emergence
of contemporary ekphrasis in the novel relates to changing attitudes in
writing about images, even within the disciplinary institutions of art
history. At the same time that art history was becoming aware of the
fact that its written discourse could not and should not completely
excise imagination and subjectivity, these aspects were already being
insistently tackled in the novel. The interpretation of ekphrasis in the
novel and narrative fiction in general is marked by a turn to the
conditions of viewing and the subject as perceiver; its presence in the
context of a longer narrative emphasises the temporality and situated-
ness of every art-encounter, as well as highlights the affective and
social dimension of looking at art.
7 Bibliography

7.1 Works Cited

Bal, Mieke. “Over-Writing as Un-Writing: Descriptions, World-Making
and Novelistic Time.” A Mieke Bal Reader. Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2006. 96–145.
Baxandall, Michael. “Introduction: Language and Explanation.”
Patterns of Intention: On the Historic Explanation of Pictures.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. 1–11.
Beaujour, Michel. “Some Paradoxes of Description.” Yale French
Studies 61 (1981): 27–59.
Brontë, Anne. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 1848. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1992.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. New York: Norton, 1993.
Brontë, Charlotte. Villette. 1853. London: Penguin, 1985.
Byatt, A. S. The Virgin in the Garden. London: Chatto and Windus,
1978.
Byatt, A. S. Still Life. 1985. London: Vintage, 1995.
Byatt, A. S. Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice. London: Chatto &
Windus, 1998.
Byatt, A. S. “A Life Less Ordinary.” The Guardian. 2 July 2005.
www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/jul/02/art.art/. (30
Dec. 2014).
Byerly, Alison. Realism, Representation and the Arts in the
Nineteenth Century Literature. Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Cheeke, Stephen. Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis.
Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008.
Clüver, Claus. “Ekphrasis Reconsidered: On Verbal Representations of
Non-Verbal Texts.” Interart Poetics: Essays on the Interrelations of
the Arts and Media. Ed. Ulla-Britta Lagerroth, Hans Lund, and Erik
 Hedling. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997. 19–34.
Cunningham, Valentine. “Why Ekphrasis?” Classical Philology 102
(2007): 57–71.
Davidson, Michael. “Ekphrasis and the Postmodern Painter Poem.”
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42 (1983): 69–89.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. 1874. Ed.
Bert G. Hornback. New York: Norton, 2000.
Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans.
Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Goldhill, Simon. “What Is Ekphrasis For?” Classical Philology 102
(2007): 1–19.
Hamon, Philippe. “Rhetorical Status of the Descriptive.” Yale French
Studies 61 (1981): 1–26.
Kennedy, David. The Ekphrastic Encounter in Contemporary British
Poetry and Elsewhere. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.
Kestner, Joseph. “Ekphrasis as Frame in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe.”
The Classical World 67.3 (1973–1974): 166–171.
Kromm, Jane. “Visual Culture and Scopic Custom in Jane Eyre and
Villette.” Victorian Literature and Culture 26.2 (1998): 369–394.
Loizeaux, Elizabeth Bergman. Twentieth-Century Poetry and the
Visual Arts. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
2008.
Losano, Antonia. “The Professionalization of the Woman Artist in
Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” Ninenteenth Century
Literature 58.1 (2003): 1–41.
Losano, Antonia. The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008.
Louvel, Liliane. Poetics of the Iconotext. Introd. Karen Jacobs. Trans.
Laurence Petit. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.
Matz, Jesse. “The Art Novel: Impressionists and Aesthetes.” The
Cambridge History of the English Novel. Ed. Clement Hawes and
Robert L. Caserio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
533–548.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Painting and the Novel. Manchester: Manchester
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Miller, J. Hillis. Illustration. London: Reaktion Books, 1992.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Visual and Verbal
Representation. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1994.
Panofsky, Erwin. “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the
Study of Renaissance Art.” Meaning in the Visual Arts. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1955. 26–54.
Rippl, Gabriele. “Visuality and Ekphrasis in A. S. Byatt’s Still Life and
‘Art Work.’” Proceedings Anglistentag 1999 Mainz. Ed. Bernhard
Reitz and Sigrid Rieuwerts. Trier: wvt, 2000. 519–534.
Rippl, Gabriele. Beschreibungs-Kunst. Zur intermedialen Poetik
angloamerikanischer Ikontexte (1880–2000). Munich: Wilhelm Fink,
2005.
Rishin, Abigail S. “Beside the Reclining Statue: Ekphrasis, Narrative
and Desire in Middlemarch.” PMLA 111.5 (1996): 1121–1132.
Silver, Carole G. “Tissot’s Victorian Narratives: Allusion and
Invention.” Seductive Surfaces: The Art of Tissot. Ed. Katharine
Lochnan. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999. 121–
137.
Smith, Mack. Literary Realism and the Ekphrastic Tradition.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.
Spitzer, Leo. “The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ or Content vs.
Metagrammar.” Comparative Literature 17.3 (1955): 203–225.
Teukolsky, Rachel. The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and
Modernist Aesthetics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 2009.
Torgovnick, Marianna. The Visual Arts, Pictorialism and the Novel.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Tremain, Rose. “Death of an Advocate.” The Darkness of Wallis
Simpson. 2005. London: Vintage, 2006. 89–98.
Wallhead, Celia M. “Velázquez as Icon in A. S. Byatt’s ‘Christ in the
 House of Martha and Mary.’” Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad
Complutense 9 (2001): 307–321.
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient
Rhetorical Theory and Practice. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.
White, Roberta. A Studio of One’s Own: Fictional Women Painters
and the Art of Fiction. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 2005.
Yacobi, Tamar. “Pictorial Models and Narrative Ekphrasis.” Poetics
Today 16.4 (1995): 599–649.
Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the
Realist Novel. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2008.

7.2 Further Reading

Elleström, Lars, ed. Media Borders, Multimodality and
Intermediality. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Hallet, Wolfgang. “The Multimodal Novel: The Integration of Modes
and Media in Novelistic Narration.” Narratology in the Age of
Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research. Ed. Roy Sommer and Sandra
Heinen. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009. 129–153.
Hepburn, Allan. Enchanted Objects: Visual Art in Contemporary
Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010.
Mitchell, W. J. T. “Ekphrasis and the Other.” South Atlantic Quarterly
91 (1992): 695–719.
Wandhoff, Haiko. “Found(ed) in a Picture: Ekphrastic Framing in
Ancient, Medieval, and Contemporary Literature.” Framing
Borders in Literature and Other Media. Ed. Walter Bernhart and
Werner Wolf. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006. 207–227
Johanna Hartmann

6 Ekphrasis in the Age of Digital

Reproduction
Abstract: The second half of the preceding century has been
hallmarked by various developments in the social, political, and
cultural spheres. The most far-reaching developments have been
enabled by processes of digitalization, resulting in the computerization
of our daily lives and also the concurrent proliferation of our lives with
images. This poses pressing questions on literary scholarship as
literature reacts and responds to changes in the cultural force-field.
After a brief overview of conceptualizations of ekphrasis and the
implications of the digital era, a refocused concept of ekphrasis is
suggested that takes seriously the human experience in the digital age.
Examples for interpretation are Siri Hustvedt’s novel The Sorrows of
an American that draws on digital images, the early hyperfictional
electronic novel Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson, and the digital
poem “Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales” by Edward Falco.
Key Terms: Ekphrasis, digital age, image, computerization, evocation

1 The Digital Age

Ekphrasis as a concept has been defined in various ways over the last
3000 years. It has been used to refer to a rhetoric device and
technique, a mode of writing, and a genre; it was conceptualized from
the viewpoints of textual production, textual aesthetics, and its effect
on the reader. Also, the realm of phenomena that can be subject to
ekphrastic description has undergone – as a reaction to changed
cultural force-fields – dramatic changes, narrowings, and extensions.
Ekphrasis, in its initial sense as a rhetorical technique, could have
referred to the whole dimension of the material world: objects,
landscapes, and human beings. Post-antique reconceptualizations have
led to a narrowing of the realm of phenomena to which ekphrasis could
refer, limiting its scope to the description of visual art in literary texts (
 1 Ekphrasis: Theory).
The last half of the preceding century has been hallmarked by
various developments in the social, political, and cultural spheres. The
most far-reaching developments have emerged in the area of
communication technology, a direct consequence of the invention of
the personal computer and the World Wide Web, and the
consequential creation of virtual worlds and cyberspace. These
developments are subsumed under the term ‘digital age’ – an era
beginning in the 1970s that was marked by the “merging [of]
previously disparate technologies of communication and
representation into a single medium” (Murray 1997, 27) and the shift
from analog to digital. The ‘digital age’ thus designates a time frame
which manifests itself in the computerization of life and can be
regarded as the culmination of what Hornung identified as the “dual
tendency” that hallmarked the last half of the twentieth century: On
the one hand, processes of individualization that concur with insights
into the “relativity and partiality of self-images and worldviews,” on
the other hand, the alienating and possibly traumatizing but also
liberating effect of waning traditional concepts of society and culture
(Hornung 2010, 306, translation mine). The increasing global
interconnectedness through the internet and social media, the
computerization and technization of the life realities of individuals
which in turn influence the way we act and interact within the world,
concur with an almost limitless access to images. This has resulted in
consequences for various dimensions that pertain to literary
production, distribution, and consumption as the changed forms of
human experience impact the way literature is being produced,
manifests itself in changed aesthetics and new forms of literary works,
which in turn determines how literature is read and experienced
(Hayles 2008, 159–186). E.g. the book page has been partially replaced
by the computer screen or other reading devices, which in turn has
changed the reading experience in unforeseen ways.
The digital age poses a challenge for concrete individual human
beings but also for literary scholarship. So far, apart from few
exceptions (e.g. Hayles 2008; Kashtan 2011; Lindhé 2013), literary
scholarship has avoided the question of how to redefine long-
established concepts in order to describe literary phenomena that are
the result of the digital age. This tendency is in a way understandable
in light of the accelerating speed of new developments. However, it is
crucial to ask how literature and the reading experience, processes of
imagination, and interpretation have changed in the digital age with its
all-encompassing impact on the contemporary conditio humana.
Therefore we need to rethink our theoretical models and terminology
in ways that allow us to describe the various dimensions in which
digitalization affects the production, perusal, and character of literary
texts in their thematic and aesthetic dimensions, as well as the act of
writing and reading. As “[e]ach age has its own method, or optic, for
seeing and then articulating reality” (Said 2003, xiii), changed ways of
experiencing the world impact the way literature represents human
experiences.1 In light of changed forms of experience, ekphrasis as a
concept that conspicuously operates between the realm of word and
image – systems of signification whose relationship is in constant need
of historicization (cf. Mitchell 1984, 529–530) – is in need of
reconceptualization. The coming and going of new devices and
software have led to a form of ephemerality of literary phenomena, e.g.
the development of new genres like the digital novel, that results in the
need for timely processes of historicization.
In the following, I will first outline various conceptualizations of the
term ekphrasis and point to implications brought about by processes of
digitalization that require theoretical reconceptualizations. I will
conclude with the proposal of a contemporary definition of ekphrasis
that reconnects to the antique practice of rhetorics, before analyzing
literary examples: Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American,
Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and the digital poem “Chemical
Landscapes Digital Tales” by Edward Falco.

2 Conceptualizations of Ekphrasis
As Winfried Fluck puts it, “[e]ach medium has its own aesthetic
dimension, to be sure” (2008, 73). When we are analyzing and
interpreting literature in general and ekphrasis in particular – in the
digital age or in connection to new media in general – we should not
forget in view of the numerous technical possibilities that literature
offers an aesthetic experience, a dimension that is inherent to the
ancient concept of ekphrasis. Digital media are not “sites of
disembodiment” (Lenoir 2006, xviii). Although “the pure flow of data
[…] defines all sound, image, voice and text,” the reader of digital art
remains a human being who relies on her embodied and intentional
interaction with and in the world (Kelly 2011, 102). However, the
digital age has had a profound impact on the nature of aesthetic
experiences as literature draws on and responds to the cultural effects
of processes of digitalization but is also determined by changed
predispositions for aesthetic experiences of works of art.
Ekphrastic descriptions, as inherently intermedial phenomena, rely
on transformational processes between word and image and thus
necessarily imply the crossing of medial boundaries. The advent of the
digital age coincided with the inauguration of various ‘turns’ that
seemingly announce the shift from word to image as the dominant
system of signification. The proliferation of images and their resulting
ubiquity in contemporary culture is fuelled by technologies that enable
this tendency, a phenomenon Jay David Bolter identifies as an increase
in “natural signs,” and a “breakout of the visual” (2011, 47). However,
contrary to this claim it has been argued that images are always in
need of being surrounded by words. Schmitz-Emans claims that word
and image “necessitate each other as both word and image mutually
determine each other and against each other” (Schmitz-Emans 2008,
25, translation mine). The heretofore unbeknownst spread and
proliferation of texts on the World Wide Web and the vast number of
annual book publications also contradict Bolter’s claim. It is however
more plausible and fruitful to proceed from the assumption that the
relationship between word and image has undergone just another shift
and is therefore in need of historicization taking into account the
radically changed cultural circumstances. Research on ekphrasis in the
digital age is therefore an interdisciplinary endeavor as it is at the
interface of studies in literary and textual aesthetics, studies in
intermediality, cultural studies, visual culture studies, the digital
humanities, and studies in trans- and posthumanism. Following Jay
David Bolter’s and Richard Grusin’s argument, new technologies
incorporate preceding literary and cultural traditions and are thus
potentially compatible with new concepts, a process which the authors
call “remediation,” defined by the integration of one medium into
another (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 53) and the fact that, in Brown’s
paraphrasing words, “all new media – at least in their infancy – copy
the conventions of older media” (Brown 2013, 10). If we follow this line
of thought, ekphrasis in the digital age depends on and integrates –
“remediates” – strategies that have been used to describe non-digital
works of art, which would allow for the potential compatibility to
analyze literature in the digital age with a modified concept of
ekphrasis.
For example, digital technologies have allowed for the production of
digitally produced images that might not be discernible from non-
digital images, but underlie different or shifting ontological
characteristics and functions which result in considerable implications
for the interpretation of literary texts. Digital images can be
manipulated and altered, resulting in epistemological and ethical
implications especially in regard to questions of their authenticity.
Taking into consideration that in their character
[a]s simulations of reality, digital entities are entirely unreal, even if they look realistic.
Many might see in their perceptual realism a reason to argue that we now truly live in a
postmodern world in which the difference between reality and illusion has become eroded
to the point of indiscernibility. (Brown 2013, 26; cf. also Suter 2005, 199)

The question of the nature of digital ekphrasis in the age of digital

reproduction is one of continuities and discontinuities in literary
practices, the aesthetics of the literary text, and the changed
circumstances that describe the reading experience.
The title of this chapter suggests a comparison between the effects of
the digital age and the radical changes that Walter Benjamin witnessed
and described in the early twentieth century. Although establishing
analogies might be futile due to the incomparability of the specific
cultural circumstances, Benjamin’s seminal essay offers insightful
thoughts for a theorization of what in this chapter is called the ‘age of
digital reproduction.’ Benjamin, in his essay “The Work of Art in the
Age of Technical Reproduction,” theorizes the medial, technological,
cultural, and socio-political changes he observed over the first decades
of the twentieth century. He diagnosed, from a rather pessimistic
stance, that the ability to reproduce works of art results in a loss of
authenticity and authority – what he termed the artwork’s ‘aura.’ This
observed “tremendous shattering of tradition” (2000 [1935], 676) is
interrelated with the observed change and thus historicity of sense
perception; the fact that the way we see the world is inextricably tied to
the technological means at our disposal: “The manner in which human
sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished,
is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as
well.” (2000 [1935], 676) Even more so, for Benjamin “social
transformations express” themselves in “changes of perception” (2000
[1935], 676).2 Thus the changes in the cultural environment not only
lead to changes in aesthetic perception, but in perception as such.
Benjamin’s essay provides important clues and thought-provoking
impulses when evaluating contemporary culture and mapping changes
in social practices, cultural production, and the conceptualization of
theoretical concepts that allow for a description of these phenomena;
Benjamin basically claims a changed functional potential of images.
According to his line of argumentation they lose their “magical,”
“religious,” “cultic,” and “ritual function[s],” which results in an
“emancipat[ion of] the work of art from its parasitical dependence on
ritual” and instead acquires a political dimension (Benjamin 2000
[1935], 677–678). Benjamin’s observation that new technical
developments are tied to changes in the nature of aesthetic perception
and perception as such ties in with Hornung’s observation that in the
digital age “concretely perceptible processes [are relocated] into
invisible mechanisms” (Hornung 2010, 307).
The radical changes in sensual perception and human experience
become apparent when one takes into account the importance
Benjamin assigned to temporality and spatiality. He claims that
“[e]ven the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one
element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the
place where it happens to be” (Benjamin 2000 [1935], 675). For
example, Warnke et al. have proposed to view the computer as “digital
‘intermedium’” (2005, 8), introducing a new prerequisite, but also
additional interface, between the human being and the aesthetic
experience.
The limitation of what could be subject to ekphrastic description has
led to a variety of definitions and competing concepts that can be
applied to literary descriptions of art. Wagner laconically states that
“[i]f critics agree at all about ekphrasis, they stress the fact that it has
been variously defined and variously used and that the definition
ultimately depends on the particular argument to be deployed”
(Wagner 1996, 11). One could say that a defining characteristic of
ekphrasis is its extreme malleability and adaptability. It has been used
as poetic and rhetorical device, genre, and principle of narration. E.g.
Krieger pleads for a differentiated understanding of “the ekphrastic
principle” as firstly “the attempted imitation in words of an object of
the plastic arts, primarily painting or sculpture,” and secondly “as any
sought-for equivalent in words of any visual image, inside or outside
art” and finally as “any attempted construction of a literary work that
seeks to make it, as a construct, a total object, the verbal equivalent of
a plastic art object” (Krieger 1998, 4). Most contemporary definitions,
however, understand ekphrasis in the widest sense as “literary
descriptions of pictures” (Klarer 2001, 1, translation mine). However,
in its initial conception in antique rhetorics, ekphrasis primarily meant
a vivid description of something or somebody (e.g. landscapes,
buildings, people, or objects) with the goal of evoking a visual effect in
the reader or listener, energeia (sometimes also evidentia) (Kjeldsen
2003, 135). Quintilian and Longinus remain the most important
antique theorists of ekphrasis. For Quintilian, the evocation of emotion
through “visions” (visiones) was of the utmost importance, and
centrally involved the embodied performance of the orator.3 According
to Longinus4 in his canonical text On the Sublime (Peri Hypsous),
sublimity “consists in a consummate excellence and distinction of
language” (“Longinus” 1953, 125), and is a form of “elevation” (123)
that is caused “by nobility of mind or imitation or imagination” (179).
For both Longinus and Quintilian “the inspiration of vehement
emotion” (141) was most important as source of the sublime.5 “The use
of ‘images’” (171) transcends a mere amplificatory function and is for
Longinus essential in order to result in the sublime effect of a text
which vitally depends on the imagination of the speaker. He
conceptualizes an overlapping of mental images that occur during the
act of writing and the act of reading, with the literary text as link
between the two. I would like to add that these antique theorizations
coincide with changing visual reservoirs of images and thus pertain to
the aspect of fantasia and imagination that are designated by the
concepts of energeia and enargeia. In this vein, W. J. T. Mitchell
claims that
[the image] has always been bound up with the body, but that interconnection is now
made evident by the onset of digital imaging, in the sense of binary computation. Just as
photography revealed unseen and overlooked visual realities, an ‘optical unconscious’ in
Walter Benjamin’s phrase, and just as cinema produced both a new analysis and a
 historical transformation of human visual experience, digital imaging may be uncovering
yet another layer of the perceptible cognitive world that we will recognize as having always
been there. (Mitchell 2010, 46)

In doing so, Mitchell evaluates the embodied aesthetic experience but

also the process of evocation that has acquired new relevance. Antique
theorizations were thus more focused on the effect of a description
than the phenomena subject to description. Although the “tendency to
translate graphic art into narrative persists in the ekphrastic literature
of every period” (Heffernan 1991, 302), the narrowing of the scope of
phenomena subject to ekphrastic description to visual works of art
with a focus on the representational aspect of the description is a
relatively recent phenomenon. James Heffernan’s influential definition
of ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of visual representation”
(2004, 3) is an example of this tendency. This definition implies a
limitation to the spectrum of phenomena that can be subject to
ekphrastic description, what Mitchell roughly subsumes under the
category “graphic images,” and is connoted with a certain canonical
status. Heffernan’s definition reactualizes implications that are present
in the etymology of the word ‘ekphrasis’ (Greek for ‘to speak out,’ ‘to
tell in full;’ ek, ‘out’ and phrazein, ‘to speak’) as the endeavor to speak
out for, and give voice to, an image that is mute and, in doing so,
verbalizing something that is only visually present. Heffernan, at the
beginning of his study Museum of Words, claims that this ‘paragonal’
relationship between image and word is responsible for the success
and longevity of ekphrasis, further stating that its favor rests on the
fact that “it evokes the power of the silent image even as it subjects that
power to the rival authority of language” (Heffernan 2004, 1). Peter
Wagner disagrees and poignantly remarks that “[e]kphrasis, then, has
a Janus face: as a form of mimesis, it stages a paradoxical
performance, promising to give voice to the allegedly silent image even
while attempting to overcome the power of the image by transforming
and inscribing it” (Wagner 1996, 13). Although very influential,
Heffernan’s definition of ekphrasis as the verbal representation of
visual representation is problematic in various ways. Newer definitions
of ekphrasis seem to reconnect to classical definitions. Such definitions
are less concerned with matters of representation and implied notions
of mimesis, similarity or verisimilitude, but also focus on the potential
effect of the ekphrastic text and thus hint at the potential for (re-
)imagination by the reader. In her study, Gabriele Rippl looks at
“indirect and verbal strategies of iconization of ekphrastic and
pictoralistic descriptions” (2005, 25, translation mine) that have the
aim of evoking visual effects. I follow Rippl in differentiating three
forms of intermedial relationships between word and image. In the
first case, both are present at the same time, secondly, cases in which
“text and image may be simultaneously present and actually form a
unit,” and thirdly, cases in which one (absent) medium is “evoked” by a
present medium (Rippl 2010, 42–43), a categorization that can also be
applied to digitally enhanced and produced literature. Also, Rippl
reverses this relationship, defining ekphrasis as “a […] more general
term that denotes any kind of intermedial and self-reflexive
relationships between two different media which constantly ponder
their own material characteristics” (Rippl 2010, 48) which allows for
an inclusion of digitally influenced literature into the scope of this
chapter. What needs to be considered is that digital images, digital
forms of literature, and our predispositions for aesthetic experiences
have been radically changed. William Brown makes us aware that
[i]n the era of digital imaging […], the indexical link to reality is more profoundly lost,
since objects can appear in the image that were never there, be those objects simply
background details or moving creatures such as dinosaurs. If the contents of digital
images have no ontological reality in the way that the contents of analogue images do,
then digital images cannot, on one level, be realistic at all. (Brown 2013, 23–24)

Laura Marks (1999) opposes this view, claiming that indexicality is at

least to some extent retained as there is a form of causal relation
between the reality captured and the digital image, even if that light
undergoes a form of computational transcoding. What can be
concluded is that the digital age has resulted in the existence of a new
interface that mediates, enables, alters and enhances various
experiences, simultaneously resulting in ontological insecurities and
epistemological doubts. Ekphrasis in the digital age has to be able to
address these dimensions. The integration of digital images in
literature will be the focus of analysis here, with Hustvedt’s novel The
Sorrows of an American, the early hypertext novel Patchwork Girl by
Shelley Jackson and one example of digital poetry, Edward Falco’s
“Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales,” serving as textual examples.

3 Case Studies
The changed life realities during the digital age have found entrance
into numerous contemporary novels, as, for example, Jennifer Egan’s
A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) in which one chapter consists
exclusively of PowerPoint slides that allow the female “narrator” to –
in a visualized way – attempt to represent the way her autistic brother
makes sense of the world. Egan is also notable here for publishing the
“twitter-novel” Black Box (2012). The digital experience has also found
entrance into Siri Hustvedt’s work, e.g. in the form of e-mail
conversations that are integrated into her novel The Summer without
Men (2011) or the integration of digital imagery in her earlier novel
The Sorrows of an American (2008) on which I will focus in the
following. The novel’s narrator is the psychiatrist Erik Davidsen who
falls in love with his new tenant Miranda Causabon, who moved with
her daughter Eglantine into his house. Her arrival in his life is
accompanied by the presence of Eglantine’s biological father, the photo
artist Jeff Lane. Jeff Lane increasingly breaks into the private life of
Erik: He clandestinely takes pictures of him, manipulates them and
eventually integrates them into his exhibition. Jeff Lane’s pathological
obsession with Erik seems to result from, on the one hand, jealousy
towards him, envying his friendship with Eglantine, but on the other
hand seems to be rooted in his fascination with photography as form of
documentation:
I need the photos, you see, it’s not like I can help it. It’s documentation, man, it’s my
whole splendid mess on film. Digital magic. Jeff’s life. Warty, sad, but there it is. Giving
that up would be impossible. The world’s going virtual anyway; there’s no reality left.
Simulacra, baby. (Hustvedt 2008, 217)

Jeff Lane epitomizes the fascination with new forms of technology that
merge with a belief in the inauthenticity of the life-world. For him
experience is located in the act of producing representations. With his
photography that relies on acts of manual as well as digital
manipulation he tries to digitally “remak[e] the world” (Hustvedt
2008, 118). Erik’s encounter with his portrait in the exhibition deeply
disturbs him as it is the result of Jeff Lane’s burglary into his house,
and threatens not only his bodily integrity but also his self-image:
It was an eight-by-ten photograph, mixed in among many other pictures with the caption
Head Doctor Goes Insane. But in that first moment, I wasn’t sure who I was looking at.
Anger had contorted my face to such a degree that I was almost unrecognizable. […] In my
lowered right hand, I gripped the hammer I had hastily retrieved from my closet. As I
looked more closely, I noticed that the picture appeared to have been taken outside rather
than from the stairs above the second-floor hallway. I saw the fuzzy outlines of parked
 cars, a sidewalk, and the street. Lane had altered the setting. […] [T]he photograph made
it appear as if I had been raving half naked in the street, wielding a hammer. (Hustvedt
2008, 262–263)

The description starts with comments on the size of the photograph

and the contextualization within the context of the exhibition. The
description then focuses on his face, his composure and eventually the
object he is holding in his hand. Then the focus switches to the
background, which is identified as the result of mechanisms of
manipulation that eventually effect a displacement of him as the sujet
of the photograph. This form of digital decontextualization eventually
results in Erik’s feeling of having been publicly humiliated and thus
epitomizes the ethical concerns that pertain to digital photography.
However, Jeff Lane also employs such techniques for his self-portrait:
When I turned the corner and walked into the next room, I first saw a giant color
photograph that had been subjected to some kind of digital distortion. It was Lane as a
Francis Bacon painting, but in neon colors, his impossibly long chin dragged to a sharp
point, his mouth undulating in a howl. The caption read: The Break. (Hustvedt 2008, 261)

The photographic illusion of depicting reality stands in stark contrast

to the visibly employed techniques of digital manipulation which
results in an aesthetic that is characteristic of the grotesque paintings
by Francis Bacon but, considering the description of the facial
expression, is also reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The
integration of digital images in this novel manifests itself in the form of
ekphrastic descriptions which include digital manipulations in the
description, and in this way opens up a space for the negotiation of the
ethical and ontological dimensions of digital photography which allow
for manipulation, fragmentation and decontextualization, all while
drawing on the aesthetics of non-digital images in an attempt to feign
authenticity.
In the following I will analyze Shelley Jackson’s digital novel
Patchwork Girl (1995) as a form of “digital literature” which is defined
as “literary texts that are based on a digital code and which cannot be
produced or perused without a computer” (Winko 2005, 138,
translation mine).6 In opposition to the preceding example, this novel
relies on digital technology to be read and experienced. This very early
digital novel can be navigated by clicking on various components of an
organization chart that contains further, embedded organigrams
which, when clicked on, either lead to a short passage of text or an
image. Although hierarchically structured, the process of reading can
be determined by the reader during her interaction with the elements
shown on the computer screen. The poetological principle of
hypertextual navigation is topicalized already in the title of the novel
that can be interpreted as putting together the narrative of the
“patchwork girl,” a fragmented being that – as a digital adaptation of
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – needs to be reassembled in the act of
reading. The theme of reassembling is continued in the novel’s central
themes of stitching and sewing; the symbol of the quilt as a patched-
together blanket also bears an aesthetic dimension. In this respect the
descriptions of the patchwork girl’s fragmented body can be
interpreted as ekphrastic passages that rely on mainly conventional
strategies of description but are – through the discontinued and non-
linear hypertextual quality of the text – not presented in a linear
manner. They are instead – analogously to the act of looking at a
painting – the result of focusing on various details that are described
in short paragraphs of text that appear after clicking on single thematic
boxes. The act of reading, writing, and describing are constantly
topicalized and negotiated, opening up a metafictional dimension
which not only pertains to this digital work of fiction but literature as
such. In this respect, the text heavily relies on metaphors of vision.
Assembling these patched words in an electronic space, I feel half-blind, as if the entire
text is within reach but because of some myopic condition I am only familiar with from
dreams, I can see only that part most immediately before me, and have no sense of how
that part relates to the rest. (Jackson 1995, n. pag, chapter “this writing”)

The textual fragments can be interpreted as parts of a fragmented body

that is being assembled and disassembled in the act of reading:
I will come apart paragraph by paragraph. If all quotes remain tethered to their sources by
however tenuous filaments, so my parts. My face will explode into fragments […] I will be
an afterimage glowing at the points of origin of my many flight paths. A Cheshire aftercat.
An unchalked outline. (Jackson 1995, n. pag., chapter “hidden figure”)

In this digital novel ekphrastic descriptions are complemented by

various digital images called “hercut” that show a disassembled and
grotesquely reassembled female body. Thus, in a self-reflexive way, the
text points to the contiguity of reassembling that is provoked by its
hypertextual nature, also topicalizing the ephemerality of experience
that is potentiated in the act of reading the novel. Ephemerality is not
only a central theme of the novel but also a characteristic that pertains
to early digital forms of fiction. Although only published in 1995 – and
at the time state of the art – being able to read the novel requires hard-
and software of the 1990s. In other words, without continuing
processes of readaptation of the work of fiction to contemporary digital
technology, the text becomes inaccessible for perusal and will
eventually turn into a myth of a lost book.
A definition of ekphrasis as “any kind of intermedial and self-
reflexive relationships between two different media which constantly
ponder their own material characteristics” (Rippl 2010, 48) allows for
the inclusion of digital poetry in this chapter. These are forms of
literature in which “text and image may be simultaneously present and
actually form a unit” (Rippl 2010, 42–43). As such, the following
example can be interpreted as a digital actualization of concrete poetry
that, in its presentation of language, evokes a visual effect, but also
negotiates the relationship between word and image. However, in the
case of digital poetry this act of visual presentation acquires further
dimensions of complexity as displayed text on a screen can be
dynamized and combined with images, video footage, and auditory
elements like music, sounds, or voice-overs. Similar to hypertextual
prose fiction, digital poetry can rely on the active interaction with the
reader, though this is not of necessity.
Edward Falco’s “Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales” (2008) is a
prime example of digital poetry. It consists of a surface which appears
to be landscape. When clicking on this landscape at various places the
image transforms into a different image and a poem appears which
subsequently disappears. Although the displayed images evoke the
genre of landscape, they are in fact photograms and thus the result of
experiments with light and chemicals on photosensitive surfaces. The
appearing and disappearing poems result in an effect of ephemerality
and acquire a metamorphosing quality that also pertains to the
aesthetics of the photograms. However, the content of the poems
paradoxically reinforces the tradition of the statics of landscape
paintings:

Rough seas. Upswells. Seething.
Depths midnight blue, dark slate blue.
Where sky touches sea light seablue.
Where the depths rush upward olivegreen drab olive green.
 Color of fury under color of sickness under color of serene. […]
(Falco 2008, n. pag.)
In this passage the colors of the underlaid photogram are referred to
by the poem. Through the fading of text as well as image the
ephemerality of vision is topicalized, and the changing arrangements
of text and image, in their oscillating fading and emerging, mutually
evoke each other. Drawing on Benjamin’s thoughts laid out above, as
these forms of digital poetry proceed in time they gain a new form of
presence in space and time. Although the literary and ekphrastic
description of the photogram suggests an adherence to conventions of
ekphrastic writings, the ontological dimensions of the image, the
various transformational processes underlying the production of the
digitalized photograms that morph into each other, and the
translational processes between word and image are being radically
questioned by this new form of digitally produced art.

4 Conclusion: Digital Ekphrasis

It was the aim of this essay to give tentative answers to the pressing
question of how to rethink and reconceptualize ekphrasis in the digital
age which has had a profound impact on our life realities and
consequently has found entrance into, and even allowed for, new forms
of fiction. These circumstances require a redefinition and
reconceptualization of ekphrasis as an established concept of literary
analysis, as literature in the digital age is “characterized by the
confluence of different media, both visual and textual” (Emden and
Rippl 2010, 1). This has led to a “new economy of media [that has]
radically altered the way in which texts and images are negotiated in
the public realm” (Emden and Rippl 2010, 2). It was suggested that the
computer screen has to be regarded as a form of additional interface
and instance of mediation that functions as a form of intermediary. It
has been shown that it is of utmost importance for scholars of literary
studies to react to the challenges that are posed by the digital age, not
least when we regard American Studies or the studies of American
literature “as Media Studies” (Kelleter and Stein 2008, ix–x, emphasis
mine) that allows for crucial insights into our contemporary culture. I
argued for an actualization of and reconnection to ancient concepts of
ekphrasis, as – in light of contemporary technological developments –
especially the ability to evoke visual effects and the individual’s
imagination gain in significance. A comprehensive concept of digital
ekphrasis thus has to include new forms of images that result from
digital processes of reproduction, but must also take seriously the
interrelatedness between the production of literary texts and the effect
on the reader. Living up to the theoretical challenges that are posed in
the light of the developments of the digital age will be a test case for the
orientation and standing of the field of literary studies in general and
American Studies in particular.

5 Bibliography

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5.2 Further Reading

Assmann, Aleida. “The Shaping of Attention by Cultural Frames and
Media Technology.” ImageScapes: Studies in Intermediality. Ed.
Christian J. Emden and Gabriele Rippl. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. 21–
38.
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Media Literary Theory. New York: Continuum, 2012.
Goody, Alex. Technology, Literature and Culture. Cambridge and
Malden: Polity Press, 2011.
Hoffmann, Torsten, and Gabriele Rippl, eds. Bilder: Ein (neues)
Leitmedium? Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006.
Landow, George P. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in
an Era of Globalization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2006.
Liestøl, Gunnar, Andrew Morrison, and Terje Rasmussen, eds. Digital
Media Revisited: Theoretical and Conceptual Innovation in Digital
Domains. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.
Mitchell, W. J. T. “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture.” Art Bulletin
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Münker, Stefan, and Alexander Roesler. Mythos Internet. Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Narrative and Digitality: Learning to Think With
the Medium.” A Companion to Narrative Theory. Ed. James Phelan
and Peter J. Rabinowitz. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 515–528.
Siemens, Ray, and Susan Schreibman, eds. A Companion to Digital
Literary Studies. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
Gabriele Rippl

7 Postcolonial Ekphrasis in the

Contemporary Anglophone Indian
Novel
Abstract: Novels by contemporary Anglophone Indian writers are
often strikingly ‘visual’ and replete with intermedial references many
of which have so far been relatively neglected by postcolonial critics.
Though usually discussed in connection with ancient Greek or Roman
texts and Anglo-American literature, the literary device of ekphrasis is
a phenomenon found in many postcolonial contexts of literary
production around the globe. Prominent examples from the Indian
subcontinent which include ekphrases and allusions to Indian visual
cultures are to be found in Salman Rushdie The Moor’s Last Sigh
(1995) and The Enchantress of Florence (2008), as well as in Raj
Kamal Jha’s Fireproof (2006). The latter not only includes
descriptions but also material reproductions of press photographs.
While Rushdie’s and Jha’s postcolonial uses of ekphrasis demonstrate
the wide range of ekphrastic writing, their ekphrases also open up
ethical dimensions by delineating counter models to traditional
historiography and critically evaluating processes of religious and
ethnic ‘othering,’ thus, ultimately, making a case for the values of a
diversified society – in India and beyond.
Key Terms: Postcolonial ekphrasis, darshan, Indian visual cultures,
communal violence, nationalism, fundamentalism, trauma

1 Postcolonial Ekphrasis and Indian Visual

Cultures
Literary scholars working in the fields of postcolonial and
cosmopolitan studies have traditionally concerned themselves with
important issues such as colonialism, imperialism, individual and
collective identity formation, ethnicity, race, ideology, post- and neo-
colonialism as well as trans-nationalism and globalization. What has
not been systematically investigated to date is the conspicuous visual
aesthetics and intermedial and ekphrastic nature of many postcolonial
and cosmopolitan literary texts. This is all the more surprising since
“[t]he ever-expanding and heterogeneous field of intermediality” offers
one of “the most promising and invigorating research areas within
postcolonial studies today,” as Birgit Neumann states in her insightful
contribution to this handbook, because “the constitutive and dynamic
role of media in construing forms of sociality and perpetuating cultural
knowledge, including concepts of identification, alterity and power,”
turns the concept of intermediality into an indispensible one for
analyses of colonial and postcolonial literary texts ( 27 Intermedial
Negotiations: Postcolonial Literatures, 512). Against the backdrop of
Indian visual cultures, this article discusses ekphrasis as a specific
subcategory of intermediality, namely intermedial reference (cf.
Rajewsky 2005, 52; Wolf 2005, 254–255; 0 Introduction), in
conjunction with contemporary Anglophone Indian novels by Salman
Rushdie, the Indian-born novelist and essayist who lives in the UK,
and Raj Kamal Jha, a New Delhi-based journalist and novelist.
As a Western literary mode, ekphrasis has its roots in ancient Greek
culture and epic literature and is at least as old as Homer’s depiction of
Achilles’s shield in Book 18 of the Iliad. James A. W. Heffernan has
presented a widely accepted definition which claims that ekphrasis is
the verbal representation of visual representation, no matter whether
the ekphrastic description is an extended and detailed one or merely a
brief allusion in poetry or narrative fiction (Heffernan 1993, 2; also 1
Ekphrasis: Theory; for a critique of Heffernan’s use of the term
‘representation’ cf. Rippl 2005, 97–98). At different times ekphrasis
has been understood either as a rather competitive undertaking, a
paragone between text and image, poetry and painting, a transgressive
method of medial and semiotic translation; or ekphrasis has been seen
as a descriptive mode based on collaboration between text and image,
which helps to understand the world, to communicate, and to transmit
and store knowledge.
During its long history ekphrasis had periods of considerable
attention and wide distribution in European literatures, while at other
times it was only a marginal literary phenomenon. Today, even with
countless images readily available on the Internet, ekphrasis is
thriving. A surprising number of contemporary Anglophone novels and
poetry collections are replete with ekphrastic passages, and
postcolonial, migrant or cosmopolitan literatures written in English
are no exception. The enormous increase, availability and rapid
circulation of pictures began with the development of photography,
which eventually led to what cultural theoretician W. J. T. Mitchell
called the “iconic” or “pictorial turn” (Mitchell 1994, 11–34). But while
some theoreticians of Western culture such as Marshall McLuhan
predicted the decline of the verbal and the end of the ‘Gutenberg
Galaxy,’ the development and dissemination of visual media have met
with literary reactions which are far from being solely apotropaic
defense mechanisms. Just as the nineteenth-century realist writers
found inspiration in the new medium of photography, contemporary
literature develops new aesthetic forms through intermedial
negotiations with today’s visual and social media. To read the
postcolonial Anglophone Indian novel against the backdrop of today’s
media scapes and to discuss how it negotiates visual phenomena will
not only enrich postcolonial and cosmopolitan studies, ekphrasis and
intermediality studies, too, profit from placing a new focus on
questions of hierarchy, power and ethics which have been central to
postcolonial studies. While it has not escaped critics’ attention that
ekphrastic texts are often saturated with gender hierarchies, as
Mitchell has brilliantly demonstrated in his reading of nineteenth-
century British poetry (1994, 151–181) – after all the mute visual work
has commonly been imagined as female, ‘envoiced’ by a male voice –
other implicit ideologies and hierarchies which inhere in ekphrasis in
general or at certain periods of cultural history, such as those of race
and class, have largely escaped critics’ attention. Like the gender
hierarchy, these racial or class hierarchies project the Other onto the
(alleged) medial/semiotic alterity of text and image and the power
struggle/paragone that results thereof. The “ekphrastic hope,” i.e. the
utopian power ascribed to ekphrasis, aims at a translation of the visual
into the verbal to achieve vision or iconicity through words and thus
represents “‘the overcoming of otherness.’ […] Like the masses, the
colonized, the powerless and voiceless everywhere, visual
representation cannot represent itself; it must be represented by
discourse.” (Mitchell 1994, 156–157) As a social practice which
translates between self and other, ekphrasis “transfers into the realm
of literary art sublimated versions of our ambivalence about social
others” (Mitchell 1992, 702), a crucial insight for discussions of
ekphrasis in colonial contexts. It is important to understand that
ekphrasis can serve different aesthetic, ethical and political goals: It
can be ab/used as a discourse of power, based on binary thought and a
politics of dualisms, which denigrates the other, but – as will become
obvious in our discussion of Rushdie – ekphrasis can also be a means
to not only accommodate but celebrate otherness, be it medial, ethnic,
cultural or religious otherness or one related to gender. The fact that
intermedial literature in general and ekphrasis in particular is
concerned with semi-otic otherness and the intersection of
signification systems triggers meta-representational questions (cf.
Rippl 2010, 2014) which enable us to disclose the values, belief
systems and assumptions underlying our concepts of the verbal and
the visual at a specific time and place. In order to investigate the role of
ekphrasis in a postcolonial context we need to expand the field of
ekphrasis studies beyond the traditional semi-otic and aesthetic
analyses and look at its epistemological, political and ethical functions,
at the many different ways ekphrases are operationalized by different
writers to serve specific ends. Focusing on these aspects, which so far
have played only a minor role in research, is an important addition to
aesthetic theories of ekphrasis because it pays due respect to the fact
that ekphrasis can tell us a lot about regimes of representation and
regimes of (social and political) power at a certain time and place. Our
particular focus in this chapter on the works of two Anglophone Indian
novelists pays tribute to the ‘postcolonial shift’ from the traditional
center in the ‘West’ to the former periphery within the literary system,
and aims at bringing into closer contact two fields of current research,
namely ekphrasis research and postcolonial studies.
What has been said so far makes clear that analyzing ekphrastic
strategies employed in literary works by postcolonial writers is not only
an undertaking in poetics, it is also a negotiation of political and
ethical issues which includes a renegotiation of “imperial legacies and
the ensuing predominance of Eurocentric epistemologies” ( 27
Intermedial Negotiations: Postcolonial Literatures, 513). Since
intermediality studies are interested in the collaborations and
interactions of different media in the process of meaning-making –
after all the term ‘intermediality’ etymologically stands for between (=
inter) and between (= medium), i.e. the translational “in-between”
space between media – they “bring to the fore the heterogeneity and
plurality of meaning-making and, in a wider sense, reflect the essential
impurity and – to use a central concept of postcolonial studies –
hybridity of all cultural formations” ( 27 Intermedial Negotiations:
Postcolonial Literatures, 514; cf. also Herzogenrath 2012, 2). Like the
concept of intermediality, ekphrasis has so far rarely ever been
discussed systematically by scholars working in the field of
postcolonial literature, even though there are exceptions such as Mary
Lou Emery (1997; 2007, 180–234) and Tobias Döring (2002, 137–
168), who have both done important work in connection with the
colonial implications of regimes of vision, visuality and ekphrasis in
Caribbean literature. There is also a collection of essays edited by
Michael Meyer (2009) on word-image intersections in post/colonial
cultures and an essay collection on Salman Rushdie and visual culture
edited by Ana Cristina Mendes (2012). The “re-visionary effort”
(Döring 2002, 166) of postcolonial writers is often preoccupied with
countering the colonial gaze, intervening in the existing relationship of
visuality and power, trying “to recover an authentic precolonial
imagination” (Emery 1997, 261) in a neocolonial context, and with
delivering subversive ekphrases of imperialist paintings (cf. Kortenaar
1997 and Kortenaar 2012, who discussed the subversive potential of
ekphrasis in Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children where Saleem
describes Millais’s 1870 painting The Boyhood of Raleigh). Since
antagonistic and paragonal forces inhere in ekphrasis, postcolonial
ekphrasis has been characterized as the urge of postcolonial
translation and transgressive transformation (cf. Ramone 2012, 87).
As we will see, Rushdie and Jha’s novels, too, use ekphrasis’
transformational potential to discuss India’s colonial legacy of the
British ‘Divide-and-Rule’ maxim, which has fostered Hindu-Muslim
antagonism, religious othering and communal violence ever since the
Partition of the Indian subcontinent (cf. van der Veer 2002).
While in the context of Anglo-American literature ekphrasis has its
roots in ancient Greek epics, an interdisciplinary investigation of
Indian literary descriptive traditions and the transcultural mobility of
ekphrasis remains to be undertaken. Thus for the time being, the
discussion of postcolonial uses of ekphrasis in the Anglophone Indian
novel has to suffice. When searching the Internet for ekphrasis in
India, the webpage ekphrasis-india.blogspot crops up. It is operated by
a group of young Indians who run the online journal Ekphrasis India
which “aims to bridge the gap between various art forms [and]
promotes budding artists and poets by giving them a platform to
express their creativity.” The poetry writing contest EI aims at
promoting ekphrastic poetry written about Indian paintings and other
artworks, thus making visible India’s rich cultural heritage (cf.
Ekphrasis India). The postcolonial effort of the young Indians who run
Ekphrasis India demonstrates how powerful a means ekphrasis is to
re-vision Indian art and to activate it in the collective memory of the
nation. Rushdie and Jha also embark on such postcolonial ekphrastic
projects in order to activate collective memory. Their texts belong to
the Anglophone Indian novel which “emerged in India in the nineteen
thirties and forties, the decade prior to independence, when there was
an urgency to foreground the idea of a composite nation” (Mukherjee
1994, 142; for overviews of the history of the Anglophone Indian novel
cf. for instance Varughese 2013, 1–23; Datta and Agarwal 2013; Gopal
2009; Wiemann 2008; Riemenschneider 2005). Writing in English,
the lingua franca of the Indian subcontinent, allows the novelist to
reach not only regional audiences, but the multilingual national and
potentially a global readership. While the use of the colonizer’s
language, English, as the language of Indian literature was a hotly
debated topic from the beginning, the publication of Salman Rushdie’s
internationally successfulMidnight’s Children in 1981 “freed the
subsequent English writers of India from the agonished [sic] burden of
self-justification” and “has been liberating for a large group of Indian
writers living either at home or abroad” (Mukherjee 1994, 145). When
we think of Anglophone Indian fiction and life writing which either
include pictures or are characterized by a heightened visuality, The
Enigma of Arrival (1987), an autobiographical novel by the Indian
diasporic-Caribbean writer V. S. Naipaul comes immediately to mind,
whose ekphrases of paintings by Constable and de Chirico have not
escaped critics’ attention. Amitav Ghosh’s use of painting in his novel
River of Smoke (2011) awaits further investigation, as does Khushwant
Singh’s memorable Train to Pakistan (1956), which the Indian
publishing house Roli Books relaunched fifty years after the novel’s
first publication as illustrated text which includes the famous press
photographs of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent taken by the
American Life Magazine photographer Margaret Bourke-White in
1946 and 1947. Another important instance of an Anglophone Indian
text which includes photographic material is Vikram Seth’s life-writing
Two Lives (2005). Likewise, Anglophone Indian graphic novels, for
instance by Orijit Sen (The River of Stories, 1994) and Sarnath
Banerjee (Corridor, 2004,The Barn’s Owl Wondrous Capers , 2007,
and The Harappa Files, 2011), have been published to great success
(cf. Varughese 2013, 137–144).
This article discusses the conspicuous literary visuality ( 17 Literary
Visuality) and ekphrastic strategies of Anglophone Indian fiction
against the backdrop of an important new, and by now already
extensive, field of research in South Asian postcolonial and cultural
studies, namely Indian visual cultures (cf. Boehmer and Chaudhuri
2011, 15–18). An introduction to India’s rich visual cultures can be
found on the Tasveer Ghar homepage created by academics in
Heidelberg, Durham and New Delhi (cf. Tasveer Ghar). This digital
network of South Asian popular visual cultures collects, organizes and
documents various materials which include posters, calendar art,
pilgrimage maps and paraphernalia, cinema hoardings,
advertisements, and other forms of South Asian street and bazaar art.
Over the last two decades the visual image and ‘visual turn’ have
attracted much attention not only among European and American, but
also among South Asian scholars who are interested in the rich
materiality of modern Indian visual cultures, an interest “sparked
largely by a widespread use of media images in Hindu religious politics
of contemporary India” (Sinha 2007, 187). Scholars such as Tapati
Guha-Thakurta, Ajay J. Sinha and Christopher Pinney “explore a
historical link between preoccupations with the visual image and the
experience of modernity in India” and focus “on the centrality of image
practices and visual discourses in India” (Sinha 2007, 188). According
to Pinney, British colonialism introduced in India a mode of
controlling and ordering the sensory experience (2004, 18), hence
‘image’ represents “the underbelly of such a hegemonic visual regime.
[…] image is not only the visual artifact but, more fundamentally, the
visual regime in which Indian artifacts participate, and the social and
political affect of visual and material things.” (Sinha 2007, 188–189)
The “Indian Hindu scopic regimes” (Pinney 2004, 9) regulate and
negotiate cultural memory and also the field of values; the ‘image’ and
the visual in general “have become charged with a politics of Hindu
religious essentialism (Hinduvata)” (Sinha 2007, 189). By emphasizing
how visual regimes are shaped by the interplay of various image
practices both Pinney and Guha-Thakurta “pay close attention to the
mediating role of technologies such as print, photography and film,
and analyze mass-produced artifacts such as art books, posters, and
trade labels” (Sinha 2007, 189). Pinney as well as Guha-Thakurta
investigate India’s visual cultures, past and present, in their work;
however, the fact that the two scholars significantly disagree in some
aspects suggests “conflicts within the field of visual culture” (Sinha
2007, 190; of course it is problematic to speak of an ‘Indian visual
culture’ in the singular as if there existed a single visual culture in
India today). It is worthwhile to discuss Jha’s novel Fireproof’s visual
obsessions, its preoccupation with seeing and gazing, its inclusion of
press photographs in connection with the central role of darshan (the
Sanskrit word for ‘to see’) in Indian culture and Hindu religion which
is based on a close link between seeing and thinking, of image and
idea. Pinney’s concept of “‘corpothetics’ – embodied corporeal
aesthetics” (2004, 8), which serves to investigate the dynamic social
role of the image in India (including its power to engender affect), is
closely related to the concept of darshan. After all, darshan brings the
Hindu worshipper and a deity/god prints into a close mutual
relationship: The deity sees the worshipper, who in turn is touched by
the deity, hence blessed and enlightened. Seeing of the divine/a deity
in a picture and the belief in a divine gaze that touches and blesses the
onlooker are important elements of Hindu faith and devotion: “Not
only is seeing a form of ‘touching,’ it is a form of knowing. […]
Hinduism is an imaginative, an ‘image-making,’ religious tradition in
which the sacred is seen as present in the visible world […]” (Eck 1985,
9–10; cf. also Babb 1981). The divine reveals itself visually, and
darshan, the divine gaze, traditionally implies blessing and visual
enlightenment7 – something we will come back to in the section on
Jha’s Fireproof.
The Anglophone novels by Salman Rushdie and Raj Kamal Jha,
which we will discuss in what follows, are characterized by a
heightened visual quality and negotiations with Indian visual cultures.
However, while they share a conspicuous visual quality and preference
for ekphrasis, there is also a significant difference: In spite of their
ekphrastic richness, to date none of Rushdie’s highly intermedial
novels combines text with actual pictures; this contrasts with Jha’s
novel Fireproof which combines pictures with ekphrases. Starting
from the observation that instances of ekphrasis have not decreased in
frequency today, its changing functions, the cultural, social, political
and ethical work ekphrastic writing performs in contemporary
Anglophone Indian novels will now be investigated in connection with
Rushdie’s and Jha’s novels. The main concern is the question of how
ekphrases function in contemporary literary texts that have grown out
of postcolonial and migrational contexts (cf. Rippl 2011a, 2011b) and
which may (Jha) or may not (Rushdie) include pictures in their
material form: What are their objectives and assets? What do they
show us about epistemological set-ups and cultural hierarchies? How
do they negotiate media boundaries (e.g. ekphrastic
literature/documentary photography) and the limits of signification
systems such as word and image in order to deal with the processes of
cultural and religious othering and the traumatic aftermath of extreme
communal violence in contemporary India?

2 Ekphrasis and the Pluralist Nation: Salman

Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) and
The Enchantress of Florence (2008)
Salman Rushdie is one of the contemporary Indian-British writers
whose novels discuss in depth the mediascapes of our times, but also
those of earlier periods, and negotiate the role of literature against the
influential role of other media such as television (cf. Banerjee 2012),
film (Western and Indian movies, cf. Stadtler 2012), photography,
painting, drawing, rock music (cf. Neumann’s reading of Rushdie’s
novel The Ground beneath Her Feet, 1999, 27 Intermedial
Negotiations: Postcolonial Literatures), comic books, commercials and
advertising. Several of his characters and narrators are photographers,
painters, sculptors, movie stars, television celebrities and art
collectors, and hence intimately linked to the visual realm. In spite of
the fact that Rushdie’s fiction is a prime example of what W. J. T.
Mitchell calls an “imagetext” (Mitchell 1994, 9) and although with
Rushdie’s wealth of verbal pictures “the visual is […] a site where
meaning is constructed and struggles over representation are staged”
(Mendes 2012, 1), to date the visual and intermedial dimensions of
Rushdie’s works are still underinvestigated.
It is notable that already Rushdie’s Booker Prize-winning first novel
Midnight’s Children (1981) employs intermedial strategies such as
ekphrases of photographs (cf. Barnaby 2005) and paintings in order to
negotiate the ambivalence and tensions of post/colonial politics and
India’s “fraught relations” to the social other, “to English high culture”
(Kortenaar 1997, 232; cf. Kortenaar 2012). Likewise, The Satanic
Verses (1990), a novel which catapulted Rushdie into the spotlight of
international politics when Ayatollah Khomeini issued a death threat
(fatwa) for blasphemy against the writer in February 1989, is a media-
sensitive novel replete with references to today’s mediascapes. The
novel, with its actor protagonists, ubiquitous film motifs and film
techniques (cf. Ramachandran 2005), discusses the close link between
India’s national and religious identities, inter-religious conflicts,
‘digital’ religion and the media in a globalized world (cf. Rippl 2011b;
cf. van der Veer 2002). Rushdie returns to a discussion of the global
media networks and capitalist marketing of pictures and people in his
futuristic and dystopian short story “At the Auction of the Ruby
Slippers” (1994), where the use of “ekphrastic shorthand” and
“ekphrastic minimalism” (Trussler 2000, 267, 271) allows the author
to fathom the nature of contemporary visual representation and the
inescapable commodification of art and people.
Rushdie’s bleak political satireThe Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) discusses
the possibility of a cosmopolitan, secular version of India’s
postcolonial future (as already propagated by Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru) and “explores tensions between inclusive and
exclusive forms of Indian nationalism” (Ball 2003, 36). The novel was
written when the Iranian fatwa had sent Rushdie into hiding and the
blatantly violent communal Hindu-Muslim riots in Mumbai and other
parts of India – triggered by the demolition of the Babri mosque in
December 1992 – shocked India and the world in the 1990s. In 1528,
the Babri mosque was supposedly erected in the city of Ayodhya on a
razed ancient Hindu temple by Babur, the first Mughal Muslim
Emperor, and exactly this site has been claimed since 1850 as the
(mythical and historically unverifiable) birthplace of the important
Hindu deity, Lord Ram (cf. Narain 2006, 57). The Ramayana, the
story of Ram’s life, serves to set Hindus apart from Muslims and aliens
in general. Already in the fifteenth century, “as India was colonized by
many foreigners, the cult of Ram gained strength and popularity in the
Hindu cultural imagination. In the 1980s, Doordarshan, the state-
controlled television channel, showcased a highly popular mini-series
based on the Ramayana.” (Narain 2006, 66 fn. 3) Over the last four
centuries, the iconography of popular pictorial depictions of Ram has
changed from a benign and effeminate deity to a muscular and militant
figure (cf. Kapur 1993). Hindu fundamentalists with their religious-
nationalist agenda appreciate this changed iconography, the “Battering
Ram” (Rushdie 1995, 363). It does not come as a surprise, then, that
Rushdie, in The Moor’s Last Sigh, depicts the leftist art historian
Zeenat Vakil as having “nothing but contempt for Ram-Rajya rhetoric”
when the Hindu fundamentalists take control of Bombay in the 1990s;
Vakil criticizes that “in a religion with a thousand and one gods they
suddenly decide only one chap matters. […] Hinduism has many holy
books, not one, but suddenly it is all Ramayan, Ramayan. […] A single,
martial deity, a single book, and mob rule: that is what they have made
of Hindu culture, its many-headed beauty, its peace.” (Rushdie 1995,
337– 338) The Moor’s Last Sigh is a novel pursuing an ethical and
political project by offering an alternative story of India’s past and the
origins of its various ethnic groups. It opposes the distorted
historiography of India’s nationalists and Hindu fundamentalists, thus
sketching different possible ways of conceiving the nation and
alternative models of community building. In order to highlight the
futility of communal violence (cf. Rushdie 1995, 365), The Moor’s Last
Sigh’s ethical task is to remind its readers of India’s pluralist past, “its
many-headed beauty,” i.e. “to render as familiar [India’s] early modern
history of cohabitation, obscured by discourses that seek to ‘other’ and
marginalize various groups in the cultural imagination of the country”
(Narain 2006, 63).
Rushdie employs two central textual strategies, ekphrasis and
palimpsest, to re-imagine an alternative version of India’s history as a
series of colonizations over time (which result in ethnic ‘impurity’) and
to shift “the focus away from the binary of Hindu and Muslim that has
informed the metanarratives of both religious fundamentalists and
multicultural assimilationists to challenge and destabilize the familiar
dichotomies of Indian political discourse” (Narain 2006, 59).
Ekphrasis and palimpsest – the latter is the name for a text, originally
on a parchment, which is inscribed with layers of earlier texts – help
Rushdie to look at postcolonial Indian Hindu nationalism with its
exclusive agenda of ethical ‘purity.’ It also allows for seeing
cosmopolitan Bombay through the ekphrastic and palimpsestic lens of
the multiracial and religiously pluralist medieval Moorish Spain before
the Catholic Inquisition expelled the Jewish and Muslim populace and
sacrificed hybridity in favor of the “purist idea of [a] Christian Spain
promoted so fiercely by Ferdinand and Isabella [who] identified the
interests of the nation-state with those of a single religious group” (Ball
2003, 42). Rushdie’s re-imagined history and his ideal of a secular,
pluralistic and heterogeneous India have their parallels in the novel’s
intermedial aesthetics with its many ekphrastic descriptions of
artworks by the protagonist-painter Aurora Zogoiby. Already the
novel’s title, The Moor’s Last Sigh, is a reference to Granada’s last
Muslim ruler Boabdil who according to legend sighed upon his
surrender of Granada to the Catholic Spanish monarchs in 1492, as
well as to the paintings and frescos by Francisco Pradilla and Francisco
Bayeu which use the scene as a motif (cf. Parashkevova 2012, 53).
Clearly, Rushdie is a contemporary writer deeply engrossed in visual
culture past and present, highbrow and popular, hence it is not
surprising that his novel adheres to an intermedial aesthetics. But what
is the asset of this aesthetic choice? Why would Rushdie, in a politically
engaged novel, take a detour via the visual arts and a painter
protagonist to sketch his political and ethical ideal of a secular and
pluralist Indian nation? Why did he not write a utopian or dystopian
novel without any ekphrastic frills and intermedial configurations?
Would not a ‘pure’ verbal aesthetics have done the same job? These
questions can be answered in several ways; here are three possible
answers: First of all, his commitment to ekphrasis and an intermedial
aesthetics demonstrates Rushdie’s conviction that ‘pure’ media and
aesthetics do not exist. Secondly, as Roland Barthes has put it,
language, due to its linguistic materiality, its ‘unnatural signs,’ is not
able “to authenticate itself” (Barthes 1982, 85), while visual media, and
photography in particular, have the power of authentication, of
bringing absent or non-existent objects before the onlooker’s eyes.
Ekphrases, then, as enargetic descriptive mode (enargeia in ancient
rhetoric means Anschaulichkeit) would have the immersive potential
which engages the reader in Rushdie’s alternate version of nationhood.
Thirdly, the role visual cultures play in Rushdie’s fiction attests to his
sensitivity to the power of the visual media today; the fact that his
focus in The Moor’s Last Sigh is on painting pays tribute to the central
role this visual medium still plays in twentieth-century cosmopolitan
Bombay, which has been famous for its art scene and Indian
Modernism, and with which Rushdie is familiar. The novel’s ekphrastic
title allows Rushdie to indicate from the start that the pluralist political
vision of India of his protagonist Aurora Zogoiby will not materialize
due to the nationalist and fundamentalist forces that have taken
control of India’s politics since the 1980s.
The Moor’s Last Sigh is replete with references to and ekphrases of
photographs (Rushdie 1995, 12), films, TV commercials, posters,
advertisements, cartoons (e.g. the illustration of the celebrated
‘Common Man’ of the Indian cartoonist R. K. Laxman who started to
publish a daily comic strip in The Times of India in 1951, 229) and
comics superstars (151–152), icons (116, 134), an altar piece (25–26),
wall paintings (58–60, 151–152, 154) and sculptures (261–262). The
Moor’s Last Sigh also evokes the cosmopolitanism of Bombay’s art
world and Indian Modernism; Indian artists (e.g. Raja Ravi Verma,
Gaganendranath Tagore, 101, Amrita Sher-Gil, 102), art historians and
art critics (e.g. Geeta Kapur, 244; cf. also 329) are mentioned and
discussed, as are Indian art history (e.g. the Progressive Artists
Movement during the 1940s and 1950s and its “hybrid style that
negotiated with the internationalist style of western modernism while
also addressing the conditions of social and cultural life in post-
independence India,” Morton 2012, 38), Western art movements (the
Cubists and Sur-realists) and Western artists (Matisse, 102, Munch,
218, Michelangelo, 225, Velázquez, 246, Goya and Rembrandt, 303, de
Chirico, 408, El Greco, 415), art galleries (244, 253), museums (the
National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, 101–103) and
exhibitions (like the 1978 Kassel Documenta show, 244). There are
also architectural ekphrases, such as the Cochin synagogue with its
antique blue-and-white Cantonese tiles prone to metamorphosis (75–
77) or the Little Alhambra in the fictive Andalusian village Benengeli
built by Vasco Miranda, a painter character in Rushdie’s novel (408;
cf. also 433 for a short description of the real Alhambra).
 While there are a few ekphrases of artworks by the fictional painter
Vasco Miranda (Rushdie 1995, 151–152, 158, cf. his palimpsest
painting 159–160) and the sculptor-character Uma Sarasvati (261), the
notional ekphrases (cf. Hollander 1975, 4, 7–9) of Aurora Zogoiby’s
paintings, drawings, water-colors, and sculptures (cf. Rushdie 1995,
115) are center-stage. The novel follows the creative life and artistic
career of Aurora da Gama, from her early years and first wall painting
full of Indian landmarks, heroes, kings, politicians, religious figures,
family members and “creatures of fancy, the hybrids” (Rushdie 1995,
59). This early artwork, whose ekphrasis is three pages long (cf.
Rushdie 1995, 58–60), already shows typical features of Aurora’s later
surrealist, palimpsestic artistic style (cf. for instance the ekphrasis of
her painting The Scandal, 102–103). The young 21-year-old Aurora sat
down at the Bombay factory gates during the strikes in February 1946
and captured the historical events in charcoal drawings, thus depicting
the bleak reality of the workers’ lives (cf. ekphrases in Rushdie 1995,
129–131). This is one of only two attempts at realist and naturalist art,
and even then her sketches were “not merely reportorial, but personal,
with a violent breakneck passion of line that had the force of a physical
assault” (Rushdie 1995, 131). This “physical assault” which propels
strong emotional affect and physical reaction in the recipient is a
quality in many of Aurora’s works and somewhat reminiscent of
Pinney’s concept of ‘corpothetics.’ The second time Aurora ponders
how far “realism” and “clear-sighted naturalism” could be an aesthetics
to follow was in the decade after India’s Independence, but once her
artistic crisis is over she decides once and for all that ‘patriotic
mimesis,’ with its documentary pictures of India’s life, are not for her,
that her art is a fantastic, a magical one dealing with “the reality of
dreams” (cf. Rushdie 1995, 173–174, 179). It is then that she decides to
make her son Moraes, alias the ‘Moor’ (who is the victim of an
incurable premature-aging disorder), “the talisman and centerpiece of
her art” (Rushdie 1995, 174), and for the next few decades creates the
famous series of major canvases called ‘the Moor sequence’ with its
masterpiece The Moor’s Last Sigh. Aurora’s son and model explains
these ‘Moor paintings’ are divided into three distinct periods:
The ‘early’ pictures, made between 1957 and 1977, that is to say between the year of my
birth and that of the election that swept Mrs. G. from power […]; the ‘great’ or ‘high’ years,
1977–81, during which she created the glowing, profound works with which her name is
most often associated; and the so-called ‘dark Moors’, those monochrome pictures of exile
 and terror which she painted after my departure and which include her last, unfinished,
unsigned masterpiece, The Moor’s Last Sigh (170 x 247 cms., oil on canvas, 1987)[.]
(Rushdie 1995, 218)

The majority of the pictures described in The Moor’s Last Sigh are
imaginary works of art and the ekphrases hence notional ones;
however, there are also references to actual paintings, e.g. to Bhupen
Khakhar’s “You Can’t Please All” (1981; cf. Khakhar), as Joel Kuortti
(2012) has convincingly argued (cf. the ekphrasis of Aurora’s painting
“You Can’t always Get Your Wish” in Rushdie 1995, 202: “a teeming
Bombay street-scene […] is surveyed from a first-floor balcony by the
full-length nude figure”). Aurora Zogoiby’s sujet “Mother India”
(Rushdie 1995, 60) and the topic of her monochrome “dark Moors”
dealing with exile and terror seem to foreshadow the haunting case of
India’s internationally renowned modernist Muslim artist Maqbool
Fida Husain, a member of Bombay’s Progressive Artists’ Group, who –
just like Rushdie’s Aurora Zogoiby – was attacked in the 1990s by the
fanatical Hindu Right, the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), a right-wing
political group allied with the Bharatiya Janata Party (cf. Guha-
Takurta 2011, 35).
The notional ekphrases of Aurora Zogoiby’s (fictional) paintings are
delivered by her son Moraes, Rushdie’s first-person narrator, the
hybrid offspring of Portuguese Christian and Indian-Cochin Jewish
(and probably Spanish-Jewish as well as Arabic-Muslim) ancestry. In
the story of his own life as a member of a minority group (Christian-
Jewish), which he tells from hindsight, he links his family’s history to
that of India’s history, from colonialism to a secular, independent
India until the rise of right-wing Hindu fundamentalism in the 1980s.
Moraes helps to visualize his mother’s painted ideal of a secular and
multicultural society and a plural nation – even if this envisioned
plurality, in the end, fails, giving way to a politically and religiously
polarized world (cf. Narain 2006, 65). As his mother’s model, Moraes
is represented in the ‘Moor’ paintings as an allegory of India as
“pluralistic, hybrid, gentle giant,” but eventually comes to symbolize a
violation of the nation’s “founding principle of pluralistic secularism”
(Ball 2003, 47). In January 1970, Aurora Zogoiby re-imagines the “old
Boabdil story” (i.e. the story of Granada’s last Muslim ruler) in one of
her ‘Moor’ paintings by placing the Alhambra on Bombay’s Malabar
Hill, a setting she calls “Mooristan” and “Palimpstine,” metaphors for a
“[p]lace where worlds collide, flow in and out of one another” (Rushdie
1995, 226):
The Alhambra quickly became a not-quite Alhambra; elements of India’s own red forts,
the Mughal palace-fortresses in Delhi and Agra, blended Mughal splendours with the
Spanish building’s Moorish grace. The hill became a not-Malabar looking down upon a
not-quite-Chowpatty, and the creatures of Aurora’s imagination began to populate it –
monsters, elephant-deities, ghosts. The water’s edge, the dividing line between two
worlds, became in many of these pictures the main focus of her concern. […] At the water’s
edge strange composite creatures slithered to and fro across the frontier of the elements.
(Rushdie 1995, 226)

Like Rushdie’s own palimpsestic writing style inThe Moor’s Last Sigh
(cf. Kuortti 2012), Aurora Zogoiby’s vivid surrealist painterly style is
palimpsestic, with subjects exploring how far a Nehruvian secular and
cosmopolitan nationalism is possible in India. Her early palimpsest-
paintings of “Mooristan” and “Palimpstine” seek to conjure up “a
golden age” when “Jews, Christians, Muslims, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists,
Jains” co-existed peacefully; she “uses Arab Spain to re-imagine India”
in her “attempt to create a romantic myth of the plural, hybrid nation”
(Rushdie 1995, 227). However, disappointed by her son, in her last
‘Moor’ pictures Aurora stops using the Moor-figure as “a unifier of
opposites, a standard-bearer of pluralism, ceasing to stand as a symbol
– however approximate – of the new nation, and being transformed,
instead, into a semi-allegorical figure of decay” (Rushdie 1995, 303).
Many of her last pictures in which the Moor appeared are collages and
diptychs created out of “the city’s unwanted detritus” (Rushdie 1995,
302; cf. Parashkevova 2012, 52, for a discussion of the diptych form).
While for most of her creative life “the ideas of impurity, cultural
admixture and mélange” stood for her notion of the “Good,” Aurora
Zogoiby now has to learn that a potential darkness lurks everywhere
(Rushdie 1995, 303). Rushdie thus also expresses his political values of
pluralist Indian communities and a multicultural Indian nation in the
ethical notional ekphrases of Aurora’s late paintings: “Full of grotesque
figures fusing human and animal parts, with breasts for buttocks or
whole bodies made from urban rubbish, Aurora’s teeming canvases
signify a grand, all-encompassing vision”; they not only “seem to be the
visual equivalent of Rushdie’s encyclopedic, grotesque, magic-realist
novels,” but also “part of the grand merging and palimpsesting of
worlds that both she and Rushdie perform to advance their more or
less mutual idea of contemporary India as a type of Moorish Spain.”
(Ball 2003, 41–42) Multicultural medieval Arab Spain is presented by
Rushdie, alias Aurora Zogoiby, as an ideal which parallels the inclusive
and pluralist nationalism supported by Nehru in the 1940s and 1950s.
It is threatened by the dangerous Hindu nationalist forces whose
fundamentalist ideology of cultural purity have gained influence since
the 1980s, finding a first culmination point in the destruction of the
Ayodhya mosque in 1992. Rushdie’s descriptive, i.e. ekphrastic, ethics
visualizes India’s past and negotiates India’s secular postcolonial
present. Rushdie’s word-image intersections are charged with cultural
significance and are a “site of conflict, a nexus where political,
institutional, and social antagonisms play themselves out in the
materiality of representation” (Mitchell 1994, 91). Rushdie’s
intermedial aesthetics is an “assault on binary distinctions” – artistic
but also cultural, political and ideological ones –, his refusal of “an
aesthetics of purity” challenges “dividing practices in society” and
argues for “an acceptance of and tolerance for the complexity of
culture”; Rushdie’s “ekphrastic hope, in this regard, is that writing can
sufficiently reach beyond its own formal boundaries – can
approximate the visual enough – to demonstrate, at one of the most
fundamental levels of textuality, that otherness is never absolute”
(Teverson 2012, 26–27).
While in The Moor’s Last Sigh the painter Aurora Zogoiby
reimagines India through the lens of Granada’s golden age under
Muslim rulers, in The Enchantress of Florence (2008) Rushdie again
goes back in history and chooses settings which Western
historiography describes as early modern. The Enchantress of Florence
is preoccupied with the act of storytelling and ways of world making:
Akbar the Great’s court at Fate-hpur Sikri is the frame narrative within
which the Florence traveler Mogor dell’Amore alias Niccolò Vespucci –
and supposedly the grandson of Emperor Barbur’s sister, the lost
Mughal princess Qara Köz (the Lady with the Black Eyes) – tells,
amongst many other tales, the story of Qara Köz’s peripatetic life in
Asia, Europe and finally the New World. Bishnupriya Ghosh sees the
“cultural work” of contemporary historical novels such as Rushdie’s
The Enchantress of Florence in their “historical cosmopolitanism: a
recuperation, and inevitable reinvention, of discontinuous ‘pasts,’
usually told from localized perspectives but threaded into a greater
story of a global history.” (Ghosh 2011, 15) In The Enchantress of
Florence, for instance, Rushdie brings together the Medici’s sixteenth-
century Florence and the capital and court of the Mughal empire,
multicultural and cosmopolitan Fatehpur Sikri, built by the great
Muslim emperor Akbar. Both cities mirror each other, thus enabling a
comparative perspective on global history. As Mughal India was a time
of cultural intermingling and hybridity, “Mughal hybridity as
represented in The Enchantress of Florence […] is associated with the
search for harmony in uniting different styles, ideas, and cultural
practices” (Thiara 2011, 416). In particular, Akbar, who reigned from
1556 to 1605, is a significant secular ruler whose policy of religious
toleration and intellectual openness allowed for communal, tribal and
ethnic harmony and cultural synthesis (cf. Eraly 2000, 163). Rushdie is
drawn to this image of Akbar’s Indian culture as hybrid, inclusive and
composite and describes him as a man who trusts beauty and painting,
but not religious faith (Rushdie 2009, 72); Akbar is “the Universal
Ruler, king of a world without frontiers or ideological limitations”
(387), a “Muslim vegetarian, a warrior who wanted only peace, a
philosopher-king: a contradiction in terms” whose tolerance allows for
“a place of disputation where everything could be said to everyone by
anyone on any subject, including the non-existence of God and the
abolition of kings” (41, 45; cf. Thiara 2011, 418 for a discussion of
Rushdie’s reflections on the dangers of hybridity and cultural
intermingling). As Jorrit Britschgi points out, the historical Akbar had
an enormous interest in the arts and
allotted considerable resources to the making of artistic weapons, toreutic works,
magnificent fabrics and the translation and transcription of texts that were then
illustrated in the court workshops. In architecture, through the fusion of different styles,
Akbar created a vocabulary that combined local and foreign languages, likewise in the
painting ateliers at court a style developed that radically departed from Persian and pre-
Mughal traditions and marked subsequent developments in Mughal painting. (Britschgi
2012, 61)

In Rushdie’s novel, Akbar’s love of imagination and fictions in general

is first illustrated by his love for the phantasmatic Hindu queen Jodha
Bai, his “imaginary wife, dreamed up by Akbar […], the emperor was of
the opinion that it was the real queens who were the phantoms and the
non-existent beloved who was real” (Rushdie 2009, 33). Jodha Bai, the
equivalent of Qara Köz who will later captivate Akbar’s imagination, is
portrayed on Akbar’s request by the Persian master Abdus Samad, who
painted her from the memory of a dream without ever looking upon her face, and when
the emperor saw his work he clapped his hands at the beauty shining up from the page.
‘You have captured her, to the life,’ he cried, and Abdus Samad relaxed and stopped
 feeling as if his head was too loosely attached to his neck; and after this visionary work by
the master of the emperor’s atelier had been exhibited, the whole court knew Jodha to be
real, […] all acknowledged not only her existence but also her beauty, her wisdom, the
grace of her movements and the softness of her voice. Akbar and Jodhabai! It was the love
story of the age. (Rushdie 2009, 34)

What this quote demonstrates, apart from the precarious implications

of the patronage system, is the power of world making ascribed to
painting and art. Rushdie’s novel, just as all his previous novels, is
replete with descriptions of cities, in this case Florence (e.g. Rushdie
2009, 347–348) and Fatehpur Sikri (8–9, 10–11, 33, 35), of palaces
and rooms (82, 349, 363), of jewelry and illuminated Qur’an texts (19–
20), of paintings and frescos. In addition to Italian Renaissance
painters such as Botticelli (Rushdie 2009, 168), del Sarto and Lippi
(337, 365) as well as the Persian miniature painters such as Behzad (c.
1450–c. 1535), statues are mentioned (e.g. a statue of Mars, 189) and
female body painting (194). Chapter 9 of Rushdie’s novel encompasses
fifteen pages filled with ekphrases of paintings of Qara Köz done by the
protagonist Akbar’s favorite painter, Dashwanth. The first master of
the imperial art studio, the Persian Mir Sayyid Ali (for information on
this famous historical miniature painter, as well as on Abd al-Samad,
cf. Britschgi 2012, 62), takes Dashwanth under his wing when the
latter enters the studio as a teenager (at the age of thirteen Dashwanth
has already made his name with caricatures of court grandees, cf.
Rushdie 2009, 146–147). Dashwanth paints “bearded giants flying
through the air on enchanted urns, and the hairy, spotted goblins
known as devs, and violent storms at sea, and blue-and-gold dragons,
and heavenly sorcerers whose hands reached down from the clouds to
save heroes from harm, to satisfy the wild, fantastic imagination – the
khayal – of the youthful king [Akbar]” (Rushdie 2009, 147–148). With
his depressive, melancholic moods, the Indian painter Dashwanth is
the prototype of the inspired European Renaissance artist suffering
from the same disease. One of his big artistic projects is dedicated to
the legendary adventures of Hamza, hero of the Hamzanama (cf.
Britschgi 2012, 64–65):
Over and over again, he painted the legendary hero Hamza on his three-eyed fairy horse
overcoming improbable monsters of all types, and understood better than any other artist
involved in the fourteen-year-long Hamza cycle which was the atelier’s pride and joy that
he was painting the emperor’s dream-autobiography into being, that although his hand
held the brush it was the emperor’s vision that was appearing on the painted cloth. […]
The hero in Dashwanth’s pictures [i.e. Hamza, GR] became the emperor’s mirror, and all
the one hundred and one artists gathered in the studio learned from him, even the Persian
 masters, Mir Sayyid Ali and Abdus Samad. In their collaborative paintings of the
adventures of Hamza and his friends, Mughal Hindustan was literally being invented; the
union of the artists prefigured the unity of empire and, perhaps, brought it into being.
(Rushdie 2009, 148)

While there are no references to stylistic features of the folios of the

Hamzanama, which derive from the Persian painting tradition and
hence contrast with “the traditional Indian horizontal format,”
depicting the episodes “from a slightly-elevated, bird’s eye perspective”
(Britschgi 2012, 65), this quote demonstrates how Rushdie uses
ekphrasis to expose the emperor’s ab/uses of painting for political
goals, how painting as “visual political propaganda” (Cottier 2014, 144)
becomes an imperial form of world making (“Mughal Hindustan was
literally being invented”). Akbar orders Dashwanth to restore the
hidden princess and lost great-aunt Qara Köz “to the history of her
family at last. ‘Paint her into the world,’ he exhorted Dashwanth, ‘for
there is such magic in your brushes that she may even come to life,
spring off your pages and join us for feasting and wine.’” (Rushdie
2009, 149) According to the stories told by the wanderer Vespucci,
alias Mogor dell’Amore, Dashwanth, in a “series of extraordinary
folios” (Rushdie 2009, 149), paints several stages of the princess’s
childhood, but the first painting already “worked as a kind of magic,
because the moment the old Princess Gulbadan looked at it in Akbar’s
private rooms she remembered the girl’s name” (Rushdie 2009, 150).
He goes on to paint her early years until she became the young beauty
with those dark eyes which “drew you in and you saw the power
lurking in their depths” and “it became plain that some higher power
had captured his brush.” (Rushdie 2009, 155 and 156) Dashwanth’s art
is an intermedial art when he paints a part of the last verse of the
“‘Prince of Poets’, the supreme versifier of the Chaghatai language, Ali-
Shir Nava’i of Herat […] into the pattern of the fabric of Qara Köz’s
garment.” (Rushdie 2009, 156–157) However, while indefatigably
painting the final picture of the Qara-Köz-Nama (the Adventures of
Lady Black Eyes), Dashwanth becomes profoundly melancholic,
eventually vanishing completely. It turns out that Dashwanth’s last
painting
did not stop at the patterned borders in which Dashwanth had set it but, at least in the
bottom left-hand corner, continued for some distance beneath that ornate two-inch wide
frame. […] under the supervision of the two Persian masters the painted border was
carefully separated from the main body of the work. When the hidden section of the
painting was revealed the onlookers burst into cries of amazement, for there, crouching
 down like a little toad, with a green bundle of paper scrolls under his arms, was
Dashwanth the great painter, […] Dashwanth released into the only world in which he
now believed, the world of the hidden princess, whom he had created and who had then
uncreated him. […] Instead of bringing a fantasy woman to life, Dashwanth had turned
himself into an imaginary being […]. (Rushdie 2009, 159)

Chapter 9 testifies to the power of painting to conjure up people and

things and to bring them to life. With the visual medium of painting,
Dashwanth not only turns himself into an imaginary being, he also
manages to bring Qara Köz, the formerly lost princess from historical
records (due to her powerful half-sister Khanzada who obliterated
her), back to the memory of the royal family. Rushdie employs
Dashwanth’s art of painting and the narrator’s art of ekphrasis, i.e. the
lively description of the Qara Köz paintings, here as a postcolonial
project of rewriting history. The imaginary Mughal artworks of Qara
Köz are not described in great detail, nor are their formal features
discussed (what is their format? were they in the Persian miniature
tradition?); they are rather evocations appealing to the reader’s
imagination. What Rushdie’s ekphrastic art achieves, however, is to
write a princess, i.e. a woman, into history: “It seems remarkable that
Qara Köz receives, post mortem, her own history. After all, the
histories of Babar and Akbar are about heroic deeds, about battles and
adventures. They serve to consolidate power and to elevate the
emperor to a near-divine status. In contrast, Qara Köz’s story is one of
migration, assimilation, love, loss, and of the power of enchantment.”
(Cottier 2014, 147)
Negotiating Indian historical and modern painting and art,
Rushdie’s ekphrastic imagetexts tell the story of a secular,
multicultural and pluralist India without communal strife, and write
migration, exile and immigration, as well as women as constitutive
members of the Indian nation, back into its history. As projects in
global history, Indian and Western art history and intermedial
aesthetics, Rushdie’s novels build on the political and ethical impact of
ekphrasis: Through ekphrasis, the power of the visual is put on display
and the visual politics of imperial painting exposed. Through notional
ekphrasis of an imaginary painting, Rushdie is able to turn a woman
into the chief character of Indian history, celebrated in Dashwanth’s
epic painterly art.
3 Ekphrasis as Antidote: Communal Violence in
Raj Kamal Jha’s Fireproof (2006)
Unlike Rushdie, who does not include representations of pictures in
the two novels discussed and who deals with painting through notional
ekphrasis, in Raj Kamal Jha’s Fireproof (2006) the pictures are not
paintings, but three documentary press photographs which are present
in material form. Thus Jha’s novel is intermedial in two ways: it is
multimedial because it combines text with photographs (cf. Rippl
2011a, 2011b; cf. contributions Part I: Text and Image, section on
Literature and Photography), and due to the inclusion of ekphrases we
also deal with intermedial references. Fireproof, Jha’s third novel, is a
trauma novel (cf. Caruth 1996; Whitehead 2004; Kaplan 2005) which
describes, in a very impressive way, communal violence in India. While
Rushdie turned to the past to evoke visions of alternate, pluralistic
notions of community and a secular nation, Jha’s project is one that
not only involves a different visual medium and different text-picture
relationships, it also serves a different goal than Rushdie’s novels: In
Fireproof, both text and photographic images serve, either on their
own or in combination, as media of traumatic memory, displacement,
amnesia and possibly as means of reconciliation and healing. We have
come to understand photography against the backdrop of theoretical
debates shaped by two scholars and their work in particular: Roland
Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1982) and Susan Sontag’s On Photography
(1979). One important difference between photography and literary
text seems to be that the former serves as visual evidence, we tend to
trust it easily, while we believe the latter, due to its linguistic
materiality, to have the potential to distort and spin reality. As Roland
Barthes put it: “No writing can give me this certainty. It is the
misfortune (but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of language not
to be able to authenticate itself. […] but the Photograph is indifferent
to all intermediaries: it does not invent; it is authentication itself […]”
(Barthes 1982, 85, 87). Susan Sontag, too, states that we tend to
understand photography as “miniatures of reality” (Sontag 1979, 4):
“Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt,
seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. […] A photograph
passes for incontrovertible proof that given thing happened.” (Sontag
1979, 5) That is, although we are aware of the digital malleability of
photographs, we still tend to consider them as silent witnesses and
documents whose indexical power transports truth and produces
presence, i.e. we fall into the indexical or representational trap of
photography (cf. William J. Mitchell 1994; Lister 1995). This is also
true for documentary photography, which is usually perceived as “a
neutral, styleless, and objective record of information. The document is
usually thought to be devoid of subjective intention, even of human
will – it is frequently claimed that the camera produces images
automatically, as if unaided by an operator.” (Edwards 2006, 12)
Documentary photographs allegedly “entail an objective, unmediated
record of facts. Documentary is said to provide its viewers with direct
access to truth” (Edwards 2006, 27); there is supposedly no
retouching, no posing, no staging, no additional lighting or dramatic
light effects.
By including and narrativizing three press photographs of
devastation in his novel Fireproof (2006), New Delhi based writer and
Executive Editor of the Indian Express, Raj Kamal Jha discusses the
violent ethnic riots between Hindus and Muslims in Gujarat in
February 2002. Jha’s negotiation of photography’s documentary
function, the intricate narrative style and interesting typographic
experiments in the novel make it a formally demanding text. The
collection of fictive eyewitness reports of atrocities and communal
violence (cf. Allen 1993; Randeria 1996; Brass 2003) presented in
Fireproof comment on the bleak facts and figures of the Gujarat riots
which Jha includes in the ‘Author’s Notes’:
Beginning February 28, 2002 – and continuing for almost a month – cities and villages
across the state saw unprecedented violence targeted against Muslims, with clear evidence
in many cases that police, if not complicit, looked the other way as the massacres went on.
Over a thousand men, women, and children were killed, more than 70 per cent of them
Muslim.

Seven months after the violence, the BJP government in the

state was re-elected with a landslide majority. […]
The numbers, as of June 2006:
All figures are government figures, including official intelligence
estimates:
Total number killed: 784 Muslims, 258 Hindus.
 Number of houses destroyed: 12,000
Number of shops looted and burnt: 14,000
Number of villages affected: 993
Number of towns affected: 151
Total number of cases filed by the police: 4,252
Cases where charges were framed: 2,019
Cases closed for what the police said was ‘lack of evidence’: 2,032
The Supreme Court of India has played an exemplary role in
prodding and pushing the state’s institutions to deliver justice.
On its instructions, some cases were shifted out of state to ensure
a free and fair trial. And all cases, including those previously
closed, have been ordered to be reviewed. Total number of cases
reviewed: 1989
Cases re-opened: 1763
Cases where trial is on: 28
Number of cases ending in convictions: 10
(Jha 2006, 386–387)8
Jha’s paratextual, sober and fact-like listing of the number of Gujarat
victims of blatant communal violence alludes to the human tragedies
involved. It is one of the ethical achievements of the novel to report on
the fate of victims, to tell the stories of individual lives. Through the
rhetorical device of prosopopeia Fireproof is able to give those a voice
that can neither be heard in newspapers, TV, online news media on the
Internet nor in historiographic documents: the silent dead victims and
tacit persecutors, who whisper to us from the footnotes, thus attesting
to the tragic events of communal violence (cf. Cottier 2013). Jha’s
multi-perspective aesthetics reports in a modern urban Indian setting
the unsettling social and political events, such as the dramatic increase
in Hindu-nationalism and communal violence, by using intermedial
devices and fantastic modes of story-telling where the dead talk to us
and take us on a trip to the underworld, a place where the persecutor
Mr. Jay is confronted with his victims.
Right at the beginning the reader is told that Mr. Jay is taking home
a newborn baby from the hospital while communal violence rages in
the streets. He believes that this heavily maimed baby is his own. And
while it has neither legs nor arms, its beautiful, brisk eyes never stay
still. Due to its immobility, the deformed and maimed baby is
reminiscent of a photo camera and it is certainly no coincidence that
photography, visuality and seeing play such a crucial role in Jha’s
novel. Throughout the novel, but in particular in chapters 11, 12 and 13
(which consist of e-mail attachments), terms such as ‘eyes,’ ‘to see,’ ‘to
look at’ etc. crop up constantly, and throughout the novel visual media,
acts of eye-witnessing, pictures and focus are mentioned (cf. for
instance Jha 2006, 183, where the verb ‘to see’ is used twelve times).
So in addition to and in conjunction with photography, the novel
repeatedly evokes India’s visual cultures and the traditional practices
of darshan, the divine gaze: The eyes of the immobile baby are not
only reminiscent of a camera, they also resemble the alert and never
resting eyes of the Hindu gods, whose attention nothing ever escapes.
Jha’s use of three documentary photos in Fireproof which were taken
from the Indian Express and shot by his colleagues Javed Raja und
Harsh Shah, show the devastation after the violent riots in Gujarat in
2002. They allow Jha to develop new literary modes to communicate
what is usually hard to express, let alone to understand: guilt, violence,
trauma. In the hospital, the protagonist finds by accident “a
photograph lying wedged in the narrow space between the mattress
and the bed’s headboard” (Jha 2006, 61) after having seen the same
scene in a dream.

Fig. 1: Javed Raja and Harsh Shah, detail of press photograph capturing the outbreaks of
communal violence in Gujarat in February 2002 for the Indian Express.
Jha 2006, 61.

At this point it becomes obvious how Jha deals with photography: Not
only does he provide a reproduction of the photo, he also delivers an
ekphrasis of it which at first seems to describe the depicted scene
truthfully down to the minutest detail. Only eventually does the reader
notice that the protagonist’s ekphrasis, which is explicitly addressed to
her, trying to involve her, does not match her own reception of the
picture; no matter how long she looks at the picture she cannot see
what the protagonist seems to see there:
The photograph shows a pavement. A street in a city, perhaps this city itself because look
at the rubble lining it, covering it completely, not even leaving a space for pedestrians to
walk.

There is a sapling that grows beside the pavement, you can see it
in the bottom left-hand corner of the picture, and another a bit to
the right, both stunted because their roots are trapped in cement,
their leaves breathe in the fumes of petrol, diesel and kerosene of
vehicles, their stems are drenched with the spit of strangers.
In the foreground, that’s where I would like to draw your
attention, in the pile of garbage, are three things lying on the
street.
Near the top edge of the picture, to the right of the half-way
mark, you can see two stones, one on top of the other, the pair
looking a bit like a hat dropped onto the pavement. Right in front
of this are three things that don’t seem to be visible in the
photograph: a book, a wristwatch. And then a piece of cloth, more
like a towel, since I could see the threading on the fabric, the curls
 that give it its furry feel. The book is open, almost halfway. The
watch is lying, face down, its strap unfastened, maybe its dial face
has broken, maybe it fell. The towel lies inches away from the
book and the watch in a tiny crumpled heap. (Jha 2006, 62)
Only at the end of the novel does the reader understand why the
protagonist is able to see more than s/he, why he can zoom into the
picture: The photo functions as the trigger of displaced memories,
reminding Mr. Jay of his own participation in the torturing and killing
of innocent Muslim citizens. During his desperate search for help for
the handicapped baby, Mr. Jay travels through a town drowning in
communal violence after having received instructions via e-mail from a
mysterious stranger called Miss Glass about where to go to get help for
the child. The e-mail has three attachments, Tariq.doc , Shabnam.doc,
and Abba.doc, which describe the murderous attacks on parents from
the perspective of three traumatized Muslim children who witness
their torturing and killing. Each of the three e-mail attachments is
preceded by one black-and-white photograph showing destroyed
buildings, interiors and objects.
The partly reproduced photo showing rubble lying on a pavement is
not only accompanied by an ekphrasis in chapter 3 of the novel (Jha
2006, 61); in chapter 11, Tariq (The First Attachment), where the
photograph is reproduced in its entirety, it is described once again.

Fig. 2: Javed Raja and Harsh Shah, press photograph capturing the outbreaks of communal
violence in Gujarat in February 2002 for the Indian Express.
Jha 2006, 171.

While this second ekphrasis of the photo refers to a boy who is

nowhere to be seen, the photo takes on an important narrative
function as a trigger for Tariq’s story, who was forced to witness the
rape and killing of his mother.
Our first eyewitness is a boy. Name is Tariq, he is ten, or, at the most, eleven years old. He
wears shorts and a T-shirt although this is February and it is cold, and if you look close
enough, you will see his elbows and his knees are bare. The skin covering them is cracked
and dry. […]

That’s his house in the picture.

A simple frame. Simpler than the house a child would draw
when told to draw a house. Just a long rectangular box, the
windows cut out as an afterthought. The house built, as if, not to
defy the elements (the rain, the sun, the dank or the chill), but
instead to surrender itself to them, its plaster to be streaked, its
corners to be shadowed, its walls to be eroded. Unprepared,
totally, for fire, for men intending to kill and burn. That’s why the
door’s gone, the windows and the ceiling, all shattered into
countless pieces scattered inside and out. There are some clouds
in the sky but no evidence of smoke, it’s bright, it’s clear. (Jha
2006, 171–172)
Chapter 12, Shabnam (The Second Attachment), also features a photo
at the beginning, and starts with an ekphrasis of the auto rickshaw
depicted in the photo.
Fig. 3: Javed Raja and Harsh Shah, press photograph capturing the outbreaks of communal
violence in Gujarat in February 2002 for the Indian Express.
Jha 2006, 188.

Again, the ekphrastic description of the photo serves to introduce the

torturing and killing of Shabnam’s parents (described in gory detail, cf.
Jha 2006, 197–201) and the girl’s flight from the traumatic crime
scene:
This is her father’s auto-rickshaw, her father who had been killed, her mother, too. This is
a city on fire. And she’s running, she’s running, she’s running, this second eyewitness.

Name is Shabnam.
Age sixteen, plus or minus one. This daughter this girl this
woman this child, in black salwar kameez, her shoes with
shoelaces, melting and dropping off, their soles, their straps, their
leather, their plastic, their everything. […]
And Shabnam isn’t used to running so hard, running so long,
Father would have never allowed it. […]
She runs past houses, apartment buildings named after Hindu
gods and goddesses, the idols painted in cement, garlanded with
marigold flowers made of plaster coloured red or orange, gods
staring at her saying you are not welcome here, keep running. (Jha
2006, 188–189, 194–195)
When escaping her parents’ killers, Shabnam runs past houses
decorated with Hindu gods and goddesses. However, as a Muslim, she
cannot feel their blessing gaze. In fact, they seem to tell her that she is
not welcome in this community.
It is not surprising that Jha includes photographs in a novel which
deals with communal violence, traumatized Muslim victims and Hindu
perpetrators when one remembers Susan Sontag’s claim that “[a]ll
photographs are memento mori” (Sontag 1979, 15). Jha presents
photographs as memento mori which function via negativity: The
murdered victims cannot be seen in the photos, the destroyed houses
and interiors refer to them solely metonymically. Due to their static
quality photographs have often been compared to the frozen, intrusive
memory pictures of traumatized people. Ulrich Baer, for instance,
highlights the structural parallels between “trauma as the puzzling
accurate imprinting on the mind of an overwhelming reality” (2002, 8)
and photography:
The startling effect (and affect) of many photographs, then, results not only from their
adherence to conventions of realism and codes of authenticity or to their place in the
mental-image repertory largely stocked by the media. It comes as well from photography’s
ability to confront the viewer with a moment that had the potential to be experienced but
perhaps was not. In viewing such photographs we are witnessing a mechanically recorded
instant that was not necessarily registered by the subject’s own consciousness.

This possibility that photographs capture unexperienced events

creates a striking parallel between the workings of the camera and
the structure of traumatic memory. (Baer 2002, 8)
While outbreaks of communal violence are presented in newspaper
articles in a sober, neutral and objective way, literature allows the
discussion of communal violence in a more subjective and emotional
fashion. Together with ekphrases, the documentary photographs Jha
includes in his novel tell stories of torture, destruction and death, thus
making the reader face the effects of India’s communal tensions and
religious othering, to face trauma and to empathize with the three
traumatized children. While documentary photographs are commonly
understood as a means of authentication, in Jha’s novel the words de-
authenticate the pictures by describing things not to be seen in them.
The use of the present tense lends the traumatized children’s stories a
high degree of immediacy which may support the insight into the
necessity of building a secular and pluralist community. The fact that
Jha combines the medium of text with the medium of photography
and, in addition, yokes together a fantastic mode of writing with
documentary photography, opens up not only new aesthetic
possibilities, but also ethical ones not usually at the disposal of political
novels.

4 Conclusion: Ethical Ekphrasis – Descriptive

Ethics
Whereas Jay David Bolter claimed in 1996 that pictures today
dominate the texts they accompany and that ekphrastic descriptions
have to fight for their legitimacy (261, 271), the intermedial aesthetics
of Rushdie’s and Jha’s novels discussed above prove exactly the
opposite. As we have seen, there is a whole range of intermedial text-
picture intersections in contemporary Anglophone Indian novels.
Salman Rushdie employs ekphrastic strategies to discuss political and
politico-religious issues such as the possibility of secular postcolonial
democracy in India, the right-wing ideology of Hinduvata and the
politically enforced Indian religious fundamentalism in an age of neo-
liberal globalization, the new media and the networks of the worldwide
communication systems. The importance of the modern artworks in
The Moor’s Last Sigh lies in providing Rushdie with “a conceptual
space for exploring the pressures and contradictions of postcolonial
modernity: a space for inventing and re-inventing the nation, and for
testing and exploring the limitations and aporia of India’s secular
democracy” (Morton 2012, 32). In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Aurora
Zogoiby’s canvases depict Bombay as an ideal cosmopolitan space until
this idealized Bombay is destroyed by right-wing Hindu nationalism
(compared in the novel to the late fifteenth-century Spanish
Reconquista). Both of Rushdie’s painter characters, Aurora Zogoiby
and Dashwanth, produce paintings that fathom the possibility of a
pluralistic Indian nation, they sketch alternative national histories and
negotiate the power of images as well as their political ab/uses. In
analogy to what Paul Ricoeur, Martha Nussbaum, Adam Zachary
Newton and others have called a ‘narrative ethics,’ Rushdie’s project of
ekphrastically reimagining those periods in Indian history
characterized by pluralistic and inclusive visions of community (cf.
Claviez 2014 for a discussion of the ‘metonymic society’), can be called
an ‘ekphrastic ethics.’ The ekphrases-press photography interactions in
Raj Kamal Jha’s Fireproof display yet other functions of postcolonial
intermedial writing: They trigger stories, document, give evidence to
crimes, boost processes of remembering and verbalize traumatic
experience. Ekphrasis as a means of captioning and describing the
photographs of communal violence makes us focus our attention and
ruminate on the photographed communal crime scenes at a time when
deluges of digitally produced pictures swamp us, and forgetting and
attention deficits are the rule. Jha’s inclusion and detailed description
of press photographs related to the violent communal riots in India in
the new millennium not only demonstrate the ethical commitment of
press photography in his political novel, but also the ethics of his
ekphrases. Rushdie’s as well as Jha’s uses of a postcolonial ekphrastic
poetics are dedicated to ethical ends: As ‘counter-descriptions,’ they
revisit sites of India’s (far and near) past, analyze processes of religious
and ethnic othering, and they fathom political ab/uses of images, thus
opening ethical paths into the future.

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London: Routledge, 2005. 252–256.

5.2 Further Reading

Babb, Lawrence, and Susan Wadley, eds. Media and the
Transformation of Religion in South Asia. Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass, 1995.
Barthes, Roland. “Rhetoric of the Image.” Image Music Text. Essays
Selected and Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977.
32–51.
Hinnells, John R., and Richard King, eds. Religion and Violence in
South Asia: Theory and Practice. London and New York: Routledge,
 2007.
Rajewsky, Irina O. Intermedialität. Tübingen: Francke, 2002.
Rippl, Gabriele. “Intermedialität: Wort/Bild.” Literatur und Visuelle
Kultur. Ed. Claudia Benthien and Brigitte Weingart. Berlin and
Boston: De Gruyter 2014. 139–158.
Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. “Narrativizing Visual Culture: Towards
a Polycentric Aesthetics.” The Visual Culture Reader. Ed Nicholas
Mirzoeff. London: Routledge 1998. 27–49.
Julia Straub

8 Nineteenth-century Literature
and Photography
Abstract: This article examines the relationship between literature
and the new medium of photography in the nineteenth century.
Photography was more than merely one of the many technical
innovations of the Victorian period: It changed ways of seeing and
representing the world in literature and the visual arts and thereby
shaped Victorian visual culture. Photography played a major part in
discourses on epistemology and provided new definitions of what is
‘real’ – also for literature where realism became an important
principle. Prominent literary voices such as George Eliot, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Thomas Hardy and Henry James engaged with
photography in their works, reflecting their own and their
contemporaries’ changing, ambivalent attitudes towards it. As a result,
the intermedial connections between photography and literature,
especially narrative fiction, are manifold.
Key Terms: Realism, photography, novel, paragone, Victorian period

1 Introduction
The French twentieth-century philosopher and literary theorist Roland
Barthes wrote one of the most important theoretical discussions of
photography entitled Camera Lucida (1980). Towards the end of his
book, he arrives at an assessment of photographs as “flat,
platitudinous in the true sense of the word” (Barthes 1980, 106). The
spectator cannot “penetrate, reach into the Photograph [sic]” (Barthes
1980, 106). Despite its many assets – its immediacy and its democratic
appeal, for example – the photograph all by itself lacks significance. In
a similarly critical vein, Susan Sontag, also an important twentieth-
century theorist of photography, argued that photographs “cannot
themselves explain anything” (Sontag 1977, 23).
As a relatively new medium, photography has, right from its
beginnings, had a close, complex and not always unclouded
relationship with literature. To investigate the connections between the
two within the specific time frame of the nineteenth century means to
draw wide circles. Photography was not merely one of the many
important technical inventions and innovations that belong to this
century, such as the steam engine or the telegraph. The year when the
Frenchman Louis Daguerre (from whose name was derived
“Daguerreotype” as a synonym for “photograph,” the term referring to
a special photographic technique where a polished metal surface serves
as the basis of the photograph), first presented this new medium to the
world, 1839, induced an “epistemic rupture” (Groth 2003, 11). The
advent of photography, whose etymological roots mean “drawing with
light,” had a strong impact on modes of seeing and perceiving ‘reality’
as well as on literary forms of representation. Writers such as George
Eliot, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy in Great Britain and
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James in the United States were
drawn to, fascinated, but also occasionally troubled by photography.
Each of them had their own opinion and found their own uses for it:
They included photographs as illustrations for their works, they
incorporated a photographic aesthetic in their writings or they
approached photography metaphorically. Literature, too, produced
significant new paradigms in this period that have defined literary
representation ever since; the middle of the nineteenth century is often
called the “Age of Realism.”
In this article, the main interactions between photography and
literature in the nineteenth-century context will be explored.
Subchapter 2 will give an outline of the changeable and at times
conflicting relationship between the two, showing the extent to which
it oscillated between rivalry and admiration, pervading the period’s
literary and aesthetic discourse. Photography was used both for
documentary and artistic purposes, but the path towards its academic
acknowledgement as an art form was long and thorny. Photography,
Daniel A. Novak has argued, is a “way of understanding the
nineteenth-century literary imaginary” (Novak 2011, 65). In order to
fathom the depth and complexity of text-image relationships, more
specifically, encounters between photography and literature, it is not
enough to look for allusions or the odd cameo of a photographer in a
novel. Rather, one has to acknowledge that photography set the bar for
literature in an all-encompassing sense, given that “a certain faith in
the objectivity of photography is registered in multiple contexts, from
the discourse of social control to poetic nostalgia” (Novak 2011, 69). As
Jennifer Green-Lewis stated, “[t]he camera was a shaping force, and its
images served as a site of contest regarding the nature of the real”
(Green-Lewis 2008, 33). Then again, literature also left its imprint on
photography as Victorian photographers looked into literature for
themes and motifs as a means of self-legitimization.
Subchapter 3 proceeds with a closer analysis of selected literary
works that bring photographs and texts together: Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s novel The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Henry
James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and his short story “The
Real Thing” (1892) and Thomas Hardy’s short story “An Imaginative
Woman” (1894). These examples are all works of narrative prose,
chosen because they reflect the varying assumptions and anxieties
guiding Victorian attitudes towards photography on both sides of the
Atlantic.
Photography did, however, interact with different kinds of literary
writing and not just with the novel or the short story, as will become
obvious in the following subchapters. It took part in the osmosis
between texts, performance and images that is central to Victorian
cultural production, which Martin Meisel, referring to phenomena
such as the theatricality and pictorialism of novels, has described as
“the pervasive collaboration of narrative and picture […], as the matrix
of a style and as a way of structuring reality” (Meisel 1983, 68). Thus,
photography had a great impact on poetry in the form of illustrations
(see below), or by providing images for depicting processes of
remembering, as in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows
(cf. Groth 2003, 113–129). Important work on the visuality of Victorian
poetry has been done by Carol T. Christ, who, in her seminal study The
Finer Optic (1975), emphasized the preoccupation with detail in
Victorian poetry, tracing the rise of an aesthetic of the particular in the
nineteenth century, which brought poetry closer to a photographic
aesthetic.

2 Nineteenth-Century Literature and

 Photography: Contexts and Key Issues
Theories of intermediality today look at literature and photography
(among others) as important media of cultural self-reflection and self-
expression, vital for the building of cultural memory and identity ( 0
Introduction; Rajewsky 2010; Wolf 2010). But when in the 1830s and
1840s, Louis Daguerre and, slightly later on, the Englishman Henry
Fox Talbot unveiled their first specimens to the world, photography
was facing tough competition. To be sure, an initial sense of
amazement and wonder prevailed. Photography’s early proponents
were very much drawn to its aesthetic powers, and the first comments
it received reflect excitement about its immediacy and accuracy
(Green-Lewis 2014, 16). The crucial immediacy and precision of
photography, based on its indexicality, gave reason enough to marvel.
John Ruskin, the leading Victorian cultural and art critic, was one of
the first to discern the potential of photography; he was frequently
photographed, took pictures himself, and his initial endorsement of
the new medium proved to be influential.
Photography challenged preceding means of representation. Pre-
Raphaelite artists such as William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel
Rossetti immediately appropriated photography as an ideal to aspire
to, combining realist, i.e. detailed, technical execution with the
frequently transcendent nature of their chosen subject matter (e.g. in
Hunt’s The Scape Goat (1854–1856) or The Light of the World (1851–
1853); cf. Smith 1995, 97). Nineteenth-century artists used
photographs as aide-mémoires, helping them to recall scenery and
settings. Many strove to achieve photographic precision, or rather “the
look of photography” (Green-Lewis 2014, 16) in their works.
Yet, following the early thrill, photography, by the middle of the
century, elicited ambiguous responses on many levels. Photography
stalls the course of time, captures a singular moment, and thereby
inevitably reminds the spectator of the fleetingness of time and the
mutability of the individual in the picture. The overall effects of the
finished product resulted, now and then, in a complex chronological
setting that Barthes famously described as an anterior future, the “will
have been” (Barthes 1982, 96). Yet in the early days, the path to the
finished product, itself a snapshot of a fugitive moment, was irksome
and time-consuming. Taking pictures still required considerable
technical effort and equipment and, above all, patience. It took Talbot
thirty to ninety minutes to take a photograph in the open air; a
Daguerreotype required fifteen to thirty minutes depending on light
conditions, which was too long, especially for portraiture (cf. Green-
Lewis 2004, 12). These technical efforts involved in taking
photographs could be interpreted in different ways: For its proponents,
photography accomplished an automatized self-representation of
nature rather than showing the artistic vision of a (fallible) individual
(cf. Brosch 2000, 83). It was also seen as a means to depict a variety of
forms of human existence in a humbling, touching manner for the
spectator. Thus, both in Britain and the United States, photography
often turned to the socially deprived, showing slums, the poor in the
factories and streets or shabby housing conditions, thereby opening up
a panoramic view of society that struck many viewers as more sincere
and ‘honest’ than, for instance, paintings of similar subjects. Henry
Mayhew’s three-volume London Labour and the London Poor (1851)
serves as an example here (cf. Green-Lewis 2014, 19). Photography was
also used for anthropological research and documentation in imperial
administration. The mechanical efforts that went into the production
of photographs seemed to vouch for its objectivity.
But the technical intricacy involved in taking pictures was also held
against it, photography being perceived as a mechanical affair lacking
origins (cf. Spear 2002, 204). Considering the threat that the
modernization and industrialization of media reproduction techniques
embodied to e.g. the Arts and Crafts Movement (which propagated a
return to the simpler forms of manufacture of pre-industrial times), it
comes as no surprise that photography struck some as a soulless, dull
form of representation. Ruskin’s endorsement of photography became
unstable, with him wavering between an initial attraction and a
gradual disdain for the new medium. In a letter to his father from the
year 1845, he had called photography “a noble invention”; in his essay
“The Art of Engraving,” which was published twenty years later, he
blamed photography for producing a kind of truth that resembled a
“mere transcript” (qtd. in Harvey 1985, 25). “The camera’s easy
metaphoric affiliation with the age of industry and mechanization
offers ready lessons for the perils of a representational world in which
art will be turned on and off at will or produced, as Ruskin had it, by
‘grinding’” (Green-Lewis 1996, 93). By the 1870s the dry plate process
accelerated the production process of photographs. In the late 1850s,
photography had become “a household world and a household want,”
as the contemporary art critic Elizabeth Eastlake put it (qtd. in Green-
Lewis 2014, 16); in the 1880s photography was in everyday use in
police work (cf. Green-Lewis 2014, 21), by which time most households
owned their own camera.
These objections notwithstanding, photography, throughout the
nineteenth century emancipated itself into an art form (cf. Spear 2002,
189) and was drawn into the paragone, the competitive discourse
between the arts that had been prominent in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries but erupted again forcefully with the emergence
of photography in the nineteenth century. In eighteenth-century
aesthetic discourse the paragone took a particular turn: In Britain, it
was Lord Shaftesbury who, in his Characteristicks from the year 1711,
insisted on the importance of choosing the most apposite moment in
painting. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his famous Laocoön essay from
1766 had underscored the material differences of each medium and
reflected on the resulting relationship. Drawing upon Shaftesbury,
Lessing saw painting as an art form that is spatially oriented and static,
poetry being temporal and narrative.
The obvious competitor was, as mentioned above, painting, whose
practitioners still had to undergo academic training in order to
establish themselves on the market, and behind which stood not only a
European fine arts legacy but also a battalion of critics, experts and
buyers. In stark contrast, photography had been accessible for
amateurs from its onset and as a form of art did not require
professional or academic training. Victorian photographers such as
Julia Margaret Cameron, Charles Dodgson alias Lewis Carroll or Lady
Clementia Haward took up photography without prior training. Julia
Margaret Cameron, for example, had received a camera in 1863 as a
birthday present from her children (cf. Cox and Ford 2003, 11–39).
But photography also had to contend with literature, equally
committed to the representation of the ‘real.’ Three aspects
characterize the complex relationship between literature and
photography during this period: (1) Intermedial forms of contact; (2)
Realism, photography and literature; (3) Photography and nostalgia.
2.1 Intermedial Forms of Contact
There is a wide spectrum of intermedial connections between
photography and literature in the nineteenth century, ranging from
e.g. the presence of actual photographs to the metaphorical use of
photography. The different categories of intermedial contact, as
established for example in the typology presented by Irina Rajewsky
(2010, 55) – medial transposition, media combination, intermedial
reference – all apply to the study of Victorian literature and
photography.
Medial transposition covers phenomena such as film adaptations
and novelizations ( 13 Adaptation – Remediation – Transmediality).
In the present context, one specifically Victorian example is the re-
enactment of scenes or figures taken from literary texts, particularly
long poems, in photographs, e.g. by Julia Margaret Cameron (see
below).
Media combination includes all sorts of mixed-media forms. A good
example here are the many instances of illustrations that adorned
books (scientific writing as well as fiction), periodicals and other print
products in the nineteenth century, reflecting a close and multifaceted
coalition between words and images ( 20 The Nineteenth-century
Illustrated Novel). In 1844, Henry Fox Talbot published The Pencil of
Nature, one of the first illustrated commercial books, including 24
calotype prints, which offered readers a taste of how text and
photographic illustrations can enhance each other.
Intermedial reference comprises a vast number of phenomena
where one medium is inserted in a different medial context. Thus
photographs can appear in literary texts plainly by being mentioned as
a material object. The presence of a photograph can also be evoked, i.e.
verbally described, which is a case of ekphrasis. Thomas Hardy’s short
story “An Imaginative Woman,” which will be discussed below, serves
as a good example as it shows a triple function of a photograph:
Accidentally found in a hotel room, a photograph triggers the
development of the narrative, acts as a symbol of the main character’s
suppressed desires and invites a conclusive statement on the dangers
of blind trust in photography.
 There are many instances of intermedial references in literature at
that time. Pictorialism, albeit a hazy category (cf. Rippl 2005, 26),
refers to instances where photographic effects are achieved in the text
with the help of language ( 1 Ekphrasis: Theory; Torgovnik 1985).
Victorian novels and poems abound with descriptions of individuals,
things and scenes that resemble (indistinct) pictures. The popularity of
tableaux in Victorian culture is another good example. Tableaux
(situated between intermedial reference and medial transposition)
originated on stage, where actors would re-enact a painting (e.g. in
Douglas William Jerrold’s The Rent-Day, 1832), thereby bringing the
narrative flow to a halt, allowing the spectator’s gaze to linger on this
arrangement. But they also became a descriptive technique in
narrative texts (cf. Brosch 2000, 244–251; Rippl 2005, 153–162; C.
Williams 2004). They merge the temporal dimension of the narrative
with the spatial quality of painting, stressing the emotional or
psychological poignancy of a particular moment. While tableaux were
in fashion before the development of photography, e.g. in early
nineteenth-century melodrama, and their arrangement was often
modelled upon paintings, the motivation to create tableaux in plays
and novels was to single out and thereby enhance the quality of a
furtive moment by making it available for scrutiny. In this regard, the
tableau is an intermedial technique with a painterly but also
photographic quality.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Faun (1860) features
depictions of the setting, Rome, which are so realistic that some
contemporaries read and used the novel as a travel guide (cf. Rabb
1995, 36). Charles Dickens created a particular photographic effect in
some of his works. In his novel David Copperfield (1850) for example
he occasionally (and deliberately) switches to the present tense, which
enhances the moments’ “visual attention and pathos” (Green-Lewis
2014, 19) by highlighting their immediacy. The effect is that of a direct,
unmediated confrontation with a particular scene similar to the
experience of looking at a photograph and its sense of realism.

2.2 Realism, Photography and Literature

The Victorian period was an “intensely visually oriented culture,” as
Jennifer Green-Lewis has argued (2013, 329). ‘Seeing’ became an
object of analysis with the physiological conditions of eyesight (cf.
Smith 1995) and the material technical instruments for improving
sight (and their impact on how Victorians changed their way of seeing)
becoming points of literary, scholarly and public interest (cf. Crary
1992; Flint 2000).
The scientific discourse on seeing was matched by the proliferation
of images in Victorian (popular) culture in more general terms. Thus,
Henry James complained about the “‘picture-book’ quality that
contemporary English and American prose appears more and more
destined, by conditions of publication, to consent, however grudgingly,
to see imputed to it” (qtd. in Johnson 2007, 5). Cheaper reproduction
techniques meant that photographs and other images were found
everywhere in advertisement, periodicals and other ephemeral print
products, but equally as illustrations for novels and other literary
works, and of course for private use. Photography seeped into
everybody’s life, e.g. in the form of family portraits, cartes-de-visite,
and business cards.
The photographic lens acted as a corrective to human vision. The
photograph beckoned with the promise of reaching utter resemblance
with the living subject or object given the proliferation of details in the
picture. Photography thereby turned into a touchstone against which
literature had to measure itself. It now defined the reality that
literature sought to engage with. Nancy Armstrong formulated the
following three propositions in order to describe the relationship
between photography and literary realism: (1) “By the mid-1850s,
fiction was already promising to put readers in touch with the world
itself by supplying them with certain kinds of visual information.” (2)
“In so doing, fiction equated seeing with knowing and made visual
information the basis for the intelligibility of a verbal narrative.” (3)
“In order to be realistic, literary realism referenced a world of objects
that either had been or could be photographed” (Armstrong 1999, 7).
While much emphasis is usually placed on the positivist merits of
photography as a medium that maximizes the amount of available
information or knowledge, photography’s position at the intersection
between the visible and the invisible is another crucial aspect (Smith
1995, 96). By putting on display what is positively there, it evokes the
absent or invisible, ghost photography being a good example. In other
words: Victorian photography produced a mode of seeing that,
paradoxically, geared the gaze towards the hidden or unavailable, to
realities which are not obvious on the surface, but it failed to make
these deeper layers known. Photography served as a means to both
“critique and celebrate the realist novel” (Novak 2010, 26) – but for
some, photography missed the point of what is real entirely.
Thus, some of its Victorian opponents blamed it for its
fragmentation and would have agreed with Susan Sontag, who
described photographs as a “series of unrelated, freestanding particles”
(Sontag 1977, 23), thereby referring to the temporal parcelling into
snapshots. Similarly, according to Daniel A. Novak, Victorian
photographic realism reflects an internal fragmentation on the level of
composition that sees groups and bodies fall apart, lacking meaningful
cohesion (Novak 2011, 70). Bodies and individuals become abstract
and anonymous, without personality. This reflects a bad kind of
realism, where details are merely accumulated but not structured
according to an ordering principle (Novak 2010, 23). Literary realism,
on the contrary, had the capacity to reassemble these disparate parts,
to recombine them meaningfully. Major literary voices at the time
struggled to accept the validity of a photographic realism. A letter
Charlotte Brontë wrote to George Lewes shows that she used the word
‘daguerreotype’ (when commenting on Jane Austen’s Pride and
Prejudice) with a negative inflection, meaning shallow, rather than
profound, soulless, rather than inspired, no matter how great the level
of technical precision was (cf. Green-Lewis 2013, 320).
Literature thus depicted realities that went ‘deeper’: On the one
hand, going back to the paragone and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s
understanding of poetry as the time-bound medium, literature was
(and still is) the medium that can reflect temporal developments and
continuity, an aspect of reality that photography falls short of; on the
other hand, it was regarded, within Victorian aesthetic thought, as a
means to lay bare hidden truths by penetrating the wall of
appearances, synthesizing the unconnected. Victorians devised their
own means of endowing photographs with the transcendent
complexities deemed missing by making a move towards literature.
2.3 Photography and Nostalgia
The relationship between photography and literature in the nineteenth
century was complex, occasionally also paradoxical. To surround
oneself with photographs in one way or another was widely regarded
as a sign of modern times – for the better or the worse. Thus, to have
one’s picture taken was an outward sign of a ‘modern’ attitude, or at
least a way for individuals to show to the outside world that they liked
to think of themselves as such. This becomes particularly evident in the
United States where photography as a new medium was accompanied
by a great appetite for technological improvement right from its early
days. Photography provided the perfect technology for the American
vision of a new beginning, whereby it did not serve the past by
recording it, but was there to make it (cf. M. Williams 2003, 2–3).
There is in fact a close link, and here things become paradoxical,
between photography and the literary (and non-literary) past.
According to Jennifer Green-Lewis, “photography was from its earliest
days understood to convey the look of the past” (Green-Lewis 2006,
26) and its association with reality was “conflated with the backward
glance of Victorian photography in the record and pursuit of antiquity,
with the result that what was real was ultimately identified with what
was past – as past” (Green-Lewis 2006, 26). The “look of the past” was
achieved by turning to old subject matters: Photographs were used to
document excavations and excursions to ancient sites of interest in the
Mediterranean, the Middle East and beyond, reflecting the importance
of historical scholarship throughout this century and the overall
fascination with historical periods, be that the Middle Ages, Roman
and Greek antiquity or the time of the Anglo-Saxons. The Victorians
had an immense craving for old things and more so than the
generations before them were they aware of the necessity of keeping
track and preserving valuable evidence. Into this vein falls their
intense preoccupation with the literary past that characterizes so much
of Victorian photography and that provided some of its most
memorable specimens. Like visual artists and writers, photographers
drew upon a vast and eclectic cultural legacy, elements of which they
adopted, illustrated, rewrote or used in one way or another for their
own work. Photographs of nymphs, knights in armour and medieval
damsels, Shakespearean figures, but also contemporary literary heroes
were legion.
In any case, the nineteenth century was not bound to the time and
place of the present, but was receptive to a wide variety of elements
taken from other media and other historical contexts. This longing to
arrest the course of time, to save moments from oblivion, has been
discussed by several critics, most extensively by Helen Groth, in terms
of nostalgia (2003). Often simple photographs of landscapes or street
scenes were accompanied with excerpts from poems, thereby
becoming collectors’ items that were enriched and legitimized by the
intermedial reference to a literary tradition (Groth 2003, 4). Here
photographs are infused with a literary rhetoric that endowed the act
of reading a literary work with “a self-consciously modern sense of
cultural nostalgia and conservation” (2).
This nostalgia took on more profoundly intermedial forms in the
case of e.g. Julia Margaret Cameron and Henry Peach Robinson’s
photographs. Cameron was renowned for her photographs of famous
men of her time as well as for her angelic child portraiture (cf. Straub
2008). Like Robinson, Cameron staged figures and episodes taken
from literature, mythology and religion. Robinson, for example,
created a triply intermedial photograph called “The Lady of Shalott” in
1861, which was based on the re-enactment of the eponymous painting
by John Everett Millais, which itself illustrated a poem by Alfred Lord
Tennyson (lines of which were printed on the mat of the original
exhibition print, cf. Rabb 1995, 61). Cameron was a friend and
neighbor of Tennyson’s and provided illustrations for an 1875 edition
of his Idylls of the King, first published in 1859, a collection of poems
inspired by Arthurian legend. Often sumptuously dressed to evoke a
sense of authenticity and posing diligently to fit the scenes provided by
literary models, Cameron’s models are renowned for their
absentminded, empty gaze, which, together with her preferred soft
focus technique, adds a blurred, distanced quality to her photographs.
By choice of theme as well as method, Cameron was thus able to
smoothen the hard lines and edges of ‘realist’ photography and to liken
it to scenes that inhabited the literary imagination rather than the
streets of London.
3 Case Studies: Hawthorne – James – Hardy
One good first example to show the complexity of text/image
relationships in the case of photography is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
novel The House of the Seven Gables, first published in 1851 but
written over the preceding years. Its genesis coincides with the
establishment of photography as a new medium and technology in
Europe. Several studies have dealt with the particularities of American
literature’s relationship with photography (e.g. Burrows 2008; Meehan
2008; Dinius 2012). As mentioned above, Americans related less
hesitantly to the new medium as their nation’s history was relatively
brief. Aesthetic traditions such as the paragone were inherited from
the ‘Old World’ allowing for greater receptivity to what was new and
different.
The House of the Seven Gables has been discussed frequently in
terms of its treatment of photography (e.g. Greenwald 1989; Green-
Lewis 1996, 69–77), especially its inclusion of a photographer as a
character with a key function. Set in mid-century New England, the
plot revolves around the mysterious Pyncheon family, whose roots go
back to Puritan days and whose remaining members find themselves
in an impoverished and destitute situation after the imprisonment and
release from prison of Clifford Pyncheon (wrongly sentenced for
murder, as the reader will find out later). He now lives with his
spinster sister in an old house that had been in the family’s hands,
built on unrightfully claimed land, for a long time. An overall sense of
mystery shrouds the family, the house and its past; reason enough for
a young boarder, Hol-grave, to write a family chronicle. As it happens,
Holgrave is also a daguerreotypist. Thus, he is not only a stranger
entering the enclosed circle of the village, determined to trawl through
the history of an ancient family. He also brings with him the new
medium of photography (photography had been exported to the
United States by François Gourraud, a pupil of Daguerre, as early as
1840, cf. Brosch 2000, 61). The fact that he represents the advent of
photography in a New England village makes him a serious threat, as
he is an investigator who will use photography to shed light on and
document the mysterious Pyncheon family history. His
characterization is telling.
 [T]he old lady [i.e. the sister, Hepzibah Pyncheon] began to talk about the
Daguerreotypist, whom, as he seemed to be a well-meaning and orderly young man, and
in narrow circumstances, she had permitted to take up his residence in one of the seven
gables. But, on seeing more of Mr. Holgrave, she hardly knew what to make of him. He
had the strangest companions imaginable; – men with long beards, and dressed in linen
blouses, and other such new-fangled and ill-fitting garments; – reformers, temperance-
lecturers, and all manner of cross-looking philanthropists; – community-men and
comeouters, as Hepzibah believed, who acknowledged no law and ate no solid food […].
As for the Daguerreotypist, she had read a paragraph in a penny-paper, the other day,
accusing him of making a wild speech, full of wild and disorganized matter, at a meeting
of his banditti-like associates. For her own part, she had no reason to believe that he
practised animal-magnetism, and, if such things were in fashion now-a-days, should be
apt to suspect him of studying the Black Art, up there in his lonesome chamber.
(Hawthorne 2009 [1851], 84)

Holgrave is a bewildering presence in Hepzibah Pyncheon’s house; he

keeps odd company, a motley crew of society’s outcasts and
bohemians. He inspires all sorts of anxieties given his lack of social
conventions and his sinister aura. Holburn is described as a “calm and
cool” (177) observer with a distinct manner of seeing the world. In
several ways, then, the photographer, who is repeatedly referred to as
an artist in the novel, comes to stand for the new medium of
photography itself, a medium that smacks of the dangerous, subversive
and occult. Hawthorne’s craft lies in shrinking the novel’s overall
concern with the clash between old and new, tradition and innovation,
into one figure who, by virtue of his profession, comes across as
untrustworthy and fascinating at the same time. The House of the
Seven Gables makes an implicit statement on the common perception
of photography at the time as delineated above: It represents
innovation and a certain charm, but it is also a disruptive element that
could potentially cut the ties between past and present. What is more,
it evokes a sense of the unknown and forbidden, in the service of
invisible, possibly harmful powers. Later on, it will be due to a concrete
photograph’s help that the truth behind a crime will come to light,
photographic vision acting as a corrective force on the faulty human
vision.
A similar case can be found in Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a
Lady. A masterpiece of psychological realism, The Portrait of a Lady,
unsurprisingly given its title, comprises several extended character
studies, most centrally that of Isabel Archer, a young, moneyed
American woman, whose maturation is mainly owed to her encounter
with Old World morality and societal quirks she encounters while
travelling in Europe. She finds herself manipulated into marriage with
an American expatriate, Gilbert Osmond, by the fellow American
Madame Merle, a sophisticated, but cunning and unreliable, friend.
Throughout this novel, James evokes spatial images, often drawing
upon painting, to frame his (female) characters, paying great attention
to light conditions and the structural composition of scenes. His novel
is rich in descriptive passages that seek to reflect the psychological and
emotional conditions of the individuals that inhabit these scenes,
James being one of the period’s writers with a particularly deep
interest in the realm of the visual (cf. Johnson 2007; Bogardus 1984)
and the visual arts (cf. e.g. Winner 1970; Rippl 2005, 103–184).
The following passage from James’s novel depicts a short scene of
recognition in which Isabel comes to understand the true character of
her friend:
Isabel got up, expecting to see one of the ladies of the sisterhood, but to her extreme
surprise found herself confronted with Madame Merle. The effect was strange, for
Madame Merle was already so present to her vision that her appearance in the flesh was
like suddenly, and rather awfully, seeing a painted picture move. Isabel had been thinking
all day of her falsity, her audacity, her ability, her probable suffering; and these dark
things seemed to flash with a sudden light as she entered the room. (James 1975 [1881],
456, emphasis mine)

This excerpt illustrates the importance of vision and perception in the

novel doubly: Seeing the real-life Mme Merle, who had been preying
on her mind’s eye, so to speak, has a startling effect on Isabel, as if a
painting had been animated. Mme Merle’s entering the room is also
described like a photograph, the moment when the flash of light
exposes what lies hidden in the dark. There is thus a pictorial quality to
this scene. Furthermore, in a manner typical of James and his subtle
tracing of processes of knowing and understanding, photography here
acts as a metaphor for finding truth and epistemological certainty.
The second example also comes from Henry James. In his short
story “The Real Thing” from the year 1892, he delivers a more negative
account of photography, relating its mediocre performance in terms of
representation back to the paragone. The story deals with a young
illustrator who, one day, receives strange visitors, a genteel couple,
past their prime and in need of money. This is not an unlikely setting
for a story since photography had been able to establish itself as a
commercial enterprise, both in Britain and the United States, by the
1860s. By then it had become common (and affordable) practice to get
one’s portrait done by a photographer, portrait photography taking
over from portraiture in painting (Brosch 2000, 61). The Monarchs
offer their services as sitters for the artist’s illustrations, arguing that
with them, he gets the real deal, the ‘real thing,’ given their aristocratic
background. Eventually, the artist decides against them and in favour
of two other models who may lack the prestigious background of the
Monarchs, but possess the expressive versatility sought for in his genre
of work. The Monarchs had tried to sell off their services to the artist
given that “[they]’ve been photographed, immensely” (James 2003
[1892], 193). They embody “spotless perfection” (197), which, however,
the artist soon experiences as “insurmountably stiff; do what I would
with it my drawing looked like a photograph or a copy of a
photograph” (200). While the artist “adore[s] variety and change,” he
only finds a “type” and “no variety of expression” in the Monarchs
(200). The genteel couple as subject of representation may have
worked for the medium of photography, yet the illustrator’s approach
to his art requires a kind of animation and flexibility he finds deficient
in them. This provides an implicit comment on photography as the
lesser form of expression. In this tale, the “make-believe” (James 2003
[1892], 201) of the two casual sitters whom he eventually favours,
standing in for painting and its opacity and multifariousness, wins over
the precision, clarity and perfection of the ‘real thing,’ i.e. photography,
which is represented as the far more commercial and soulless industry
than that of the (dying) species of the illustrator.
The final example is a short story by Thomas Hardy from the year
1894, a novelist and poet who had an equally dense relationship with
photography as Henry James. Hardy used a lot of pictorial elements in
his writing and chose visual vocabulary to describe the conflicts carried
out by the characters in his novels and short stories. “An Imaginative
Woman” recounts the infatuation that a married woman and mother of
two, Mrs Marchmill, develops for a man whom she has never met in
person, but only seen in a photograph. She is trapped in a loveless
marriage with a gun maker and spends her holidays with her family at
the English seaside. Prone to daydreaming, her attention is soon
caught by what she hears about a mysterious tenant also living in their
rented holiday home, whom, however, she never gets to see. It turns
out that he is a poet called Robert Trewe, whose work Mrs Marchmill
admires. She herself is a poet who had published her work under a
male pseudonym, but whose literary ambitions had been thwarted by
her sex as well as motherhood. Robert Trewe becomes a phantom in
her life whose ‘presence in absence’ is further intensified when she
finds a stray photograph in her room, which turns out to be a portrait
of the mysterious poet. Given the emotional and physical absence of
her husband, who for most of the narrative remains oblivious if not
indifferent to his rival, the photograph soon becomes an object of
veneration for Mrs Marchmill, looking at which assumes an almost
ritualistic quality:
To gratify her passionate curiosity she now made her preparations, first getting rid of
superfluous garments and putting on her dressing gown, then arranging a chair in front of
the table and reading several passages of Trewe’s tenderest utterances. Next she fetched
the portrait-frame to the light, opened the book, took out the likeness, and set it up before
her.

It was a striking countenance to look upon. The poet wore a

luxuriant black moustache and imperial, and a slouched hat which
shaded the forehead. The large dark eyes described by the
landlady showed an unlimited capacity for misery […].
As she gazed long at the portrait she fell into thought, till her
eyes filled with tears, and she touched the cardboard with her lips.
(Hardy 1998 [1894], 67–68)
As this passage suggests, the photograph becomes the material
embodiment of an absent passion and a lingering sensation of
yearning. Together with his poems and the hearsay about Trewe, the
photograph brings to life the poet in the woman’s imagination, the
dream world of the protagonist clashes with social realities. The
picture renders her idea of the poet clearer than before, but it also
intensifies her projection of Romantic qualities (“unlimited capacity
for misery”) into this chimera. Returning home from her holidays, Mrs
Marchmill devises several plans to finally get hold of the real Robert
Trewe, but her efforts are repeatedly disappointed, and her hearing of
his suicide sends her into depression. She eventually dies in childbirth,
and her husband, having finally woken up to the fierceness of his wife’s
feelings for another, yet absent, man, recognizes a likeness to the
photograph in his youngest born, suspects cuckoldry based on such
‘solid’ evidence and rejects him as his son.
Written at the end of the nineteenth century, this story can be read
as a resume of Victorian photography in that it dramatizes its unkept
promises. First, the photograph, as in Barthes, represents presence in
absence. The object of desire that the photograph depicts is never
there, but what is more, Mrs Marchmill is looking at the likeness of a
man who is dead in a double sense: dead according to the theoretical
assumptions inscribed into photography, but, at the end of the story,
dead also in a literal sense. As a piece of social critique, Hardy’s story
depicts the confinement of women within marriage and motherhood
and their invisibility in the public and artistic world. But it can also be
read as a critical comment on the private desires stirred by
photography due to its capacity to indulge the viewer in feelings of
bitter-sweet nostalgia (as discussed above), evoking parallel realities,
numbing his or her awareness of their duties in the here and now.
Second, the story’s ending, when the husband wrongly discerns
resemblance, points to the hazardous conclusions drawn from a blind
belief in photography as a mirror of reality.

4 Conclusion
The examples discussed above have shown multiple angles from which
photography was viewed in the nineteenth century and several
discourses into which photography was drawn: the link between vision
and knowledge, the desire for realist representation that pervaded
intellectual discourse and artistic practice, the contest between
photography as a new medium and more established media such as
painting as well as the social changes that concurred with the
development of photography and that it occasionally embodied.
Furthermore, they represent various forms of intermedial contact
between texts and photographs. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House
of the Seven Gables, photography is personified and enters the
narrative in the shape of a photographer. The photographer-artist
exudes an air of enigma and peril, but eventually his art comes to stand
for innovation, progress and clarity of judgement. Hawthorne thus
provides a two-fold comment on the new medium. The two texts by
Henry James offer differing visions of photography. In The Portrait of
a Lady, photographic imagery, such as the flash that illuminates a
metaphorical dark and brings instant clarification, is used to describe
processes of vision and perception. “The Real Thing” may come across
as a satirical work first, but it also constitutes a very refined
contribution to the competition between the arts, the paragone, where
the art of painting scores higher than photography due to its greater
proximity to the nuances of human nature. Finally, Thomas Hardy’s
“An Imaginative Woman” dwells on the power of photography to
engender presence where there is absence, leaving a vacuum to be
filled by dreams and longing. The photograph of the elusive poet
conjures up a parallel world, which proves to be as detrimental as blind
faith in photography’s truthfulness.
However, photography and literature were also connected beyond
the genre of narrative prose: A photographic aesthetic found its echo
on stage in Victorian melodrama, where tableaux were very popular. In
poetry, photographs, such as those by Julia Margaret Cameron, were
used to illustrate works by e.g. Alfred Lord Tennyson, based on
historical, literary and mythological themes. Thus, the link between
photography and literature in the nineteenth century allows insights
into how the relationship between the past and the present was
perceived. It rests on various intermedial forms of contact with the
help of which cultural and literary legacies are perpetuated. The
relationship between photographs and literary texts in the Victorian
period informs readers today about the aspirations and discontents of
a society witnessing rapid social and technological change and reminds
them of the discourse and the aesthetic practices dedicated to finding
the ‘real’ and the adequate means to represent it.

5 Bibliography

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Backward Glance of Victorian Photography.” English Language
Notes 44.2 (Fall/Winter 2006): 25–43.
Green-Lewis, Jennifer. “Teaching Victorian Literature in the Context
of Photography.” Victorian Review 34.2 (2008): 33–41.
Green-Lewis, Jennifer. “The Invention of Victorian Photography and
the Novel.” Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literature. Ed. Lisa
Rodensky. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 313–334.
Green-Lewis, Jennifer. “The Invention of Photography in the
 Victorian World.” A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and
Photography. Ed. Anne Lyden. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty
Museum, 2014. 1–20.
Greenwald, Elissa. Realism & the Romance: Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Henry James, and American Fiction. Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Press, 1989.
Groth, Helen. Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003.
Hardy, Thomas. “An Imaginative Woman.” 1894. The Short Story and
Photography, 1880’s–1980’s: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Jane M.
Rabb. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998. 57–73.
Harvey, Michael. “Ruskin and Photography.” The Oxford Art Journal
7.2 (1985): 25–33.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables. 1851. Ed.
Michael D. Bell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. 1881. Ed. Robert D. Bamberg.
New York: Norton, 1975.
James, Henry. “The Real Thing.” 1892. Tales of Henry James. Ed.
Christof Wegelin and Henry B. Wonham. New York and London:
Norton, 2003. 189–210.
Jerrold, Douglas W. “The Rent-Day.” 1832. The Modern Standard
Drama: A Collection of the Most Popular Acting Plays. Ed. John W.
S. Hows. Vol. 4. New York: W. Taylor and Co., 1848. 1–48.
Johnson, Kendall. Henry James and the Visual. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Lessing, Gotthold E. Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and
Poetry. 1766. Trans. and ed. E. A. McCormick. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1984.
Meehan, Sean R. Mediating American Autobiography: Photography in
Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman. Columbia: University
of Missouri Press, 2008.
Meisel, Martin. Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts
in Nineteenth-Century England. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1983.
Novak, Daniel A. Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century
Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Novak, Daniel A. “Photographic Fictions: Nineteenth-Century
Photography and the Novel-Form.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 43:1
(Spring 2010): 23–30.
Novak, Daniel A. “A Literature of Its Own: Time, Space, and
Narrative Mediations in Victorian Photography.” Media, Technology,
and Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Image, Sound, Touch.
Ed. Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.
65–90.
Rabb, Jane M., ed. Literature & Photography: Interactions 1840–
1990. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.
Rajewsky, Irina O. “Border Talks: The Problematic Status of Media
Borders in the Current Debate about Intermediality.” Media
Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality. Ed. Lars Elleström.
London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 51–68.
Rippl, Gabriele. Beschreibungs-Kunst: Zur intermedialen Poetik
anglo-amerikanischer Ikontexte (1880–2000). Munich: Wilhelm
Fink, 2005.
Shaftesbury, Anthony A. Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times. 1711. Ed. Lawrence E. Klein. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999.
Smith, Lindsay. Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry: The
Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morrow and the Pre-Raphaelites.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. London: Penguin, 1977.
Spear, Jeffrey. “The Other Arts: Victorian Visual Culture.” A
Companion to the Victorian Novel. Ed. Patrick Brantlinger and
William B. Thesing. Malden: Blackwell, 2002. 189–206.
Straub, Julia. “Diaphanous Angels: Julia Margaret Cameron’s and
Walter Pater’s Go-Betweens.” Textus 21 (2008): 261–278.
Talbot, Henry F. The Pencil of Nature. 1844. Chicago: KWS
Publishers, 2011.
Tennyson, Alfred. Idylls of the King. London: Edward Moxon & Co.,
 1859.
Williams, Carolyn. “Moving Pictures: George Eliot and Melodrama.”
Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion. Ed. Lauren
Berlant. New York: Routledge, 2004. 105–144.
Williams, Megan R. Through the Negative: The Photographic Image
and the Written Word in Nineteenth-Century American Literature.
New York: Routledge, 2003.
Winner, Viola H. Henry James and the Visual Arts. Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 1970.

5.2 Further Reading

Becker, Sabina, and Barbara Korte, eds. Visuelle Evidenz: Fotografie

im Reflex von Literatur und Film. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011.
Brunet, François. Photography and Literature. London: reaction
books, 2009.
Christ, Carol T. , and John O. Jordan, eds. Victorian Literature and
the Victorian Visual Imagination. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995.
Grossman, Julie. “‘It’s the Real Thing’: Henry James, Photography,
and the Golden Bowl.” The Henry James Review 15.3 (1994): 309–
328.
Heffernan, James A. W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis
from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993.
Rabb, Jane M. , ed. The Short Story and Photography, 1880’s–1980’s:
A Critical Anthology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1998.
Astrid Böger

9 Twentieth-century American
Literature and Photography
Abstract: During the Great Depression, the sharecropper hit hard by
the Dust Bowl disaster became a national symbol, as Alfred Kazin put
it, of “all that had to be recognized and redeemed in America.” Even
though John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is nowadays
considered the most iconic text of the Depression, at the time
Americans turned toward non-fictional documentary books combining
texts and photographs into one intermedial format. Promising an
objective representation of the crisis and in some cases even ways out
of it – via New Deal relief programs – the genre became very popular.
This article discusses four works published between 1937 and 1941 in
terms of their attempts at presenting reality more persuasively than
was thought possible in a single medium. Although the documentary
book has lost much currency in the era of television and the internet,
the format continues to raise important questions concerning the
representational strategies of intermedial artifacts.
Key Terms: Reality effect, indexicality, intermediality, documentary
book, New Deal aesthetic

1 Definitions and Concepts

This article takes as its starting point the notion that literature and
photography have always enjoyed a particularly fruitful relationship
with one another. To begin with, both media are imbued with a
referential quality unlike that of other modes of representing reality. At
least in part, this is due to the fact that they partake of certain realist
conventions, first established in the mid-nineteenth century, in order
to depict their respective subjects with a perceived truthfulness that
goes beyond the various ways of representing reality typically
encountered in other media (in this regard it seems significant that the
emergence of photography roughly coincided with that of the realist
novel in Europe). That literary conventions of realism, in turn, are
thoroughly constructed was aptly argued by Roland Barthes in “The
Reality Effect,” where Barthes was specifically interested in the
overabundance of descriptive detail in realist novels, which, he argued,
was necessary in order to ascertain a referential relationship between
the text and the world it depicts. More precisely, the descriptions of
seemingly insignificant details in realist novels create what Barthes
calls a “concrete reality” intended to render a “pure and simple
representation of the ‘real,’ the naked account of ‘what is’ (or has
been)” (Barthes 1986 [1968], 146). The ensuing textual reality,
however, is clearly an illusion rather than an actual reproduction of the
elusive ‘thing itself,’ unavailable in mediated form (cf. Orvell 1989).
Whereas realist literature aims at minimizing the difference between
reality and its representation, photography has traditionally relied on
the (false) notion that there simply is none. No one expressed this idea
more succinctly than André Bazin in “The Ontology of the
Photographic Image,” where he writes:
All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage
from his absence. […] The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of
credibility absent from all other picture-making. In spite of any objections our critical
spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced,
actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say, in time and space. Photography enjoys a
certain advantage in virtue of this transference of reality from the thing to its
reproduction. (Bazin 1967, 13–14)

Full of enthusiasm for what he sees as the medium’s capacity to

reproduce reality automatically (which is to say, without human
intervention or, indeed, manipulation), Bazin concludes his essay by
claiming that “photography is clearly the most important event in the
history of plastic arts” (Bazin 1967, 16). Other media theorists have
built on this idea by adapting the semiotic system introduced by
Charles Sanders Peirce (cf. Atkin 2013) to describe what is perceived as
analog photography’s indexical relationship to reality. In other words,
a photograph is said to bear an existential, even physical connection to
the reality it mechanically records (cf. Gunning 2008). Not only has
this notion come under considerable pressure in the digital age, where
there is no longer a need for such a mechanical-chemical process of
recording reality; as a consequence, photographs have become so easy
to manipulate that some critics have even announced the end of the
medium’s credibility altogether (cf. Ritchin 2009). What is more, even
analog photography was never an objective medium, as various
processes of selecting, framing, printing, and cropping are involved
which are highly subjective and greatly affect the reality as represented
by any given photograph, not to speak of retouching negatives or
prints. Roland Barthes took note of this dilemma, even as he affirmed
the medium’s special representative capacity: “Certainly the
[photographic] image is not the reality but at least it is its perfect
analogon and it is exactly this analogical perfection which, to common
sense, defines the photograph” (Barthes 1977, 17).
“Analogical perfection” is something that narrative texts have rarely,
if ever, achieved. Unsurprisingly, countless texts have made use of
photographs, ever since it became possible, in the late nineteenth
century, to reproduce them in print in order to somehow confer the
latter’s truth value to their own version of reality, to illustrate their
content, or to instill a particular affective response in readers.
Photographs, in turn, are often accompanied by textual elements such
as captions or explanatory notes in order to identify the subject or
comment on what can be discerned in it. As a consequence,
photography and literature have always been closely intertwined. What
is more, photographs, while operating on a denotative level (cf. Barthes
1977, 20), can also be ‘read,’ analyzed and interpreted in a way
comparable to the activity of reading and deciphering a literary text.
Likewise, narrative texts can be regarded on a denotative level as well,
as more or less straightforward representations of historical realities.
In combination, photography and literature can augment the ‘reality
effect,’ by adding two modes of representation with their specific
versions of ‘concrete reality’ into one coherent, intermedial artifact,
thereby approximating reality in much greater detail and more
dynamically than each medium could by itself.
‘Intermediality,’ in Almut Todorow’s recent definition, refers to the
specific relations between at least two different media in the sense of
their combination, fusion, interaction, transformation, or overlay [“im
Sinne ihrer Kombination, Fusion, Inter-aktion, Transformation oder
Überlagerung”] (cf. Todorow 2012, 399). What becomes immediately
apparent from this definition is the degree of complexity not afforded
by older definitions of intermediality, such as Hansen-Löve’s from
1983, which simply referred to relations between literature and the
visual arts emphasizing the co-presence of two distinct media in one
work of art (cf. Wolf 2005, 252). More generally, intermediality,
according to Gabriele Rippl, is a theoretical concept, which makes it
possible to situate texts within larger media networks in historical as
well as systematic terms (cf. Rippl 2014, 140). Moreover, Rippl agrees
with other scholars of intermediality that one is well-advised to move
beyond the postulation of clearly distinct media. Harking back to W. J.
T. Mitchell’s dictum that, in fact, “all media are mixed media” (Mitchell
1994, 95), Rippl convincingly argues that it is indeed necessary to
overcome essentialist constructions of media borders
(“Mediengrenzen”) in order to do justice to today’s increasingly inter-,
cross-, and transmedia phenomena (cf. Rippl 2014, 144).
Literature and photography have merged into intermedial forms
since roughly the late nineteenth century. Yet, their co-existence has
not always been peaceful. Indeed, Ralph Köhnen describes the
historically rather stark competition between both media, which was
likely due to their mutual claim to authenticity, inevitably raising the
question which medium was better able to represent reality adequately
(cf. Köhnen 2009, 374–380, qtd. in Hillenbach 2012, 10). In what
follows, the concrete interactions between photographs and texts in a
variety of non-fictional American works will be explored. Throughout,
it will be asked how these interactions are specifically negotiated, and
toward which end. Do the photographs illustrate the text, or do the
texts rather explain the images? Is there a hierarchy between both
media and, if so, how does this affect the reading experience?
Furthermore, it will be explored in each case how the formal and
structural factors influence the process of meaning-making. Finally,
each work has to be placed in its historical context to show how it
resonates with related works, as well as with society at large.

2 Documentary Modes
While the focus here is on the twentieth century and the 1930s in
particular as a highly productive decade in terms of photo-textual
efforts at recording the crisis of the Great Depression, it is worthwhile
mentioning at least two important precursors serving as models. The
first publication of note, which effectively combined photographic
images and text, was Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives: Studies
among the Tenements of New York (1890). Preceding the scope of this
article by a decade, it should still be mentioned as a seminal example
of so-called ‘muckraking’ photo-journalism, whose aim was to expose
the inadequate living conditions in the slums of New York City’s Lower
East Side to a more privileged readership belonging to the middle and
upper classes, or that contingent of the U.S. American population
which needed to be convinced that social reforms were in order to
ameliorate the problems that Riis’s book made it impossible to ignore.
The substantial publication consists of twenty-five chapters and about
one hundred photographs. While nowadays the text is usually passed
over – written in the distanced and authoritative prose style typical of
the social sciences at the time, but no longer en vogue today – the
photographs have had an impressive shelf life and appear in all major
accounts of the Progressive Era, or the period of social and political
reforms in the United States which lasted roughly from 1890 to 1920.
This is likely due to the fact that they go far beyond illustrating the
squalid living conditions in the slums. Instead, they fully absorb
readers’ attention – unlike the accompanying text – with their singular
focus on the spectacle of unimagined poverty voyeuristically captured
from up close.
Lewis Hine was another influential reformer, who used photography
to document social wrongs in American society. As a teacher of
sociology at the Ethical Culture School in New York City, he
encouraged his students to explore photography as an educational tool,
and gave them hands-on instructions when taking portraits of
immigrants passing through entry procedures at the Ellis Island
facilities in New York Harbor. Moreover, Hine’s sympathetic portraits
of child laborers within their working environment, which he
accompanied with captions specifying names and circumstances, are
famous documents of the inhuman working conditions prevalent in
many industries in the early decades of the twentieth century. Not only
were they instrumental in bringing about child labor laws in the United
States, they also established documentary photography as an
indispensable tool for recording disgraceful realities, implicitly calling
for change (cf. Böger 2010, 121–122). It is important to note that Hine
could not have succeeded without documentary photography. As he
once remarked: “If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t have to
lug a camera” (qtd. in Puckett 1984, xv).
 During the years of the Great Depression, many Americans
hungered for an authentic expression of the dire realities surrounding
them, which gave rise to a veritable wave of non-fictional literature.
Writers turned in scores to “the endless documentation of the
dispossessed in American life,” as cultural historian Alfred Kazin put it,
famously commenting that “[n]ever before did a nation seem so
hungry for news of itself” (Kazin 1982 [1942], 486). With the novel in
decline, readers increasingly favored documentary modes, “and the
documentary journalist who writes it on the run will give them history
in terms which they are prepared to understand” (Kazin 1982 [1942],
490–491). Even such a classic of depression-era literature as John
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) was initially conceived as a
piece of photo-textual journalism documenting the hardships of
destitute Dust Bowl victims and praising the New Deal labor camps in
California intended to ameliorate their lot (“The Grapes of Wrath,”
2002). But even without the accompanying photographs – text and
photos were published separately – the book with its alternating close-
up views of the Joad family and the more universal picture of the
devastated American landscape is clearly indebted to photography and
film and thus, despite appearances, constitutes a markedly intermedial
effort entirely typical of its time.
The format that arguably best satisfied America’s hunger for ‘news of
itself,’ however, was the documentary book combining text and
photographs into one (ideally) coherent narrative, which was
particularly prevalent between 1934, or the height of the Great
Depression, and 1941, when it ended largely due to the United States’
entry into World War II. The genre needs to be placed in the context of
hugely popular, picture-based magazines such as Life and Look,
established in 1936 and 1937 respectively, which created the
expectation in readers to see with their own eyes what demanded their
attention most urgently each week in the form of ‘picture stories,’
combining often sensational photographs accompanied by captions
and journalistic texts using an innovative page layout. Documentary
books, by contrast, were less commercially-oriented and generally
more subdued in layout, style, and tone. Many of them made liberal
use of photographs amassed for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s
Farm Security Administration (FSA), whose photography unit (1935–
1943) chiefly documented the problem of rural poverty and its various
causes as well as the ‘rural rehabilitation’ efforts devised by New Deal
reformers to remedy the situation.
In the following, four classics of the genre will be considered: You
Have Seen Their Faces by Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-
White (1937), An American Exodus by Paul S. Taylor and Dorothea
Lange (1939), Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941), and Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans (also
1941). All of these documentary books deal with the agricultural crisis
and, more precisely, sharecropping in the South as an exploitative and
dysfunctional system. Regarding each effort’s intermedial approach to
representing reality, it is useful to keep in mind Elizabeth
McCausland’s contemporaneous description of the ideal documentary
book (McCausland 1942, 2785), summarized by Puckett as “one in
which the pictures and words were of equal importance; where one
would not illustrate the other, but would complement the other and
perform important communicative functions which the other could not
perform so well” (Puckett 1984, 12).

2.1 You Have Seen Their Faces (1937)

Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their
Faces was among the first documentary books when it came out in
1937. Bourke-White had a background in advertising and industrial
photography, and was a noted staff photographer for Life magazine,
when Caldwell, a southern novelist and playwright, asked her to
collaborate on this project. Caldwell’s Tobacco Road (1932) had
received mixed reviews for its stereotypical and exaggerated characters
and, according to Bourke-White’s autobiographical account in Portrait
of Myself (1963), he wanted “to do a book with pictures that would
show the authenticity of the people and conditions about which he
wrote. He wanted to take the camera to Tobacco Road” (Bourke-White
1963, 113, qtd. in Puckett 1984, 23–24). Both admired what they
considered photography’s truthful representation – more truthful, in
any case, than the novelist apparently felt capable of in prose.
Consequently, a healthy skepticism might also be brought to the
captions in You Have Seen Their Faces, as these were thoroughly
invented and thus break with the veracity conventionally associated
with this textual genre. Bourke-White describes the collaborative
process in her autobiography as follows:
We plunged into writing captions for the book, and ours was a real collaboration. We did
not want the matter of whether the pictures ‘illustrated’ the text, or the words explained
the pictures, to have any importance. We wanted a result in which the pictures and words
truly supplemented one another, merging into a unified whole. We had a kind of ritual
about this. We would arrange eight pictures in the middle of the floor. We backed away
and, sitting against the wall separately, wrote tentative captions and then put them side by
side to see what we had. Many times the final caption was a combination of the two – the
thought mine and the words Erskine’s, or vice versa. (Bourke-White 1963, 136, qtd. in
Puckett 1984, 40)

The resulting structure and layout of the book are indeed quite
innovative. Alternating with four photographic sections consisting of
sixteen pages each, there are seven textual sections mixing general
descriptions of the plight of southern sharecroppers and tenant
farmers with political commentary often ominous in tone, as in the
following example:
The South has been taking a beating for a long time, and the pain and indignity of it is
beginning to tell. It can be seen any day now in the lean and hungry faces of men. It means
unrest. […] There has been talk, from one end of the South to the other, of joining with
other tenant farmers to take collective action against the institution of sharecropping.
(Caldwell and Bourke-White 1955 [1937], 1–2, 7)

Such passages are often directly juxtaposed to first-person accounts

rendered in vernacular. These, too, were only loosely based on
Caldwell’s conversations with people whom he came across while
traveling. In the following instance a man from Louisiana complains
about the ignorance of fellow cotton farmers:
Government and God put together in a lifetime couldn’t beat a pinch of sense into those
fool cotton farmers. They think all they’ve got to do is go out there and get hold of forty
acres of land, plant cotton, and look at the pictures on hundred-dollar bills. (Caldwell and
Bourke-White 1995 [1937], 9)

Faced with such contradictory messages, readers are bound to turn to

the photographs for a less ambiguous picture. However, there are few
matches between images and text. What is more, there are entire series
of images which are not mentioned in the text at all. Without textual
commentary for guidance, one has to ‘read’ the photo pages by
themselves. Bourke-White focused entirely on the people, often shown
in close-up, who appear for the most part destitute. She further
intensified these images by using Hollywood-style lighting, color filters
and extreme angles to add dramatic effects, heightening the visual
spectacle. In some cases the individual page layout provides an
additional layer of meaning. Thus, in the first photo section there is a
double page which shows a black man on the lower left, who lies on his
back on what appears to be a heap of trash but turns out to be tobacco
crop according to the (fictional) caption, “STATESBORO, GEORGIA.
‘The auction-boss talks so fast a colored man can’t hardly ever tell how
much his tobacco crop sells for.’” At the top of the opposite page, there
is a series of three photographs of a child eating a melon accompanied
by the caption, “SUMMERSIDE, GEORGIA. My daddy grows me all
the water-melons I can eat” (cf. fig. 1 and 2).
Between both images, there exists an intricate web of oppositions:
adult versus child, black versus white, and poverty versus (seeming)
plenitude, to name but the most obvious ones. Moreover, while the
man appears static, the child is shown in three installations suggesting
movement, as in a film (cf. Puckett 1984, 38), an innovative layout
design occasionally encountered in Life but almost never in
documentary books.
In sum, You Have Seen Their Faces reduces the complex problems
related to a dys-functional economic system to the barest level of
existence as represented by certain individuals viewed from up close.
Images and texts are, indeed, of equal importance; however, they
rarely complement, let alone elucidate, each other. Instead, both stir
the emotions without giving them a clear direction. No doubt due to its
powerful visual appeal, the book was a huge popular success despite
severe criticism on account of its latent racism, condescension toward
its subjects, and general penchant for dramatic effect in lieu of factual
documentation (cf. Stott 1973, 217–224). It was also considered a
liability by many writers and photographers, among them Paul S.
Taylor and Dorothea Lange, who felt the genre of the documentary
book had been done a serious disservice (cf. Puckett 1984, 91).
Fig. 1: M. Bourke-White, no title, from You Have Seen Their Faces, 1937. Caldwell and
Bourke-White 1995 [1937], n. pag.
Fig. 2: M. Bourke-White, no title, from You Have Seen Their Faces, 1937. Caldwell and
Bourke-White 1995 [1937], n. pag.

2.2 An American Exodus: A Record of Human

Erosion (1939)
With An American Exodus, Paul S. Taylor and Dorothea Lange wanted
to rectify some of the evident distortions of You Have Seen Their
Faces. Thus, they carefully distinguished their own approach from
Caldwell and Bourke-White’s in the foreword:
We use the camera as a tool of research. Upon a tripod of photographs, captions, and text
we rest themes evolved out of long observations in the field. We adhere to the standards of
documentary photography as we have conceived them. Quotations which accompany
photographs report what the persons photographed said, not what we think might be their
unspoken thoughts. (Lange and Taylor 1999 [1939], 6)

Taylor, an economic historian, contributed a text which explains the

mass exodus of the Great Depression in terms of broad historical
continuities. Additionally, the book is structured geographically,
starting with a chapter on the “Old South,” then moving on to
“Midcontinent,” across the “Plains” and the “Dust Bowl,” before finally
arriving, along with the migrants so to speak, in the “Last West.”
Although the text is generally informative, it is doubtful that the
average reader would have considered it useful information, for
instance, that “[i]n the long view of history, it has been adjudged by
scholars that the economic effects of British enclosures were
beneficial,” as Taylor writes at the end of the “Plains” chapter (Lange
and Taylor 1999 [1939], 88). In fact, one contemporary critic wrote in
1940 that Taylor’s text was “quiet, scholarly, dispassionate,
unassailably accurate,” but “not really essential” (McWilliams 1940,
218, qtd. in Stott 1973, 228). Compared to the sober text, the
photographs by Lange, a portrait photographer by training and
member of the FSA staff credited with some of the most iconic images
of the Great Depression, take center stage.
Each chapter begins with a section consisting of up to a dozen
photographs accompanied by captions specifying the place and date
the picture was taken as well as its general theme, such as “Hoe
Culture” or “Couple, Born in Slavery.” In the latter case, image and
caption (“Greene County, Georgia. July 20, 1937”) are followed by a
longer quote in vernacular about the dramatic end of the Civil War
“when the Yankees came through, a whole passel of ‘em, hollerin’ and
told the Negroes you’re free. But they didn’t get nothin’ ‘cause we had
carried the best horses and mules over to the gulley” (Lange and Taylor
1999 [1939], 15). As in this case, the people quoted frequently come
across as resourceful and defiant, even proud in spite of their apparent
misfortune. Critics have enthusiastically commented that “[t]he voices
of the people confront us immediately. This is their book” (Puckett
1984, 85). The photographs generally support the idea of self-
possession, as in the portrait of the elderly black couple from Georgia
(fig. 3), who are shown in medium close-up, at a distance that would be
natural for a direct exchange, facilitating viewer identification. Their
posture is upright, and their clothing, though worn, appears clean and
dignified. Possibly because of her professional background, Lange had
a knack for imbuing her subjects with authority as well as physical
beauty, resulting in images that could hardly be more different from
Bourke-White’s.
Fig. 3: D. Lange, Couple, Born in Slavery, from An American Exodus, 1939. Library of
Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. Lange and Taylor 1999 [1939], 15.

When she did not interact with her subjects directly, Lange tended to
emphasize the larger environment using a style entirely typical of the
New Deal aesthetic (cf. Böger 2001). An excellent example is a
photograph of a “Squatter Camp on [the] Outskirts of Holtville,
Imperial Valley, 1937” (fig. 4). As there is no text explaining the image
in addition to the caption, readers have to make sense of the rich visual
information on their own. In the foreground, there is a pile of debris
filling nearly half the image, so that cars and people are pushed off-
center, toward the top. The image appears to capture a brief stop-over
in a contaminated, desert-like environment unfit for human habitation
in spite of the tent in the background with a cut-off human figure
standing in it. Without being overly dramatic, the photograph still
makes a clear statement about the inhuman conditions suffered by
Dust Bowl refugees, but leaves it up to readers to draw their own
conclusions.

Fig. 4: D. Lange, Squatter Camp on Outskirts of Holtville, Imperial Valley, 1937, from An
American Exodus, 1939. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. Lange and Taylor
1999 [1939], 117.

Lest readers put the book away lost for answers, Taylor made sure to
include a final section titled “Directions,” where he responds to their
anticipated questions: “If these are the conditions, why do you not tell
us what is being done to meet them, and what ought we to do?” (Lange
and Taylor 1999 [1939], 152). Taylor gives detailed answers very much
in accordance with the New Deal philosophy of state interventionism.
Significantly, whereas the social scientist claims to know exactly “what
these people want” (namely, “not relief,” Lange and Taylor 1999
[1939], 152), the photographs present us with more important
questions than simple answers, which is likely why they, unlike
Taylor’s text, have remained so prominent in the collective memory of
the Great Depression. Returning to McCausland’s ideal of the
documentary book, one may conclude that, while text and photographs
indeed complement each other, the combination of both media tends
to upstage the photographs at the expense of the text. As a result, the
book can hardly be considered a fully convincing intermedial effort,
despite its obvious merits. Furthermore, about six months before An
American Exodus appeared, Steinbeck had published his instant
classic The Grapes of Wrath, and as a result Americans had a pretty
clear picture, albeit in prose only, of the plight of the Dust Bowl
refugees. Taylor and Lange asked Steinbeck in vain to endorse their
project. In the end, they had to endure reviewers who considered their
work “an album that illustrates the Grapes of Wrath” (Stourdzé 1999,
ccxii) rather than the “pioneering effort to combine words and
photographs” (cf. Stott 1973, 231) they had intended.

2.3 12 Million Black Voices (1941)

Lesser known than the other documentary books discussed here,
Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices still deserves to be included
for several reasons. To begin with, Wright’s is a much more political,
even propagandist, text whose stated aim, according to the author’s
preface, was “to render a broad picture of Negro life” in the United
States (Wright 2002 [1941], xx). His “broad picture” was clearly
painted with feelings of outrage at what Wright perceives as a long
history of racism, violence and discrimination directed toward African
Americans since slavery. His novel Native Son, which surpassed
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath on the best-seller lists after it came
out in 1940, made Wright “America’s first black literary celebrity”
(Bradley 2002, xv). When he was asked by Viking Press in the summer
of 1940 to write a text that would accompany a selection of FSA
photographs documenting black life in the U.S., Wright readily agreed
and set to work. As was customary for writers of documentary books,
he traveled to do first-hand research, which brought him back to the
Jim Crow South he had escaped as a young man (cf. Bradley 2002,
xvii), a painful return which fed the anger heard so clearly throughout
12 Million Black Voices.
The book is divided into four chapters broadly tracing the history of
African Americans from slavery (“Our Strange Birth”) to the Plantation
system, continued in the form of sharecropping after the Civil War
(“Inheritors of Slavery”), to the urban ghettos following the Great
Migration North (“Death on the City Pavements”). It closes with a brief
chapter dealing with the uncertain outlook of black male youths in
America (“Men in the Making”). The layout was done by Edwin
Rosskam, a German-born photographer and editor working for the
FSA. Together with Wright, he selected over eighty photographs from
the agency’s archive in Washington, D.C., to which a handful of press
photos were added, among them a particularly shocking image of a
lynching in Georgia. Importantly, the layout was not organized
collaboratively. What is more, the images seem to have been selected
mainly to “maximize their impact as illustrations” (Puckett 1984, 63).
It is incorrect, however, that Wright wrote his text without knowledge
of the photographs, as some critics have suggested (cf. Stott 1973, 232).
On the contrary, Maren Stange could show how involved Wright was in
the process of securing the photographs, particularly for the chapter on
“Death on the City Pavement,” where he directly communicated with
FSA photographers Rosskam and Lee on the sites to shoot (cf. Stange
2003, 182).
If the photographs in 12 Million Black Voices generally adhere to the
subdued documentary style associated with the FSA, the text conveys
the expressly literary ambition of its author. Thus, Wright decided to
keep the entire text in the present tense, even when he deals with past
events, imbuing the entire narrative with a rare poetic quality.
Moreover, he used the first person plural throughout, giving it a highly
personal tone:
We are the children of the black sharecroppers, the first-born of the city tenements. We
have tramped down a road three hundred years long. We have been shunted to and fro by
cataclysmic social changes. We are a folk born of cultural devastation, slavery, physical
suffering, unrequited longing, abrupt emancipation, migration, disillusionment,
bewilderment, joblessness, and insecurity – all enacted within a short space of historical
 time! (Wright 2002 [1941], 142)

Apart from the problematic voice excluding not only whites, but
anyone who does not identify with this trajectory, there is also a
mismatch between photos and text. As Rosskam used contemporary
photographs only, he had to resort to images of sharecroppers to
illustrate slavery, which distorts the historical picture (all the more so
as one subject is clearly white; cf. Puckett 1984, 64–65). The
relationship between text and images is more successfully negotiated
in the chapter on urban housing, where both media interact more
closely – unsurprisingly so, considering that the photographs were
specifically shot for the publication. Thus, there are horrifying images
uneasily harking back to Riis’s, of decrepit bathroom interiors and
young children sleeping on filthy floors in a kitchenette building in
Chicago, placed next to Wright’s sobering comment: “The kitchenette
scatters death so widely among us that our death rate exceeds our birth
rate” (Wright 2002 [1941], 106–107). Arguably, the most convincing
pages in the book are those where the photographs speak for
themselves, as in the case of Russell Lee’s “Negro dwelling, Chicago,
Ill.” (fig. 5), which eloquently demonstrates the crammed and fully
inadequate living conditions in Chicago’s slum areas. Significantly, the
chapter title, “Death on the City Pavements,” is printed across the
image, which was an innovative layout technique unheard of in
documentary photography.
Fig. 5: R. Lee, Negro dwelling, Chicago, Ill., 1941, from 12 Million Black Voices. Library of
Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. Wright 2002 [1941].

Wright’s attempt at integrating a text both propagandist and poetic

with documentary photographs presents a new approach to the
documentary book, revealing a number of problems, such as
mismatched images and text and a clash between the sober style of the
majority of photographs and the relentlessly personal voice of the text.
As a consequence, little or no coherence is achieved in the reading
process, with both media remaining strangely apart.

2.4 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)

The last work considered here, James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us
Now Praise Famous Men, presents the culmination of the New Deal
documentary book, even as it explodes the genre from within.
Nowadays considered a classic, the project started as reportage in
1936, when Fortune Magazine commissioned an article on white
sharecroppers in the South, which would confirm what Americans
already knew, namely, that they were in deep trouble. The piece was
completed, but it never appeared. Instead, Agee revised it into a book
of four hundred and fifty pages, including thirty-one photographs by
Evans, which was finally published by Houghton Mifflin in 1941, but
sold so poorly that it was remaindered (cf. Stott 1973, 261–264) – only
to be rediscovered following the 1960 re-publication with twice as
many photographs by Evans, by then a famous photographer.
It is impossible to give a conclusive account of the book’s structure
beyond the fact that it is divided up into two books (though Book One
is only five pages long, mainly consisting of quotes from Shakespeare
and Marx) preceded by a foreword by Evans and a preface by Agee. In
the latter, Agee clarifies his and Evans’s ethical and aesthetic aims as
he writes that “the effort is to recognize the stature of a portion of
unimagined existence, and to contrive techniques proper to its
recording, communication, analysis, and defense” (Agee and Evans
1988 [1941], xiv). Agee thus makes it plain from the start that their
book was not going to use the familiar approach emphasizing the
suffering of the dispossessed at a safe distance, but that it was going to
‘defend’ them after truly getting to know them first. Agee and Evans
stayed with a tenant farmer’s family in Alabama for about six weeks in
the summer of 1936 while visiting two others, making possible a
degree of familiarity with their subjects entirely untypical of the genre.
What is more, the techniques that Agee and Evans “contrive[d]” to
record their lives were equally unorthodox. To begin with, Agee
inserted himself into his prose by exposing his most intimate feelings
and desires, thereby flouting the basic rule that documentary be
objective. The reader, as well, is directly addressed, making it difficult
to remain in the position of a distanced observer of other people’s
misfortune. In fact, Agee sarcastically pokes fun at this very attitude,
when he writes: “This is a book about ‘sharecroppers,’ and is written
for all those who have a soft place in their hearts for the laughter and
tears inherent in poverty viewed at a distance, and especially for those
who can afford the retail price” (Agee and Evans 1988 [1941], 14). Even
more challenging perhaps are the sections in the book primarily found
in Part Two titled “Some Findings and Comments,” where Agee
attempts to describe the farmers’ lives in the greatest amount of detail
imaginable, specifically in the areas of money, shelter, clothing,
education, and work. Even as he aims for something that from our
perspective may seem akin to Barthes’s notion of ‘concrete reality,’
Agee is doubtful whether it can be achieved in literature and would
greatly prefer the real thing – or photography, the next best thing –
over writing:
If I could do it, I would do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would
be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and
iron, phials of odors, plates of food and excrement. (Agee and Evans 1988 [1941], 13)

At times, Agee indeed leaves it to Evans to capture objects and spaces

he does not know how to cover in language adequately. As he frankly
acknowledges: “Bareness and space (and spacing) are so difficult and
seem to me of such greatness that I shall not even try to write seriously
or fully of them” (Agee and Evans 1988 [1941], 155).
Evans’s photographs, in contrast to Agee’s excessive prose, are
generally quite reticent, frequently emphasizing empty spaces and the
beauty of objects not usually recognized for anything but their use
value (cf. Böger 1994, 106). Looking at the images, one cannot help but
admire the (unconscious) arrangement of objects which appear
elegantly ordered, as in the image below of the corner of one tenant’s
kitchen, displaying only a handful of objects such as a broom leaning
against a bare wooden wall, a towel hanging on a line, and a chair (cf.
fig. 6). The arrangement is as unobtrusive as it is pleasing to the eye,
and consequently it has been argued that Evans aestheticizes his
subjects’ lives, turning them into art, and thereby undermining the
ideological assumptions of liberal documentary (cf. Böger 1994, 108–
109).
Fig. 6: W. Evans, Corner of kitchen in Floyd Burroughs’ cabin. Hale County, Alabama, 1936,
from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division.
Agee and Evans 1988 [1941], n. pag.

Unlike in the other documentary books discussed so far, in Let Us Now

Praise Famous Men, both media are fully independent of each other
and, what is more, there is no discernible hierarchy between them.
Moreover, the photographs are organized in two sections not directly
related to the text, and there are also no captions explaining what they
depict. Agee acknowledges this innovative approach when he
maintains: “The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text,
are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative” (Agee and
Evans 1988 [1941], xv). In terms of style, text and photographs are
quite different, even conflicting, as argued by Wright Morris, who
adds, however, that “the counterpoint is more fruitful than if the words
and images were on the same plane” (Morris 1979, 466). Indeed, “they
are complementary,” as Orvell notes, “adding a richness to each other
the more we turn from one to the other” (Orvell 1989, 282). To
conclude, not only does Let Us Now Praise Famous Men correspond
most closely to the intermedial ideal as formulated by McCausland, it
is also the only documentary book of those discussed here which takes
seriously not only its subjects, but also the reader’s active role in the
meaning making process.

3 Conclusion
When the United States experienced one of the worst economic
depressions in its history, new modes of representing the crisis had to
be found in order to satisfy America’s collective hunger for ‘news of
itself’, in Alfred Kazin’s well-known turn of phrase. The documentary
book combining photographs and text into one intermedial artifact
effectively responded to this demand. Interestingly, the best-known
documentary books used rather different approaches to representing
reality. As has been argued throughout, it is important to ask in each
case how exactly text and images are brought together, and what
meanings are engendered as a result. The book discussed last, Agee
and Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, corresponds most
closely to the ideal as formulated by Elizabeth McCausland, as it is the
only truly intermedial effort where both media are fully independent
and of equal importance. On the other hand, Famous Men requires
infinitely more work of its readers than the other books discussed here,
precisely because of its refusal to offer simple answers to the problems
it raises throughout (literally) beginning with the questionable ethics
of representing destitute others. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the
publication of Famous Men in 1941 marks not only the end of the
Great Depression, but also that of the documentary book as the
preferred genre of that crisis.

4 Bibliography

4.1 Works Cited

Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
1941. London: Picador Classics, 1988.
Atkin, Albert. “Peirce’s Theory of Signs.” The Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy. Summer 2013 Edition. Ed. Edward N. Zalta.
plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/peirce-semiotics. (1
Aug. 2014).
Barthes, Roland. “The Reality Effect.” The Rustle of Language. 1968.
Transl. Richard Howard. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. 141–148.
Barthes, Roland. “The Photographic Message.” Image – Music – Text.
Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill
and Wang, 1977.
Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” What is
Cinema? Essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray. Foreword by
Jean Renoir. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of
California Press, 1967. 9–16.
Böger, Astrid. Documenting Lives: James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s
‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.’ Frankfurt am Main and New York:
Peter Lang, 1994.
Böger, Astrid. People’s Lives, Public Images: The New Deal
Documentary Aesthetic. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2001.
Böger, Astrid. “Die amerikanische Fotografie.” Visuelle Kulturen der
USA: Zur Geschichte von Malerei, Fotografie, Film, Fernsehen und
Neuen Medien in Amerika. Ed. Christof Decker. Bielefeld:
transcript, 2010. 99–159.
Bourke-White, Margaret. Portrait of Myself. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1963.
Bradley, David. “Introduction.” Richard Wright. Native Son. New
York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002. vii–xix.
Caldwell, Erskine, and Margaret Bourke-White. You Have Seen Their
Faces. 1937. Foreword by Alan Trachtenberg. Athens and London:
Brown Thrasher Books/University of Georgia Press, 1995.
“The Grapes of Wrath: Horace Bristol’s California Photographs.” The
J. Paul Getty Museum, 15 October 2002 – 9 February 2003.
www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/bristol. (4 Aug. 2014).
Gunning, Tom. “What’s the Point of an Index? Or Faking
Photographs.” Still/Moving: between Cinema and Photography. Ed.
 Karen Beckman and Jean Ma. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.
23–40.
Hillenbach, Anne-Kathrin. Literatur und Fotografie: Analysen eines
intermedialen Verhältnisses. Bielefeld: transcript, 2012.
Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern
American Prose Literature. 1942. San Diego etc.: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1982.
Köhnen, Ralph. Das optische Wissen: Mediologische Studien zu einer
Geschichte des Sehens. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2009.
Lange, Dorothea, and Paul S. Taylor. An American Exodus: A Record
of Human Erosion. 1939. Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1999.
McCausland, Elizabeth. “Photographic Books.” The Complete
Photographer 8.43 (Nov. 1942): 2738–2794.
McWilliams, Carey. Rev. of An American Exodus by Dorothea Lange
and Paul S. Taylor. National Review. 12 Feb. 1940. 218.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual
Representation. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1994.
Morris, Wright. “Photographs, Images, and Words.” The American
Scholar 48 (1979): 457–469.
Orvell, Miles. The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in
American Culture, 1880–1940. Chapel Hill and London: University
of North Carolina Press, 1989.
Puckett, John Rogers. Five Photo-Textual Documentaries from the
Great Depression. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research
Press, 1984.
Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements
of New York. 1890. New York: Penguin Classics, 1997.
Rippl, Gabriele. “Intermedialität: Text/Bild-Verhältnisse.” Handbuch
Literatur & Visuelle Kultur. Ed. Claudia Benthien and Brigitte
Weingart. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2014. 140–158.
Ritchin, Fred. After Photography. New York: Norton, 2009.
Stange, Maren. “‘Not What We Seem’: Image and Text in 12 Million
 Black Voices.” Iconographies of Power: The Politics and Poetics of
Visual Representation. Ed. Ulla Haselstein, Berndt Ostendorf, and
Peter Schneck. Heidelberg: Winter, 2003. 173–186.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking Press, 1939.
Stott, William. Documentary Expression and Thirties America.
London, Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Stourdzé, Sam. “Introduction.” Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor. An
American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion. Paris: Jean-Michel
Place, 1999. ccix–ccxiii.
Todorow, Almut. “Intermedialität.” Historisches Wörterbuch der
Rhetorik. Vol. 10: Nachträge A-Z. Ed. Gert Ueding. Berlin and
Boston: De Gruyter, 2012. 400–410.
Wolf, Werner. “Intermediality.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative
Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan.
London and New York: Routledge, 2005. 252–256.
Wright, Richard. 12 Million Black Voices. 1941. Foreword by Noel
Ignatiev. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002.

4.2 Further Reading

Brunet, François. Photography and Literature. London: Reaction
Books, 2009.
Grishakova, Marina, and Marie-Laure Ryan, eds. Intermediality and
Storytelling. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010.
Helbig, Jörg, ed. Intermedialität: Theorie und Praxis eines
interdisziplinären Forschungsgebiets. Berlin: Schmidt, 1998.
Ribbat, Christoph. Blickkontakt: Zur Beziehungsgeschichte
amerikanischer Literatur und Fotografie. Munich: Wilhelm Fink,
2003.
Schröter, Jens, and Joachim Paech, eds. Intermedialität –
Analog/Digital: Theorien, Methoden, Analysen. Munich: Wilhelm
Fink, 2008.
Danuta Fjellestad

10 Nesting – Braiding – Weaving:

Photographic Interventions in
Three Contemporary American
Novels
Abstract: While photography has played an important role in fiction
since the moment of invention of this new visual medium in 1839, it is
only since the late 1990s that we can speak of the widespread presence
of photographic images in fictional narratives. By virtue of being
regarded as bearers of the imprint of the real, photographs are
inevitably in friction with the fictional, especially if they are explicitly
(that is, graphically) displayed rather than implicitly (verbally only)
represented. Focusing on the first (explicit) mode of photographic
presence, the essay examines the different ways of embedding
photographs in narrative. It suggests three broad categories of nesting,
braiding, and weaving to indicate how the processes of reading and
meaning-making are orchestrated by the manner in which
photographic images are inserted into fictional narratives.
Key Terms: Interanimation, photographic image, word-image
interaction

1 The Pictorial Turn (again)

The current eruption of the presence of photographs in fiction should
be viewed as part and parcel of the so-called “pictorial turn,” a term
coined by W. J. T. Mitchell in 1994. At approximately the same time (if
not prior to Mitchell), Gottfried Boehm, a German art historian and
philosopher, proposed the concept of the iconic turn. Both theorists
have recently acknowledged that rather than thinking in terms of
temporal priority, the relation between the concepts of the “pictorial”
versus the “iconic” turn should be regarded as “a parallel wandering in
the forest” (Boehm and Mitchell 2010, 17).
But what exactly does the concept of the pictorial turn entail? In a
letter to Gottfried Boehm, dated June 2006, Mitchell explains that by
the pictorial turn he means “both […] a contemporary paradigm shift
within learned disciplines (one that treats non-verbal representations
with a new kind of respect […]), and as […] ‘a recurrent trope’ that
occurs when a new image-repertoire, or a new technology of image-
production creates widespread anxiety” (Boehm and Mitchell 2010,
20). Elsewhere Mitchell offers a somewhat simpler explanation:
“pictorial turn” refers to “a qualitative shift in the importance of
images driven by their quantitative proliferation” (Mitchell 2010, 37).
Of course Boehm and Mitchell are not alone in talking about “the
fabulous proliferation of images that characterize our media-filled
cultures” (Latour and Weibel 2002, 8); indeed, it would be difficult to
find today an area of contemporary life or an academic discipline that
does not concern itself with images. In short, the saturation of
contemporary culture with images has launched the image as a
particularly urgent topic across a broad range of disciplines,
challenging us to understand anew its nature, function, circuits of
circulation, power, etc. Regarded as replacing the “linguistic turn” (the
term ushered by the collection of essays edited by Richard Rorty in
1967), the “pictorial turn” can be viewed as one of several trends that
collectively constitute the post-postmodern paradigm (cf. Fjellestad
and Engberg 2013).

2 The Photographic Image

Despite – or perhaps because of – the great many attempts by
philosophers, art historians, semioticians, cognitive psychologists, etc.
to define it, the concept of the image remains fuzzy, the fuzziness not
quite dispelled by modifiers such as “verbal,” “mental,” or “graphic,”
although undoubtedly W. J. T. Mitchell’s (1984) typology of the “family
of images” is quite useful. Building on the thought of the philosopher
Charles Sanders Peirce and the art historian Erwin Panofsky, Mitchell
has persistently scrutinized the concept of the image in such
foundational texts as Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986), Picture
Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (1994), and
What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (2005) as
well as numerous essays (cf. Mitchell 2010). However, this is not the
place to launch a survey of theoretical work on the image, as several
contributions to this volume offer good introductions to the central
issues in the debates about the image.
What is of central importance to this essay is the specificity of the
photographic image, its distinction from other images. Publicized as a
scientific discovery, as a breakthrough in chemistry and optics, the
photograph was pronounced revolutionary in its “spontaneous
reproduction of the images of nature” (Daguerre 1980, 11).
Photographs’ mechanical (or, to be correct, photochemical) mode of
production constitutes the foundation of theoretical thought on
photography. According to André Bazin, photography offers “an image
of the world […] formed automatically, without the creative
intervention of man” (Bazin 1960, 7). For Susan Sontag, a photograph
is “a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint of a
death mask” (Sontag 1977, 154). The metaphors of “trace” and
“footprint” are also used by Rosalind Krauss, who sees photography as
“an imprint or transfer of the real; it is a photo-chemically processed
trace causally connected to that thing in the world to which it refers in
a manner parallel to that of fingerprints or footprints” (Krauss 1986,
110). By virtue of it being a physical impression of the real world, the
photograph has been linked to objectivity and truth; even in what
William J. Mitchell (1992) has dubbed the “post-photographic era,” an
era of digital rather than photomechanical images, the belief in the
evidentiary and documentary nature of the photographic image
endures and underpins our attitude and understanding of
photographs.
So it is this persistent perception of the photograph as a truthful
record of the real world that is commonly proposed as distinct for this
type of image. This “myth of photographic truth” (Sturken and
Cartwright 2001, 17) has been, of course, the object of intensive
critique in recent years, since digital technology allows for easy
manipulation of images (cf. William J. Mitchell 1992). However,
creativity and artfulness have accompanied photography from the very
start: any photograph is a result of various processes of selection,
framing, posing, cropping, exposure rate, filters, developing, etc. (cf.
Gunning 2008). More than that: ever since its invention, photography
has been used for fictive purposes. As, for instance, Daniel A. Novak
shows, in the nineteenth century re-touching of photographs was an
accepted practice; popular too was the so-called “composition”
photography, that is, a photograph created from several negatives so
that a seemingly single body was de facto “sutured together from
different models” (Novak 2008, 2–3).
While photographs belong to the category of “proper” (graphic)
images (Mitchell 1984, 506), they are also pictures, that is, material
objects. The picture, Mitchell explains, is “material support” for the
image, understood as an “immaterial entity”; the image, Mitchell
further states, can never appear “except in some medium or other”
(Mitchell 2008, 16). However, when photographic reproductions are
found in fictional narratives, Mitchell’s distinction between images and
pictures is given a special twist: The photographs function not only as
“material support” but they themselves (or, to be more correct, their
reproductions) become images.

3 Photography and Literature: Implicit and

Explicit Presences
The relationship between literature and photography has been
complex and full of tensions ever since the moment of the “birth” of
this new visual medium in 1839, when the daguerreotype and the
calotype were publicly announced. Fascination and fear, suspicion and
enthusiasm, enchantment and disgust are some of the sentiments that
prominently figure in writers’ comments on photography. Ambivalent
feelings about photography’s representational powers haunt many
literary texts as well; how troubled the cross-fertilization between
literature and photography (especially as regards their shared concern
with realism) has been over the years is quite well known, thanks to
the work of numerous critics (cf. Shloss 1987; Rabb 1995; Armstrong
1999; Hughes and Noble 2003b; Novak 2008; Brunet 2009; 8
Nineteenth-century Literature and Photography).
Given the documented richness of literature’s concern with
photography, it may be useful to distinguish between implicit (verbal)
and explicit (graphic) modes of the photographic presence in fictional
narratives. Photography is implicitly present in fiction when it is
verbally evoked to function as a literary motif, theme, or subject
matter. One of the earliest examples of this type of fiction is Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables (1851) in which the figure of the
daguerreotypist, Holgrave, plays an important role. Photography’s
(vulgar and devastating) power is also the subject matter in Henry
James’s short story “The Real Thing” (1892). However, even if
literature has shown a penchant for photography from the start, it is in
postmodernism that we can observe a real boom in fictional narratives
that center on photography. Of the numerous photography-focused
novels one can mention Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of
Billy the Kid (1970) and Coming Through Slaughter (1976), Paul
Theroux’s Picture Palace (1978), Richard Powers’s Three Farmers on
Their Way to Dance (1985; 21 Intermedial Encounters in the
Contemporary North American Novel), Helen Humphrey’s Afterimage
(2000) or Penelope Lively’s The Photograph (2004). Literary fiction’s
surge of interest in photography has prompted some critics to speak of
the emergence of a subgenre of “photofiction” (cf. MacLaine 1991;
Pohlad 2002).
The subgenre of “photofiction” also encompasses a different mode of
path-crossing between literature and photography: It is when
photographs are tangibly present as graphic images. Until recently it
was quite rare to find a novel in which a photographic image was
graphically reproduced; an occasional incorporation of a photograph
in fiction was meant to be illustrative, and was routinely regarded as
such. Deeply suspicious of photography in general, Henry James, for
instance, agreed to have Alvin Langdon Coburn’s photographs feature
as frontispieces in the New York edition of his novels. These
photographs, James insisted, should function as “complementary,
noninterfering, and generalizing illustrations” (qtd. in Bogardus 1984,
5), echoing at a distance the text’s ideas but not competing with words.
A more extensive use of photographs is found in Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando (1928): the first edition of the novel included nine
photographs meant to depict the different incarnations of the main
character (cf. Dickey 2010). Generally, though, photographs as
illustrations were shunned for emotional and economic reasons, as
Jane M. Rabb explains: “The combination of authors who disdained
illustrative help (or mistrusted possible competition) and their
publishers who feared the additional expense of including photographs
discouraged significant collaborations” (Rabb 1995, xliii). However,
the closer we get to our times, the more common is the physical
presence of photographs in fiction.
The steadily growing corpus of fiction that explicitly incorporates
photographic images is bordered by two extremes. On the one hand,
there may be a single photograph (often in a paratextual position)
inserted in the narrative. This is the case in Richard Brautigan’s Trout
Fishing in America (1967): the novella’s opening lines draw the
reader’s attention to the photograph on the cover of the book, but
beyond that photographs are not physically present. The other extreme
is the photo-novel (sometimes spelled photonovel or fotonovel): a
series of photographs (often from a film or a TV show) systematically
combined with captions or speech balloons (cf. Baetens and Bleyen
2010; 11 The Photographic Novel). In-between these two extremes
we find a great variety of ways in which photographic images are
incorporated into fictional narratives. In, for instance, William H.
Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968) or Jamaica Kincaid’s
Autobiography of My Mother (1995) we find a single photographic
image reproduced multiple times; in most novels the reader will come
across an array of photographic images incorporated within the
narrative. Apart from the three novels that serve as case studies in this
handbook chapter, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000),
Lane Olsen’s Girl Imagined by Chance (2002), Barbara Hodgson’s
Lives of Shadows (2004), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and
Incredibly Close (2006), and Lauren Groff’s The Monsters of
Templeton (2008) should be mentioned here as prominent examples
of literary texts that incorporate photographs.
Inevitably, the presence of photographic images invokes the themes
of personal and collective memory, testimony, death, and spectrality,
discussed broadly by theorists and critics alike (cf. Sontag 1977;
Barthes 1981; Hirsch 1997; Adams 2000). These themes are
particularly potent in the rather rare cases when photographs of people
are included in narrative. That pictures of people are uncommon in
novels is not surprising: characters are obviously fictional, they do not
exist apart from the words generating them, while photographs are
regarded as documenting real-life existence. When photographs of
people are re-contextualized from their real life contexts (be it from the
sphere of a private family album or from public archives such as
newspapers or museums) into the context of fictional narrative, they
introduce an element of foreignness and disturbance to a much greater
degree than in the case of photographs of places or even groups of
people. When the documentary and the fictional clash and the line of
demarcation between fiction and non-fiction is breached, ambiguity
and confusion flare up.
Generally, photographs in novels do not merely support a specific
narrative element but interact with narrative to co-create meaning;
they cannot be relegated to illustrations. Actually, the very concept of
“illustration” as merely echoing or shadowing words is illusory, as J.
Hillis Miller (1992), among others, convincingly argues. That
photographs in fictional narratives are never neutral is the basic
premise of my argument; photographs never just mirror, double, or
parallel what is said in the text. Rather, the photographic image and
the text enter a complex process of interdependent storytelling. To use
Meek’s term, they “interanimate” (1992, 177) each other through
augmentation, amplification, extension, contradiction, counterpoint,
and other processes. (Here I am loosely drawing upon the large body of
critical work on the so-called “picturebooks”; cf. Schwarcz 1982;
Nikolajeva and Scott 2001.) But even if photographic images and text
always construct the story together, photographs can be embedded
into the narrative in different ways and co-produce meaning to
different degrees. In what follows I want to suggest three broad
categories of nesting, braiding, and weaving which can be used to
indicate the structuring of “interanimation” between the two media.

3.1 Nesting, Braiding, Weaving

In an effort to think through media interactions, W. J. T. Mitchell first
mentions the practices of braiding and nesting in “Medium Theory:
Preface to the 2003 Critical Inquiry Symposium.” He returns to the
two concepts in a later article, “There Are No Visual Media” (Mitchell
2005), in which he defines the phenomenon of “nesting” as an
appearance of one medium “inside another as its content” (Mitchell
2005, 262). To exemplify the practice of nesting, Mitchell refers to
films such as Network and Wag the Dog in which television becomes
their content. Even ekphrasis, he writes, may be regarded as a form of
nesting, although “the ‘other’ medium, the visual, graphic, or plastic
object, is never made visible or tangible except by way of the medium
of language” (Mitchell 2005, 263). We can speak of the phenomenon of
“braiding” (glossed as “mixed media,” in “Medium Theory,” 2004,
334), Mitchell explains, “when one sensory channel or semiotic
function is woven together with another more or less seamlessly”
(2004, 262). His example of “braiding” is the cinematic technique of
synchronized sound.
The concepts of nesting and braiding as understood by Mitchell are
problematic when we deal with photographic images that are tangibly
present in narrative: the two media cannot seamlessly work together,
the image is always perceived as standing apart from the verbal
medium. However, Mitchell’s categories are highly suggestive, so I
would like to appropriate the terms but to do so in ways vastly
unfaithful to his line of inquiry. I also would like to add a third term,
that of weaving. The concepts of nesting, braiding, and weaving can be
used to indicate how the interaction between the narrative and the
photographic image is set up, that is, in what ways photographs are
embedded in the narrative. How images are inserted into fictional
narratives matters, because this orchestrates the processes of reading
and meaning-making. Thus the three terms also indicate the (relative)
degree of intensity of interanimation between the linguistic and the
visual medium.
At the core of each term lies, of course, its dictionary meaning. Thus
nesting evokes the processes of fitting one within another; it carries
associations with safety and sheltering; above all, it suggests place and
habitat. Braiding entails joining together several threads, each
component strand zigzagging forward through the overlapping mass of
the others; it implies linearity rather than place. In weaving, the
interlacing of two threads at right angles produces a fabric, that is,
surface; weaving conjures up associations with webs and intricate
patterns.
Always visually separated from the verbal medium, photographic
images can be variously embedded in the narrative to marshal shifts
between reading and viewing. In nesting the image that appears in
close proximity to the text arrests the reader’s eye, the visual biding the
reader’s time. In braiding the reader is made to actively search for
semantic signals that would indicate the photographic image’s relation
to the story elements; the interanimation between word and image
emerges gradually in the process of linear reading. In weaving, the
photographic image and the text work in tandem on each page: the
reader’s attention is constantly shuttling between the two media, the
acts of reading the verbal and viewing the pictorial comparable to the
work of weft and warp. These three broad categories are meant to
signal certain dominant tendencies rather than exclusive practices in
any single narrative. The three case studies below exemplify how the
categories can be employed in discussions of novels that embed
photographs.

4 Three Case Studies

4.1 Preamble to Case Studies

In the following, I consider how photographs are embedded in three
novels: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2011) by
Ransom Riggs, The Lazarus Project (2008) by Aleksandar Hemon,
and Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of
Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion,
and Jewelry (2009) by Leanne Shapton. Riggs’s gothic fantasy,
Hemon’s travelogue, and Shapton’s experimental narrative all flirt
with the genre of memoir and/or auto/biography, with which
photographs have “a natural affinity” (Hughes and Noble 2003a, 6),
not least to justify the inclusion of photographs of people.
My interest here is not in reading the photographs per se; nor is
their participation in meaning production my main focus. Rather, to
understand the type of partnership – or medial relation – between
photographic images and fictional narrative, I find it useful to look at
the formal arrangements of photographs in fiction. Some of the
questions that guide my inquiry are: Where in the text do photographs
appear? Is there a pattern to how they are embedded? What is their
relation to diegesis? To which of the story elements do the images
relate? Are we dealing with snapshots or studio photographs? What
information is given about the provenance of the photographs and how
does this matter? By asking these and similar questions I want to draw
attention to the processes of interanimation between words and
images, to the fact that photographs in fiction are encountered over a
sequence of pages. An analysis of formal aspects of the text-
photographic image interactions is not, of course, a goal in itself: it
allows us to better understand the complex production of meaning
through the interplay of the photograph and the narrative.
Two reminders might not be amiss at this point. First, theoretical
investigations of the image are being conducted simultaneously at
different geographical locations; to give a thorough account of the
ongoing research is an impossible task. Even if the area is restricted to
Europe and North America only, it becomes quickly apparent that the
dialogue and exchange of ideas tends to be hampered by language
barriers. For instance, the work on the image by key European figures
such as Gottfried Boehm, Jacques Rancière, and Jan Baetens have
become widely known only after their books and essays were
translated into English. Second, we have to keep in mind that claims
about images replacing words are not new; indeed, they seem to
reappear with some regularity. For instance, four decades before W. J.
T. Mitchell, Daniel J. Boorstin (1962) claimed that image-thinking had
replaced “thinking in ideals” (Boorstin 1962, 197); blurring our sense
of reality, images, according to him, constitute a “jungle” in which “we
live our daily lives” (Boorstin 1962, 261). Thus a longer historical
(diachronic) perspective is a necessary corrective to synchronic studies
of the image.

4.2 Ransom Riggs: Miss Peregrine’s Home for

Peculiar Children (2011)
In Ransom Riggs’s novel, we follow the adventures of Jacob Portman,
the story’s protagonist-narrator. When he was a child, Jacob enjoyed
listening to his grandfather’s tales about the “peculiar” children among
whom Grandpa Abe Portman – then a teenager himself – lived for a
while. Now sixteen years old, Jacob is trying to cope with his beloved
grandpa’s recent and horrific death. In an attempt to recover Abe’s life
story, Jacob leaves his town in Florida for a (fictional) Cairnholm Isle
off the coast of Wales in search of the orphanage where his grandfather
spent some time at the beginning of World War II. On his first visit,
Jacob finds the children’s home in ruins; on revisiting it, however, he
is mysteriously transferred back in time to the day before the German
air raid destroyed the orphanage. The place intact, Jacob meets the
“peculiar” children which his grandfather talked about: a boy called
Millard, who can make himself invisible; Olive, a girl who can levitate;
Emma, who can make fire with her bare hands; Hugh, who is host to a
swarm of bees; and many, many others, all taken care of by the
headmistress Miss Peregrine. Initially visiting the time loop every day,
Jacob eventually decides to abandon his normal life and remain with
the children.
If the characters in the novel are “peculiar,” so too are the over forty
photographs embedded in the narrative. These antique black-and-
white photographs are (with a couple of exceptions) snapshots and
studio images of (predominantly) children portrayed in eye-catching
costumes and/or poses. The presence of the photographs is diegetically
motivated: as a narrator, Jacob not only tells the reader about his
adventures but also repeatedly draws the reader’s attention to the
presence of the photographs and provides prompts as to what to look
at and how to respond. And thus the reader receives information about
the provenance of the photographs: some of them belonged to Jacob’s
grandfather who kept the photographs in a cigar box; many of the
pictures are found by Jacob in the trunk that he discovers in the ruins
of the orphanage; a couple, we are informed, are exhibits in the local
Welsh museum; a few come from the boy’s family album. Prior to each
photograph’s physical occurrence in the narrative, the reader is
introduced to it by Jacob, who identifies its motif and its peculiar
elements and registers his emotional response to the photograph. For
instance, Jacob tells us about looking at a photo of “an unhappy young
contortionist doing a frightening backbend” (Riggs 2011, 45); on
turning two pages (both featuring photographs), the reader can see the
image too (cf. fig. 1). The same goes for a photograph of “a pair of
freakish twins […] dressed in the weirdest costumes” (Riggs 2011, 45);
the twins make a second appearance later on in the narrative, when
Jacob comes across yet another photograph of “two masked ruffle-
collared kids who seemed to be feeding each other a coil of ribbon”
(111; cf. fig. 2 and fig. 3).

Fig. 1: Riggs 2011, 49.

Fig. 2: Riggs 2011, 50.

Fig. 3: Riggs 2011, 115.

Repeatedly, the narrator informs the reader that he finds the

photographs bizarre (Riggs 2011, 45), creepy (110), and haunting. The
photographs, Jacob states, can “give any kid bad dreams” (Riggs 2011,
45); they are “fuel for nightmares” (111). What makes the photographs
eerie? This question is first explicitly raised in the novel’s prologue, in
which Jacob recollects how his grandfather, trying to convince the then
seven-year-old grandson about the veracity of his bizarre tales, shows
him a few “wrinkled and yellowing snapshots” (Riggs 2011, 10). Abe
Portman’s gesture echoes Sontag’s claim that “photographs furnish
evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when
we’re shown a photograph of it” (Sontag 1977, 5). However, as if
picking on Sontag’s “seems,” the novel shows that this authentication
gesture fails: Jacob finds the photographs unconvincing, their
documentary function undercut by elements which bespeak the
supernatural instead. To cope with this tension between the real and
the unreal within the photographs, Jacob decides that the photos are
simply “fakes” (Riggs 2011, 16). An even older Jacob re-examines the
photographs for the possible ways in which they may have been
manipulated; the levitating child, he speculates, may have been
“suspended by something hidden in the dark doorway behind her”
(Riggs 2011, 45). The manipulation theory, however, is finally
abandoned and the unconditional “truth” of the photographs is
asserted as Jacob enters the “time loop” and meets the children. Thus,
by having Jacob ponder the fakery and deceit of the photographs only
to prove him wrong, the novel mischievously asserts photography’s
power to document the fantastic.
Quite often, the reader is informed about the (fictional) name of the
person in the photograph; this act of bestowing individuality through
narrative goes against what Barthes (1981, 13–14) presents as
photography’s power to transform subjects into objects. It would seem
that if death, as Barthes (1981, 15) asserts, is the eidos of the
photograph, resurrection could be seen as the eidos of narrative. In
Riggs’s novel, however, this opposition is complicated, since the
pictures themselves are presented as having the power to conjure
people to life. Nowhere is it expressed more clearly than when Jacob,
now re-visiting the orphanage, discovers a trunk with photographs. As
he is looking at the pictures, he notices “a half dozen kids kneeling
around the craggy jaws of broken floor, peering down.” It takes him a
moment to realize that their faces appear familiar because he has seen
them in photographs. Jacob becomes a focal point, the pictures
“staring up” at him, “the children star[ing] down” (Riggs 2011, 117).
While all the photographs are narratively nested in the fictional
world, the way in which they are embedded in the narrative
underscores their otherness as a medium. Each photograph is
reproduced on a separate page; each is displayed against chocolate-
brown background, thin double white lines marking the margins of the
page. Most of the images are themselves framed by white borders
typical of old-fashioned photographs (cf. fig. 4). The complex play of
frames creates the impression of the photographs’ having been glued
onto the pages. This visual and formal arrangement of images draws
attention to photographs as material objects, foreign to the narrative,
their proper home – their nest, so to speak – a family album. This
multiplication of formal markers of the photographs’ ‘otherness,’ of
their medial difference from the narrative into which they have been
re-nested, both augments the story-line of Jacob’s encounters with
“peculiar” children and relays peculiarity onto the encounter between
the two media.

Fig. 4: Riggs 2011, 13.

The photographs that the reader encounters are, we are reminded

throughout the narrative, re-located from their “original” (though
fictional) sites to accompany Jacob’s tale. But they also cross
ontological levels: as “emanations” of the referent (Barthes 1981, 80),
they insert the real world into the fictional one. A note at the end of
Riggs’s book informs the reader that all the pictures are authentic and,
mostly, reproduced in an unaltered state. The photographs, we read,
were lent from the personal archives of ten collectors, people who have spent years and
countless hours hunting through giant bins of unsorted snapshots at flea markets and
antiques malls and yard sales to find a transcendent few, rescuing images of historical
significance and arresting beauty from obscurity – and, most likely, the dump. (Riggs
2011, 350)
The note creates an interesting homology between the “orphaned”
material artifacts and the narrative about parentless children. Rescued
from extinction (the dump), the photographs of the children are like
the characters themselves, miraculously saved from death in a Nazi
aerial attack and, like them, they live in a time warp (the nest) that the
narrative creates.

4.3 Aleksandar Hemon: The Lazarus Project

(2008)
The Lazarus Project (2008) by the Bosnian-American writer
Aleksandar Hemon is framed as a familiar postmodern story-about-
writing-a-story: the main character-narrator, Vladimir Brik, an émigré
Bosnian newspaper columnist, gives an account of his attempts to
write a book about the so-called Averbuch affair. Lazarus Averbuch, a
historical figure, was a survivor of Eastern European pogroms and
refugee camps who immigrated to the United States at the beginning of
the twentieth century. On March 2, 1908, he was shot to death by the
Chicago Chief of Police, George Shippy. The circumstances of the
shooting never having been clarified, Averbuch was thought of as a
dangerous anarchist by some, and as a helpless victim of American
xenophobia by others. To recover the story of the nineteen-year-old
Jew, Brik embarks on a research trip to Averbuch’s birthplace,
Kishinev, as well as to other places to which the young man could be
connected. An old photographer friend from his Sarajevo days, Rora,
accompanies Brik on his travels to Ukraine, Moldova, and, eventually,
Sarajevo.
As most commentators point out, The Lazarus Project abounds in
echoes and parallels between characters, themes, incidents, and motifs
(cf. Shine 2008; Levy 2009; Weiner 2014). And thus the immigrant
experiences of the narrator, Brik, are not unlike those – mutatis
mutandis – of the subject of his inquiry, Averbuch, in that both
experience American fear and suspicion of foreigners. Olga, Lazarus’s
sister, finds her counterpart in Rora’s sister, Azra. There are even two
American journalists, both called Miller: one, William P. Miller, who
reported on the Averbuch case for the Chicago Tribune, and another
Miller, who covered the Yugoslav war for American audiences. The
narrator himself draws parallels between the sociopolitical climate of
his post-9/11 U.S.A. and the widespread xenophobia a century earlier:
“The war against anarchism,” he writes, “was much like the current
war on terror,” adding sarcastically: “funny how old habits never die”
(Hemon 2008, 42). Beyond the numerous parallels drawn within the
narrative, there are also those between the narrator, Vladimir Brik,
and the author Aleksandar Hemon: both are natives of Sarajevo of
Ukrainian origin, both came to Chicago on a visit and were forced to
stay in the United States due to the outbreak of war in what was then
Yugoslavia; raised in Christian families, both marry American women,
work as teachers, and write a column in a local paper in Chicago.
Brik’s research into a historical event and the presence of Rora and
his camera constitute a double justification for the twenty-three
photographs embedded into the narrative. Of the twenty-three images,
eleven are reprints of historical photographs, most of which were
originally published in the Chicago Daily News in the years 1904–
1919. The remaining twelve, presumably taken by Ahmed Rora
Halilbašić and meant to ‘document’ his and Brik’s journey through
Eastern Europe, are the work of Velibor Božović, a Montréal-based
photographer from Bosnia-Herzegovina. Critics (cf. Weiner 2014)
customarily point out that the historical and the new photographs
alternate in accordance with the two story-lines of Lazarus and Brik.
While correct, this observation is based on paratextually provided
information about the provenance of each photograph rather than
anchored in what can be gleaned from the photographs themselves,
since the look and design of both sets of photographs – the archival
and the contemporary – are almost indistinguishable. Velibor Božović
has stylized his photographs based on the historical ones so that both
sets of images share the same turn-of-the-twentieth-century
aesthetics: they are in black and white; in some pictures the contrast
between white and black is conspicuously stark while in others there
seem to be but grades of gray; many photographs are slightly out of
focus, blurry, and watery, echoing the distinct Sebaldian foggy,
mournful stylistics (cf. Patt and Dillbohner 2007); the corners of each
photograph are slightly rounded, increasing the look-alike quality.
None of the photographs are captioned, although two of the historical
ones are identified by (hardly legible) hand-written inscriptions in
white: one of these identifies the image of Chief Shippy’s house, the
other of Lazarus himself in the company of one “Capt. Evans Police
Dept.”
The fogginess of the photographic images, their eerie atmosphere,
undercuts the documentary function with which photography is
consistently linked and introduces an element of hallucination and
phantasmagoria. Rather than authenticating, it corrodes the truth-
value of the images, not least due to the way in which the images are
embedded in the narrative, as I will show below. In the novel this
spectral aura of the photographs resonates with the themes of
“resurrecting” the story of Lazarus Averbuch and uncovering historical
truth, an undertaking that ultimately fails. “The haze of history and
pain” (Hemon 2008, 1), which the narrator registers in the opening
line of the novel, is not dispersed at the end of it. The aesthetics of the
photographic images in the novel seems to contradict Barthes’s (1981,
9) claim that photographs return the dead to life; instead, this
aesthetics places the dead in the uncannily timeless zone between life
and death. (This is powerfully visualized in the menacing images of
Lazarus as a “living dead” person – cf. fig. 6 and fig. 7 discussed
below).
The intertwining of the historical with the newly taken photographs
appears to echo the doubling of the two main storylines (Averbuch’s
and Brik’s). However, on closer inspection both the narrative and the
photographs are orchestrated in a more complex way, often by
triangulation. Let us look at the photograph of two young men in wide-
brimmed tall hats, one wearing a dotted ribbon tie, both, slightly
smiling, are staring directly at the reader/viewer (cf. fig. 5). Who are
the men? The story teases with two possibilities. The distinct
antiquarian look of the clothes encourages us to think that we see
Lazarus and his friend, Isador, but for the fact that both were too poor
to wear the rather fancy clothes of the two men depicted. The other
feasible explanation is that it is a picture of Brik and Rora, also close
friends. But why would they wear such period clothes? Eventually the
narrative that follows allows the reader to identify the two men in the
photograph as actors: Brik briefly refers to watching Rora take
photographs of costume-dressed citizens of Chisinau as they were
rehearsing a play.
Fig. 5: From Hemon 2008, 202.
Copyright Velibor Božović; reproduced with permission.

The uncertainty regarding which narrative elements to tie the

photographs to is the result of the way the images are embedded in the
novel. In a manner similar to that employed in Miss Peregrine’s Home
for Peculiar Children, in The Lazarus Project each photographic
reproduction appears on a separate page. However, in Hemon’s novel
photographic images are interspersed throughout the narrative in a
different manner: rather than appearing within the chapters, the
photographs are placed in the ambiguous zone between them,
simultaneously linking and separating the chapters. Smallish in size,
each photograph is placed at the center of an otherwise black verso
page. Quite often what the reader first sees on having read a chapter is
not even the photograph itself but a completely black recto page that
functions as the reverse of the image. This visual separateness of the
photographs is narratively augmented: diegetic references to the
images are often oblique; when explicit, they are always very brief, easy
to miss. Importantly, whatever references to the photographs may be
found in narrative, they are all analeptic, that is, they come after the
photograph has been seen and they are never given in its vicinity.
Unlike in Riggs’s novel, the photographs in The Lazarus Project are
not simply nested in the narrative but demand the reader’s active
construction of links: the reader is urged to braid images with the
story.
To complicate the text-image interaction, some of the photographs
that appear in the novel as material artifacts are brought together with
images that are either only alluded to or that are embedded through
ekphrasis. This is the case with the central image, that of Lazarus,
photographed post-mortem, his body staged as if he were just sitting
upright in a chair, his head held by a police officer who stands behind
the chair, staring straight into the camera. The morbid photograph,
reproduced twice (once en face and once in profile, cf. fig. 6 and fig. 7),
finds its equivalent in the infamous Abu Ghraib pictures that are
mentioned in the narrative by Brik, and in a photograph that Rora
recollects having taken during the Yugoslav war, that of Rambo, a
criminal-turned-rebel leader, “sitting on top of a corpse of one of our
soldiers, some poor sap who stood up to him in front of the wrong
audience – the boy’s eyes were glassy and wide open in surprise,
Rambo on his chest with a cigarette in his mouth, as if he were in a
commercial for a vacation in Iraq” (Hemon 2008, 183).
Fig. 6: From Hemon 2008, 52.
Chicago History Museum DN-0005898; reproduced with permission.
Fig. 7: From Hemon 2008, 240.
Chicago History Museum DN-0005897; reproduced with permission.

It is indeed Rora and his experiences during the siege of Sarajevo in

the early 1990s that constitute a third narrative strand in The Lazarus
Project. The narrative offers quite a bit of information about Rora’s
family background and his life. This “Baš Čaršija boy” (Hemon 2008,
36), of a wealthy Muslim family, was a rebellious entrepreneur even as
a teenager. He survived the Sarajevo siege by selling his
photographer’s services both to Rambo, a seasoned Čaršija gangster
who rose to prominence as a Bosnian rebel leader in the 1990s, and to
the American journalist, Miller, who reported on the Sarajevo conflict.
Although assigned the role of photographer to Brik’s tale, Rora doubles
as a story teller: his stories of grim incidents from the Sarajevo war and
his “Murjo” jokes are interspaced throughout the novel, sometimes
creating contact zones between and sometimes counterpoints to the
Lazarus and Brik story lines.
Fig. 8: From Hemon 2008, n. pag.
Copyright Velibor Božović; reproduced with permission.

Rora’s presence is uncannily inscribed in the very first photographic

image that the reader sees (cf. fig. 8). Placed paratextually on the verso
to the title page, this frontis-piece image portrays a man in front of a
mirror, his back turned to the reader. His face is only partially reflected
by the mirror, his features fuzzy. What makes the photograph
perturbing is the fact that the man is not looking at his reflection in the
mirror but at something else, something unavailable to our gaze: the
photographer taking the picture. The photographer’s position is
aligned with the position of the readers/ viewers: it is as if the man in
the photograph were looking at us looking. That tripling rather than
coupling is the dynamic in the photograph is additionally suggested by
the arrangement of the frames: the broad white frame of the mirror is
(partially) framed by the interior, grayish in tone. The photograph is
then framed – like all the other images in the novel – by broad black
margins of the page. The spatiality of the image is punctured by signs
of movement: the fleeting nature of a mirror gaze, the jacket caught
sliding down (or is it up?) the shoulders, the (invisible) arms raised to
adjust the front of the shirt, the hardly visible ribbon bow, the two
horizontal lines to the right of the man’s head, all suggest transition
and change.
This frontispiece picture, signaling the importance of photographs in
the novel, draws the reader’s/viewer’s attention to what is not visible,
to the absences and erasures as well as to what is actually available to
the eye. What we do see is framed, and the framing sets in motion
guesswork as to what is left out of the picture. It is to signal the
complex process of gradual interlacing of what is seen with what is said
and with what is withheld that the concept of braiding is meant to
imply.

4.4 Leanne Shapton: Important Artifacts and

Personal Property from the Collection of
Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including
Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry (2009)
My third case study is a strikingly unorthodox novel. Leanne Shapton’s
Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of
Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion,
and Jewelry (2009) consists of a series of black-and-white
photographic images of a staggering variety of objects: sunglasses and
bathing suits; pajamas and fortune cookies; books, CDs, and theatre
tickets; perfume bottles and bottles of wine; phone bills and chipped
mugs; Christmas tree ornaments and kitchen utensils; postcards,
hand-written notes, e-mail offprints, and numerous photographs. All
the objects are private, some even intimate, as is the case with a group
of eighteen bras on pages 112–113. Numbered from 1001 to 1332, each
“lot” (which may comprise one or several pictures) is priced and
described in the laconic, formulaic style of an auction catalogue. Lot
1329, for instance, is labeled “A dog’s head eggcup” and specified as
“One porcelain dog’s head eggcup. Made in Germany. 2¾ x 2¼ in.
$10–12” (Shapton 2009, 127). The chunks of text that accompany each
image are largely descriptive; occasionally, however, these terse
captions are supplemented with reproductions of snippets of text and,
sometimes, are even appended with an explanatory comment. This is
the case with, for instance, lot 1112, titled “A three-piece suit,” which,
apart from the basic information that the lot is “A vintage brown wool
tweed three-piece suit, label inside reading ‘Made in Poland,’” provides
further identification: “Given to Morris by Doolan on Thanksgiving
2003. Laid into the vest is a homemade card reading ‘Happy
Anniversary Hal! Much love and endless tweed, Lenore.’ $40–60.” A
comment that follows (in a font much smaller than that of the caption
text) reads: “Included is a photograph of the couple, taken by Jason
Frank. Morris is wearing the suit” (Shapton 2009, 43).
Such “expanded” captions provide prompts for the reader to see the
photographed objects not as a random assemblage of items brought
together in an auction catalogue, but as documenting various moments
in the trajectory of the relationship between two characters whose
photographs (itemized as lots 1001 and 1002 respectively) open the
novel. Lenore Doolan, age 26, writes a food column for the New York
Times, and Harold “Hal” Morris, age 39, a globetrotting commercial
photographer. Lenore and Hal first meet at a Halloween party in 2002,
he dressed as Harry Houdini (an illusionist and stunt performer
famous for his sensational escape acts), and she as Lizzie Borden (a
late-nineteenth-century American woman accused of murdering her
father and stepmother), as we learn from the caption to lot 1005,
which is the first photograph in which Morris and Doolan are featured
together. The relationship – at the beginning passionate, toward the
end quite tempestuous – lasts four years; in 2006 the couple break up,
their personal property is to be auctioned, ironically enough, on
Valentine’s Day in 2009. The power of personal possessions to narrate
identities, of intimate relations between things and memory, of trivia
as bearers of affects, of the processes by which detritus is turned into
precious mementos, of objects becoming artifacts are some of the
themes of Shapton’s novel.
But these themes, like the story itself, emerge – or, to be correct, can
be pieced together – gradually, as the reader gleans bits of information
from both the verbal and the visual material. The reader/viewer is
compelled to create links between the various lots, between the various
snippets of verbal and visual information, to interpret hints and clues,
and, last but not least, to fill out numerous blanks. Whom did Hal call
for the total amount of $800 when he was staying at the Hotel
Bangalore (lot 1312)? Why is Doolan’s handwritten list, reading “Pros:
Fun, good sex, different world, travel, art / Cons: Depressive –
drinking? celebrity fixation, bad breath, always traveling, doesn’t
care about food, withholdi ng,” pictured as a five-times-folded piece of
paper (lot 1106)? What was in lots 1064, 1065, and 1200, which are
listed as “removed”? Why are close to sixty lots not accompanied by a
picture? Such visual and verbal ellipses whet the reader’s/viewer’s
appetite for the deleted, the untold, and the unseen while at the same
time overwhelming him/her with an excess of visual information.
Connecting pictures and captions, the reader may notice a broad
spectrum of interactions: sometimes the relations appear to be almost
symmetrical (the picture and the caption conveying more or less the
same information), sometimes images enhance the words and vice
versa; at times the image and text diverge or even contradict each
other (the caption for lot 1102, for instance, announces a series of
twenty-four photographs but only four are reproduced). These
interactions are orchestrated in ways radically different from the two
cases previously discussed: the pictures are not intermittently inserted
into the pages of the narrative but co-exist with text on the same page
(or spread). Although text and image are systematically linked together
via numbers, the captions are not always placed in close proximity to
the pictures. While the photographs are often placed at the top of the
page with the captions below, sometimes the images and the captions
are arranged in vertical columns; on one occasion (lot 1020) the verso
page is completely filled with text and the recto one with images only.
Irregularity also informs the image-text ratio: some pages are
dominated by an image (fig. 9); on others (fig. 10) the image and the
accompanying text are given equal space; in yet other instances the
situation is more ambiguous, since the image contains a text that is
reproduced in the caption (fig. 11). The text and the photo seem to
compete for primacy, the pictures at times taking the lead role, at times
the text dislodging the photograph, as is the case when lots, though
listed and described, are not accompanied by a picture at all. These
lots, glossed as “not illustrated,” are mostly printouts of e-mails and
paper clippings whose contents are (at least partly) transcribed. Such
lots shift emphasis from picture to word. Lot 1062, for instance,
identified as “a handwritten note,” is described as follows: “A note on a
Post-it dated May 10, 2003. Reads: ‘Lenore, I’m sorry we fought last
night. I will give you a call from my hotel. H x.’ 3 x 3 in. Not
illustrated. $10–20.”
Fig. 9: Copyright 2009 by Leanne Shapton; reproduced with permission of Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, LLC. Shapton 2009, 70.

Such capricious word-image arrangements make the reader’s eye

traverse the page in a variety of ways to combine reading and viewing,
the verbal and the visual medium demanding active synthesis. To tell
the story, the photographs and captions work in tandem; the two
media are woven together to co-create the intricate tapestry of the love
affair. Shapton’s archetypal story about a romance gone sour is
particularized in two ways. First, the photographs of the various
artifacts are fashioned as “personal property” of the two lovers through
explanatory captions. Second, the aesthetics of a “clean, detached,
cold, still-life image” (Shapton, qtd. in Ferri 2009, n. pag.) that is the
signum of formal pictures in auction catalogues is challenged by the
personalizing aesthetics of an informal snapshot. For instance, a
generic photograph of an umbrella with an equally generic caption (lot
1030) is appended with a snapshot of Doolan holding the umbrella (cf.
fig. 12). Such snapshots are included in many lots to “document” the
personal nature of a given object to be auctioned.
Fig. 10: Copyright 2009 by Leanne Shapton; reproduced with permission of Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, LLC. Shapton 2009, 30.

Fig. 11: Copyright 2009 by Leanne Shapton; reproduced with permission of Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, LLC. Shapton 2009, 71.
Fig. 12: Copyright 2009 by Leanne Shapton; reproduced with permission of Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, LLC.
Shapton 2009, 15 (detail).

It is primarily the snapshots (or, to be more correct, the reproductions

of the photographs) of Doolan and Morris that play the central role in
this individualization. By including photographs which (presumably)
portray fictional protagonists, Shapton goes further than either Riggs
or Hemon in troubling the fact/fiction, document/ fantasy oppositions.
She does so not only by having recruited her two friends to pose as Hal
and Lenore, but also by having “Hal” and “Lenore” impersonate real-
life people. This is the subject of the above-mentioned Houdini–
Borden photograph (lot 1005) as well as of lot 1280, which is a series of
five photographs of the fictional couple casting themselves as such
famous couples as Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath or Woody Allen and
Diane Keaton (Shapton 2009, 108). These impersonations are in line
with the overall format of the novel, which masquerades as an auction
catalogue. They also bring home the eerie power of photographs to
bestow the status of the real onto fictional characters and to
fictionalize real-life people.

5 Conclusion
The inclusion of photographs, particularly snapshots of people,
inevitably sets in motion the themes of loss, memory, and death, but
also of reanimation, resurrection, and even deception. In each of the
three novels these themes are given a special turn if the provenance of
the images is taken into account. In Miss Peregrine’s Home for
Peculiar Children the real lives of the people in the photographs are
unrecoverable; the life they acquire is that which the fictional narrative
bestows on them. The Lazarus Project simultaneously brings to life
historical people and “ghosts” contemporary ones, the photographic
aesthetics making both meet in the spectral zone between fiction and
documentary. In Important Artifacts, deception and masquerade
come to the fore in the photographs that pretend to document the lives
of fictional characters.
Photographs in Riggs’s and Hemon’s novels contribute minimally to
the development of plot; instead, they play an important role in
providing information about characters, and to some extent, produce
mood and participate in setting. In Shapton’s novel, on the other hand,
photographs participate in co-production of the meaning of all aspects
of the narrative: story, character, plot, setting, mood, etc. They also
recast the reader/viewer into a voyeur and the narrator into a curator.
The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is
regulated by where in the narrative they are placed; each of the three
novels organizes its reading paths and its reading/viewing rhythm in a
different way. In Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and The
Lazarus Project photographs are subordinated to the verbal medium,
while in Important Artifacts photographs are, so to speak, on equal
footing with the text. The three novels combine the visual with the
verbal medium in different ways: in Riggs’s text the reader encounters
the words before seeing the picture; in Hemon’s pictures are seen first,
verbal references to them encountered at some distance later; in
Shapton’s images and words compete for primacy on each page, their
interanimation highly irregular and unpredictable. To indicate such
different orchestrations of reading and viewing when the two distinct
media are employed to co-create meaning, the essay has suggested the
concepts of nesting, braiding, and weaving, concepts that are in need
of further elaboration.
6 Bibliography

6.1 Works Cited

Adams, Timothy Dow. Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in
Autobiography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2000.
Armstrong, Nancy. Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of
British Realism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Baetens, Jan, and Mieke Bleyen. “Photo Narrative, Sequential
Photography, Photonovels.” Intermediality and Storytelling. Ed.
Marina Grishakova and Marie-Laure Ryan. Berlin and New York: De
Gruyter, 2010.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. 1980.
Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” Trans.
Hugh Gray. Film Quarterly 13.4 (1960): 4–9.
Beckman, Karen, and Liliane Weissberg. “Introduction.” On Writing
with Photography. Ed. Karen Beckman and Liliane Weissberg.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ix–xvii.
Boehm, Gottfried, and W. J. T. Mitchell. “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn:
Two Letters.” The Pictorial Turn. Ed. Neal Curtis. London and New
York: Routledge, 2010. 8–26.
Bogardus, Ralph F. Pictures and Texts: Henry James, A. L. Coburn,
and New Ways of Seeing in Literary Culture. Ann Arbor: UMI
Research Press, 1984.
Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image, or What Happened to the American
Dream. New York: Atheneum, 1962.
Brunet, François. Photography and Literature. London: Reaktion
Books, 2009.
Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé. “Daguerreotype.” Classic Essays on
Photography. Ed. Alan Trachtenberg. New Haven: Leete’s Island
Books, 1980. 11–13.
Dickey, Colin. “Virginia Woolf and Photography.” The Edinburgh
Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2010. 375–391.
Ferri, Jessica. An Interview with Leanne Shapton. Bookslut. April
2009. www.bookslut.com/features/2009_04_014308.php/. (22 Dec.
2014).
Fjellestad, Danuta, and Maria Engberg. “Toward a Concept of Post-
Postmodernism or Lady Gaga’s Reconfigurations of Madonna.”
Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 12.4 (2013).
reconstruction.eserver.org/Issues/124/Fjellestad-Engberg.shtml/.
(30 Dec. 2014).
Gunning, Tom. “What’s the Point of an Index? Or, Faking
Photographs.” Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography.
Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008. 23–40.
Hemon, Aleksandar. The Lazarus Project. New York: Riverhead Books,
2008.
Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and
Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Hughes, Alex, and Andrea Noble. “Introduction.” Phototextualities:
Intersections of Photography and Narrative. Ed. Alex Hughes and
Andrea Noble. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
2003a. 1–16.
Hughes, Alex, and Andrea Noble, eds. Phototextualities:
Intersections of Photography and Narrative. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 2003b.
Krauss, Rosalind E. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Modernist Myths. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986.
Latour, Bruno, and Peter Weibel, eds. Iconoclash: Beyond the Image
Wars in Science, Religion, and Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.
Levy, Michele. Rev. of The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon.
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MacLaine, Brent. “Photofiction as Family Album: David Galloway,
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Meek, Margaret. “Children Reading – Now.” After Alice: Exploring
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Watson. London: Cassell, 1992. 172–188.
Miller, J. Hillis. Illustration. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
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Mitchell, W. J. T. “What Is an Image?” New Literary History 15.3
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Mitchell, W. J. T. “Medium Theory: Preface to the 2003 Critical
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Mitchell, W. J. T. “There Are No Visual Media.” Journal of Visual
Culture 4.2 (2005): 257–266.
Mitchell, W. J. T. “Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science.”
Visual Literacy. Ed. James Elkins. New York and London:
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Mitchell, W. J. T. “Image.” Critical Terms for Media Studies. Ed. W.
J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen. Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2010. 35–48.
Mitchell, William J. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-
Photographic Era. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.
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Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Patt, Lise, and Christel Dillbohner. Searching for Sebald: Photography
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Pohlad, Mark B. “Contemporary Fiction and the History of
Photography.” Photography and the Book. Ed. Peggy Ann Kusnerz.
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Riggs, Ransom. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.
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Shapton, Leanne. Important Artifacts and Personal Property from
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46.2 (2014): 215–235.

6.2 Further Reading

Adams, Timothy Dow. “Photographs on the Walls of the House of
Fiction.” Poetics Today 29.1 (2008): 179–195.
Grishakova, Marina, and Marie-Laure Ryan, eds. Intermediality and
Storytelling. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010.
Talbot, William Henry Fox. “A Brief Historical Sketch of the Invention
of the Art.” 1844–1846. Classic Essays on Photography. Ed. Alan
Trachtenberg. New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980. 27–36.
Jan Baetens

11 The Photographic Novel

Abstract: The photographic novel is in various ways an unusual
genre. Historically speaking, it seems to ignore much of the internal
and external changes of other related genres. Sociologically speaking, it
is a rare example of a popular genre which has never met cultural
legitimization. And from the point of view of intermediality, it
continues to suffer from many misunderstandings, all of which tend to
confuse the photographic novel with either comics or film-novels. This
chapter discusses some of the difficulties that burden the genre’s
reading, while proposing some ideas to enable a better understanding
of the singular ways in which it departs from the usual relations
between words and images in visual storytelling.
Key Terms: Comics, functionalism, layout, photography, portrait,
storytelling

1 The Immediate Birth of a Genre

Contrary to most other popular visual genres9, the photographic novel,

or photonovel as it is also called, appeared almost overnight in a
specific form that revealed, from the very beginning, most of the
genre’s visual, thematic, narrative and social characteristics. Unlike
photography, film, or comics, whose ‘birth’ continues to be widely
debated and whose form, content and use have changed dramatically
over time and continue to do so (cf. Gaudreault and Marion 2013 for a
discussion on the ‘birth’ and ‘death’ of media), the photographic novel
was immediately presented by its producers and marketers as a
completely new genre and instantly recognized and acknowledged as
such by its numerous readers. It was on 8 May 1947 that Il Mio Sogno
(“My Dream”) was launched, the first magazine to label itself
Settimanale di romanzi d’amore a fotogrammi (“the photo-romance
weekly”), a watershed moment in the history of both romance
literature and women’s magazines. Various authors have been credited
with the ‘invention’ of the concept of the photonovel (cf. Faber et al.
2012, 39), but the historical priority of Il Mio Sogno has never been
seriously contested, despite the ongoing efforts to unearth earlier
examples of the genre. It is important to remark that the photographic
novel seems to be a typically European, i.e. continental and even
‘Latin’-European, genre. In Europe, the photographic novel was strong
in Italy, France and Spain (and to a lesser extent in peripheral
countries such as Portugal, Greece and Belgium). In the Anglo-Saxon
world, the genre is hardly represented (we will quote some examples
however) and in the U.S.-U.K. publishing industry the genre label
‘photonovel’ is generally used to identify a special type of movie tie-in
production that was quite popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s: it
refers to books adapting a film or television episode, using film stills
instead of artwork, along with the narrative text and word balloons
containing dialogue (the genre nearly disappeared with the advent of
VCR technology). The photonovel version of Philip Kaufman’s 1978
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers opens with the following
presentation of “The Fotonovel” series:
It’s a book that used to be a movie, instead of the other way around – a brand new
medium with plenty to say about movies and books.

For the film buff it offers all the elements of the film; to the fan
if offers more pictures of the stars than ever was available in a
magazine – all in beautiful full color! (Invasion 1979, 1)
This kind of photonovel is represented in the European context as
well (cf. Morreale 2007), but in what follows we will focus on the
‘original’ form of the genre.
Fig. 1: Cover of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Copyright Los Angeles: Fotonovel
Publications, 1979.
Invasion 1979.

As can be inferred both from the immediate success of the European

photographic novel (which became the most popular narrative format
in the late 1940s and 1950s, before its audience started to decline due
to the emergence of the newer medium of television) and from the
exceptional stability of its material properties (despite the mockery
and disdain that was the genre’s burden from the very start), the
photographic novel presented a very clear profile that has remained
more or less stable till today. Obviously, the social presence and impact
of the photographic novel today can no longer be compared with the
situation of the genre in the decade following its invention, when it was
a real competitor of cinema (this situation lasted until the advent of
television: the photonovel is emblematic of the post-war pre-television
years). And, no less obviously, the photographic novel underwent a
very rapid series of variations and transformations, first within its own
context of popular culture and its taste for parody-like
reappropriations (cf. Baetens 2013b for an analysis of the rewriting of
the photonovel culture in Federico Fellini’s first feature film, The
White Sheik, 1952) and later within the environment of narrative
photography, which became a new strand of art photography in the
1970s, and finally within the context of digital culture and the
increased access to self-publication by amateur-photographers and
storytellers. However, none of these changes (described in Baetens
2010) has really jeopardized the way the photographic novel continues
to function as a genre. Photographic novels continue to be produced as
they were in the late 1940s, they still look (more or less) the same,
apparently the same type of readership has not ceased to buy them
(the copy run of the leading magazine, Nous Deux, has been stabilized
today around 300,000 weekly copies), and last but not least the idea
that the larger public has of the photographic novel has not been
modified by the emergence of new, and perhaps different, forms of
visual storytelling with words and photographs in recent years. English
examples such as Jackie (at its peak in the 1970s, Jackie sold almost
one million copies a week but it waned in popularity and folded in
1993), Mr Guy, Jackie’s more risqué rival (Hugh Grant, George
Michael, former Spandau Ballet singer Tony Hadley and comedienne
Tracey Ullman graced the pages of this magazine) or Photo-Love
(Britain’s original photo story magazine, targeting the adolescent
audiences), all presented material that was very close to that of their
continental counterparts, the main difference being of course the use
of local celebrities. Even more astonishing examples, such as the photo
stories one finds in the 1970s PUNK magazine (some of them starring
Debbie Harry!) is no different from the parodic and anti-establishment
photonovels one finds in post-1968 France. In short, there definitely is
a certain social consensus on what a photographic novel is, visually
speaking, just as there is a large agreement on what kind of stories it
tells and to whom.
Fig. 2: Cover of Photo-Love Annual 1981. Copyright London: IPC Magazines.
Photo-Love 1981.
Fig. 3: A fragment from “The Legend of Nick Detroit,” PUNK 6, 1976 (with D. H. Blondie as
one of the ‘nazi dykes’). Copyright PUNK Magazine. All rights reserved.
Holmstrom and Hurd 2012.

But what is, more exactly, that generic robot-photo of the genre? As
already stated, its definition entails a wide range of criteria and
parameters that go beyond classic short-cuts such as: a photonovel is a
comic with pictures, or: a photonovel is a film in magazine form. As
soon as one starts looking at the existing definitions of the genre, i.e. of
the genre in its most mainstream and popular occurrences, not in the
marginal variations that we also know from parodies and high-art
upgrades, it appears that a number of characteristics are not only
systematically present, but that they buttress and strengthen each
other.
First of all, there are of course the narrative features: a
photographic novel is, prototypically, a form of original visual
storytelling. It tells stories that are not illustrative of an accompanying
text or a preexisting movie, as often happens in the case of the film-
novel, which is generally made of the narrative paraphrase of the
script-cum-dialogues of a successful film, often enriched with a small
set of pictures (as stated above, this is the genre that the U.S.
publishing industry calls photonovel). Moreover, these stories are
fictional stories, which makes them very different from the picture
stories one may find in news magazines.
Second, the stories told by photographic novels belong to a
particular thematic domain: they are melodramas and romances, and
even if the notion of melodrama is both universal and highly culture-
and period-specific (Brooks 1976; Morreale 2012), the longing for love
by an initially unhappy woman (melodrama) and the cliché of the
happy ending (romance) are key to the thematic as well as ideological
understanding of the genre. Theme and value cannot be separated in
the case of a melodrama-cum-romance: behind the anecdotal
representation of the love theme, one always finds a certain stance
toward life and society (and it is said that this stance is conservative, if
not utterly reactionary – a claim challenged by non-canonical feminist
readers such as Sylvette Giet, 1998, who has stressed the agency of
women in and through the photographic novel).
Third, there is intermediality. The story is told with the help of
photographs and texts, although there also exist examples of textless
photographic novels, such as the famous Right of Inspections (1999)
by Marie-Françoise Plissart. These cases are rare, though, and even
there the notion of wordless is open to large debates, as demonstrated
by the fact that the Plissart book contains a very long reading by the
philosopher Jacques Derrida, who tells in much detail the many stories
encapsulated in the book’s images. Moreover, Plissart’s photonovel
makes large use of a technique that allows for the indirect inclusion of
words, handwritten or printed: the photographic representation of
textual elements that appear within the fictional world.
Fourth, the words and pictures are arranged in series and sequences
on the pages of a magazine or, less frequently, a book. This
distinguishes the photographic novel from similar works made to be
discovered on the walls of a gallery or a museum. The original form of
the genre is therefore always already a reproduction. A typical page
contains 6 to 9 images, frequently presented in a grid. The
photographic novel is mainly a popular (and thus decidedly
commercial) genre, whose home is less the bookshop than the
newsstand, and whose readers, often wrongly defined as only female,
do not always possess a high degree of traditional literacy (their
popular media literacy, however, is often very sophisticated). As far as
libraries are concerned, one will not be surprised to notice that these
longtime harbors of good reading and quality books did not accept
photographic magazines within their walls.
Fifth, and at a somewhat different level than these narrative,
thematic, intermedial and publication characteristics, is the general
disdain in which the photographic novel has always been held. This
contempt concerns each of the four abovementioned features: 1) the
genre’s storytelling aspects are seen as a danger to the visual quality of
its images, chaperoned by the story and therefore prevented from
becoming good photographs; 2) the genre’s tendency to highlight
romance and melodrama is analyzed through the lens of its suspect
preference for outdated forms of intersubjective and social
relationships, and vice versa, of course; 3) the genre’s intermediality is
considered weak and unchallenging given the poor quality of both the
texts and the images, on the one hand, and the apparent difficulty of
inventing new forms of relationships between the verbal and the visual
on the other; 4) finally, the genre’s grounding in commercial culture
makes it an easy prey for all the critiques that have been addressed to
the culture industry and its supposed brainwashing strategies. Hence
the general conclusion that, if all culture industries are bad, the
photonovel is by far the worst. It is certainly not a detail that, contrary
to other formerly called paraliterary genres such as comics, science
fiction, children’s literature or even pornography, all of which are now
objects of serious academic study, the photographic novel (whether
bravely or not) resists that kind of cultural recuperation.
At the same time, it should be underlined that none of these
characteristics is absolutely typical for the genre, and that there exist
quite a few overlaps between the photographic novel and other visual
genres. Examples of this can be found in contemporary comics, with
their tendency to hybridize drawn and photographic material, but also
in the film-novel, whose visual layout, traditionally quite different from
that of the photographic novel, adopted during a certain number of
years the format and stereotypes of the genre that dominated the
popular magazine market in the 1950s. However, yet not
unpredictably, various historians have noticed the distrust of this
merger of film-novel and photonovel, which the traditional public of
the photonovel seemed to consider an illegitimate and snooty
colonization of a popular genre by a more high-brow one (cf. Morreale
2012).

2 On the Difficulties of Reading Photographic

Novels
These blurred boundaries, overlaps, if not confusions, between genres,
demonstrate the limits of a purely formalist approach to the
photographic novel and the necessity to always keep in mind the
cultural and material context of its reading. As convincingly
demonstrated by Joe Sutliff Sanders (2013) in a seminal article on the
impossible formal distinction between comics and picture books,
which do share so many properties (such as for instance their
intermedial aspect and the way in which words and pictures are
intertwined), the difference between these two genres can only be
understood through an analysis of whom their works are addressing
and how they are being read (comics are read by independent, isolated
readers, who are no longer under parental control; picture books are
read by a combination of listening readers – the children – and readers
reading aloud – the adults). The same applies to the photographic
novel, where contextual aspects are also vital, but the problems here
are both different and more significant.
On the one hand, and this has to do with the reading context in the
narrow sense of the word, one should never separate the genre from
the context in which it normally appears. Traditional photographic
novels do not live in a kind of cultural vacuum; they are part of two
cultural series or media networks (on this concept, cf. Dulac and
Gaudreault 2004), one of them synchronic, the other diachronic.
Synchronically speaking, the photographic novel is read in a specific
kind of magazine, mostly targeting a female audience, but actually read
by men and women alike, as shown by several sociological surveys in
the 1950s and 1960s (here as well the comparison with the television
soap may be illuminating). In these magazines, the reader is
confronted with other genres, ranging from letters to the editor over
advertisements for a certain type of merchandise (for instance beauty
products) to short stories, celeb gossip, film reviews, horoscopes, etc.
Inevitably, all these genres influence the reading of the photographic
novel, which occupies a strategic position between the ‘utterly real’ (a
letter to the editor, an item for purchase) and the ‘utterly fictional’
(Hollywood’s dream factory), an intermediary position that should not
come as a surprise given the permanent shifts between the real and the
fictional in the world of romance and melodrama. Diachronically
speaking, the photonovel highlights this negotiation between fact and
fiction even more, since the genre often served as a springboard for
would-be starlets eager to make their way to the movie industry. In the
early years of the genre, the cursus honorum entailed the following of
three steps: election as a local beauty queen, selection as a photonovel
actor or actress, casting for a part in a movie. Later on, when television
had killed the prominent role of the photonovel, it worked the other
way round: celebrities from the small screen and the world of popular
entertainment were hired to play a part in photonovels in the hope that
their presence would put an end to the commercial erosion of the
genre. What matters here is the fact that the photographic novel is part
of a broader network. This can be seen as a form of cultural
intermediality, the abovementioned notion of cultural series already
hinted at: the photographic novel is a typical example of an in-between
practice. It does exist as an independent genre, but at the same time it
permanently points to other genres (film, television, popular fiction,
serialized melodramas in print form), which all play with the frontiers
of reality and fiction, and this intertextual networking gives all these
individual media a strong, albeit virtual, intermedial character.
Reading a photographic novel in itself is, in such a sense, never
possible: one can only read photographic novels as an in-between
genre whose understanding also entails the reading of other genres.
On the other hand, and this has to do with the reading context in the
broad sense of the term, the general contempt in which the
photographic novel is kept means that many readings and analyses of
the genre are actually relying more on ideas and prejudices than on
facts. The lack of good archives as well as the difficult access to the
corpus (absent from libraries, and most of the time only kept by fans,
who shy away from academic circles) explain why many scholars and
critics seem to rely in their study on only a very limited number of
examples, if they are not elaborating their hypotheses on the ground of
vague, half-faded personal memories and general claims circulating in
the social field. Even authors who feel sympathetic to the genre suggest
interpretations that do not really match the actual form and content of
the photographic novels themselves.
A characteristic instance of such a (fascinating and inspiring)
misreading is given by Rosalind Krauss in her analysis of the
installation art of James Coleman, who claims the Italian photonovel
to be a direct influence in his remediation of the slide show as an
artistic practice (Krauss 1999; for a discussion, cf. Baetens 2014). In
her reading of Coleman, Krauss foregrounds the originality of the Irish
artist by highlighting a number of ways in which he departs from his
initial source of inspiration, the photographic novel. The differences
between Coleman’s slide shows (which project images inspired by
typical photonovel situations, but with no captions or speech balloons
and with clearly posing, immobile characters in positions that recall
pictorial models) and the mainstream photographic novel itself are
incontestable, and Krauss’s description of Coleman’s achievements is
sharp and forceful. Yet the repeated mentions of the photonovel itself
disclose only a second-hand knowledge of the genre, which may look
satisfying at first sight but whose basic claims do not survive a close-
reading of the corpus itself.
First, Krauss does not make any real distinction between
photographic novels and comics, which may be correct from the
perspective of the low cultural prestige of both genres (at least seen
from the avant-garde high-art point of view embraced by Krauss), but
which is debatable at the level of their use of intermediality and page
layout structure, as results almost immediately from the comparison of
any photonovel with any comic strip. Except their low art-sociological
status (and we know things have changed quite a lot since, at least in
the field of comics), all that both media share is the application of the
grid in their average layout structure. But even this material similarity
is deceiving: a photonovel grid derives from the montage of previously
made images, which are complete from the very start (even if there is
always the possibility of cropping and touching up), whereas the
comics grid precedes the images and supposes the progressive filling-
up of the panels. This fundamental difference is even heightened by a
totally different use of word and images (and word and image
relationships) in both genres. Photographic novels are often more
wordy than comics, which is normal given the fact that it is easier to
produce ‘meaningful’ material as well as to delete ‘less relevant’
information in drawings than in photographs. Moreover, the visual
features of the verbal along with the visual itself are often the same in
the case of comics, where it is the ‘same hand’ that draws the lines and
writes the text, whereas the photographic novel has always had
problems with the material integration of handwritten or typeset
captions and dialogues into the picture.
Second, Krauss also pays great attention to a comparison with the
movies, which brings her to the claim that photographic novels and, by
extension, their high-art remediation by James Coleman, cannot
contain the still equivalent of the so-called action-reaction scene in
film. A full-length quotation is necessary here:
For in the very grammar of the photonovel Coleman finds something that can be
developed as an artistic convention, both arising from the nature of the work’s material
support and investing that materiality with expressiveness. This element, which I will call
the double face-out, is a particular kind of setup that one finds in scene after scene of the
story (whether in the photonovel or, nonphotographically, the comic book), especially in
the dramatic confrontation between two characters. A film would treat such an exchange
through point-of-view editing, with the camera turning from one interlocutor to another,
interweaving statement and reaction. But a book of stills can afford no such luxury and
must sacrifice naturalism to efficiency, since the multiplication of shots necessary to cut
back and forth from one character to another would dilate the progress of the story
endlessly. Therefore the reaction shot is conflated with the action that has instigated it,
such that both characters appear together, the instigator somewhat in the background
looking at the reactor who tends to fill the foreground, but, back turned to the other, is
also facing forward out of the frame. Now with both shot and reaction shot projected with
a single frame, what we find in both photonovel and comic strip is that the highest pitches
of emotional intensity, the double face-out presents us with the mannerism of a dialogue
in which one of the two participants is not looking at the other. (Krauss 1999, 300)

This reading of Coleman is absolutely correct, and the concept of

‘double face-out’ a highly remarkable contribution to a better
understanding of his art. Nevertheless the underlying idea, namely
that his photonovelistic source material shows the way to this
innovation, is contentious. Photonovels do contain point of view
editing and statement-reaction sequences, as shown for instance in the
two following examples:
Fig. 4: Premier Roman (“First Novel”), published in the magazine Nous Deux (1988).
Copyright Paris: éd. Mondiales, 1981.
Premier Roman 1988, 45.

Translation:
She: In other words, you blame me for being sincere. I’m sorry. But
your book is not one of those one would like to read a second time.
He: So how do you explain that it’s got a prize?
She: Please let’s keep it this way, since your vanity does not accept
any critique.
Back in the villa She: He was really unpleasant with me.
She: I should have been less direct. After all sincerity is a terrible
vice in certain cases.
Ludovic thinks he is in his right.
He: What a fool I was to trust her!
He: I should listen to those who believe in me. I will sign that
contract. (Translation mine)
Fig. 5: Notre Douce Nuit (“Our Sweet Night”), published in the magazine Lucky Color
(1986). Copyright Rome: ed. Lancio, 1986.
Lucky Color 1986, 46.

Translation:
 He: What?! Don’t you know how much I love you?
She: Sure? I didn’t have the impression that you made great efforts
to demonstrate it. If you really loved me, you would stay with me.
She feels suddenly aggressive and no longer recognizes her own
voice.
She: Wasn’t it because I used to be the prettiest girl in town and
obedient and everything a girl is supposed to be?
She: A first love, so to say, but now that we’ve grown older…
He: I’ve never seen you so aggressive and I hardly recognize you.
She: I only try to be realistic. It’s clear that your mother wants to
see you with Barbara Nardin and you are not strong-willed enough
to say what you want. But one day you will have to make your
choice.
This new Suzanne makes a strange impression on him and he
would like to hold her tight.
He: Stop thinking of it and kiss me. (Translation mine)
However, more fundamentally, the relative absence of the shot-
reverse-shot technique should not be evaluated by comparing it with
its role and place in cinema only (with such a technique, here one
character is shown looking at another character (often off-screen), and
then the other character is shown looking back at the first character;
since the characters are shown facing in opposite directions, the viewer
assumes that they are looking at each other). If it is meaningful to
weigh this technique in film against its use in slide show art, which are
both examples of narratives based on the successive projection of
single frames, it is much less relevant to compare it with its use in the
photonovel, the latter being a totally different medium at the level of
the sequential arrangement of the pictures. In a photonovel, the visual
arrangement is based on the simultaneous representation of different
images, which do not aim to detail the successive elements of an action
one after another but to present various perspectives on the same
characters, the narrative progress being assumed by the accompanying
textual elements – a crucial feature to come back to in a moment.
If the photonovel does not rely very much on the shot-reverse-shot
technique, it is probably because the use of this mechanism would not
enhance the narrative treatment of action and reaction, as in cinema,
but instead, paradoxically, hinder it. Given the simultaneous presence
of all pictures on the page (it is physically impossible for the human
eye to focus on just one image and to block out all the others that
surround it), the systematic use of a shot-reverse-shot setup would
confront the reader with a kind of overall checkerboard grid whose
artificiality would have a disruptive effect on the emotional
involvement that this procedure is capable of producing in film, where
it is one of the pillars of Hollywood’s ‘invisible’ or ‘continuity editing’
philosophy. In the photonovel, a similar technique would lead to a
form of ostranenie or defamiliarization (Shklovsky 1998; Van den
Oever 2010), and the subsequent disclosure of the artificiality that
traditional editing is meant to hide. The current art-historical and
medium-theoretical debates on the photonovel overlook these
differences due to the absence of any real look at the actual corpus,
sticking to the idea of photonovelistic medium-specificity that is not
backed by actual occurrences in the medium (cf. fig. 4 and 5). A
corpus-based approach would rather foreground a different setup, not
that of the double face-out, but that of the captioned two shot (to keep,
perhaps incautiously, a term from film theory), for this is what is
repeated over and over again in the photonovel. Once again: Krauss’s
description of the double face-out is perfect, but it applies to Coleman’s
reinventing of the photonovel, not to the photonovel itself. None of the
Coleman images is even remotely thinkable in a photographic novel,
though each of his images would fit nicely into a photo sequence by
Duane Michals, for instance. However, the practical difficulty of
grasping the conventions of the photographic novel from an art-
historical point of view may also be seen as an invitation to focus the
debate on the close-reading of the genre itself, more specifically of its
intermedial dimension.

3 Close-reading
How can we analyze the word and image interaction in the two pages
(fig. 4 and 5) that exemplify – in a representative manner – the
practice of the traditional photographic novel? As stated above, the
interweaving of the verbal and the visual is not an easy operation in
this genre, and can certainly not be narrowed down to a one-to-one
analysis, panel by panel, of its various components. Such a ‘juxtalinear’
approach, which fits the analysis of single images but not that of a suite
of images, would be a methodological and theoretical mistake. A more
comprehensive analysis is necessary, of which the following
paragraphs will try to sketch an overview.
Unlike a drawing, a photograph is difficult to control (for the very
reason that in a photo everything is pictured at once and most
elements are represented with the same intensity). If it is possible, yet
not always very painless, to picture in this medium what one considers
crucial for the communication of a given meaning or, as in the case of
the photonovel, for the comprehension of a given story, it is already
more problematic to filter out less relevant elements (even after
cropping and retouching there often remain elements one cannot make
sense of, at least in light of an intended meaning or an unfolding
narrative) and more difficult still to draw a line between essential and
secondary points and parts of information. For this reason, all
attempts to link the two media in presence (words and images) must
start with an internal clarification of the visual dimension of the work,
in order to make sure that the image becomes well-structured and
‘readable’. This is clearly what happens in the two examples quoted
above.
At a first level, one notices how the visual information foregrounds
the characters while simultaneously reducing all other information to a
mere (more or less pretty and aesthetic) backdrop. Even when seen at
a distance and looked at with not too much attention, the image
unmistakably displays what the story is about. In a more sophisticated
manner, this foregrounding of the characters also affects their own
defining features, in this case mainly through the simple but
dramatically efficient color management of bodies and background.
The colors of the clothes of the male and female characters are the
same in both examples: black, gray, dark in the former case; red,
orange, light in the latter, and this color code is then transferred to the
backdrop. In fig. 4, red spots and accessories appear on the back of the
man when the woman is absent from the image. In fig. 5, the ‘vertical’
conversation between orange and dark is tilted into the ‘horizontal’
dialogue between the blue of the sky and the green of the meadows.
 At another level, the visual information is presented according to the
rules of ‘tabular’ or overall page composition (Fresnault 1976). The
distribution of color spots generates a global structure that escapes the
sequential ordering of the panels from left to right and from upper row
to lower row, without, however, losing the readability of the separate
pictures that make up the whole page. The perception and
interpretation of the shifting relationships between dark and light,
red/orange and gray/black, help the reader follow the romantic
relationship and the teasing play of distance and proximity during the
lovers’ conversations.
The consequence of these visual orderings for the cognitive framing
of the work is crucial. As a matter of fact, the internal readability of the
visual information enables the reader to understand that the
traditional relationship between word and image is questioned.
Whereas it is an almost universally accepted rule that the combination
of words and images is meant to discipline the virtual excess of
meaning of the visual elements with the help of words, whose role in
imposing order and clarity is almost unchallenged, the photographic
novel proceeds in a totally different manner. Here, the clarification of
the image’s meaning is no longer necessary, since to a certain extent its
own clarity makes words superfluous. It is true that, in order to grasp
the details of what is going on exactly, one needs to read the captions
and speech balloons in the two examples that are being used
throughout this discussion. But this reading does not discipline the
image, it limits itself to provide the reader with more circumstantial
information, nothing more. Readers who like thought experiments
should try to imagine what would happen if the text were in Serbo-
Croatian or Russian instead of being in French, provided of course one
reads French rather than Russian or Serbo-Croatian: the difference
would not be as far-reaching as one might have expected at first sight.
Yet the functional upgrading of the image, which occurs separately
from its alleged aesthetic qualities or the lack thereof, does not end
with its relative independence from the verbal information. Language,
indeed, does impose its order on the image in more than one sense. If
it converts opacity into transparency or profusion into simplicity, it
also projects its own linear and sequential structure upon the pictorial
elements. In other words: an image is controlled by the verbal
elements that accompany it because it has to abandon its multiple
meanings to the more easily graspable meaning of a linguistic
utterance. In the same way, it starts obeying a sequential and temporal
logic. The image is structured in a linear way, it eventually surrenders
the multiple directions of its ‘one next to another’ to the necessity of
the ‘one after another’ we associate, since Lessing, with the distinction
between arts of space and arts of time (see section 1 above).
In the photographic novel, things work differently. The image not
only breaks away from textual surveillance (as said above, the
signification of the panels can be deduced by just looking at the
pictures), it also frees itself from the linear ordering that the grid-like
composition of the page, with its seamless integration of rows and
columns, seems to prepare. The eye can browse an image in many
directions, for one is never forced to start at the upper left corner and
then descend a kind of visual staircase until one reaches the opposite
corner at the bottom of the page. The specific tabularity of the
photonovel page layout allows for other reading directions, and as a
result the temporal aspect – this is read before that because this
happens before that, or conversely – is no longer at stake. The reader
simply no longer cares whether, in fig. 5 for instance, the spatial
relationship between the images can be translated into a temporal one.
One might turn this observation into the following, more radical,
claim: not only is it the linear and sequential ordering that loses its
preeminence in the photographic novel, it is narrative itself that
becomes less important. What matters in the pictures is not (only) that
they tell a story, but that they show something – and that something
introduces a radical transformation in the status of the photographs.
Within the image, the center of gravity shifts from the representation
of the story to something else, namely the portrait. It is a persistent
misunderstanding to believe that the visual string of a photographic
novel aligns the successive parts of an action unfolding in time, as if
the photographic novel was offering a selection of shots from a virtual
movie sequence. The visual logic of the photographic novel is less
syntagmatic than paradigmatic (or if one prefers: less narrative than
illustrative). What it shows is in the first place a series of variations on
the face. Even if photographic novels do tell stories, their first concern
is the portrait of the characters (and the portrait in question is visual,
not psychological). In that sense, the very label of photographic novel
is a partial category error, for the genre is as much concerned by the
embodiment of characterization as by the narrative unfolding of this
component. The functional analysis defended by Joe Sutliff Sanders
(2013), who claims that we can only understand images once we know
how (i.e. in which material circumstances) they are read, again seems
useful. Printed in magazine format (and thus very different from the
large screen of the movies) as well as ‘squeezed’ into the small
rectangles of the photographic novel page layout (which, except for its
covers, almost never uses full page images), the body of the actors is
inevitably miniaturized, on the one hand, and apparently
monotonously repeated, on the other hand. However, these apparent
handicaps are turned into specific advantages, since the genre takes
advantage of these limitations to accentuate and aggrandize the visual
and erotic seduction of the face, a staple feature of any photographic
novel. A second contextual reason that helps explain the relative
vanishing of the story elements in favor of the more strictly visual
elements of the body is of course the fact that photographic novels
tended to appear within the wider range of romance and melodrama,
whose scenarios were already well known to the public. What the
readers were looking for was less new types of stories than new faces,
new bodies, new stars to identify with.
Does all this imply that the text is no longer of any importance in the
intermedial play of the photographic novel? Does it mean, perhaps
even more surprisingly, that it becomes subjugated to the constraints
of the visual aspects of the genre, as suggested for instance in the way
the photographic novel has learnt to shape and display the balloons
and captions? If we take a look at our two examples, we notice how the
size of their verbal elements fits well into the semantically empty space
of the pictures (the text always manages to fill a void, it never walks on
visually and semantically important zones) and so do the color of the
backgrounds and the shape of the letters (all smoothly inserted in their
new visual environment).
The answer to the above question on the vanishing role of the text is
certainly negative. No, the promotion of the pictorial and its partial
independence from narrative and language do not signify that the
photographic novel ceases to be an intermedial genre or that textual
elements no longer count, quite the contrary. First, there is always the
hard fact that only the text is capable of identifying the specific details
of the images’ contents. Even if it is perfectly possible to tell stories
without words, one needs words to explain many important parts of a
storyworld more precisely. Second, the text is also an element that
reintroduces, often in a massive and direct manner, a certain narrative
stance and tension. Even if the genre’s preference for visual
characterization and portraiture is undeniable, the photographic novel
cannot take the risk of severing all ties with the commercially
indispensable presence of a storyline. The text is always heavily
narrativized, and this offers the guarantee that the work in question
will find its place in the world of popular fiction, which we all know to
be strongly story-driven. For the same readers who are receptive to
thought experiments: try to read a photographic novel without looking
at the images at all. Most of the time, the combination of captions and
speech balloons will be more than sufficient to make sense of the story.
Third and last, the text also contributes to the production of a broad
reading frame that enables the photographic novel to resonate with
other, related genres of melodrama and romance.

4 Conclusion
The photographic novel may be a culturally despised genre, but for the
study of intermediality it is a very thrilling one. Indeed, the genre helps
overcome traditional ideas of the mutual collaboration of words and
images in phototextual works. Two major features distinguish the
genre: on the one hand the departure from the traditional idea of
words chaperoning images; on the other hand the necessity to rethink
the methodology of word-image relations, which can no longer be
analyzed in terms of one-to-one relationships between a visual element
and its accompanying text. Photographic novels need to be approached
in contextual and functional terms, and this involves a broader
analysis of both its images and its texts. Such an analysis provides us
with new insights into the intermedial dynamics of a genre where
words and images both dominate and ignore each other.

5 Bibliography
5.1 Works Cited
Baetens, Jan. Pour le roman-photo. Brussels: Les Impressions
Nouvelles, 2010.
Baetens, Jan. “The Photo-Graphic Novel: Hybridization and Genre
Theory.” The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change in
Contemporary Fiction: Theoretical Frameworks, Genres and Model
Interpretations. Ed. Michael Basseler, Ansgar Nünning, and
Christine Schwanecke. Trier: wvt, 2013a. 147–162.
Baetens, Jan. “The Photonovel: Stereotype as Surprise.” History of
Photography 37.2 (2013b): 137–152.
Baetens, Jan. “Reworking or Making Up? A Note on Photonovels in
Costello’s Approach of Medium Theory.” Critical Inquiry 41.1
(2014): 163–166.
Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1976.
Dulac, Nicolas, and André Gaudreault. “Heads or Tails: The
Emergence of a New Cultural Series, from the Phenakisticope to
the Cinematograph.” Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for
Visual Studies 8 (2004): n. pag. hdl.handle.net/1802/3564/. (10
Nov. 2014).
Faber, Dominique, Marion Minuit, and Bruno Takodjerad. La Saga du
roman-photo. Paris: Jean-Claude Gawsewitch, 2012.
Fresnault-Deruelle, Pierre. “Du linéaire au tabulaire.”
Communications 24 (1976): 7–23.
Gaudreault, André, and Philippe Marion. La fin du cinéma? Paris:
Colin, 2013.
Giet, Sylvette. Nous Deux 1947–1997: Apprendre la langue du cœur.
Leuven and Paris: Peeters and Vrin, 1998.
Holmstrom, John, and Bridget Hurd, eds. PUNK: The Best of PUNK
Magazine. New York: HarperCollins, 2012.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (anon.). Los Angeles: Fotonovel
Publications, 1979.
Krauss, Rosalind. “Reinventing the Medium.” Critical Inquiry 25.2
(1999): 289–305.
Lucky Color. Rome: ed. Lancio, 1986.
Morreale, Emiliano. Cosí piangevano: Il cinema melò nell’Italia degli
anni Cinquanta. Rome: Donzelli, 2012.
Morreale, Emiliano, ed. Lo Schermo di carta. Milan: Il Castoro, 2007.
Nous Deux. Paris: éd. Mondiales, 1988.
Photo-Love Annual 1981. London: IPC Magazines, 1981.
Plissart, Marie-Françoise, and Jacques Derrida. Right of Inspection.
Text by Jacques Derrida, photographs by Marie-Françoise Plissart.
New York: Monacelli, 1999 [French original Droit de regards, 1985].
Sanders, Joe Sutliff. “Chaperoning Words: Meaning-Making in Comics
and Picture Books.” Children’s Literature 41.1 (2013): 57–90.
Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” Literary Theory: An Anthology.
Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 1998. 17–23.
Van den Oever, Annie, ed. Ostrannenie. Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2010.

5.2 Further Reading

Bravo, Anna. Il fotoromanzo. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003.
Brunet, François. Photography and Literature. London: Reaktion
Books, 2009.
De Berti, Raffaele, and Irene Piazzoni, eds. Forme e modelli del
rotocalco italiano tra fascismo e guerra. Milan: Cisalpino, 2009.
Miodrag, Hannah. Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical
Discourse on the Form. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press,
2013.
Laura Marcus

12 Film and Modernist Literature

Abstract: Firmly anchored in present-day research on modernism,
this chapter makes a case for the idea that the alignments of, and
interplays between, cinema and literature around the turn of the
nineteenth century were among the most crucial factors that shaped
what came to be called modernist literature and culture. Cinema,
representing many of the aspects that are attributed to defining and
shaping a notion of modernity in the early twentieth century, was at
the centre of discourse in journals such as the British Close Up, while
writers ranging from H. D., Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen to
Gertrude Stein show a range of intermedial endeavours which include
writing about cinema, writing for film, writing about cinema and
sound, and modes of cinematic writing.
Key Terms: Silent film, cinema, film criticism, modernist
literature, Close Up

1 Introduction: Early Film History

The close and complex relationships between modernist literature and
film have become central topics in the last two decades, driven in part
by the desire to understand how film, as it emerged in the final years of
the nineteenth century, contributed to the shaping of a modernist
literature whose beginnings, though the dating is not uncontested, are
frequently also situated towards that century’s close. Nor is the
influence from film to literature one way. Film, from its early years
onwards, sought narrative form and its stories were frequently drawn
from plays, poems and novels. Early accounts of film as a medium, and
then as an art, turned to the topic of literary adaptation, as well as to
the question of cinema’s particular modes of visual storytelling. There
were explorations, too, of the ways in which writers were responding to
the threat, and the promise, of the new medium.
Instances of writers’ earliest representations of the film medium
include short stories by H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling. Wells, whose
engagement with the cinema was life-long, explored new dimensions
of visuality, motion and locomotion in his fictions of the 1890s and
1900s, including The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897),
When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) and Tales of Space and Time (1899).
The literature of science fiction and of future imaginings emerges with
projections of possible visual technologies which transform the human
environment and sensorium. In Wells’ short story “The New
Accelerator” (1901) the two protagonists take a drug which, by
speeding up the nervous systems of its takers, puts the world into slow
motion, revealing the minutiae of gestures and breaking down motion
into its component parts in ways that recall the stop-motion
photography of the late nineteenth century. The Invisible Man plays
with the disappearance of the visible human form of its central
protagonist, and the seeming animation of the objects in his grasp or
on his person, in ways that would become particularly attractive
subjects for early film-makers.
There are strong connections between Wells’ stories and the
fantastical cinema of the magician turned pioneer film-maker Georges
Méliès. By contrast, Rudyard Kipling’s “Mrs Bathurst” (1904)
represents film in a mode close to that of the Lumière brothers, whose
one-shot films of the 1890s are known as ‘actualities’, recording the
events of real life: workers leaving a factory, a train arriving at a
station. This last topic is the subject of “Mrs Bathurst”, which places
cinema on the side of repetition (subject to endless replaying), the
interplay of absence and presence, and death (the present it records
has since become the past). These early perceptions of filmic ontology
would become crucial to an emergent film aesthetics and to the work of
a number of modernist writers.
Recent years have seen a radical reappraisal of early film history.
The shift from a view of cinema in its first years as the ‘primitive’ pre-
history of film to an apprehension of it as a representational form in its
own right has been particularly significant. The highly influential
concept of the ‘cinema of attractions’, theorised by the film historians
Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault in relation to early cinema,
denotes an understanding of film in its first years as a form of
spectacle, marked by the display of its own technical powers and
possibilities. The focus on the ‘performativity’ of early cinema has,
more recently, been extended by a concern with modernism,
performance and embodiment. In this field, there has been a particular
focus on the importance of the performing and gestural body in
modernist literature, film, dance and theatre. There has also been
discussion of the ways in which the representation of the ‘hysterical
body’ at the turn of the century was taken up in the avant-garde
cinema and the poetry of the early twentieth century. The centrality of
Charlie Chaplin (viewed as exemplary of the performative body, the
‘shocked’ body of the modern subject, and the body-machine nexus in
modernity) has become a major preoccupation in a number of recent
studies.
Absolute distinctions between film and theatre (which were
frequently upheld in early writings on cinema, as film sought to
establish itself as an autonomous artistic form) have thus begun to
cede to a sense of the profound connections between the two. Renewed
attention to the film-theatre relationship has led not only to a return to
the writings of Bertolt Brecht on this topic but, in a different context,
to research into the ways in which theatrical performances mediated
between novels and their film adaptations in the early years of
narrative cinema, including the films of the American film-maker D.
W. Griffith. Furthermore, while the novel remains central to an
understanding of film-literature relationships in the modernist period,
poetry, in addition to drama, has entered the frame in much more
substantial ways. Writers such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, formerly
held to be highly resistant to the cinema, have been shown to have
engaged extensively with the new modes of representation which film
brought into being.

2 Cinema and Modernism

The interest in cinema and modernism in recent decades has arisen in
the context of broader theories of modernity and modern experience
and an understanding of cinema’s central role in the culture of
modernity. As Tom Gunning writes: “Given its striking appeal to
popular sentiment, its mechanical force and play, its enlivening and
contradictory tension between picturing and moving, cinema
metaphorised modernity.” (Gunning 2006, 302) The work of Walter
Benjamin, including his model of film as the embodiment of the
modern experience of ‘shock’ and as the revelation of aspects of
phenomenal experience unavailable to the human eye, has been
central in this context (cf. Benjamin 2002a). Recent literary critics
have proposed models of modernist literature running directly counter
to those earlier critiques and accounts which defined modernism as a
reaction against cultural modernity. The identification of modernist
writing with, and not against, the cultures of modernity has found
some of its strongest support in the allying of literature with cinema
which, as Gunning suggests, has come to represent modernity tout
court.
A further context has been the intense focus in modernist studies on
coteries, networks and publishing history – the ‘institutions of
modernism’, to borrow Lawrence Rainey’s phrase (1999) – which has
led to a much greater concentration on early twentieth-century film
cultures as an aspect of modernism. This has taken in dimensions such
as the place of cinema in the journals and little magazines of the
period, the work of the film societies that were founded in the late
1910s and 1920s, and the circumstances of film exhibition and
spectatorship (cf. Marcus 2007 for a fuller discussion). The
transatlantic ‘little magazines’ of the early twentieth century, including
The Little Review, transition and Broom, played a crucial role in
sustaining the dialogue between American and European modernisms,
in which the machine culture of modernity and of visual culture were
central concerns. The British film journal Close Up, which ran from
1927 to 1933, has also been central to an understanding of the close
connections between modernist literature and film. Co-edited from
Switzerland by the artist Kenneth Macpherson and the writer Bryher
(Winifred Ellerman), the magazine published numerous articles by the
poet and novelist H. D. (who also acted in three of the four films
directed by Macpherson in this period, including Borderline (1930), in
which Paul Robeson played the central role) and the writer Dorothy
Richardson, author of the multi-volumed autobiographical novel
Pilgrimage. The reach of Close Up into the international contexts of
film-making and film-culture was near-unparalleled (the journal, for
example, was deeply entwined with Berlin film culture and published
the first English-language versions of a number of articles by the Soviet
director and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein). The journal also retained
a strong commitment to the literary in rendering ‘writing about film’ as
an artistic or avant-garde practice in its own right.
Traversing the years of the transition to sound, Close Up also opens
up the intense debates in the period over the coming of sound to film,
which transformed not only the institutional and economic contexts of
film-making but also the very nature of film aesthetics, formed and
predicated on the silent cinema (as they would often continue to be in
film aesthetics, many years after the transition) and on visuality as the
defining quality and essence of the medium. Close Up reveals a gradual
accommodation to ‘the talkies’, supported by the Soviet directors’
model of ‘contrapuntal sound’ or ‘sound montage’ as a way of
counteracting the staginess and static qualities of synchronised sound
film in its early years (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov [1928]
1998). The two writers for the journal who did not make this
accommodation were H. D. and Dorothy Richardson, and this is
suggestive of a gendered dimension to the resistance to sound, and to
the perceived intrusions of the voice into (as H. D. conceived it) the
world of half-lights and dreams.

3 Film and Women Writers: H. D. – Woolf –

Bowen
More broadly, recent research has made clear the centrality of cinema
and film-going to women audiences, the important roles played by
women film critics in the early years of cinema, and the importance of
film to women modernist writers, including H. D., Bryher, Dorothy
Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Djuna
Barnes, Mina Loy, Iris Barry and Elizabeth Bowen. Their writings on
film, regular or occasional, anticipated or continued the focus in Close
Up on the experience of film-viewing, taking in the space of the cinema
auditorium, the paradoxes of solitary viewing within the collective
sphere of the cinema (including the implications of this for concepts of
aesthetic experience as individual or communal) and the impact of
dimensions such as light, sound and music in the cinema space. This
attention to sensory experience, which could be understood as
‘phenomenological’ or ‘haptic’ (to be defined as a form of ‘touching
with the eye’), is neither essentially gendered nor limited to women’s
experience (it plays a significant role, for example, in Kenneth
Macpherson’s writings on film). It is, however, more marked in the
work of women modernists, and this is reflected in the greater
proportion of essays by women writers representing film-
spectatorship, including Woolf’s “The Cinema” (1926; cf. Woolf 1994)
and Elizabeth Bowen’s “Why I Go to the Pictures”, published a decade
later (1938).
“The Cinema” is one of the most significant meditations on film to
have been produced by a modernist writer and has generated
significant critical discussion. Woolf saw in the cinema a means of
capturing sensations and emotions too circumstantial, fleeting or
abstract to be the subjects of the established arts. Film would appear to
be closer to nature than to art, and Woolf saw in it the potential for a
comprehension of ‘reality’ at once entirely new and ‘archaic’ or
‘primitive’: the essay in all its versions comes back repeatedly to an
image of ‘the savages watching the pictures’. While a number of
commentators have interpreted this as Woolf’s negative response to
film, such a reading reduces and simplifies the complexities of her
response. Woolf was by no means alone in understanding film as a
medium at once absolutely modern and yet reaching back to the
earliest forms of human expression, as in modes of picture-writing,
and to the fundamentals of human emotion (Fear, Pain, Rage, Anger,
Joy).
Any aversion to film Woolf felt was centred on its ‘development’ into
the adaptation of literary texts, and in particular novels. Film-makers
had moved away, she noted, from early documentary films, or
actualités, and in so doing had left behind the most powerful
dimension of the cinema: its power to bring forth the world as it is. The
future cinema she envisaged would represent both the world of dreams
(in which relations of time and space are subject to no known laws)
and present reality in its contingency, detail and, it could be argued,
modernity. As she wrote towards the close of her essay: “How all this is
to be attempted, much less achieved, no one at the moment could tell
us. We get intimations only in the chaos of the streets, perhaps, when
some momentary assembly of colour, sound, movement, suggests that
here is a scene waiting a new art to be transfixed.” (Woolf 1994, 595)
The representation of the city was a crucial forum for the encounter
between literature and film in modernist culture.
As Woolf worked on “The Cinema”, she was also writing the central
section of her novel To the Lighthouse, “Time Passes”, which presents
the world of matter through time and in the absence (or near-absence)
of a human observer: Woolf described it as ‘eyeless’ writing. The
ghostly presences of Mr and Mrs Ramsay – the one absent, the other
now dead – appear on the walls of the decaying house in the form of
projected film: “and faint and flickering, like a yellow beam or the
circle at the end of a telescope, a lady in a grey cloak, stooping over her
flowers, went wandering over the bedroom wall, up the dressing-table,
across the wash-stand” (Woolf 1992, 149). The passage of ten years
between the first and third parts of the novel (though it is also
condensed into one night, during which the world tosses and turns in
the nightmare of history) has its mirror in the gap of ten years alluded
to in “The Cinema”. These come between the present in which the early
films are being viewed and the past of the realities they record: “We are
beholding a world which has gone between the waves. […] The war
sprung its chasm at the foot of all this innocence and ignorance, but it
was thus that we danced and pirouetted, toiled and desired, thus that
the sun shone and the clouds scudded up to the very end” (Woolf 1994,
variant version, 592).
The issue of the ways in which novelistic techniques changed and
altered as a response to film is a complex and vexed one. We can never
know how the writing of Woolf, or any other modernist writer, might
have developed without an awareness of film and film technique. We
can, however, speculate, with a high degree of confidence, that film
made its impact both on Woolf’s approaches to aesthetic questions and
on her formal solutions to issues of narrative construction. Thus her
way of representing ‘simultaneity’ in “The Lighthouse”, the third and
final section of the novel, was almost certainly inflected by a familiarity
with cinematic strategies. These include parallel editing (or cross-
cutting) as a means to depict events taking place at the same moment
but in different spaces, as well as the shot-reverse-shot structure of
continuity editing which has its literary correlative in the novel in the
views from shore to sea, and back from sea to shore. In “The Cinema”
Woolf wrote of a future cinema in which “we should have the
continuity of human life kept before us by the representation of some
object common to both lives” (Woolf 1994, 352). Her novel The Years
represents this continuity through various objects – a painting, a chair,
a walrus-brush – which survive the years and changes in place and
circumstance.

4 Further Examples: Joyce – Beckett – Stein –

Chaplin
James Joyce’s relationship to the cinema is rather more diffuse than
that of Woolf. Explorations of the topic have addressed the impact on
his writing of pre-cinematic technologies (such as the Mutoscope,
referred to by Leopold Bloom in the Nausicaa episode of Ulysses in
conjunction with ‘Peeping Tom’) and early cinema: Joyce’s founding of
the Volta cinema in Dublin in 1909 and his meeting with Eisenstein in
Paris in the 1930s add further dimensions. It seems clear that the ludic
aspects of early film, and early film performance, were particularly
influential in the composition of Ulysses. The fascination with
metamorphoses and with the animation of objects central to the films
of Georges Méliès, as well as the quick-change artistry of the performer
Leopoldo Fregoli, have been seen as shaping forces on the Circe or
“Nighttown” episode of Ulysses, with its transformations of bodies
between sexes and species and its animated objects: Bloom’s singing
bar of soap, the brothel-madam Bella’s erotic talking fan.
The “Wandering Rocks” section of the novel evokes rather different
dimensions of the cinema, in its representation of motion and
transport around Dublin. In an exemplary reading of the episode,
David Trotter finds in “Wandering Rocks” the forms of movement,
‘automatism’ (the neutrality of the camera-eye) and ‘intercutting’ at
work in the actualités of film’s earliest years, a cinema which included
numerous films of Dublin’s daily life and of public events in the city (cf.
Trotter 2007, 87–123). Such spectacles would seem to be parodied in
the closing part of “Wandering Rocks”, with its representation of a
cavalcade in which all the figures who have appeared in earlier scenes
are presented and named in the narrative. To this one might add
Joyce’s depiction, throughout the episode, of part-objects and persons:
“The blind of the window was drawn aside. A card Unfurnished
Apartments slipped from the sash and fell. A plump bare generous
arm shone, was seen, held forth from a white petticoat bodice and taut
shiftstraps. A woman’s hand flung forth a coin over the area railings. It
fell on the path” (Joyce 1993, 216). This ‘sectional vision’, and the
fragmentation of bodies and objects, seems closer to a rather later
cinema. It could be suggested that the relationship between Joyce’s
writing and the cinema was one of mutual influence, mediated by, and
embodied in, modern urban experience. For the German writer Alfred
Döblin, author of Berlin Alexanderplatz, a novel much influenced by
Ulysses, Joyce’s novel had shown the extent to which cinema had
“penetrated the sphere of literature […]. To the experiential image of a
person today also belongs the streets, the scenes changing by the
second, the signboards, automobile traffic […] the fleeting quality, the
restlessness” (Döblin 1994 [1928], 514).
In recent work on film and modernism, the figures of Gertrude
Stein, Wyndham Lewis and Samuel Beckett have become prominent.
Stein has in the past been more fully associated with modernist
painting than with film – she and her brother Leo were prominent art
collectors in the Paris of the 1920s and 30s – but the close
relationship, and at times shared identity, between avant-garde artists
and film-makers at this time contributed to the cinematic contexts for
her work. As she wrote in her essay “Portraits and Repetition”:
I was doing what the cinema was doing, I was making a continuous statement of what that
person was until I had not many things but one thing. […] I, of course did not think of it in
terms of the cinema, in fact I doubt whether at that time I had ever seen a cinema but, and
I cannot repeat this too often any one is of one’s period and this our period was
undoubtedly the period of the cinema. (Stein 1967, 106)

The ‘continuous present’ of Stein’s prose could also be understood as

the ‘tense’ of cinema, while her deployment of repetition and/with
difference has its corollary in film’s putting into motion, at the level of
projection, of a series of still frames whose differentiations mark the
flow of time in fractions of a second.
For the avant-garde film-makers, artists and writers of the early
twentieth century Charlie Chaplin (or ‘Charlot’, as he was known in
France) came to stand for the film medium itself. The artist Fernand
Léger’s ‘Dadaist’ film Ballet mécanique (1924) is composed of machine
imagery, the movements of everyday objects, and the repetitive
movements of human figures, opening and closing with a fractured
and recomposed representation of the figure of Chaplin. Chaplin’s walk
– the defining dimension of the figure of the Tramp – and his gestural
screen-life more generally became a focus for the complex and
contested understanding of the human being as organic or
mechanical/automatic creature. For Walter Benjamin, Chaplin’s
unique significance was that “in his work, the human being is
integrated into the film image by way of his gestures […]. The
innovation of Chaplin’s gestures is that he dissects the expressive
movements of human beings into a series of minute innervations”
(Benjamin 2002b, 94).
Wyndham Lewis wrote disparagingly of the ‘infant-cult’ in his
account of Chaplin in Time and Western Man (1924), linking Chaplin,
‘child-man’, to the personae and work of Anita Loos (a highly
successful cinema screenwriter and author of the comic ‘Hollywood’
novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) and Gertrude Stein, whose prose he
defined as similarly faux-naif and infantilised. His critique of Chaplin,
and in particular the Tramp persona, is extended (even as the figure
energises) Lewis’ novel The Childermass, in which the two central
characters, Pullman and Satters, are re-united in the afterlife (both
having died in World War One) as, in Anthony Paraskeva’s phrase,
“animated stiffs” (2013, 100). The despotic Bailiff, who at times
appears in the guise of Chaplin, requires that they enact routines from
Chaplin’s films. Here the animus would seem to be directed against
film’s automatic life, as well as the forms of imitative behaviour and
crowd response connected to the Chaplin figure and to cinema as mass
culture in general. Yet there were inconsistencies and paradoxes in
Lewis’s cultural critiques which were often at their fiercest when their
objects came closest to his own ideas: This is almost certainly true of
his relationship to Chaplin’s early films.
Writers in the 1930s were engaging with film as a talking medium,
but for many the lure of the silent film remained strong. Chaplin
famously held out against sound cinema for a decade after the arrival
of the ‘talkies’ and his ‘conversion to sound’ was only ever a partial one.
Samuel Beckett’s absorption in film was also closely tied to the silent
era: In a letter written in 1936, he expressed his hope “that a back
water may be created for the two dimensional silent film that had
barely emerged from its rudiments when it was swamped”; silent and
sound film could then become “two separate things and no question of
a fight between them or rather of a rout” (Beckett 2009, 311–312).
Beckett wrote to Eisenstein at this time, “to ask to be considered for
admission to the Moscow State School of Cinematography”, noting that
he was most interested “in the scenario and editing end of the subject”
(Beckett 2009, 317). He received no reply. Other letters of this period
show him engaging with the writings, and films, of Eisenstein and
Pudovkin, and expressing interest in the principles of Soviet ‘montage’.
The depth and breadth of film’s influence on Beckett (to include not
only the Soviet cinema of the 1920s and 1930s but film in its earliest
years) can be observed in his silent Film (1965). Here the former silent
film actor Buster Keaton is both subject and object of scenes of looking
and looking away, and repeated visual references to Battleship
Potemkin emerge. Beckett replicates Eisenstein’s transfer of an
eyeglass between figures on the screen, and stages a sequence in which
a woman, wearing a pince-nez, opens her mouth in an expression of
horror which mirrors that of Eisenstein’s wounded schoolteacher, her
mouth held open in a scream, on the Odessa steps. As with the artist
Francis Bacon’s Study for the Nurse in the Film ‘Battleship Potemkin’
(1957) the forms and images of silent film, and of the cinema of the
modernist period more generally, continued to reverberate in works of
literature and art.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Vol. 1. 1929–1940.
Ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overback. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological
Reproducibility.” 1936. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Vol. 3.
1935–1938. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002a. 101–133.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Formula in Which the Dialectical Structure of
Film Finds Expression.” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Vol.
3. 1935–1938. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings.
 Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002b. 94.
Bowen, Elizabeth. “Why I Go to the Cinema.” Footnotes to the
Films. Ed. Charles Davy. London: Lovat Dickson, 1938. 205–220.
Döblin, Alfred. “ Ulysses by Joyce.” 1928. Reprinted in The Weimar
Republic Sourcebook. Ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward
Dimendberg. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1994. 514.
Eisenstein, Sergei M., Vsevolod I. Pudovkin, and Grigori V.
Alexandrov. “The Sound Film: A Statement from U.S.S.R.” 1928.
Close Up 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism. Ed. James Donald,
Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus. London: Cassell, 1998. 83–84.
Gunning, Tom. “Modernity and Cinema: A Culture of Shocks and
Flows.” Cinema and Modernity. Ed. Murray Pomerance. New
Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2006. 297–315.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. 1922. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Marcus, Laura. The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the
Modernist Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Paraskeva, Anthony. The Speech-Theatre Complex: Modernism,
Theatre, Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013.
Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and
Public Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
Stein, Gertrude. “Portraits and Repetition.” Look at Me Now and
Here I Am: Writings and Lectures 1911–1945. Ed. Patricia
Meyerowitz. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. 106.
Trotter, David. Cinema and Modernism. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.
Woolf, Virginia. “The Cinema.” 1926. The Essays of Virginia Woolf.
Vol. 4. 1925–1928. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth Press,
1994. 348–353. Variant version, 591–595.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. 1927. Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1992.

5.2 Further Reading

Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 62001.
Collins, Jo, and John Jervis. Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories,
Modern Anxieties. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Gaudreault, André. Film and Attraction: From Cinematography to
Cinema. Transl. Timothy Barnard. University of Illinois: Board of
the Trustees, 2011.
Gunning, Tom. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and
Modernity. London: British Film Institute, 2000.
Hill, John, and Pamela Church Gibson. Film Studies: Critical
Approaches. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Barbara Straumann

13 Adaptation – Remediation –
Transmediality
Abstract: Textual elements, especially narratives and characters, can
move from one media system to another, and media often refer to
other media. This chapter focuses on adaptation, remediation and
transmediality as three closely interrelated concepts. Adaptations raise
questions concerning their media transfer but also concerning their
contexts. Foregrounding the mediality of media, the concept of
remediation describes how media adapt other media and absorb them
into their media logic. Transmediality, finally, refers to the practice of
telling a story in several media. Transmedia storytelling, which has
become widespread and popular in the context of the new digital
media, develops narratives across a variety of media platforms in order
to allow its recipients to explore different aspects of their plots,
characters and story-worlds. In order to apply the theoretical concerns
at stake in these concepts, this chapter will offer a close analysis of Baz
Luhrmann’s postmodern adaptation William Shakespeare’s Romeo +
Juliet (1996).
Key Terms: Adaptation, remediation, transmediality, transmedia
storytelling, hyper-mediacy, intertextuality, recycling, postmodernism,
William Shakespeare, Baz Luhrmann

1 Adaptation
Adaptation – the “extended, deliberate, announced revisitation of a
particular work of art” (Hutcheon 2006, 170) – can occur within the
same medium, for example in literary rewritings, which appropriate
and refigure previous literary texts. However, in order to examine
issues of intermedial exchange, the focus of this section will be on
adaptations between different media, notably the adaptation of literary
texts in the cinema.
 Cinematic adaptations of literary texts enjoy immense popularity,
while adaptation discourse often invokes pejorative terms such as
“‘infidelity,’ ‘betrayal,’ ‘deformation,’ ‘violation,’ ‘bastardization,’
‘vulgarization,’ and ‘desecration’” (Stam 2005, 3). As well as seeing
literature and film in rivalry with each other, this moralistically
inflected rhetoric works with a clear-cut dichotomy between high art
and popular culture as well as a hierarchical distinction between
original and copy (cf. Naremore 2000, 2). Already George Bluestone’s
Novels into Film: The Metamorphosis of Fiction into Cinema (1957),
the first full-length study of literary film adaptations, affirmed “the
intellectual priority and formal superiority of canonical novels”
(Naremore 2000, 6). This binary opposition in which the literary
source text is privileged over the cinematic adaptation and in which the
copy is considered to be less prestigious than the original has, however,
been deconstructed by recent approaches in adaptation studies. Critics
such as Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (1999), James
Naremore (2000), Robert Stam (2005), Julie Sanders (2006), Linda
Hutcheon (2006), Anne Bohnenkamp (2012) and Costas
Constandinides (2012) emphasise the intertextual and dialogic
character of both literary texts and their cinematic adaptations.
According to poststructuralist notions of intertextuality, any text is
in dialogue with a multiplicity of other texts (cf. Allen 2011).
Adaptations, for instance, often refigure earlier adaptations. Spectators
familiar with Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944), made in a patriotic
spirit during WWII, will inevitably read Kenneth Branagh’s version
(1989) against the earlier adaptation, which has become an integral
part of the play’s reception history. Moreover, adaptations often invoke
many additional textual and generic traditions. Branagh’s Love’s
Labour’s Lost (1999), for example, couches its adaptation of
Shakespeare’s comedy in the tradition of the 1930s Hollywood film
musical (cf. Sanders 2006, 20–21). Similar processes can also be
observed in literature, which feeds on texts in order to generate new
texts. As Sanders points out, “adaptation and appropriation are
fundamental to the practice, and, indeed, to the enjoyment, of
literature” (Sanders 2006, 1). Shakespeare was himself very much an
adaptor, drawing on authors such as Ovid, Plutarch and Holinshed
among many others, and his period had “a far more open approach to
literary borrowing and imitation than the modern era of copyright and
property law encourages or even allows” (Sanders 2006, 46–47).
Modern notions of originality and autonomy, on the other hand, are
the result of “a rather recent, individualistic conception of the ‘author’
and the ‘work’, a conception […] that started to become legally defined
only at the end of the eighteenth [century]” (Bazin 2000 [1948], 23).
Poststructuralist approaches, however, have made significant
contributions to the way in which adaptations are viewed. Linda
Hutcheon (2006, 169), for instance, underlines that although
adaptations are derived from predecessor texts, this does not render
them derivative or second-rate. Similarly, Robert Stam (2005, 9, 31)
points out that if literary texts are themselves intertextual and dialogic,
and if authors are multi-discursive and fragmented, there is no single
‘origin’ or ‘spirit’ to which adaptations could be ‘faithful’.
Attuned to the poststructuralist notion formulated by Michel
Foucault that “[t]here is nothing absolutely primary to interpret, for
after all everything is already interpretation” (1998, 275),
contemporary approaches regard all texts and adaptations as forms of
(re)interpretation. Instead of following a negative rhetoric of loss, they
see adaptation as an “interpretative and […] creative act” (Hutcheon
2006, 111; cf. Verrone 2011). In fact, there are many different attitudes
that adaptations can adopt towards their source texts, ranging from
tribute and homage, illustration and translation to appropriation and
transformation, rewriting and critique, re-vision and subversion.
Importantly enough, adaptation is “a mutually transforming rather
than a one-way process” (Elliott 2005, 4). The (re)interpretation
offered by an adaptation can alter our reading of a literary text in a
lasting way. Furthermore, Stam (2005, 3) describes adaptations as
“mutations” that help their source texts “survive” by adapting them to
changing environments. Indeed, the cultural survival of texts can be
nourished by the ways in which adaptations reimagine them in and for
a different historio-cultural context and media system. After all, the
verb ‘to adapt’ means ‘to make fit’, ‘to adjust’, ‘to alter’, ‘to make
suitable for a new purpose or to a different context or environment’, be
this a different medium, a different historical moment or a different
culture. Film has been called a synthetic medium which devours and
transforms other arts and media together with their respective
iconographic traditions and techniques – a process that renders film
an intermedial form of expression from the start and that will be
discussed in more detail in the next section on remediation (cf. Stam
2005, 23; Bohnenkamp 2012, 35). At the same time, film adaptations
have been described as a ‘digest’ processing literature so as to make it
more widely accessible in popularised form to a mass audience (cf.
Bazin 2000 [1948]).
While analysing adaptations, the very fact of the media transfer can
be seen to be enriching: The media changes at stake in adaptation
allow us to trace medial differences and specificities as well as to
recognise and describe the added value of such a transfer (cf.
Bohnenkamp 2012, 18). Usually the shift from the literary to the
cinematic is said to require condensation and concentration, especially
with regard to plot and characters (cf. Bazin 2000 [1948], 25;
Hutcheon 2006, 36). Here, it is important to emphasise that literature
is not literature, and that film is not film (cf. Bohnenkamp 2012, 32). A
television series has clearly far more scope for the development of both
plot and characters than would be the case in a two-hour feature film,
while the transposition into film will proceed differently depending on
whether an adaptation is based on a play, novella, novel or a graphic
novel. Yet regardless of its form, film as a medium is synaesthetic
because it engages various senses (cf. Stam 2005, 23). As a multi-track
medium, film can create ironic contradictions by juxtaposing word,
sound and image and, in so doing, produce a cinematic polyphony that
resembles novelistic discourse (cf. Stam 2005, 20).
In discussions of adaptations, the medium of film is often compared
to the conventions of drama and narrative fiction respectively (cf.
Bohnenkamp 2012, 30). Hutcheon (2006, 22–23), for example, points
out that narrative fiction immerses its readers through imagination,
while both drama and film engage their spectators through the direct
perception of concrete audio-visual representations. In the first,
recipients imagine and picture a world from letters, and in the second,
they perceive before they then name and give meaning to a world of
images, sounds and words (cf. Hutcheon 2006, 130; Stam 2005, 14;
Bohnenkamp 2012, 34). While narrative texts describe characters
through purely verbal means, characterisation in film and drama can
draw on a range of extraverbal elements such as body movements,
acting styles, gestures, accents but also the star images of the actors
performing the characters together with their intertextual allusions to
previous film appearances (cf. Stam 2005, 22–23). In addition to their
multimediality, film and theatre share another structural proximity in
their collective production and reception. At the same time, the
consumption of film on DVD means that films can be ‘read’ much
along the lines of novels and, indeed, especially television series can be
seen as the novel form of today (cf. Stam 2005, 11; Bohnenkamp 2012,
32–33).
In other respects, however, film resembles narrative fiction more
than drama. While the theatre stage offers a broad perspective on the
scenes, all of which are invariably seen from the same angle and
distance, film allows for a myriad of changes in the position of the
camera so that scenes are always represented from a particular angle
and distance. Since the camera adopts a particular position and thus a
particular point of view, it can be said to focalise, accentuate and
mediate the narration in analogy to the narrator in narrative fiction (cf.
Bohnenkamp 2012, 30; Sanders 2006, 48). In fact, film deploys a
whole range of cinematic techniques – various types of shots, editing
and montage – that have no parallel on stage (cf. Hutcheon 2006, 43).
In contrast to drama, where soliloquies are the only available means to
explore a character’s inner mental stage, narrative fiction can include
inner monologues and focalise characters from within. Like narrative
fiction, film can convey a character’s point of view not just through
direct speech (namely commentary by voice-over) but also by means of
a range of other devices, including camera angle, focal length, music,
mise-en-scène, mind screens and dream sequences (cf. Stam 2005,
39–40; Hutcheon 2006, 55). Moreover, the close-up technique of film
can be used to create a sense of psychological intimacy (cf. Hutcheon
2006, 58–59).
Adaptations tend to favour certain authors and texts as well as
specific genres and particular time periods (Sanders 2006, 120–121).
As indicated by its numerous adaptations of early modern and
Victorian texts, postmodern culture shows remarkable affinities in its
cultural recycling with these two periods and their own investment in
adaptation (cf. Kucich and Sadoff 2000; Lehmann 2002). At the same
time, the frequent adaptation of the ‘classics’ is partly due to economic
and legal considerations, namely the fact that the texts in question are
outside of copyright law (cf. Sanders 2006, 48). Starting with the early
cinema, film has often sought to accrue cultural capital by drawing on
the literary canon. Yet the adaptation of well-known canonical texts is
also a way of ensuring prior knowledge on the part of the viewers
because they will actually have read the text or know about it from “a
generally circulated cultural memory” (John Ellis qtd. in Sanders
2006, 25). Textual knowledge is significant since the appeal of
adaptations for the audience is caused to a considerable extent by
“their mixture of repetition and difference, of familiarity and novelty”
(Hutcheon 2006, 114). Allowing readers to prolong their encounter
with a certain text, adaptations add a “sense of play” thriving on both
“expectation and surprise” (Sanders 2006, 25; cf. Hutcheon 2006, 4, 9,
114–115, 173). Films adapting literary texts usually function as works of
art in their own right. It may not be necessary to know Joseph
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in order to appreciate Francis Ford
Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), or Jane Austen’s Emma in order to
enjoy Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1985) (cf. Sanders 2006, 22–23).
However, knowing the texts makes one aware of an “enriching,
palimpsestic doubleness” (Hutcheon 2006, 120). That is, only a
knowing audience will actually perceive an adaptation as an adaptation
and thus enjoy the interplay between similarity and difference (cf.
Sanders 2006, 22; Hutcheon 2006, 120–128).
Adaptation always occurs at a particular historical moment and in a
particular cultural context. Especially in the case of canonical texts,
there is often a considerable historical distance and sometimes also
cultural difference at stake, and filmmakers have to decide whether or
not their adaptation is going to entail a cultural relocation and
historical updating. The historical, cultural and regional specificity of
adaptations can either be reduced or heightened. One of the best-
known cross-cultural adaptations is Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood
(1957), which transposes Macbeth from medieval Scotland to Japanese
feudal culture and, in so doing, replaces the Shakespearean text with a
form of “visual poetry” (Schmidt 2012, 65; cf. Hutcheon 2006, 145).
Taking its cue from Kurosawa’s Hamlet remake The Bad Sleep Well
(1960), which relocates the play to the corporate world of the Tokyo
Stock Exchange, Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000) refigures
Elsinore as a Manhattan financial corporation and Claudius as a
corrupt CEO – an updating that brings the play closer to the audience’s
temporal, geographical and social frame of reference (cf. Sanders
2006, 55, 21).
Transcultural adaptations often involve shifts in racial and gender
politics (cf. Hutcheon 2006, 147). In Gurinder Chadha’s Bride &
Prejudice (2004), for instance, which gives Jane Austen’s Pride and
Prejudice a Bollywood treatment and refigures the Bennets as a
contemporary Indian family, the centrality that marriage holds for the
female characters appears to be even more pronounced than in the
source text. Likewise, a significant part in the reinterpretation and
renewed relevance of a prior text can be played by contemporary
events and media images as can, for example, be seen in Tim Blake
Nelson’s ‘O’ (2001), an update of Shakespeare’s Othello which focuses
on an African-American high school basketball player, and thus
invokes the O. J. Simpson trial as an important intertext (cf. Hutcheon
2006, 149).
As a form of retelling, adaptation can be said to oscillate between
conservative affirmation and revisionist subversion. As J. Hillis Miller
points out, the need for the same stories to be told over and over can be
seen as “one of the most powerful, perhaps the most powerful, of ways
to reassert the basic ideology of our culture” (1995, 72). Similarly,
James Naremore (2000, 14) suggests together with André Bazin that
adaptations can support the creation of cultural and national myths. In
fact, it is hardly a coincidence that the genre of the British heritage
film, with its revival of Britain’s past in nostalgic fashion, was
particularly pronounced during the Thatcher years, when a more
general heritage culture “sought to bolster a sense of a fixed national
identity” (Hadley 2010, 10; cf. Vidal 2012). At the same time,
adaptations can also have the potential of re-visioning the past in their
appropriation and rewriting of canonical texts. Hence they can, for
instance, bring to the screen what is absent, merely evoked or even
hidden and repressed in the texts they refigure. An example for this
type of rewriting is Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park (1999), which
fills the gaps and absences that have been located by Edward Said’s
postcolonial reading of the novel (1994) as it makes explicit the
colonialism and slavery on the Antiguan plantations that support the
Bertram estate in England (cf. Sanders 2006, 22; Stam 2005, 42;
Hutcheon 2006, 152). Because of its ongoing dialogue between past
and present and its use of texts written in the past to negotiate
contemporary concerns and ideological interests of today, the constant
reinterpretation at stake in adaptation refers us to what Leo Braudy, in
his discussion of remakes, calls “unfinished cultural business” (qtd. in
Hutcheon 2006, 116).

2 Remediation
The much-cited concept of remediation was coined and developed by
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in their book Remediation:
Understanding New Media (2000). Following a media comparative
approach, the authors argue that media are not autonomous. Rather
than operating in isolation, media are in constant exchange with other
media. Indeed, according to their definition, “a medium is that which
remediates. It is that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and
social significance of other media […]” (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 65).
Put differently, what defines media is not their distinct formal or
technical specificity but the fact that they adapt, remodel and
transcode the forms and practices of other media. “Media are
continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each other,
and this process is integral to media. Media need each other in order to
function as media at all” (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 55). Remediation
can thus be seen as a radical form of intermediality: Media are
inherently intermedial because they constantly remediate other media.
Newer media refashion older media just as older media draw on newer
media. Hence, for example, virtual reality remediates both film and
perspective painting, while television can remediate digital computer
technology, for instance in the BBC series Sherlock (2010–), where
digital textual layers are superimposed on the film image in order to
render the thinking process of the protagonist visible as he is searching
for and filtering information in his mind (cf. Stein and Busse 2012, 10–
12)
The concept of remediation works with two distinct and
contradictory modes of mediation: ‘transparent immediacy’, in which
the medium is made to erase the traces of mediation so as to render
the fact of mediation altogether invisible (e.g. in the case of virtual
reality), and ‘hypermediacy’, in which a medium multiplies and, in
fact, highlights the signs of mediation (e.g. in the fragmented visual
style of computer desktops and the internet) (cf. Grusin 2005, 497).
While these modes follow contradictory impulses, they are, in fact,
both part and parcel of the same double logic of remediation, in which
mediation is at once heightened and veiled. Indeed, these two forms of
mediation coincide with “the twin preoccupations of contemporary
media: the transparent presentation of the real and the enjoyment of
the opacity of media themselves” (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 21).
The process of remediation is closely linked to the long-established
tendency of media to adapt and absorb older media in order to present
themselves as ever more transparent (cf. Allen 2011, 214). This attempt
is particularly pronounced in the case of the new digital media, which
according to Bolter and Grusin, remediate and refashion earlier media
such as television, film, photography and perspective painting on an
unprecedented scale (cf. Grusin 2005, 497). Paradoxically enough,
however, certain digital media forms have to employ a lot of mediation
(i.e. hypermediacy) in order to create an experience of transparent
immediacy and thus make the medium (seemingly) disappear. The
immersive experience of virtual reality and video games, for instance,
requires that the viewers do not notice the presence of the medium
itself. Conversely digital special effects in Hollywood cinema can
trigger a form of wonder and amazement at the effect of immediacy
that is reminiscent of the very early cinema of attractions and
produced by an awareness of the medium itself (cf. Bolter and Grusin
2000, 158). Here viewers are aware of the mediality that produces the
reality effect.
Bolter and Grusin (2000) are particularly interested in the new
digital media, and their book has been particularly influential in new
media studies. However, their discussion can also fruitfully be applied
to earlier media and their remediation, including literature and film.
As they themselves point out, “the practices of contemporary media
constitute a lens through which we can view the history of
remediation” (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 21). Indeed, without
necessarily using the concept of remediation, various other scholars
have traced related forms of borrowing across media. Ben Brewster
and Lea Jacobs (1997), for instance, explore the relations between
early cinema and nineteenth-century theatre by analysing the pictorial
stage traditions (such as the theatrical tableau, acting styles and
staging techniques) that were borrowed, adapted and transformed by
early feature films. Challenging previous assumptions that early
filmmakers had to distance themselves from the theatre in order to
develop a specifically cinematic aesthetic, Brewster and Jacobs argue
that the early feature film can in fact be seen to refashion the pictorial
traditions of the earlier medium theatre. A different historical
perspective is provided by Grahame Smith in his book Dickens and the
Dream of Cinema (2003), where he argues that Dickens’ proto-filmic
language anticipates the modern medium of film, which only emerged
after his death. What these two examples illustrate is the idea, in
keeping with Bolter and Grusin, that media are in a constant exchange
with other media.
The concept of remediation can also be made useful for a discussion
of film adaptations of literary texts. Bolter and Grusin (2000, 44)
observe that many adaptations adapt the content (the plot and the
characters) but not the medium of the source text. As a result, they
argue, there is no conscious interplay between the two media. Using
period-correct settings, these traditional adaptations allow for
seamless viewing and thus transport a sense of transparent immediacy.
However, there are also counter-examples where the process of
mediation comes to be foregrounded. William Shakespeare’s Romeo +
Juliet (1996), which will be discussed in section 4 of this chapter,
remediates the medium of theatre in addition to many other media,
including television, photography and painting, so as to produce an
effect of hypermediacy. Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000) may not
offer a conscious remediation of the theatre, but by turning Hamlet’s
play-within-the-play into a video-montage and hence a film-within-a-
film, the film provides a reflection on its mediality in analogy to
Shakespeare’s dramatic self-reflection (cf. Donaldson 2006).
Mansfield Park (1999), Patricia Rozema’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s
novel, finally, signals its remediation of literature not only by opening
with an extreme close-up of an ink drop, quills and sheets of paper, but
also by showing the protagonist Fanny Price, who is here transformed
into a writer and eventually a published author, as she is writing and
reading out her texts.

3 Transmediality and Extended Storytelling

The term ‘transmediality’ literally means ‘across media’ and is used to
refer to textual elements such as plots and characters that appear in a
variety of different media. Some critics argue that contents such as
characters and/or story-worlds are not dependent on a particular
medium but, on the contrary, can be put into narrative form in
different media. Although transmedial phenomena play themselves out
in media, the elements moving across media are thought to be media-
indifferent (cf. Robert 2014, 25, 75). Other critics, however, emphasise
the specific possibilities of particular media and, therefore, examine
how the possibilities of narration change as a result of different medial
forms of presentation ( 0 Introduction; 23 Narratives across Media
and the Outlines of a Media-conscious Narratology; cf. Mahne 2007).
Transmedial examples include Disney films that have led to the
creation of entire franchises comprising comic books, musicals,
collectable figurines, physical and digital games as well as theme parks,
or the The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a modern-day multi-platform
adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which began as a web
series before it also came to include a book and Tweets on Twitter.
The more specific concept of transmedia storytelling coined by
Henry Jenkins (2006) is concerned with projects which extend and
develop their stories across various media platforms both deliberately
and coherently. In contrast to spin-offs and mere merchandising, the
transmedia approach is, from the start, crucial to the conception of the
narrative plot, the fictional story-world and the characters as well as to
the ways in which they are dispersed and sold across various delivery
channels. What is emphasised by Jenkins’ concept of transmedia
storytelling is not so much the question of how a story is translated
into another medium (adaptation) or how a medium refashions
another medium (remediation), but the possibility of expanding the
scope and meaning of a narrative by using a range of different media.
Several different media platforms are used because certain media can
explore certain facets better than others. A game, for example, can
develop aspects and ideas that do not fit within a two-hour feature film
(Jenkins 2006, 8–9). Telling a story on multiple media-platforms
makes it possible, for instance, to add further plot developments, to
explore character backgrounds, or to provide new insights into the
fictional story-world. Transmedia storytelling thus typically thrives on
rich story-worlds with multiple characters that sustain multiple
narratives.
Transmedia storytelling puts a lot of emphasis on recipients (or
consumers as Jenkins calls them). The need to collect information and
make connections between different media texts makes for a deepened
engagement with a story, its characters and fictional worlds.
Furthermore, the quest for dispersed pieces of information encourages
and fosters the rise of fan communities:
Transmedia storytelling […] places new demands on consumers and depends on the active
participation of knowledge communities. […] To fully experience a fictional world,
consumers must assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story
across media channels, comparing notes with each other via online discussion groups […].
(Jenkins 2006, 20–21)

While each media text needs to be self-contained in order to allow

individual consumption, reading across the various media platforms
used provides a type of experience that encourages and motivates more
consumption. In order to maintain the interest and enhance the
investment of transmedia consumers, it is important to avoid
redundancy and reproduction and instead offer additional insight and
new levels of experience with each media text and platform adding
another perspective, for example by introducing a change in
focalisation or offering a backstory (i.e. the history or background story
created for a character) in the form of a prequel.
One of Jenkins’ core examples is the Matrix phenomenon, where the
filmmakers planted clues in the films which can only be solved by
playing the computer game and by establishing the background story
from animated shorts downloaded from the Web (Jenkins 2006, 96).
Further examples include the Indiana Jones films and their further
development in games and television, including the TV series The
Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992), which shows how the
protagonist developed against the backdrop of twentieth-century
history, or the novelisation of Star Wars, which expands the timeline
and centres on secondary characters, thus fleshing them out in the
process (cf. Jenkins 2006, 108). Made by the same creators (the
Wachowski brothers and the production company Lucasfilm
respectively), these transmedia storytelling experiences are
characteristic of Jenkins’ vision of a culture of media convergence in
which filmmakers and the creators of games and other ‘texts’ come to
collaborate at “creative intersections between the media” (Jenkins
2006, 9), thus producing a unified and coordinated experience of
narrative content that travels across multiple media.
However, it is possible to expand the definition of transmedia
storytelling, for example to include forms in which the dispersal is not
as systematic and the authorship not as official as suggested by
Jenkins’ examples. While focusing on the BBC series Sherlock (2010–),
the essay collection Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom examines “the
rich history of Sherlock Holmes” as an “expansive transmedia text”
(Stein and Busse 2012, 9–10); also 16 Literature and Television),
which includes numerous refigurations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories
and characters in comic books, films, commercial works of pastiche,
fan fiction and fan videos, thus bespeaking “the wide reach, breadth,
and multiplicity of Holmes and Watson […] as cultural figures” (Stein
and Busse 2012, 9). Indeed, by paying particular attention to the fan
engagement and participation, the volume shows how various media
channels – both commercial and non-commercial, both official and
unofficial – can contribute to transmedia storytelling. While the
official transmedia narrative extensions provided by the BBC in the
form of Sherlock’s website and John’s blog offer no active participation
on the part of viewers and readers, fans can be seen to build “their own
transmedia webs of text and image” (Stein and Busse 2012, 13) by
producing additional works of fiction based on the series. This
underlines how in transmedia storytelling, readers and consumers can
literally become writers and producers.
Finally, the distinction between transmedia extension and
adaptation is not clearcut. As mentioned earlier in this chapter,
adaptations represent reinterpretations so that viewers are offered a
new perspective and experience with each adaptation. It is possible,
therefore, to discuss adaptations and appropriations of much earlier
texts as transmedia phenomena. Numerous Shakespeare plays have
been adapted and extended by multiple media platforms including
film, television, the visual arts, comic novels, crime fiction,
advertisement etc. (cf. Burt 1998; Lanier 2002; Garber 2008; Marx
2014; Hesse and Marx 2014). Moreover, many Shakespeare
adaptations work with precisely the type of expansion mentioned by
Jenkins, namely added backstories, shifts in focalisation and minor
characters that become central. Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) famously puts centre stage two
characters who are only in the margins in Hamlet, while John Updike’s
novel Gertrude and Claudius (2000) presents itself as a prequel
focusing on Gertrude, Claudius and old Hamlet, and Jane Smiley’s A
Thousand Acres (1991), a rewriting of King Lear which focuses on
Goneril (renamed Ginny), expands the storytelling by foregrounding a
feminine perspective (cf. Sanders 2006, 50).

4 Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet

Romeo and Juliet is one the most frequently adapted Shakespeare
plays (cf. Lehmann 2010). The play has, for instance, been translated
into orchestral music by Tchaikovsky, ballet by Prokoviev, painting by
Henry Fuseli and Ford Madox Brown, into narrative fiction by
Gottfried Keller, whose novella “Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe”
(1875) inspired Frederick Delius’ opera A Village Romeo and Juliet
(1907). Cinematic adaptations include the 1936 version directed by
George Cukor, the 1961 film version of Leonard Bernstein’s musical
West Side Story, Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 adaptation as well as William
Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) by Baz Luhrmann, which offers
an explicit updating by relocating the story from Verona to a
contemporary multi-ethnic Verona Beach in southern California.
The rich adaptation history of Romeo and Juliet can be discussed as
an example of transmedia storytelling. Although the various versions
do not offer the type of unified and coordinated storytelling experience
described by Jenkins (2006), they do allow us to explore additional
aspects of the story and its characters. It is not just that the different
versions reinterpret the play by making use of the particular
possibilities of their respective media, but the fact that they have
emerged over many centuries can, in fact, be seen to add to the
experience of transmediality. In addition to the cultural shifts that
become apparent with the transposition to new cultural contexts, the
long lineage of adaptations also refers us to the emergence of new
modes and practices in the course of media history. Among the most
recent transmedia expansions are computer games which have their
players assist Romeo in rescuing Juliet from her balcony or help the
lovers find a way into each other’s arms so as to arrive at a happy
ending. The appearance of Shakespeare’s protagonists in these games
underlines their status as cultural figures who have gained a life
independent of Shakespeare’s tragedy.
 Since the limited scope of this chapter does not allow us to trace the
intermedial exchanges at play in the transmedia web created by the
panoply of adaptations, the following discussion will focus on William
Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet as an adaptation that foregrounds its
mediality to an exceptional degree. By combining the Shakespearean
text with a plethora of cultural signs and images, the postmodern
recycling of Luhrmann’s film allows us to trace how his cinematic
language draws on and remediates other media, genres and styles,
including television, music video clips, cinematic traditions,
advertisement but also more traditional modes of representation such
as theatre, photography, classical music and Renaissance painting. As
pointed out by Donaldson, Luhrmann’s adaptation belongs to a group
of recent Shakespeare films that present “a wide range of
contemporary media on screen, reframing or ‘remediating’ them as
elements of cinema and thus creating a multi-level idiom that recalls
Shakespeare’s habit of drawing metaphors from book and manuscript
production as well as from the theater” (Donaldson 2006, 216).
Shakespeare’s prologue proleptically summarises the plot, in which
“[a] pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life” (Prologue, l. 6). In so
doing, the beginning of the play underlines that the two are doomed
from the start and that indeed this is a story that has already been
scripted, offering no escape from tragedy. By calling his film William
Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, Luhrmann explicitly marks his work as
an adaptation and, by naming the author and title of his source,
underlines that he follows the text of the play. At the same time, the
cross or plus that connects the protagonists’ names in the title refers us
to the paradoxical status of adaptation, namely its characteristic
interplay between similarity to and difference from its source. While
the cross in Luhrmann’s title points to the fatal tragedy of the “star-
crossed lovers” already mentioned and established in Shakespeare’s
prologue, the plus can be understood to signal that the film serves as
an addition and, as a result, represents both a retelling and a
transformation.
In following the Shakespearean text, Luhrmann retells a story that
long before entered the realm of the legendary. Having passed through
myriad adaptations, Romeo and Juliet has become the “modern
cultural shorthand for romantic love” (Garber 2008, 35). Hence
Luhrmann’s film repeats not only the early modern play but also
recycles a modern myth which is reminiscent of Barthes’ notion of the
déjà-lu (cf. Lehmann 2002, 131). Yet, significantly enough, the film
also makes an important addition by transposing the text and its
corresponding myth to a late twentieth-century present and retelling
the story through the language of contemporary popular culture, thus
mainly (but not only) addressing a young global audience. As we shall
see, the film brings into play a wealth of cultural signs, citations and
allusions and, in so doing, adds additional intertextual layers inspired
by further sources. In other words, the plus in the title can be seen to
indicate that adaptation is to be understood as not merely repeating a
source text but as adding to it in creative ways. Something is literally
gained in the process of adaptation.
At the same time, the film also offers a reflection on the mediality of
its refiguration and, in fact, any storytelling by virtue of its frequent
references to other media. This heightened mediality is particularly
pronounced in the spectacular credit sequence, which adapts
Shakespeare’s prologue in a mode of hypermediacy. While in the play,
the prologue is spoken by a dramatic chorus, the film renders it as a
complex audio-visual montage. Initially we see a flickering TV screen
which is brought closer in a slow zoom. Following a number of credits
on the screen, an African-American female news anchor-woman starts
to read out the text of the prologue. As well as introducing the tragic
love story, Shakespeare’s prologue reflects on its theatrical mediality
by making reference to “the two hours’ traffic of our stage” (Prologue, l.
12). The film adaptation develops Shakespeare’s media reference even
further. In order to emphasise the mediatised and representational
character of its rendition, it combines the theatrical text with the
medium of television, which is encoded as at once ‘dated’ and
contemporary by virtue of a retro 1970s TV model and the present-day
appearance of the African-American news presenter. As the anchor-
woman is finishing her announcement, the camera appears to move
through the TV screen as if it were going ‘live’ (cf. Hindle 2007, 178).
What follows is a rapid succession of cinematic shots, still media
images, written text and newspaper headlines. Instead of offering
traditional establishing shots that introduce a cinema audience to the
location and setting, the film ironically juxtaposes rapid camera zooms
through the rough cityscape of Verona Beach with title cards citing the
Shakespearean phrase “In fair Verona” (Prologue, l. 2). In addition to
high-rise buildings with the logos of the Capulet and Montague
business corporations, the disorientingly fast-paced montage also
features shots of passing police cars and circling helicopters in their
attempt to impose order on the urban violence unfolding below.
Pixelated photographs introduce the members of the feuding families,
while newspaper headlines and magazine covers put emphasis on the
urban feud and its media treatment and, in so doing, make reference to
the desire for mediatised spectacle that permeates our contemporary
culture at large.
As well as offering a form of cultural diagnosis, the audio-visual
collage underlines the artificial quality of its own mediality.
Interestingly enough, the credit sequence repeats the prologue several
times, thus underlining the process of the adaptation as a form of
repetition while emphasising its medial excess. Following the typically
bland mode of news reportage endorsed by the news anchor-woman,
we hear the voice of Pete Postlethwaite, the British actor and veteran
member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, who plays the Friar in the
film, speak the prologue in an urgent and insistent tone. Next, the
prologue is repeated in the form of written title cards. After a
refiguration of Shakespeare’s dramatis personae in the form of a series
of freeze frames which present the individual actors, we are offered a
purely visual ‘prologue’, namely an extremely fast succession of shots
drawn from later moments in the film. Even while on first viewing, the
images of this seven-second montage composed of 26 different shots
register only subliminally (cf. Hindle, 2007, 179), they point to the
themes of violence, love and death. By serving as a visual prolepsis,
they evoke the “sense of fate and foreknowledge” (Anderegg 2003, 59)
already present in Shakespeare’s prologue.
Because of the way in which its film language incorporates other
media, Romeo + Juliet can be related to Bolter and Grusin’s concept of
remediation (2000). By means of its multiple references to television,
news images and photography, the credit sequence creates an effect of
hypermediacy. The viewer is drawn into a vortex of images, and the
spectacular editing creates an effect of urgency and immediacy.
However, at the same time, the heterogeneous collage keeps reminding
us that we are looking at representations that are highly mediated,
both because they are marked by the mode of news reportage and
because of the jarring way in which they are juxtaposed in Luhrmann’s
montage. The various shots are held together only by the text of
Shakespeare’s prologue and a musical variation on Carl Orff’s “O
Fortuna” from his Carmina Burana. Rather than striving towards a
transparent immediacy and erasing the signs of mediation, the credit
sequence highlights its mediated character. By framing its narrative
with this complex montage, the film appears to suggest that we
perceive the world through mediatised images and tell stories through
pre-existing tropes and traditions, which in this case include, but are
not limited to, those of Shakespeare.
The film’s emphasis on media citations is also evident in its
adaptation of Shakespeare’s first scene, which introduces the two
opposing gangs of the Montague and Capulet boys. While transposing
their violent and witty encounter from the streets of Verona to a gas
station, Luhrmann adds further references to Shakespeare with the
line “hubble, bubble, toil and trouble”, a variation on the witches’
refrain in Macbeth (IV.1.10, 20, 35), and the punning advertisement
sign “Add more fuel to your fire” lifted out of 3 Henry VI (V.4.70). At
the same time, the camera techniques, the acting and the soundtrack
quote the styles of several cinematic traditions tongue-in-cheek. As
Hindle points out, the sequence makes reference, for instance, to “the
fast-cutting and speeded-up action movie approach of John Woo”, “the
tough-guy acting styles and gestures of Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of
Dollars and Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West, while
the twanging guitar and haunting whistles […] echo the trademark
scores of Ennio Morricone in both Sergio Leone films” (Hindle 2007,
180). Moreover, the match that is extinguished by Tybalt in time and
the cigarillo that then sets the spilt gasoline on fire are reminiscent of
the gas explosion in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). What these
intertextual references illustrate is the fact that, because they work in a
different period and in a different medium, adaptations tend to invoke
not only their source texts but also a host of further cultural and
textual layers. With the mise-en-scène of this sequence, Luhrmann
refigures the cinematic traditions of his own medium, thus creating a
multi-layered intertextual network.
Yet Romeo + Juliet also remediates the theatrical medium of its
source text. We are first introduced to Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) as
he is sitting on a theatre stage near the beach and amusement park
Sycamore Grove, a name that is inspired by a line from the play
(I.1.119). The fact that the theatre, once clearly magnificent with its
grand proscenium arch, is ruined and dilapidated may underline the
archaic mode of the theatrical medium. And yet the film also appears
to pay homage to the theatrical origins of its source. In fact, it is the
theatre that serves as the location of the dramatically powerful climax
of the film, namely the violent confrontation between the two gangs
leading to the death of Mercutio (who is played by the African-
American actor Harold Perrineau). Recording the fight between Tybalt
(who is played by the Latino actor John Leguizamo) on the one hand
and Romeo and Mercutio on the other, the camera cuts from shots of
the stage to close-ups of their faces. Mercutio is stabbed by Tybalt with
a glass shard from a broken window in the auditorium area. Like a
theatre actor, Mercutio climbs the stage and announces laughingly and
with a theatrical flourish that he has “a scratch” (III.1.94), which
unbeknownst to the others is, in fact, a mortal wound. If up to this
point, there have been a lot of comic moments in the film, this scene
signals both a sudden change in tone and the irrevocable peripeteia,
the tragic point of no return. Mercutio’s pronouncement, “A plague on
both your houses” (III.1.92, 100–101, 108), is repeated both by himself
and the echo of his voice in the rising storm. Leaving the stage and
managing to walk a distance, he dies in Romeo’s arms behind but still
in view of the remains of the theatre. As if to underline the theatrical
mode, his death is witnessed by several audiences: the members of
both gangs and a group of younger boys. Significantly enough, the film
finds a dramatically engaging mode in order to stage this decisive
moment by drawing on the earlier medium of theatre. It is in the
theatrical performance of Mercutio facing death that the film appears
to become most ‘real’.
Like most cinematic adaptations of literary texts, Romeo + Juliet
both reduces and condenses its source. The film draws much of its
narrative pull from the feud between the two gangs and thus puts a lot
of emphasis on male violence. The decision to focus on the interaction
between the young men means, however, that Juliet (Claire Danes)
emerges as a less complex figure than her literary predecessor (cf.
Anderegg 2003, 62). Some of her most important soliloquies are
shortened, including her famous speech preceding the wedding night
and her morbid reflections before she drinks the potion. That the film
is less interested in Juliet as a multi-faceted figure is also suggested by
the way in which it rearranges the scenes of the play and thus alters the
sequence of events. In the play, the death of Mercutio is immediately
followed by Romeo’s vengeful killing of Tybalt. In the next scene, Juliet
expresses her impatience for the night to begin and for Romeo to come
to her so that they can consummate their marriage. When the Nurse
tells her about the death of her kinsman Tybalt at the hands of Romeo,
her love temporarily turns to hatred, which deepens the complexity of
her character (cf. Anderegg 2003, 62). In the film, the message of the
Nurse is left out. Moreover, Claire Danes delivers not only a shortened
version of Juliet’s famous soliloquy, but she does so before Tybalt’s
death. The film cuts from the deserted theatre stage and beach, where
Mercutio has just died and where night can be seen to fall through
timelapse photography, directly to Juliet sitting on her bed next to
numerous lit candles. It is after her soliloquy that we see a close-up of
Romeo’s face full of anger as he and Tybalt are racing in a car chase.
Juliet is almost bypassed in this sequencing. The camera only quickly
cuts to her looking back over her shoulder as if in a premonition as
Romeo is shooting Tybalt.
In its final scenes, the film revisits a number of prior elements and
again refers to several other media. The elevated death bier on which
Juliet’s body is laid out in a church illuminated by a sea of countless
candles and several blue fluorescent crosses is reminiscent of the
theatre stage at Sycamore Grove. At the same time, the white bier
among the numerous candles refers back to Juliet’s bed, which we saw
earlier also illuminated by candles, and indeed the death scene of the
two lovers in this quasi-theatrical mise-en-scène is represented as a
private and intimate moment. The Friar does not appear, and the lines
of the text are manipulated in such a way as to allow for a brief reunion
as Juliet wakes up before Romeo dies.
After Juliet has shot herself with Romeo’s gun, we hear the
Liebestod aria from Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde (1865),
which serves as an intertextual reference to another transgressive love
that ends tragically. At the same time, the camera starts to slowly move
away from the bodies on the bier and to rise upwards. Yet rather than
presenting the pair from above, the angle and the movement of the
camera create an effect whereby they seem to float and ascend until
they appear like two figures in a Renaissance fresco on a church ceiling
(cf. Hodgdon 1999, 97). The image of the two floating bodies invokes
painting as yet another medium, and it also reminds us of the religious
iconography of the numerous icons that have previously appeared on
the guns as well as in the Friar’s mental vision of a peaceful reunion of
the two families. Yet the image can also be seen as a transformation of
Shakespeare’s text into ‘visual poetry’. With the two figures adorning
the ceiling, the film creates a visual equivalent to the metaphorical
language in Juliet’s famous soliloquy in which she asks night to
Give me my Romeo; and when I shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
[…]. (III.2.21–24)
In Luhrmann’s visualisation of their Liebestod, Romeo and Juliet
both look like “little stars”. The mise-en-scène suggests that they have
come to be arrested in an image, which underlines their apotheosis,
the fact that through their death, they have attained a mythical status
in culture. Yet bearing in mind the context of cinema and celebrity
culture, one may want to add that the image literally presents two
international stars: Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes were both
catapulted to global stardom through this film. This brings into play
yet another intertextual layer that is often at work in cinematic
adaptations, namely the way in which roles and performances can
contribute to a star image.
Spliced into the ascent of the two lovers, the film presents several
shots from their shared story, including their first encounter, their
playing in bed as well as their underwater kiss in the Capulet pool,
which turns into a freeze frame and then a completely white screen. If,
as discussed earlier, the film begins with a rapid succession of media
images and culminates in a number of proleptic shots drawn from later
moments in the film, this analeptic sequence turns into a
memorialisation of the two lovers by virtue of a collage of private and
intimate images. However, like Shakespeare’s play, Luhrmann’s film
returns to the public world, namely by showing how the death of the
two lovers is transformed into another news item.
In a superimposition, the white screen turns into the shroud
enveloping one of the corpses on a stretcher. The shots of the arriving
parents in their cars bear a close resemblance to their appearance in
the credit sequence, which reinforces the sense of fatedness. In the
play, the feuding families are reconciled and decide to erect gold
statues of their children. In the film, however, the fresco image and the
analeptic sequence of images serve as the sole ‘monument’ visible only
to the movie audience. In the public space of Verona Beach no
monument is erected, nor is there any reconciliation. Reminiscent of
the condemnation of the two houses by Mercutio, the African-
American ‘Captain Prince’ (Vondie Curtis-Hall) reprimands the
parents by speaking only four lines from the play, culminating in his
pronouncement, which he repeats, “All are punish’d” (V.3.294). The
film’s narrative thus appears to remain in the cycle of violence.
Yet perhaps even more importantly, the ending of Luhrmann’s
refiguration underlines that there is no escape from mediality. The
image quality deteriorates as one of the bodies is put into one of the
ambulances, and we realise that we are (still) watching news footage
on a TV screen. On the soundtrack, the news anchor-woman from the
credit sequence can be heard to speak the final lines of the Prince from
the play text before she shortly comes into view again, completing her
presentation of the (long) news item. Finally, we return to the
flickering TV screen retreating into the distance. Luhrmann’s
postmodern recycling of signs and media refers to our image-saturated
media culture. Yet at a more fundamental level, it also underlines that
stories can be (re)told only by adapting pre-existing texts and media.
The hypermediacy of the film’s hybrid collage never lets us forget that
what we are seeing is a highly mediated representation. By recycling
Shakespeare’s play in the context of contemporary media culture,
Romeo + Juliet offers a timely intervention and, at the same time,
contributes to the timelessness of Shakespeare’s play (cf. Garber 2008,
273).

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. London and New York: Routledge,
22011.

Anderegg, Michael. “James Dean Meets the Pirate’s Daughter: Passion

and Parody in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet and
Shakespeare in Love.” Shakespeare, the Movie, II: Popularizing the
Plays on Film, TV, Video, and DVD. Ed. Richard Burt and Lynda E.
Boose. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. 56–71.
Bazin, André. “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest.” 1948. Film
Adaptation. Ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 2000. 19–27.
Bluestone, George. Novels into Film: The Metamorphosis of Fiction
into Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.
Bohnenkamp, Anne. “Vorwort: Literaturverfilmungen als
intermediale Herausforderung.” Literaturverfilmungen. Stuttgart:
Reclam, 2012. 9–40.
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding
New Media. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2000.
Brewster, Ben, and Lea Jacobs. Theatre to Cinema: Stage
Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997.
Burt, Richard. Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares: Queer Theory &
American Kiddie Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Cartmell, Deborah, and Imelda Whelehan, eds. Adaptations: From
Text to Screen, Screen to Text. London and New York: Routledge,
1999.
Constandinides, Costas. From Film Adaptation to Post-Celluloid
Adaptation: Rethinking the Transition of Popular Narratives and
Characters across Old and New Media. London: Continuum, 2012.
Donaldson, Peter S. “Remediation: Hamlet among the
Pixelvisionaries: Video Art, Authenticity, and ‘Wisdom’ in
Almereyda’s Hamlet.” A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on
Screen. Ed. Diane E. Henderson. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell,
2006. 216–237.
Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx.” Aesthetics, Method, and
 Epistemology: Essential Works of Michel Foucault. Vol. 2. Ed.
James Faubion. Trans. Robert Hurley et al. London: Penguin, 1998.
269–278.
Elliott, Kamilla. “Adaptation.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative
Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan.
London and New York: Routledge, 2005. 3–4.
Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare and Modern Culture. New York:
Pantheon, 2008.
Grusin, Richard. “Remediation.” Routledge Encyclopedia of
Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-
Laure Ryan. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. 497–498.
Hadley, Louisa. Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The
Victorians and Us. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Hesse, Petra, and Peter W. Marx, eds. A Party for Will! Eine Reise
durch das Shakespeare-Universum – A Journey through
Shakespeare’s Universe. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2014.
Hindle, Maurice. Studying Shakespeare on Film. Houndmills: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007.
Hodgdon, Barbara. “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet:
Everything’s Nice in America?” Shakespeare Survey 52 (1999): 88–
98.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York and London:
Routledge, 2006.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media
Collide. New York and London: New York University Press, 2006.
Kucich, John, and Dianne F. Sadoff, eds. Victorian Afterlife:
Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century. Minneapolis
and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Lanier, Douglas. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002.
Lehmann, Courtney. Shakespeare Remains: Theater to Film, Early
Modern to Postmodern. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002.
Lehmann, Courtney. Screen Adaptations: Shakespeare’s Romeo and
 Juliet – The Relationship between Text and Film. London: Methuen
Drama, 2010.
Mahne, Nicole. Transmediale Erzähltheorie: Eine Einführung.
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007.
Marx, Peter W., ed. Hamlet-Handbuch: Stoffe, Aneignungen,
Deutungen. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2014.
Miller, J. Hillis. “Narrative.” Critical Terms for Literary Studies. Ed.
Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 21995. 66–79.
Naremore, James. “Introduction: Film and the Reign of Adaptation.”
Film Adaptation. Ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 2000. 1–16.
Robert, Jörg. Einführung in die Intermedialität. Darmstadt: WBG,
2014.
Said, Edward. “Jane Austen and Empire.” Culture and Imperialism.
London: Vintage, 1994. 95–116.
Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York:
Routledge, 2006.
Schmidt, Johann N. “Macbeth (William Shakespeare – Orson Welles,
Akira Kurosawa, Roman Polanski).” Literaturverfilmungen. Ed.
Anne Bohnenkamp. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2012. 56–73.
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Ed. Brian Gibbons. The
Arden Shakespeare. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen
Greenblatt. New York and London: Norton, 22008.
Smith, Grahame. Dickens and the Dream of Cinema. Manchester and
New York: Manchester University Press, 2003.
Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of
Adaptation.” Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and
Practice of Film Adaptation. Ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra
Raengo. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 1–52.
Stein, Louisa Ellen, and Kristina Busse, eds. Sherlock and Transmedia
Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series. Jefferson and London:
 McFarland, 2012.
Verrone, William. Adaptation and the Avant-Garde: Alternative
Perspectives on Adaptation Theory and Practice. London:
Continuum, 2011.
Vidal, Belén. Heritage Film: Nation, Genre and Representation.
London and New York: Wallflower, 2012.
William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, dir. Baz Luhrmann. 20th
Century Fox, 1996.

5.2 Further Reading

Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Shakespeares Geist und das Phantom des Kinos:
Hollywood, nicht Helsingör.” Die Horen: Zeitschrift für Literatur,
Kunst und Kritik 49.1 (2004): 199–215.
Burnett, Mark Thornton. Shakespeare and World Cinema. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Cartmell, Deborah, ed. Literature, Film, and Adaptation. Malden and
Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
Ryan, Marie-Laure, ed. Narrative across Media: The Languages of
Storytelling. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press,
2004.
Stam, Robert, and Alessandra Raengo, eds. A Companion to
Literature and Film. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Christine Schwanecke

14 Filmic Modes in Literature

Abstract: The present entry investigates a phenomenon that has been
variably termed filmic writing, cinematic techniques, or filmic modes
in literature. After a brief introduction to the terminology, sketches of
both the historical emergence of filmic modes and the research history
on filmic modes are given. Before a toolkit is introduced with which
filmic modes can be analyzed, the pitfalls of clearly identifying and
intersubjectively proving the existence of filmic modes are discussed.
In the article’s last section, by way of example, Robert Coover’s short
story collection A Night at the Movies, which features a great variety of
filmic modes, is briefly analyzed. The article closes with some research
desiderata.
Key Terms: Filmic mode, cinematic technique, cinematographic
structures, filmic writing, cinematic reading

1 Filmic Modes: Terms and Concepts

Understanding ‘film’ as motion picture and audio-visual narrative
(Grodal 2008) and ‘mode’ as a “form or manner of expression”
(“Mode,” def. 4b), one can conceptualize ‘filmic modes’ as literary
forms of expression or discursive structures which, in analogy to the
cognitive processing formula “seeing X as Y” (Jahn 2008, 67–68),
trigger the actualization of the ‘filmic medium’ in a reader’s mind while
s/he is actually reading and processing nothing but words. Filmic
modes can establish the illusion of the filmic medium being
(materially) present in the literary text even though it is not.
At present, there is a plethora of terms and concepts by which
attempts to theorize ‘the filmic’ in literature have been made. The
terms ‘filmic mode’ and ‘film (narrative) mode’ (Hefner 2010) exist
alongside ‘cinematic techniques’ (Fratto 2011), ‘cinematographic form’
(Spiegel 1973; Lodge 1974), and ‘cinematographic structures’
(kinematographische Strukturen, Greiner 1985). While any of these
terms adhere to specific filmic structures on the discourse-level of a
literary text, there are others referring, more generally, to style and
literary production. ‘Filmic writing’ (filmisches Schreiben, Tschilke
2000), ‘filmic ways of writing’ (filmische Schreibweise, Kaemmerling
1973; Tschilke 1999), or, terminologically much broader, but in – and
only in – Rajewsky’s case predominantly geared towards film,
‘intermedial storytelling’ (intermediales Erzählen, Rajewsky 2003)
refer to manners of writing or narrative styles which can be perceived
as – more or less dominantly – ‘filmic.’ In addition to the terminology
highlighting either discursive structures or styles and ways of
production, there is a nomenclature that points to a filmic reception of
literature, as in ‘cinematic reading’ (Kuo 2009). Apart from these
terminological classifications, there are labels which indicate the
existence of genres which display filmic modes and styles; for instance,
the ‘cinematic narrative’ (Helyer 2009), the ‘cinematic story’
(Garrington 2008), ‘cinematographic fictions’ (Bewes 2007), or the
ciné-roman (Olcay 1999).
Filmic modes and styles (and maybe even filmic genres) occur
transgenerically across all kinds of literary texts: hyperfiction, novellas,
novels, plays ( 28 Contemporary British Theatre and Intermediality;
29 Intermediality and Performance Art; 30 Literature and Dance),
poems, and short stories. This dispersal across genres, however, is
veiled by an idiosyncratic stratification of research, which, with a few
exemptions (e.g. poetry, cf. Kane 2008; Kong 2005; Leonard 2011;
theater, cf. Albersmeier 1992; Albersmeier 1995, 149–266; Carroll
1985) has primarily focused on the filmic in literary prose, such as
novels and short stories. This may be due to the comparatively strong
research interest in the novel and the (sub-)consciously influencing
notion of a “family resemblance between film and novel,” already
propagated in the early 1970s (Lodge 1974, 248).

2 Earlier Research on Filmic Modes: 1960–2000

Research on ‘filmic modes in literature’ has been closely related to, and
has to be distinguished from, equally rich and interesting research
fields. For instance, the complementary studies on ‘the literary in film’
(cf. Bleicher 1982; Meixner 1977), adaptation theory and history (cf.
Cartmell and Whelehan 1999; Carroll 2009; McFarlane 1996) and
transmedial research on narrative across media, e.g. in fiction and film
( 13 Adaptation – Remediation – Transmediality; cf. also Bordwell
1985; Chatman 1978; Griem and Voigts-Virchow 2002; Ryan and Thon
2014).
Even though the brothers Lumière, who invented the
cinématographe, screened one of the first films as early as 1895,
prompting some novelists to react immediately to the emergence of the
medium (as in Bertolt Brecht’s famous claim that “[t]he filmgoer
develops a different way of reading stories. But the man who writes the
stories is a filmgoer too,” Brecht 1964, 47), it was not until the 1960s
that literary criticism took up the task of tracing the filmic in
narratives. Reviewing the history of research on film and literature,
one can observe that the research landscape, today tolerant, broad and
diversified, was, then, not only characterized by a reluctance to deal
with the topic, but also by feelings of ‘anxiety’ towards a perceived
influence of film on literature. This culminated in a ‘death of the novel-
debate,’ in which Harold Bloom and John Fowles especially took part
in favor of filmic modes (Drexler 1994, 199) and which, under the
influence of ever newly emerging media and in slightly changing
forms, has kept reappearing until today (Pressman 2009, 465).
It was not until the 1970s that European and transatlantic literary
studies became more liberal. Surprisingly, at a time when a new audio-
visual medium, TV, was becoming increasingly popular ( 16
Literature and Television), researchers, who can be divided into three
different groups, started to investigate the interrelations between film
and literature. The first party seems to have remained under the
influence of the anxieties of the previous decade. They conceptualized
film largely as a medium that (uncannily) ‘dominated’ literature, to
which various personifications bear witness, such as the attribution of
agency to film as a medium that actively ‘influences’ literature (Eidsvik
1973; Albersmeier 1978). The second group focused on aspects of
‘exchange,’ analyzing the literary in film and the filmic in literature
(Meixner 1977; Cohen 1979; Bleicher 1982). A third group, focusing on
the conceptualization of literary studies as media (cultural) studies,
also sprouted up (Kreuzer 1977). Twenty years later, in the 1990s, this
emergence would be perceived as the root of a turn or paradigm shift
(sensu Thomas S. Kuhn) in literary studies towards intermediality. The
first two approaches in particular were characterized by conceptual
flaws, which reappeared throughout the decades to follow. These
conceptual problems, which I will introduce by examining two
exemplary articles, were neither tackled nor solved until the millennial
turn. Firstly, ways of narration that were ‘perceived’ as especially
‘visual’ were – without a substantiation of this perception and a
problematization of this analogy – equated with the ‘camera eye’
(Spiegel 1973, 238). Secondly, while today’s audiences and researchers
are aware of both the artificiality and subjectivity of filmic narration
and camera work, the latter was said to render the things ‘without
affect’ (Spiegel 1973, 238) and ‘objective’ (the camera shows “things as
they are,” Spiegel 1973, 229). Thirdly, there was a focus on
examinations of the ‘visual.’ The motion picture, the audio-visual
medium, was recurrently reduced to its visual traits, and more
specifically, the still. Neither was filmic visualization differentiated
from visualizations in painting or photography by, for example, an
examination of qualities such as ‘motion’ or ‘movement,’ nor were
other defining filmic features, such as sound or music, reflected upon.
Research on paradigmatic movie sounds (e.g. a door creaking and a
high-pitched woman’s scream in a horror movie) and film music as
imitated in literature – with very few exceptions (e.g. Ramachandran
2005) – has remained until this very day a major desideratum.
A fourth conceptual problem lays in the phenomenon that, since the
1970s, filmic modes and filmic readings have been applied to works
that were written around and even before the invention of the film.
Examinations of literature written in the early days of cinema by
Joseph Conrad (Donovan 2003) or Virginia Woolf (Kuo 2009) do not
allow for a definite verification of the presence of filmic modes.
Providing evidence of filmic traces in literature pre-dating the first
screenings of films, for instance in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the
Native (1887; Lodge 1974) or even in medieval literature (Paxon
2007), is even more problematic (or even impossible).
Inspiration is a non-demonstrable entity. Demonstrations of cinema-influence or of the
cinematic in literature must proceed from analysis of the printed page, and […] that sort
of demonstration […] [is] difficult. […] A passage can look cinematic without being
demonstrably cinematic, let alone unquestionably cinematic. Qualities such as
fragmentation, montage, and animation have analogs in printed verbal language, which
resemble, but do not necessarily stem from, the cinema. The literary critic whose
filmgoing habits lead him to read in terms of movies is apt to deceive himself if he thinks
too sloppily about media, equating all fragmentation, montage, or object-orientation with
 only one medium, film. (Eidsvik 1973, 120)

Research has reacted heterogeneously to Charles Eidsvik’s caveat of

the early 1970s. There were those who altogether ignored it and who
‘substantiated’ their claims of the presence of filmic modes in literary
texts by way of mere intuition (Albersmeier 1978, 953–954). There
were those who emphasized that the early movie makers, such as D. W.
Griffith, declaredly took their inspiration in developing the montage
technique from famous novels such as those by Charles Dickens (Paech
1988, 48). They thereby implicitly challenged those researchers who
uncritically and ahistorically interpreted novelistic montage
techniques as intermedial, filmic modes instead of intertextual, literary
modes. There were the scholars and novelists, such as John Fowles,
who carefully reflected upon the possibility of a filmic imagination in
novel production and reception:
I saw my first film when I was six; I suppose I’ve seen on average […] a film a week ever
since […]. How can so frequently repeated an experience not have indelibly stamped itself
on the mode of imagination? […] This mode of imagining is far too deep in me to eradicate
– not only in me, in all my generation. (Fowles 1968, 92–94)

In the 1980s and 1990s, yet another, completely different notion

gained ground. The ‘othering’ principle of the ‘influence of the filmic
other on literature’ (and vice versa) largely vanished in favor of more
value-free concepts, which were also more to the point. Scholars
increasingly promoted an analogous development between literary and
filmic expression (Dörr 1991, 124). Based on the assumption that
historically and culturally specific ways of perception had developed
since the end of the nineteenth century, as a reaction to socio-cultural
change and technical developments, scholars suggested that these
ways of perception transmedially influenced all art production,
including film and literature, independently of each other (Paech 1988,
123; Rajewsky 2002, 37–38).
The preceding three opinions are certainly most appealing, in that
they oppose under-considered approaches and help legitimize well-
reflected but anachronistic studies on cinematographic techniques
such as David Lodge’s on Thomas Hardy’s fiction. They show that
filmic modes may be established both in literary production
(sometimes in direct reference to film, sometimes as a consequence of
a general shift in the perception of reality, whose emergence coincided
with the emergence of the filmic medium and/or was heavily
influenced by it) and literary reception. The latter has, since the 1880s,
also been determined by a cultural context in which film is popular,
widely received and, consequently, likely to trigger the processing
formula of ‘seeing X as Y.’
Even though the terms of film production and reception used in
literary analysis were applied more critically and carefully, and even
though ‘film’ and ‘filmic ways of writing’ were acknowledged in their
historical and cultural dependency, a toolkit of terms and concepts
with which filmic modes could be clearly identified and their existence
intersubjectively proven was still missing. Yet, the theoretical
discussions between the 1970s and 1990s provided the ground for such
conceptualizing endeavours – as did literary analysis. By the last
decade of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first century,
the research on filmic modes in literature had spread across all
disciplines in literary studies, including English studies (Drexler 1994),
German studies (Alt 2009), Romance studies (Mecke and Roloff 1999;
Roloff 1995; Scheidt 1999), and Slavic studies (Fratto 2011). Along with
this disciplinary stratification of the topic came the ‘intermedial turn’
in literary studies.

3 The Intermedial Turn: Research 2000–

The ‘intermedial turn,’ encompassing issues as varied as the
‘musicalization of fiction’ ( 24 Literature and Music: Theory; Wolf
1999b), painting in literature ( for instance, 3 Text-Picture-
Relationships in the Early Modern Period; 5 Ekphrasis and the
Novel/Narrative Fiction; Rippl 2000), photography in fiction (for
instance 7 Postcolonial Ekphrasis in the Contemporary Anglophone
Indian Novel; Amelunxen 1995) and others (Nünning and Nünning
2002), turned out to be highly beneficial for the study of filmic modes
in literature. Research on the related concept of ‘multimodality,’ which
emerged at the same time (Fludernik 2000; Kress and van Leeuwen
2001; Hallet 2008), proved fruitful, too, in that it acknowledged the
existence of different non-narrative, alter-medial discourse modes in
fiction, among them argumentative, descriptive, filmic and further
(audio-)visual modes. Both intermediality and multimodality research
contributed many proto-concepts of filmic modes in literature, which
early studies of the twenty-first century took up and refined.
In her structuralistically informed studies on intermediality at the
intersection of literature and film, Irina O. Rajewsky (Rajewsky 2002,
2003) conceptualizes different kinds of what she terms ‘intermedial
references’ to film (intermediale Bezüge, Rajewsky 2002, 69–77) and
successfully applies them to literary texts which feature filmic modes
(Rajewsky 2003). In doing so, she solves a variety of heretofore
virulent problems: Firstly, she popularizes the assumption of the not
widely-received processing strategy of ‘seeing X as Y,’ i.e. ‘literary
discourse as film.’ She emphasizes that the medium of film is not really
present within the literary medium, even at those times in which an
illusion of this presence is built up within literature (she calls this
illusion of the filmic presence an ‘as-if quality,’ Rajewsky 2002, 39–
40). Secondly, she emphasizes the historicity of any medial and filmic
understanding (Rajewsky 2002, 32–37). And finally, she tackles the
hitherto unsolved desideratum, to clearly identify and intersubjectively
prove the presence of filmic modes in literature by distinguishing
different kinds of intermedial references to film within literature (i.e.
her typology serves as a toolbox that helps spot and verify the presence
of filmic modes in literature, Rajewsky 2002, esp. 158–162).
Rajewsky’s works on literature referencing film have been widely
received and proven highly fruitful. Her strong focus on ‘intermediality
proper,’ though, has slowly given way to a focus on intermediality as
narrative strategy. Terms like ‘intermedial storytelling,’ which refer to
special ways of storytelling, among them filmic ones (Rajewsky 2003),
photographic ones (Schwanecke 2012) and others (cf. also Grishakova
and Ryan 2010), have appeared since then, highlighting the fact that
the alter-medial in literature, here, ‘the filmic’ is primarily established
by literary (verbal, typographic, paratextual) means and serves specific
narrative ends.

3.1 Filmic Modes in Literature: Three Variables

On the basis of the research done on intermediality, multimodality and
intermedial storytelling, it has finally become possible to
intersubjectively trace filmic modes in literature. These are determined
by at least three variables (cf. fig. 1). To present a toolkit with which
these variables can be analyzed and the filmic mode in literature
characterized, I will, firstly, answer the question of what is imitated
(i.e. which facets, norms, or qualities of film are referenced in a literary
text so that it appears filmic); secondly, how these facets of film are
presented (i.e. in which modes); and, thirdly, where they appear (i.e.
on which textual levels and units).
To be able to recognize (and prove) filmic qualities in a given literary
text, we have to have an idea of what these might be; that is, we have to
have a fairly good understanding of the medium of film in the first
place. Against the backdrop of Werner Wolf’s definition of ‘medium,’
film can also be framed as a “conventionally distinct means of
communication or expression” (Wolf 1999a, 40). In other words, what
people understand as ‘film’ or as distinctly ‘filmic’ is a cognitive
concept or a mental schema that depends on convention; like any
convention, it is prone to cultural and historical variation and change.
People in the early days of the cinema were likely to associate ‘film’
with special spaces or institutions (a movie theater, red carpet, and
plush chairs); certain techniques (film reels and projectionists);
acoustic specifics (live music, because silent films were often
accompanied by the piano); special optical aesthetics (grainy black and
white moving pictures); and specific actors (Charlie Chaplin), which
differ from today’s cultural concepts of ‘cinema.’ Movie consumers of
today might think of movies in terms of ‘cineplexes,’ (more or less
illegal) streams on the internet, Saturday night TV, 5.1 Dolby Digital,
and 3D-glasses. And while American audiences arguably think of the
Oscars and actors like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt as soon as ‘film’ is
mentioned, German cineastes are perhaps more inclined to think of
the Berlinale and directors such as Caroline Link and Tom Tykwer.
What is perceived and known as ‘typically filmic’ is context dependent.
This is why students and researchers who want to identify and
interpret filmic modes in literary texts have to acquire a sound
knowledge of the distinct cultural and historical notions of ‘film’ that
exist or are prevalent in any given society and/or time in which a
literary text featuring filmic modes was written or to which it refers on
its story level.
Fig. 1: Variables determining a filmic mode in literature.

People’s cognitive concept of ‘film’ is a conglomerate of multiple

features (e.g. material, institutional or generic ones), among which
there are ‘must-haves’ (core characteristics) and ‘nice-to-haves’
(peripheral characteristics). There are many aspects which ‘make’ a
‘film’ a film; some of them are always needed (e.g. moving pictures),
others less so (e.g. sound, cuts) or not at all (e.g. Brad Pitt). To
organize these heterogeneous features, which – necessarily,
sufficiently, or peripherally – inform people’s culturally specific
notions of film, and to become aware of what those features might
actually be, it makes sense to categorize them. The interrogative
determiners ‘what,’ ‘how,’ and ‘where’ enable us to do so.
(1) ‘What?’: To answer the question of ‘what’ a filmic mode might
refer to, one can resort to Irina Rajewsky’s distinction between textual
‘references to film as a single product,’ e.g. a specific movie, and
‘references to film as a system’ (Einzelreferenz vs. Systemreferenz,
Rajewsky 2002, 65). As intriguing as this distinction might be, it
arguably clouds the variety of filmic codes and conventions an author
can possibly refer to and homogenizes them. This is why, within this
context, I would like to promote another, more detailed
conceptualization which can be used to determine the ‘what’ of the
filmic that is referenced in literature.
In 2000, the media critic Siegfried J. Schmidt gave a useful
categorization of features influencing people’s notion of any medium,
which has proven to be fruitfully applicable to a whole range of media
(Nünning and Rupp 2011a, 8–16; Nünning and Rupp 2011b;
Schwanecke 2012). Schmidt understands ‘medium’ as a ‘compound
concept’ (Kompaktbegriff Medium, Schmidt 2000, 94), composed of,
and influenced by, four different conceptual categories. Firstly, by its
technologies and materiality (Medientechnologien bzw. technisch-
mediale Dispositive); secondly, by the semiotic system(s) it makes use
of (semiotische Kommunikationsinstrumente); thirdly, by social
factors and institutions (sozialsystemische Institutionalisierung von
Medien); and fourthly, by specific media products (Medienangebote,
Schmidt 2000, 93–95).
Applied to the medium of film, the following list of concrete features
informing filmic modes can be given: Filmic technologies and
materiality, which are always dependent on time and context (just like
the other three categories and the features constituting them), include
cameras, projectors, film screens, film reels, super 8, digital
production, 3D-screenings, pyrotechnics, and stunt units. Among the
semiotic symbols a film typically makes use of are moving pictures,
verbal language, sound (including special kinds of sounds such as a
door creaking in a thriller or gunshots in a Western), and music
(including genre specific music, such as strings in a Hollywood
Romance or melodies produced by a theremin in alien films). This
category also includes the conventionalized ‘language’ of film, not seen
as a complex of different medial signs but as a semiotic system in its
own right, which audiences know about and can make sense of, that is,
consciously or subconsciously use for interpretation. This language
includes different kinds of cuts (jump cuts, match cuts), shots (aerial
shots, close-ups, crane shots, long shots, tracking shots), camera work
(panoramic views, shifts of focus or perspective, zooms), or symbols
established in post-production (animation, fade ins, fade outs,
matching of the audio track with the pictures, montages, slow and fast
speeds, split screens, stills, superimposition, or voice-overs). The social
factors that influence people’s understanding of film pertain to the
conventional contexts of film production, practices of reception, and
movie institutions. They entail, for instance, Hollywood as an industry,
the screenwriters, screenplays, composers, the Academy Awards, the
Festival de Cannes, production companies, (famous) actors and
directors, camera crews, independent movies, specific ways of
production and post-production, and filmic reception in a movie
theater or on DVD. Among Schmidt’s fourth category, we could list
specific, traditional film products that people are familiar with:
Concrete films such as Casablanca (1942), The Godfather Trilogy
(1972, 1974, 1990) or all films by, say, Robert Altman; specific genres
like ‘horror movies’ or ‘romantic comedies;’ and even particular plots,
such as the marriage plot or the whodunit. Filmic modes in literature
actualized by authors and readers in their respective encoding and
decoding activities can refer to any feature in any of those four areas
that compose people’s cultural, cognitive concept of ‘film.’ Thus, they
need to be known by literary critics and students of literature who aim
at identifying, analyzing, and interpreting filmic modes in literature.
(2) ‘How?’: While Siegfried Schmidt’s conceptualization of ‘medium’
can be used to find out which characteristics of film might be
actualized by authors and readers when processing filmic modes, Irina
Rajewsky’s theory (Rajewsky 2002, 2003) can account for ‘how’ the
characteristics, codes, and conventions of the compound concept are
integrated in literature. According to her, there are two basic shapes of
filmic modes in literature: reference and contamination (intermediale
Systemerwähnung and Systemkontamination, Rajewsky 2002, 158–
162). The filmic modes she collects under the heading ‘reference’ can
be either explicit or implicit. In explicit references, film is either
mentioned or reflected upon. Vocabulary pertaining to any of its four
compounding categories appears, for instance, in a literary work’s title
(e.g. in Hart Crane’s poem “Chaplinesque,” 1921/1926, Muriel
Rukeyser’s “Movie,” 1935, and David Lodge’s 1960 novel The
Picturegoers) or in the dialogue within a story world (e.g. in David
Lodge’s Changing Places, 1975, where a character famously says:
“Well, the novel is dying, and us with it. […] Those kids […] are living a
film, not a novel,” Lodge 1993, 217). In intermedial novels, these
explicit references to another medium (explizite Sytemerwähnung,
Rajewsky 2002, 159) often serve as ‘markers’ or ‘highlights,’ signalling
the presence of implicit modes of, here, filmic narration. Thus,
vocabulary belonging to the compound concept of ‘film’ enables
students of literature to become attentive to the possible presence of
implicit filmic modes; it even serves to prove their presence (Rajewsky
2003, 66).
References to films which are not explicit are termed ‘reference via
transposition’ by Rajewsky (Systemerwähnung qua Transposition,
Rajewsky 2002, 159–160). These filmic modes evoke, simulate, or
(partly) reproduce filmic elements in literature; the trigger for such a
‘filmic’ reception is, according to Rajewsky, a combination of explicit
references (vocabulary) and the establishment of iconic analogies
between literary structures and filmic conventions, qualities, and
structures. One of these modes consists in the (partial) reproduction of
filmic elements in literature as, for example, in Lodge’s Changing
Places, the last chapter of which is written in the form of a screenplay
(i.e. the genre of ‘screenplay’ which belongs to the compound concept
‘film’ is typographically and stylistically reproduced in the literary
medium, Lodge 1993, 206-218). Other cases of the supposed
‘transposition’ – N.B., this is nothing but an ‘as-if quality’ – are
thematic evocation and discursive simulation. In the first mode, an
analogy between literature and film is established by explicit remarks
(e.g. of a character or a narrator). This is done, for example, by the
narrator of Adam Thorpe’s 1995 novel Still (as in ‘film still’), who with
his assertion to provide a “unique screening” (Thorpe 1996, 2) and
with his claim “[that t]his is the trailer” (Thorpe 1996, 3) gives the
instruction to ‘read’ the novel as a film. In the second mode, analogies
between film and literature are discursively established. In contrast to
the former mode, specific filmic qualities are actually imitated by
certain ways of storytelling; they are not just verbally insinuated. This
is the case in Ali Smith’s The Accidental (2006), where the
accumulation of short paratactic sentences and the quick alternation
between two different semantic domains, which explicitly refer to the
contents of the first silent movies and to supposedly the first movie
theater audiences respectively, simulate a rapid succession of filmic
jump cuts.
The Paris Express arrives. Audiences in the front rows duck their heads! Workers come
out of their factory. Audiences marvel! A boy tricks a gardener with a hose pipe. Audiences
fall off their seats laughing! (Smith 2006, 205)
The spatially consecutive brief sentences coexisting on a sheet of paper
can, with the help of allusions to early films and filmic vocabulary
(“audiences”) that serve as reading instructions, be read as a
simulation of the quick, temporal sequence of the succession of
different scenes typical of film. As the sentences’ tense is present
simple instead of past tense, the narrative quality that characterizes
most novels is given up in favor of a style with the seeming immediacy
of filmic narration. Thus, the specific combination of vocabulary,
semantic content, tense, and their discursive composition (brevity of
sentences, succession of parataxis, alternating imagery) serves as a
mode to simulate both film semiotics (jump cuts, temporal succession
of brief scenes) and filmic ways of reception (practices of watching
movies and making sense of the succession of pictures by way of the
principle post hoc ergo propter hoc, cf. also the ‘Kuleshov effect’).
Besides the filmic modes which belong to Rajewsky’s category of
‘references,’ there are those which belong to her category called
‘contamination’ (Systemkontamination, Rajewsky 2003, 160–162). In
contrast to the former, in instances of ‘contamination’ there is,
according to Rajewsky, no ‘conventional’ narration anymore; literary
narration is elementarily shaped by the application of filmic ways of
expression. There is not ‘just’ the reproduction, evocation, or
simulation of single filmic elements; rather, prescriptive and restrictive
rules of filmic narration are applied at all times within the literary text.
There are mainly two modes which can be counted amongst
‘contamination:’ ‘contamination by translation’ (Systemkontamination
qua Translation, Rajewsky 2002, 161) and ‘contamination by (partial)
actualization of film’ (teilaktualisierende Systemkontamination,
Rajewsky 2002, 161). As will be seen in the analysis of Robert Coover’s
short story “Lap Dissolves” (Coover 1992, 79–86) in the analytical
section of the present article, in the first category, media specifics of
the compound film are ‘translated’ into literature. Forms of filmic
expression, production, or reception are applied as a rule by which the
literary expression is restrictively governed. In contrast to this, a filmic
contamination of literature ‘by (partial) actualization of film’ is
achieved if the filmic rules applied to literature are conventionally seen
as filmic, but actually transmedial and/or congruent to the rules of
literary expression. Thus, the well-known plot structure of the classic
Casablanca can also be actualized in literature, for instance, in Woody
Allen’s Broadway play Play It Again, Sam (Allen 1998), the title of
which quotes a famous Casablanca line and whose characters
constantly refer to characters and actors from the film. Even though
the story about the newly divorced writer Allan Felix and his affair with
Linda, his best friend’s wife, could be told in a plethora of ways, Allen
decided to adhere to Casablanca’s character constellation, plot-line as
well as ending and to actualize these characteristics throughout his
text. The filmic mode applied in Play It Again, Sam, is, as such,
principally transmedial (it can be applied to a film, a written or staged
play, arguably even to a novel), but, at the same time, it is culturally
linked to a very specific film product, the famous film classic
Casablanca. Thus, Allen’s play, of which incidentally a film adaption
exists, is, upon reception, likely to be actualized as ‘film-specific.’
(3) ‘Where?’: To draw on Schmidt’s compound concept of media,
apply it to film, and combine it with Rajewsky’s categorization of
literary ways of referencing film helps to identify, to characterize, and
to prove the existence of most of the dominant and traditional filmic
modes in literature. One more aspect that can be held to define a
specific filmic mode in literature is still missing in their research: Apart
from the ‘what’ and the ‘how,’ a third factor influences filmic modes in
literature, namely, ‘where,’ that is, on which textual levels, they appear.
So as to give students of literature and literary scholars an idea as to
where to possibly look when trying to identify or prove the existence of
filmic modes, a – by no means exhaustive – list of examples shall be
given here: Filmic modes can occur and be promoted on grammatical
levels by means of tense, phonemes, morphemes, lexemes, or at a
syntactic level. They can be actualized on formal levels,
typographically, or by means of layout. They can be realized on
compositional levels, such as the overall structure, imagery, plot
design, or character constellation. Filmic modes can appear on diegetic
levels, extra-diegetically, and even paratextually (as in titles of plays,
poems, novels, or short stories, chapter headings, and tables of
contents). Finally, as of the 2010s and with the increasing
digitalization and technization of all areas of life, including publishing,
film can even be included on a material level: for instance, as a film
clip that can be played by using a smartphone app while one reads
Marisha Pessl’s Night Film (Pessl 2014), or as the succession of
pictures in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
(Foer 2006), which, when flipped through, creates the impression of
moving pictures, and thus realizes the technique at the heart of all
films.
When encountering filmic modes in literature, researchers have to
look at all three factors (‘what,’ ‘how,’ and ‘where’) to determine the
specific formation and realization of these aspects within the present
filmic mode and, consequently, to describe and characterize this mode.
With the help of the seminal research of the 2000s outlined above, this
has definitely become manageable, as will be shown by the analysis
below. The challenges early research on filmic modes in literature had
to face (such as the problems of identification and the then usual lack
of intersubjective proof) have been successfully met. In the future,
though, the current concepts, methods, and approaches will
necessarily have to be expanded. As a current dissertation project
reveals, the filmic modes present in materially hybrid novels, such as
Pessl’s Night Film, which goes beyond the now widely accepted ‘as-if
quality’ of literature that appears filmic, cannot yet be sufficiently
captured by the toolkits developed so far (cf. Weigel 2014).
As a rule of thumb, one can say that the more filmic modes any given
literary text displays, the more different kinds are combined in it, and
the more clearly they are marked through explicit references, the more
likely this literary text appears ‘filmic.’ In the following section, a short
story collection will be analyzed and interpreted. The collection is
characterized by a high number of filmic modes and a great variety of
combinations of different kinds of filmic modes, features a high degree
of saliency, and, thus, at times, appears more filmic than literary.

4 A Case Study: Robert Coover’s A Night at the

Movies or, You Must Remember This (1987)
Robert Coover’s A Night at the Movies or, You Must Remember This
(Coover 1992; cf. the discussion of Coover 18 Images in Narrative
Literature: Cognitive Experience and Iconic Moments) is an
experimental text that is presented as, and evokes, a long evening at an
old-fashioned movie palace. Similar to Thorpe’s Still, Coover’s short
story collection features what Rajewsky has termed ‘transposition,’
albeit in a more complex manner because two filmic transpositionary
modes are combined, that of thematic evocation and that of discursive
simulation. Even in the collection’s most prominent paratext, its title,
the medium of film is explicitly referenced, not only through the term
‘movie,’ but also through the direct quote of the first line of the chorus
of “As Time Goes By,” the song that became associated world-wide
with the film classic Casablanca. The literary text, that is, black and
white signs on a sheet of paper, aims at evoking not only the
compound concept ‘film,’ but also some of its constitutive elements:
the social practice of going to the cinema, of spending an evening
there; a special point in the past, one in which film classics, such as
Casablanca, were first screened; a special kind of visual aesthetics, in
this case the black-and-white film. It also evokes acoustic specifics, the
movie’s sound track. Thus, with a minimal number of words, i.e. with
non-acoustic, verbal signifiers, the audio-visual sign system of film is
evoked; maybe even its ‘as-if presence’ established, in that the allusion
to “As Time Goes By” might trigger some recipients to actualize its
melody in their minds. Furthermore, the collection’s explicit references
to film may serve as a proleptic readers’ guide: It points towards the
contents of the short stories, all revolving around (the) movies, and to
how to process what is read upon opening the book. The readers are to
constantly compare and match the filmic modes in literature to their
cognitive schemata of film (especially to their knowledge of early
twentieth-century Hollywood movies) and thus actualize the latter;
they are to ‘read’ the short stories as filmic, or at least attribute a filmic
quality to them. Coover combines the evocative filmic mode with a
discursive one, in which the analogies between film and literature are
not primarily explicitly, but structurally, that is, discursively,
established. Rather than the action of opening a book, the specific
experience of entering a movie theater is imitated by certain ways of
storytelling. Upon opening the book, under the title, a picture of a
baroque-style sign is printed that reads “silence please” (Coover 1992,
typography in the original). This is followed on the next page by
snippets of dialogue (actually, a modification of a famous Casablanca
quote), which can be interpreted as the comments of theater goers
muttered under their breaths and overheard, in passing, by another
cinema goer. The next page features, in lieu of a table of contents, a
movie program, which displays titles ranging from “Previews of
Coming Attractions,” a “Cartoon,” and a “COMEDY!” to “ROMANCE!”
(Coover 1992, typography in the original). After this, a page follows
that says nothing but “Ladies and Gentlemen May safely visit this
Theatre as no Offensive Films are ever Shown Here [sic]” (Coover
1992). The extradiegetic, paratextual framing of the short stories –
with its idiosyncrasies in typography and layout – diverges from the
conventional framing of a literary text. In fact, the text’s ‘literariness’ is
suppressed through the transposition of what is conventionally
associated with ‘the filmic’ to literature. The very first pages turned in
the reading process discursively simulate an audience’s experience of
entering a movie theater, of going through various doors and rooms,
which, in succession, display distinct signs (the request for silence,
movie theater programs or posters, and warning signs, that is, an age
rating, still commonly used in the lobbies and at the doors of Anglo-
American cinemas) until they have actually arrived at the screening
hall, the first chapter of which is to be read/processed as a film
preview. The illusion of going through the lobby and dark vestibules in
front of the actual screening hall is enhanced by the discursive
evocation of sound. Modifying the line of a famous Casablanca
dialogue and introducing it with the sign “silence please,” associations
to sound are invited ex negativo, more specifically, within this context,
to muffled voices anticipating the beginning of the film, overheard by
the reader, that is, the alleged movie theater goer.
The aforementioned filmic modes, which have necessarily been
touched upon only exemplarily at this point, are complemented by
‘contaminatory’ filmic modes, above all, by the strategy of
‘contamination by (partial) actualization of film.’ For instance, in the
short story called “Lap Dissolves” (Coover 1992, 79–86), a certain form
of filmic expression, produced in the post-production process of film
editing, is applied as a rule and, thus, governs literary expression
restrictively. The stories that are told within the chapter could have
been told in a plethora of ways. Coover, however, decided to restrict his
way of storytelling to adhere to the filmic technique of lap dissolves at
all times, which the first passage of the story exemplifies:
She clings to the edge of the cliff, her feet kicking in the wind, the earth breaking away
beneath her fingertips. There is a faint roar, as of crashing waves, far below. He struggles
against his bonds […], throwing himself at the cabin door. […] At last the door splinters
and he smashes through, tumbling forward in his bonds, rolling toward the edge of the
cliff. Her hand disappears, then reappears, snatching desperately for a fresh purchase. He
 staggers to his knees, his feet, plunges ahead, the ropes slipping away like a discarded
newspaper as he hails the approaching bus. She lets go, takes the empty seat. Their eyes
meet. “Hey, ain’t I seen you somewhere before?” he says. (Coover 1992, 79, emphasis
mine)

Starting from the above passage, the reader is likely to infer, from the
sparse information given, the following story: A woman is clinging fast
to a cliff, facing her death should she fall down into the wild waters. A
man, who would like to rescue her, is tied up in a nearby shed, and, in
a James Bond-like manner, frees himself from both the shed and,
finally, his ‘bonds.’ The moment they ‘slip away,’ though, he makes a
movement that is first read as a plunge towards the cliff, intending to
rescue the woman. Reading further, though, the reader realizes the
man is plunging forward to hail a bus. The woman’s gesture to ‘let go’
can be analeptically read as ‘letting go from the cliff’ and, at the same
time, proleptically as ‘letting go’ of some pole in a bus to take a seat
next to the man, who begins to chat her up. The chiastic structure of
the end of the passage, that is situation A (a man plunging ahead to
save a woman) merging into scene B (a man plunging ahead to hail a
bus) and, again, situation A (a woman letting go from a cliff, falling
down) merging into scene B (a woman letting go from a pole, sitting
down) is built to restrictively adhere to the structure of lap dissolves.
The process of the dissolution of the first scene is additionally
highlighted in the phrase ‘to slip away.’ Thus, a ‘filmic’ reception in
terms of lap dissolves is made possible, and maybe even initiated, not
only by the short story’s title but also by a more or less explicit
reference to dissolution within the text itself.
The quantity, combinatory quality and salience of filmic modes
within Coover’s short story collection serve to establish an illusion of
‘the filmic’ within literature. Yet, there is even more to it – not only
with regard to Coover’s fiction but also with regard to other literary
texts featuring filmic modes. Filmic modes can serve to characterize a
poem’s, play’s, or novel’s story world on a spatio-temporal level in that
they show which media, which filmic forms, genres, and conventions
are around when and where, which of them are dominantly used, and
in which ways they influence the protagonists’ lives. They may be
functionalized in terms of characterization and character constellation.
Bearing in mind a novel’s fictional status, a recipient is induced to
draw conclusions about the historical status of film, about the ways in
which the medium has been perceived, discussed and used in different
times and cultures (regarding the historical contexts the literary texts
refer to and/or in which they were written). Coover’s short story “Lap
Dissolves” can, for instance, be read metonymically for the whole
collection, which projects 1980s notions of film onto those of the 1920s
to 1950s. It evokes the Golden Age of Hollywood and, at the same time,
postmodernly challenges and parodies it (Schmitt 2007, 43). Besides
this, narrators and/or characters deal meta-aesthetically, meta-
fictionally, meta-narratively, and/or meta-medially with the two media
in question, reflecting on the differences and analogies between
literature and film, as is done for example, by the characters in the
quote by Lodge above. The existence of filmic modes within literature
can, finally, go beyond the mere actualization of the processing
formula ‘seeing X as Y’ by triggering meta-medial and meta-filmic
reflections of the aforementioned kind in readers as well.
Against this backdrop, the primary tasks of forthcoming research on
filmic modes in literature are manifold. The analytical toolkit of filmic
modes in literature has to be modified and expanded to make it
applicable to digital multimodal novels of the twenty-first century. The
scope of generic analysis and interpretation has to be broadened: Not
only novels, but also short stories, plays, poems, digital narratives, and
computer games have to be looked at from the perspective of filmic
modes. A plethora of individual literary works featuring filmic modes
that have not yet been analyzed with the help of the toolkit presented
above have yet to be considered by literary and cultural studies.
Finally, the culturally and historically sensitive extraction of additional
functions of filmic modes in a wide range of literary texts and genres
remains to be further explored.

5 Bibliography

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Laure Ryan. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. 67–71.
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Kuo, Chia-chen. “A Cinematic Reading of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Kew
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Lodge, David. A David Lodge Trilogy: Changing Places, Small World,
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Gegenwart: Theoretischer Bezugsrahmen, Genres und
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Brigitte Narr, 1999. 295–307.
Paech, Joachim. Literatur und Film. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988.
Paxon, James J. “The Anachronism of Imagining Film in the Middle
Ages: ‘Der Golem’ and Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale.’” Exemplaria 19.2
(2007): 290–309.
Pessl, Marisha. Night Film. 2013. London: Windmill Books, 2014.
Pressman, Jessica. “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-
Century Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 48.4 (2009): 465–
482.
Rajewsky, Irina O. Intermedialität. Tübingen: Francke, 2002.
Rajewsky, Irina O. Intermediales Erzählen in der italienischen
Literatur der Postmoderne: Von den ‘giovani scrittori’ der 80er
zum ‘pulp’ der 90er Jahre. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2003.
Ramachandran, Hema. “Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses:
Hearing the Postcolonial Cinematic Novel.” The Journal of
Commonwealth Literature 40 (2005): 102–117.
Rippl, Gabriele. “Visuality and Ekphrasis in A. S. Byatt’s Still Life and
‘Art Work.’” Anglistentag 1999 Mainz: Proceedings. Ed. Bernhard
Reitz. Trier: wvt, 2000. 519–534.
Roloff, Volker. “Film und Literatur: Zur Theorie und Praxis der
intermedialen Analyse am Beispiel von Buñuel, Truffaut, Godard
und Antonini.” Literatur intermedial: Musik, Malerei,
Photographie, Film. Ed. Peter V. Zima. Darmstadt: WBG, 1995.
269–309.
Ryan, Marie-Laure, and Jan-Noël Thon, eds. Storyworlds across
Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology. Frontiers of
Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.
Scheidt, Dagmar. “‘Pero los sueños son mentira, capitán. Pura
 mentira, como las películas’: Film und filmische Techniken in
‘Beltenebros’ von Antonio Muñoz Melina.” Kino-/(Ro)Mania:
Intermedialität zwischen Film und Literatur. Ed. Jochen Mecke
and Volker Roloff. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag Brigitte Narr,
1999. 223–245.
Schmidt, Siegfried J. Kalte Faszination: Medien, Kultur, Wissenschaft
in der Mediengesellschaft. Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2000.
Schmitt, Claudia. Der Held als Filmsehender: Filmerleben in der
Gegenwartsliteratur. Saarbrücker Beiträge zur vergleichenden
Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft 38. Würzburg: Königshausen &
Neumann, 2007.
Schwanecke, Christine. Intermedial Storytelling: Thematisation,
Imitation and Incorporation of Photography in English and
American Fiction at the Turn of the 21st Century. Trier: wvt, 2012.
Smith, Ali. The Accidental. 2005. London: Penguin, 2006.
Spiegel, Alan. “Flaubert to Joyce: Evolution of a Cinematographic
Form.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 6.3 (1973): 229–243.
Thorpe, Adam. Still. 1995. London: Minerva, 1996.
Tschilke, Christian von. “‘Ceci n’est pas un film’: Die filmische
Schreibweise im französischen Roman der Gegenwart.” Kino-
/(Ro)Mania: Intermedialität zwischen Film und Literatur. Ed.
Jochen Mecke and Volker Roloff. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag
Brigitte Narr, 1999. 203–221.
Tschilke, Christian von. Roman und Film: Filmisches Schreiben im
französischen Roman der Postavantgarde. Tübingen: Gunter Narr,
2000.
Weigel, Anna. “Reframing the Concept of Transmedia Storytelling for
Novel-Based Transmedial Worlds: An Analysis of Marisha Pessl’s
Night Film (2013).” Conference Talk, “Transmedial Worlds in
Convergent Media Culture,” University of Tübingen, 24 February
2014.
Wolf, Werner. “Musicalized Fiction and Intermediality: Theoretical
Aspects of Word and Music Studies.” Word and Music Studies:
Defining the Field. Ed. Walter Bernhart. Amsterdam: Rodopi,
 1999a. 37–58.
Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory
and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999b.

5.2 Further Reading

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction. 1936. Trans. J. A. Underwood. London: Penguin,
2008.
Eisenstein, Sergei M. The Film Sense. 1942. London: Faber and Faber,
1968.
Elliott, Kamilla. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Seeber, Hans U. “Narrative Fiction and the Fascination with the New
Media Gramophone, Photography and Film: Metafictional and
Media-Comparative Aspects of H. G. Wells’ A Modern Utopia and
Beryl Bainbridge’s Master Georgie.” Metareference across Media:
Theory and Case Studies. Ed. Werner Wolf. Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2009. 427–449.
Zima, Peter V., ed. Literatur intermedial: Musik, Malerei,
Photographie, Film. Darmstadt: WBG, 1995.
Elisabeth Bronfen

15 War Literature into War Film:

The Aesthetics of Violence and
the Violence of Aesthetics
Abstract: This contribution investigates intermediality in the form of
medial transposition. Connecting the novels Heart of Darkness by
Joseph Conrad and Day by A. L. Kennedy with the movies Apocalypse
Now (dir. Francis Ford Coppola) and Men in War (dir. Anthony
Mann), this chapter touches on the mediatization and transformation
of fictional narratives which are based on traumatic experiences that
can only be represented in hindsight.
Key Terms: War literature, war film, mediatization of war, pathos
formula, violence

1 The Telling of a True War Story

This chapter is about war literature and war film and the intermedial
negotiations between these two art forms. The central question is how
war’s violence can be represented in different media ( 13 Adaptation –
Remediation – Transmediality; 14 Filmic Modes in Literature). Any
discussion of the aestheticization of war’s violence which both
literature and cinema affords must engage with the fact that these
representations are invariably mediations, adjusting actual
occurrences to the artistic medium in which they are being
transmitted, be this cinematic or literary. In the course of narrative
refiguration, war experiences are transformed into stories, offering
coherence and meaning. Indeed, often the point is to share war
experiences with an audience that has no first-hand knowledge of
them. Yet the traumatic reality of the events they speak to can, to a
certain degree, neither be conceived by nor adapted to the cognitive
processes regulating the way we view the world in peacetime.
Addressing what is necessarily lost in such an act of translation in a
manner fruitful for the following discussion, Tim O’Brien interlaces
two separate modes of narration in “How to Tell a True War Story”
(1998). On the one hand, his story revolves around a chilling scene that
occurred while he was fighting in Vietnam. During a trek along a trail
leading into the jungle, one of his buddies, Curt Lemon, stepped on a
booby trap and was blown up. O’Brien keeps returning to this event,
fully aware that he will never get it perfectly right. On the other hand,
in order to underscore his conviction that there is no definitive
message to be gained from the story he has to tell, he also repeatedly
interpolates into his depiction of this traumatic scene a meta-textual
commentary concerning the difficulties at issue in telling a war story
which claims to be true.
Not only is a war story never moral, as O’Brien explains, because it
“does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper
human behaviour” (O’Brien 1998, 68). Instead, in so far as “there is a
moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth. You can’t tease it
out. You can’t extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper
meaning” (O’Brien 1998, 77). With each new detail added, something
shifts in his recollection, rendering it ever more nebulous. O’Brien’s
struggle with plausibility in part pertains to the fact that what happens
in war zones is often too incredible or incomprehensible even (or
especially) to those involved that in hindsight they can find no
adequate words at all. What further makes an account of war so elusive
is that, in retrospect, what happened and what seemed to happen
cannot be neatly separated. “What seems to happen,” O’Brien notes,
“becomes its own happening and has to be told that way.” (O’Brien
1998, 71) Thus, even when a given war story may seem to be untrue, it
may well represent “the hard and exact truth as it seemed” (O’Brien
1998, 71).
Further troubling any claim to verisimilitude is the fact that war
evokes a plethora of contradictory passions, ranging from terror and
despair to courage and exhilaration, and as such renders all
subsequent recollection radically subjective. Given that, as O’Brien
notes, “in war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of
truth itself” (1998, 79), it may matter to the audience whether a given
representation is grounded in reality. Yet, as he recalls the fatal event
he witnessed over 20 years ago, he is forced to admit that “the angles
of vision are skewed” and “the pictures one so viscerally recalls get
jumbled” (O’Brien 1998, 71). Any absolute certainty that something
occurred is, thus, irrelevant when it comes to translating a war
experience into a narrative. Even stories about something that never
actually happened but could have, might be considered to be true
stories, especially when they offer narrative management for the
contradictory affects war calls forth. O’Brien’s meta-textual point is
that precisely because no aesthetic refiguration of war is ever
absolutely true, the most appropriate mode of narration is one that
speaks in two voices, enmeshing the literary re-creation of a past
experience with belated commentary.

2 Between Authentic Record and Aesthetic

Reformulation
Crucial for any theorizing of representations of war is, then, the way
the word ‘story’ relates to two separate but enmeshed acts of
translation – the manner in which a given person produces his or her
personal account of a war experience on the one hand, and, on the
other, the manner in which an author, screenplay writer or film
director turns this particular depiction into a representation that can
make a claim, if not to truth, then to aesthetic veracity. Precisely
because both literary and cinematic texts reconceive individual war
experiences in terms of collective cultural needs, they draw attention to
the way any aesthetic depiction of war can only ever be an
approximation of actual historical events, a re-mediation after the fact,
the overarching story of a set of separate stories coming out of a war
zone. If, on the diegetic level, characters in war fictions use storytelling
to make sense of their experience and to explain themselves to others,
the narrative as a whole adjusts these personalized accounts to the
rules and conventions regulating the manner in which war has
previously been represented in art. A postmodern author like O’Brien
may self-consciously trouble the conventions of war literature, yet, in
so doing, he is citing this tradition. By virtue of refuting his artistic
predecessors he re-invokes and re-iterates them.
As Robert Burgoyne (2010) argues, representations of war are
fundamentally double voiced. Not only do they recall and rework our
cultural image repertoire pertaining to a long history of war’s aesthetic
refiguration, they also explicitly use genre memory to transport
recollections of the past into the present, reconceptualizing this history
from the position of the contemporary now. The war that is refigured
on the written page and on screen invokes the danger of war for us in
such a manner that we can negotiate our attitude toward this traumatic
past within the cognitive framework of our peacetime world. This
entails a belated refiguration, reenacting history again by
reconceptualizing it under the auspices of present concerns. Of course,
the events of war referred to in these aesthetic refigurations, as well as
the effects these have had, draw their authority from the horrible
destruction of actual human life they refer to. An unequivocal
referentiality hovers around the edges of any representation of war.
And yet, our access to the experience such texts and films invoke is
neither immediate nor direct. Instead, mediated as a literary or
cinematic ‘text,’ this experience is one we can only empathize with by
tapping into our capacity for historical reimagination.
When it comes to the aesthetic transmission of war, there is nothing
before such refiguration, even when we are dealing with accurate
documentary records. The prefix ‘re’ – marking both a temporal and a
spatial shift and pertaining to the renewal of the past as a reaction to it
– is the critical point. An aestheticization of war’s violence thus
invariably involves a reenactment of sorts. Even while literary or
cinematic ‘texts’ refer to actual historical occurrences, they perform
these wartime events again, at a site other than the original battle zone
and within the context of a time after the original military engagement
took place. When a literary text like Tim O’Brien’s short story self-
consciously reflects on its own mediality, it draws attention to the
more general point that war can only ever be represented. This is not
simply because troops stand in for a political idea or a nation, nor
because, in order to understand war, we need a narration focused on
individuals whose personal involvement renders abstract conflicts
concrete. Also at issue are the aesthetic laws of fiction and film
involved in transmitting to others the intense emotions actual war
elicits in those on the ground.
As Paul Fussell points out in his monumental study on the way the
Great War, i.e. WWI, shaped modern memory, not only does everyone
fighting in war tend to think of it in terms of the last one s/he knew
anything about. In the way fiction and screenplay writers choose to
depict war from one decade to the next, we also find a “similar
deployment of traditional literary terms in aid of the new actuality”
(Fussell 1975, 62). As Fussell notes, “those who fought in the Second
War couldn’t help noticing the extra dimension of drama added to
their experiences by their memories of the films about the Great War,”
only to surmise: “[I]f one’s perceptions of the Second War naturally
take the form of one’s response to cinema, one’s perception of the
Vietnam War equates that experience with the films of the Second
War” (Fussell 1975, 222). Given, then, that any understanding and
subsequent depictions of war implicitly invoke or explicitly recycle
previous aesthetic refigurations, the evidence given by veterans and
writers/directors alike invariably hovers between authentic record and
aesthetic reformulation.

3 Pathos Formulas of War

In my book, Specters of War, I argue that deeply conflicted and
radically subjective experiences of war can be transmitted not
although but rather because these can be aesthetically formalized
according to codes dictated by genre memory, which is to say by
tapping into previous aesthetic refigurations of war and recoding these
for contemporary cultural concerns. So as to explain the affective gain
such recycling affords, it is useful to bring Aby Warburg’s concept of
Pathosformeln (2010), developed in relation to his Mnemosyne
project, into the critical discussion regarding the double-edged effect
representations of war can have, straddling, as these do, authentic
record with historical reimagination. The usefulness of Warburg’s
critical concept consists in the fact that it draws attention to the
productive tension between a state of being overpowered by an
aesthetic experience (ergriffen) on the one hand, and, on the other, the
ability to intellectually grasp it (begreifen). At the same time, his
concept ‘pathos formula’ also points to the fact that all subsequent
representations of a given emotional intensity (Pathos) are themselves
predicated on an original act of formalization. Any art work whose
pathos overwhelms its audience even while containing this intensity, is
itself an aesthetic re-iteration of a prior formalization, namely the
original response to an overwhelming experience of emotional
intensity, be it in the form of a body gesture or a verbal utterance.
Applied to literary and cinematic refigurations of war’s violence,
Warburg’s concept allows us to bring together two separate but
enmeshed moments of affective containment: On the one hand, to
speak of a formalization of pathos brings into focus the manner in
which those on the ground in a war zone transfer the intensity they
experience into some account of it, whether this involves a coherent
story, fragmentary recollections, or staunch silence; and an account, to
boot, predicated on some previous literary, visual or cinematic
formalization. On the other hand, the concept ‘pathos formula’ also
allows us to engage the contradiction that while the intensity of war is
never directly accessible, its affective force can be conveyed by tapping
into our capacity for imagining the stressed condition of others. The
affectively charged reenactment of a war situation, whether on the
page or on the screen, transfers the intense emotions to which we have
no direct access into aesthetic formulas familiar to us, such that the
traumatic impact can be apprehended in both senses of the word –
arrested and understood. The formalization is precisely what allows us
to not only comprehend what is an incomprehensible, overwhelming
emotion. Rather, formalization is also what compels us to
empathetically share in an experience that is not our own.
As will be discussed in more detail further on, literary and cinematic
texts endow the incomprehensibility of war with coherent meaning by
making use of previous narratives and visual formulas, whether this
involves citing oneself, as is the case in Lewis Milestone’s classic
combat film A Walk in the Sun (1945), or whether this means splicing
together two generically distinct literary texts, as Francis Ford Coppola
does in Apocalypse Now (2001 [1979]). Lastly, in her novel, Day, A. L.
Kennedy pays a dual debt to war literature, bringing together
descriptions of the shooting of a POW camp on location in post-war
Germany with the war memories a veteran reenacts in his mind as his
personal war film. At issue in all three examples is the way in which the
aesthetic formalization contains the visceral and emotional intensity
experienced in war zones in both senses of the word. The actual impact
war has is restricted, even while the visual and narrative refiguration
comprises the emotional intensity effected, having the capacity to ward
off what it also holds, preserving what it restrains. One aspect of this
strategy of containment consists in the fact that, if recapturing war in
the codified language of aesthetic reenactment functions like a
protective fiction, mediating violence by blocking out its full impact,
this apotropaic shield is inevitably tarnished. Though doing so only
obliquely, aesthetic refiguration, by having recourse to genre memory,
articulates the violence it reencodes. It gives evidence of the actual
horror it diffuses, albeit in the more palatable register of historical
reimagination.
While the aesthetic formalization cannot help but hold at bay the
actual horror of war, it also brings into circulation a knowledge of past
global violence which keeps its hold on us. Rather than distorting
historical events or obscuring their actual impact, the aestheticization
produces an authenticity effect. We may always already be in the realm
of historical reimagination and yet an aesthetic refiguration of war
takes effect by virtue of the visceral emotions and cognitive insights it
mobilizes. By recapturing a given military situation in terms of
previous pathos formulas of war – Milestone’s landing of U.S. forces
on the shores of Italy in 1944, Coppola’s classified mission in the
Mekong Delta in the late 1960s, and Kennedy’s air battle over England
and Germany in the early 1940s – all three texts pay homage to a long
tradition of an aesthetic containment of war, ranging from Homer’s
epic and Shakespeare’s history plays through the historical novels and
paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to war
photography since the Crimean War and cinema since WWI. Yet the
contemporary intervention in our cultural image repertoire all three
artists offer also seeks to recapture what war feels like, what effects it
has on individuals in battle zones, making theirs if not a
comprehensible experience, then at least one we can partake in by
proxy.

4 The World of Fiction and the World of War

Before turning to these three cases, however, it is useful to bring a final
theoretical point into the discussion. Writing one year after WWI
began, Freud engages a rich and strange alliance between the world of
fiction and the world of war, regarding the changed attitude toward
death brought on by the outbreak of the Great War. While we tend to
exclude mortality from our quotidian calculations in times of peace, in
wartime its ubiquitous presence can no longer be denied. “[W]e are
forced to believe in it,” Freud states, “[p]eople really die” (Freud 1957
[1915], 291). In addition, death can no longer be seen as a chance
event, but must be perceived in relation to necessity. “To be sure,” he
continues, “it still seems a matter of chance whether a bullet hits this
man or that; but a second bullet may well hit the survivor; and the
accumulation of deaths puts an end to the impression of chance”
(Freud 1957 [1915], 291). Astonishing, however, is the conclusion he
draws from the changed attitude toward death that war calls forth:
“Life has, indeed, become interesting again; it has recovered its full
content” (Freud 1957 [1915], 291).
His own stance as an analyst of both personal and collective psychic
states regarding the more primitive, indeed barbaric, embrace of death
retrieved in the face of war, is fraught with ambivalence. After all, if
being compelled to acknowledge mortality as an inevitable truth of
human existence makes life recover its full content, then implicitly the
exclusion of death from peace is based on a loss. Furthermore, Freud
introduces his astonishing claim by invoking the world of fiction as the
site where, in times of peace, we find compensation for the denial of
death civilized culture is predicated on. “There we still find people who
know how to die – who, indeed, even manage to kill someone else,”
Freud contests (1957 [1915], 291). “There alone too the condition can
be fulfilled which makes it possible for us to reconcile ourselves with
death: namely, that behind all the vicissitudes of life we should still be
able to preserve a life intact.” (Freud 1957 [1915], 291) The
compensation fiction can afford, however, itself proves to be
duplicitous. The world of fiction can harbor the death we seek to deny
in everyday life with impunity, because it renders the knowledge of our
mortality compatible with our need to believe in our own invincibility.
“In the realm of fiction we find the plurality of lives which we need,”
Freud adds (1957 [1915], 291). “We die with the hero with whom we
have identified ourselves; yet we survive him, and are ready to die
again just as safely with another hero” (Freud 1957 [1915], 291). By
implication, the world of war becomes both comprehensible and
transmittable when it is dealt with as a world of fiction, because this
pits survival against the ubiquity of death. Someone will live on to tell
the tale.
 Picking up on Freud’s claim that whenever we attempt to imagine
our own death, so utterly inconceivable to us, we notice that we do so
from the position of a surviving spectator. Paul Fussell, himself an
infantry soldier during WWII, suggests that it is the very hazard of
modern war situations, their utter unthinkableness, that aligns them
not only with the world of literature, but more specifically with the
theatrical: “Seeing warfare as theater provides a psychic escape for the
participant: with a sufficient sense of theater, he can perform his
duties without implicating his ‘real’ self and without impairing his
innermost conviction that the world is still a rational place.” (Fussell
1979, 192) In retrospect, Fussell adds, soldiers often describe moments
of heightened anxiety during battle as having produced a sense of
being ‘beside oneself.’ While the part of the fighting man that is
convinced that the battle is real acts out commands, the other,
protecting himself by treating it as an illusion, observes and records.

5 From Novel to Moving Images

Emblematic for the analogy between the world of war and the world of
fiction, the classic Hollywood WWII combat film, A Walk in the Sun,
begins with a close-up of a hand, carefully placing a book on the top of
a desk. A lap dissolve moves to a close-up of the book’s cover, where, at
the very top, we read “Lewis Milestone Productions presents.” In the
center we find the title of a novel, along with the name of its author: “A
Walk in the Sun by Harry Brown.” The film about to begin is, thus,
marked as a twofold mediation, representing on screen events that had
already been represented by a literary work. As the hand disappears
from our sight, the book no longer lies on top of a desk but is propped
up against a textured background, while a male voice-over sets in to
explain: “This book tells a story that happened long ago, way back in
1943, when the Lee Platoon of the Texas Division hit the beach at
Salerno in sunny Italy.” Milestone relegates the war his film
production company is presenting to a distant past, although it took
place only three years earlier, because he is staging these events
retrospectively, with the knowledge of the Allied victory in mind. The
movie audience of 1945 is to be reconciled with the destruction of war
still present in their minds by virtue of the fact that the European
campaign is being presented as finished business, a story that can be
placed between two book covers.
As the camera pans closer toward the book, the cover opens on its
own. On each of the first eight pages, now being turned by an invisible
force, we see a photograph of one of the main actors of the film, their
names printed at the bottom of each inserted image frame. For a few
seconds, furthermore, each of these frames contains a vignette from
the film we are about to see, depicting each of these men marching in
the Italian sun. Then, just before the page is turned, these moving
images are frozen into a photograph, now resembling an actual
illustration on a book page. Throughout this opening part of the credit
sequence, the male voice-over, in turn, gives us the fictional name of
the character played by each of the actors we see in the inset, telling us
where each man is from and what he did before joining up. This
narratorial voice then continues to explain that there were a lot of
other men involved, only to admonish us: “Here’s a song about them,
listen!” As the page of the book is once more turned, we see the text of
the first stanza (along with the opening bar of the score) of the ballad
Earl Robinson wrote for the film. At the end of A Walk in the Sun we
return, once more, to a close-up image of this book, only now, having
again been shut, the camera draws our attention to what is written on
the back cover: We read the final stanza of the ballad we have heard
throughout, with the reference at the very bottom that the film was
released through Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation. In the song
text that has, once again, replaced the moving images, the walk
through enemy territory which the film brought to the screen is
equated with all the other roads on which American soldiers might find
themselves, subsumable under the generalized title: “It’s wherever
men fight to be free.”
The individual members of this platoon prove to be prototypical
G.I.s, whose adventures are endowed with allegorical value. As the
survivors of this particular battle they find entrance into the
Hollywood image repertoire on which each new wave of war films can
feed. When the film was released late in 1945, film critics faulted
Milestone for his excessive visual montage and stylized dialogues. Yet,
beginning with the credit sequence, the producer/director self-
consciously seeks to foreground the issue of aesthetic refiguration
precisely by drawing our attention to the way the moving images of
this depiction of one episode in the Italian campaign emanate from the
pages of a book which is itself already a fictional reworking of an actual
historical event. As part of the containment of war’s destruction,
furthermore, the action of Milestone’s war story follows the generic
formula of the combat film. Men from diverse geographical regions
and classes come together in this division. At the same time, the
success of their mission is contingent on the emergence of a
courageous and war savvy leader, Dana Andrews’s Sgt. Tyne, whose
authority the others are willing to trust blindly. A further part of the
formula is that if the plot sets in with a moment of utter uncertainty, as
these men wait in the dark before dawn, about to land on an unknown
and potentially lethal beach, the large body of the story deals with their
long and treacherous walk toward their goal, a farmhouse occupied by
enemy troops.
The narrative management Milestone’s aesthetic refiguration offers
for what, in a real battle zone, would be confusing and indiscernible, is
a series of individual stories, revolving around unforeseeable obstacles
and dangerous interruptions, which this small band of soldiers
encounters in the course of their six-mile walk. An initial attack by
enemy planes fuels a ruse to take out several Nazi tanks, of whose
approach the group’s scouts were able to warn them. The mental
breakdown of their commanding officer, in turn, serves to strengthen
the resolve of the group as a whole. The path they leave behind is
measured by the losses they must face amongst their own ranks along
with the enemy soldiers they are able to fell. Part and parcel of the
combat film formula is also the tediousness inscribed in any military
mission. The digging in, waiting, smoking, eating and marching take
up almost all of the story time, while the actual battle with the enemy is
limited to three short sequences. Particularly decisive for the
emotional effect of any narrative management of war’s confusion is the
fact that the story renders the subjective experience of a set of
concerned soldiers, with whose experience we are meant to identify
and empathize. Although the success of this mission may be contingent
on Sgt. Tyne’s astute leadership, he, in turn, relies on the successful
teamwork between the separate members of his troop. Milestone thus
strategically deploys close-ups of his foot soldiers to visualize their
affective solidarity.
Particularly salient for an analogy between the world of war and that
of fiction is Milestone’s copious usage of dialogue amongst the men.
Not only does the verbal repartee perform the camaraderie these men
share, it also gives voice to their divergent attitudes toward the danger
around them: their fear of being wounded, their hope for
commendation, but above all their desire to return home.
Furthermore, the literary quality of these conversations picks up on the
self-reflective comment introduced with the credit sequence. The
narrative management of war is such that the conversation these
soldiers share produces stories meant to protect them against the
danger they feel lurking everywhere. By turning themselves into
fictional characters whom death cannot touch, they can assure each
other of their survival, even while they are walking through enemy
territory. Indeed, from the very beginning they had perceived their
mission in terms of the theatricality Fussell addresses, putting their
trust in the invincibility of a given play’s dramatis personae. Shortly
before landing on the beach near Salerno, this little band of soldiers
had, in a compelling speech act, sworn to each other “nobody dies.”
When they finally reach their goal, Rivera, manning the machine
gun, will pick up this apotropaic formula even while, from the distance
of his shooting position, he is forced to witness the casualties of their
first failed assault on the farm house. He assures the three men
watching with him behind the wall that he is invincible and thus
nobody will die. Sgt. Tyne, in turn, sells the plans for the second attack
as a war hero story. Having explained to the men huddled around him
the far more insidious charge they are about to undertake, he rapidly
fires at them the narrative formula they will enact: “That’s the story
then. Its suicide, I’m a hero, we’re all heroes. This will mean the good
conduct medal.” Indeed, once the actual battle begins, all have pledged
themselves to the magical thinking prevalent in the world of fiction, as
if they could only execute this dangerous mission by conceiving
themselves as actors on a stage who may trust in their own
invincibility. As Sgt. Tyne, while crawling toward the farm house,
passes one of the men who died in the earlier assault, he, too, begins to
repeat the preposterous claim “nobody dies” in his head. It is as
though, tapping into an uncanny magical belief in the omniscience of
thought, he is convinced he is speaking to all the men crawling on the
ground around him, encouraging them to move forward. Milestone’s
camera remains focused on a close-up of Sgt. Tyne’s distraught face
until the explosion of the bridge behind the farmhouse, the signal for
them to charge, breaks his inner dialog.
This highly aestheticized mise-en-scène draws our attention once
more to the magical thinking these men share, which acknowledges the
terrible truth of death, even while containing its terror. Yet the analogy
between the world of fiction and that of war, which Milestone’s stylized
camera work and montage underscores, refers, above all, to the fact
that genre memory comes into play most pointedly in the way
Milestone chooses to film the men attacking from both the field in
front and the river in the back of the farm house. The camera pans
along both groups, repeatedly cross-cutting between them, before
offering a third visual position, namely shots of the enemy soldiers
ferociously pointing the three machine guns inside the house at Sgt.
Tyne and his men. Significantly, this editing recycles the analogy
between machine gun fire and camera movement which Milestone had
already introduced in his first war film, All Quiet on the Western Front
(1930). In both cases, the correspondence between the shooting of the
camera and the shooting of the machine gun introduces the reference
of real destruction into the perception of war as theatricalized fiction,
even while it further underscores the act of aestheticization at work in
any belated cinematic reenactment.
The windows framing the soldiers running straight toward these
machine guns (as though oblivious to their lethal power), transform
the images of these valiant American troops into a cinematic frame
within the larger cinematic screen. Thus doubled, these framed images
of the G.I.s unstoppable approach splice together the space-time of the
diegesis, within which these figures embody actual troops, with an
extra-diegetic comment on their status as film characters played by
actors. For genre memory to be effective, however, the difference
between the earlier representation of battle in All Quiet on the Western
Front and its subsequent recycling, some 15 years later, is equally
seminal. In contrast to the bleak sobriety of Milestone’s depiction of
trench warfare, where the battles he stages are shown to be pointless in
terms of military strategy, the military assault in A Walk in the Sun
culminates in Sgt. Tyne and his men taking out the machine guns,
storming the farm house and vanquishing their enemies. Endowed
with far more patriotic significance than in 1930, when the point of
adapting Erich Maria Remarque’s novel to the screen was to warn
against a new militarization of Germany, Milestone’s soldiers are
shown to have succeeded in this particular mission in a battle against
Nazi terror which was unequivocally justified when this war film came
out.
In the last moments of the film, we are shown the aftermath of
battle, though clearly not the end of the campaign as a whole. One man
lights up a cigarette and sits down on the stairs leading into the house,
another one helping a wounded buddy passes him. Others follow,
biting into an apple, sharing a bottle of wine with a buddy or cutting off
a slice of salami before walking out of the frame. The camera, however,
tarries with Sgt. Tyne who, having reached the bottom of the stairs,
cuts a further nick into the handle of his rifle. This mission, marked as
one singular episode in a long campaign, thus conjoins past and future.
The other nicks on Sgt. Tyne’s gun not only remind us of the previous
battles he has fought, but also those he will still have to fight before he
and his men can really go home. A double survival is at issue. The
individual soldier, who has survived to tell this story, referring to a
particular battle, fought around Salerno in 1943 on the one hand, and,
on the other, the survival of a cinematic fiction, elevating this singular
event to the status of a general war story about foot soldiers, and, thus,
to a piece in our collective memory. Given the way these final images
refer once more to those at the end of the corresponding battle scene in
All Quiet on the Western Front, they can be seen as a last commentary
on the mediality of this aestheticization of war’s violence: Implicitly
gesturing toward previous instances of war literature transformed into
cinema and anticipating a continuation of the rich exchange between
these two media.

6 On Screen War Correspondence Meets

Colonial Fiction
Coppola’s Apocalypse Now also makes use of the standard Hollywood
combat film formula. Under the leadership of Capt. Willard (Martin
Sheen), a small band of G.I.s takes a small boat up the Nung River so
as to cross clandestinely into Cambodia and make contact with Col.
Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a former Special Services commander. In this
cinematic narrative, the mission is also interrupted at various stages by
obstacles before Willard can finally do battle with his designated
enemy. He will terminate with extreme prejudice the American officer
whose methods have become untenably unsound for the U.S. Army,
mimicking the ritual slaughter of a sacrificial animal Kurtz’s followers
are performing in front of his quarters that same night. Although the
killing is staged as a moment of sublime catharsis, signaled by the rain
that has begun to pour down, Coppola offers a bleak closure to his
gruesome journey into the heart of war’s madness. After we see
Willard and Lance, the only surviving members of the crew, regain
their boat and begin their return journey down the river, the scene
moves to an eerie sequence of montage images. A close-up of the pagan
sculptures from the Cambodian temple Kurtz had turned into his
headquarters fuses with a close-up of Willard’s face, with silent
helicopters flying back and forth across the screen and images of the
burning jungle. Yet all we hear, together with the sound of rain, are
Kurtz’s final words: “The horror.”
This ending re-iterates the double-tiered mediality at issue in
Coppola’s historical reimagination of the Vietnam War, given that
Apocalypse Now adapts two literary texts. On the one hand, Kurtz’s
final words, repeated in the closing sequence of the film, make explicit
reference to the novella, Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s quasi-mythic
story of an ominous journey into the inscrutable Congo jungle, both
fascinating and treacherous, serves as the template for transforming a
particular war mission into a coherent narrative, if only about the
insanity and lawlessness of America’s military engagement in
Southeast Asia. On the other hand, the film, for which Francis Ford
Coppola himself, along with John Milius, wrote the screenplay, gives
credit for the narration to Michael Herr. The distinction is crucial
because, inserted into the overall structure of the film’s plot, which
charts a hallucinatory journey from Saigon to Kurtz’s headquarters, are
individual scenes revolving around the grunts on the ground and their
estrangement from the battle they are fighting. Not only does the
ironic tone, with which these strange adventures are brought to the
screen, recall Dispatches, Herr’s first-hand record of Vietnam as a war
spun out of control. Rather, Willard’s voice-over narration, which
offers a running commentary on the events he witnesses during his
classified mission, is quite explicitly inscribed by the timbre of Herr’s
own voice as an enthralled war correspondent. It endows Coppola’s
historic reimagination with the necessary authentic sound.
Self-consciously making claim to a literary inheritance, what
Apocalypse Now takes from Heart of Darkness is a set of characters
and a geographical site. As Conrad’s narrator, Marlowe, travels up the
Congo River on behalf of a British trading company, he becomes more
and more captivated by the idea of Kurtz, the remarkable agent
everyone had expected to rise in the ranks of the Administration, who
is rumored to have fallen ill. Yet from one station to the next, both the
jungle into which he is penetrating ever more deeply, as well as the
mystery surrounding this brilliant colonialist, are conceived in terms of
a place where death and hidden evil is lurking, so dark that it remains
unfathomable to human thought. Marlowe admits that, drawn into the
irresistible allure emanating from the dark wilderness, he had the
impression it were whispering things to him about himself which he
had previously been completely oblivious to. In retrospect, he has
come to understand his mission above all in terms of a journey into the
dark places of his own psyche.
Yet when, on the story level, Marlowe finally reaches the dying man,
he is compelled to read his uncanny double such that his difference
from Kurtz is underscored, not least of all to assure his own survival.
By judging Kurtz in terms of the very codes of civilization from which
this remarkable agent has allegedly kicked himself loose, Marlowe can
contain his own enchantment with the impenetrable darkness he
attributes to both the wilderness as well as the renegade. Marlowe’s
explanation, “I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no
restraint, no faith, and no fear” (Conrad 1973 [1902], 96), is a form of
narrative management in that it forecloses the possibility of
understanding Kurtz precisely by elevating him to the level of an
enigmatic presence, beyond all cognitive grasp. At the same time,
Kurtz affectively overwhelms the man who, alone, witnesses this
demise with such intense passion that Marlowe has nothing but
formulaic words to describe this intriguing moment. “I saw on that
ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven
terror – of an intense and hopeless despair” (Conrad 1973 [1902],
100). The final words the dying man whispers, “The horror! The
horror!” are, in turn, attributed to a nebulous image, “some vision”
which Marlowe can only imagine to have been the source of Kurtz’s
outcry. The inscrutability Marlowe’s narrative preserves is, thus, a
rhetorical ploy to distinguish himself unequivocally from the man who
had stepped over the edge. As a witness to, rather than a participant in
this dark final scene, he is able to draw back again from the Congo’s
temptation.
His decision not to betray Kurtz’s terrible last words to those he
reports back to in London, even while he is willing to disclose them to
his enraptured listeners, waiting on the Thames on a cruising yawl
Nellie for the turn of the tide, is the final mark of the rhetoric violence
at the heart of his narrative journey. Kurtz functions as an allegorical
embodiment of the trauma of imperialist trade, recognized as such and
yet kept at bay precisely by being subsumed under the pathos formula
of his final words, “The horror! The horror!” Apocalypse Now, in turn,
recycles this rhetorical gesture by not only refiguring Kurtz as a
brilliant American officer, who could have risen to the rank of general
in the U.S. army but whose lack of restraint caused him, instead, to
become the leader of a death cult in Cambodia. It also refigures the
narrator, Marlowe, entangled in the story he has to tell, in the figure of
Willard, in that for both, in hindsight, the journey into the heart of
darkness is conceived as a dream narrative. At one point Marlowe
interrupts his narrative to explain to his listeners: “It seems to me I am
trying to tell you a dream – making a vain attempt, because no relation
or a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of
absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in tremor of struggling revolt,
that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very
essence of dreams” (Conrad 1973 [1902], 39). Coppola’s film, in turn,
begins with Willard, lying in a drunken stupor on his bed in Saigon,
with images of the film to come superimposed on a close-up of his face,
signaling that the film about to unfold on screen is also his daydream.
We see the same images that will again return in the final moments
of Apocalypse Now: a jungle landscape going up in flames, helicopters
flying through the gray sky, and the pagan sculpture of a temple in
Cambodia he has not yet traveled to. Like Marlowe, he is a solitary
operator, unable to return to civil life, and while his trip up the Dang
River is also conceived as a penetration into a heart of darkness,
Willard, too, remains an aloof witness to the madness unfolding
around him. As such, the American military actions in Southeast Asia
are refigured by Coppola through the lens of a previous war story,
arising from a different historical moment, the British colonial war in
Africa in the late nineteenth century. At the same time, the narrative
voice of Willard not only recalls Michael Herr’s own tone of voice in his
witness reports in Dispatches. Herr’s narration adds details specific to
the Vietnam War to Coppola’s recycled story of a mythic journey, thus
endowing it with a verisimilitude effect. Where, in Milestone’s A Walk
in the Sun, we find prototypical characters, whose stylized dialogs give
a self-reflexive touch to the story of a military mission recalling
documentary footage of similar actions in the news reels of the times,
Apocalypse Now offers the reverse. While the story revolves around
the psychedelic sacrifice of a heroic man, targeted as the allegorical
embodiment of war’s inscrutable madness and destruction, the
characters who undertake this journey are captured with realistic
detail. The language, humor, passion, fears and hallucinations of the
grunts fighting on the ground are entirely plausible.
Particularly salient about the relation between literature and film in
regard to their transformation of war’s violence, however, is the way
Dispatches explicitly invokes this correspondence. Early on in the
book, Herr insists that Vietnam is neither a movie, nor a jive cartoon
“where the characters get smacked around and electrocuted and
dropped from heights, flattened out and frizzed black and broken like a
dish, then up again and whole and back in the game, ‘Nobody dies,’ as
someone said in another war movie” (Herr 1991 [1977], 46). And yet, in
a later passage, he implicitly recalls Fussell’s point about how
theatricalization makes war endurable, even while giving it the
celebrity awareness so typical for the postmodern condition: “You
don’t know what a media freak is until you’ve seen the way a few of
those grunts would run around during a fight when they knew that
there was a television crew nearby; they were actually making war
movies in their heads, doing little guts-and-glory Leatherneck tap
dances under fire, getting their pimples shot off for the networks…
doing numbers for the cameras” (Herr 1991 [1977], 209).
Apocalypse Now turns the screw further on this uncanny equation.
When Willard and his men meet the First of the Ninth, the Air Cav unit
meant to escort them to the mouth of the Nung River, they find a Viet
Cong village still smoldering from a recent attack. The press is already
there, and as Willard and his men begin walking among the ruined
houses, they are confronted with a voice, repeatedly bellowing: “Just
keep going. Don’t look at the camera. Go on, keep going. This is for
television. Don’t look at the camera.” We then see the director of the
news team, played by Coppola himself, alongside his cameraman and
soundman, now giving directions especially to Willard: “Just go by like
you’re fighting.” In his self-reflexive spin on Fussell’s point about the
soldiers’ mental theatricalization of battle, Coppola introduces bitter
irony. The actor, Martin Sheen, is to act the part of a soldier acting as
though he were fighting. Given that the attack on the village for which,
on the diegetic level of the film, the director is seeking to shoot footage,
is already over, he must re-enact what happened in as plausible a
manner as possible, with the subsequent restaging writing over the
actual occurrence, even though (or precisely because) this is for
television.
For the grunts passing by, to look into the camera shows up the
restaging and thus undermines the sought after verisimilitude of the
fight. Yet the stare with which Willard, who has stopped walking
completely as though petrified by this preposterous command,
confronts his director indicates the passing of a judgment that also
moves beyond the film’s diegesis and is aimed directly at us. The
command not to look at the camera actually draws attention to its
presence, and as such underscores yet a further aspect of containing
war’s violence by ‘violently’ turning it into filmed images.
Verisimilitude is shown up as a plausible restaging. On screen, Coppola
moves his hands, shooing away this troublesome grunt, while
reiterating once more: “Don’t look at the camera. Go on. Keep going.”
Yet, his cameo appearance can also be taken as a self-conscious
reflection on the medium he is working with. War brought to the
screen is always a representation. The violence can only be rendered by
virtue of an aesthetic refiguration, even if the tone one strives for is
that of reimagined realism.
What follows is the infamous scene in which Lt. Col. Kilgore attacks
yet another Viet Cong village, so as to clear a beach to make it safe for
surfing. Self-consciously commenting on the fraught interface between
war and aestheticization, Coppola has Kilgore order a tape recording of
Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” to be played during the attack. As the
American helicopters come in low out of the rising sun, preparing to
bomb the small strip of beach, Wagner’s music is infused with the
sounds of their propellers, their guns being loaded, the Vietnamese
preparing themselves for the attack, and finally the actual detonation
of the bombs and the spray of artillery fire. Even while the scene
suspends judgment, it forces upon us yet another aspect of what it
means to tell the truth in a war story. In Coppola’s historical
reimagination, coming almost five years after all U.S. forces had been
recalled from Vietnam, the war zone emerges as a ubiquitous theater,
where the soldiers are actors in a self-orchestrated entertainment. Our
access to the obscenity of this enjoyment of violence can, in turn, only
be through further aesthetic formalizations of this aestheticization of
war’s ungraspable yet overwhelming affective intensity.

7 Cinematic Reenactment as Literary Memory

In a diary entry, written eight years after the Great War was over, C. G.
Jung jots down a dream, in which he found himself “driving back from
the front line, with a little man, a peasant, in his horse-drawn wagon.
All around us shells were exploding, and I knew that we had to push on
as quickly as possible, for it was very dangerous.” (Jung 1963, 203) The
interpretation he offers addresses the way in which, for some veterans
at least, war remains unfinished business even after peace has been
found: “The happenings in the dream suggested that the war, which in
the outer world had taken place some years before, was not yet over,
but was continuing to be fought within the psyche” (Jung 1963, 203).
Rethinking the issue of belated psychic haunting in relation to
cinema’s official memory and indeed commemoration of war, A. L.
Kennedy’s novel, Day, proposes yet a further spin on the imaginary
theatricalization of fighting in war. If, to protect themselves against
this trauma, soldiers imagine themselves to be actors on a stage,
veterans, haunted by past battles, may be compelled to restage these
battles in their minds, based on war films they have seen and spurred
by the songs they had in their ears while fighting.
At the onset of Kennedy’s novel, her protagonist, Sgt. Alfred F. Day,
formerly a tail-gunner in the Royal Air Force, has joined up with a film
unit, on location in Germany for a film about British soldiers in a
German prisoner of war camp. Where Apocalypse Now splices
together Conrad’s novella and Herr’s journalistic dispatches from a
war zone, Day crosscuts between two narrative strands, straddling the
present with memories of the past, which Alfred’s presence on the set
of a reconstructed POW camp continually triggers. The first of these
storylines revolves around his comments on what it means for him to
be in Germany again in 1949. Throughout he addresses himself as
‘you,’ signaling that he is perceiving himself as an actor in a postwar
reenactment of the past. To Ivor, the man he is working for in a
bookshop in London, he had not been able to explain why he felt
compelled to join up and come back for a second time, now as one of a
troop of veterans playing themselves as former Kriegies, with actual
German civilians playing German officers. The language he uses to
describe the various scenes in which he appears – planting a vegetable
path, demonstrating the digging of a tunnel, being brought to the
courtyard on a stretcher with a head wound – underscore his cynicism
toward what he perceives as pretense, a make-believe resuscitation of
the past. Yet Kennedy’s point is that it is precisely this phony
reenactment, restaging the war as a war film, which allows her
traumatized veteran to return to “whatever had been left unfinished”
(2008, 106).
As is the case with Coppola’s brief cameo appearance in Apocalypse
Now, in the scenes on location in Germany, real soldiers are acting on
a set, pretending not to notice that there are cameras filming them. Yet
as the past floods back into the present, the distinction between ironic
staging and affective truth becomes more and more blurred,
culminating in a disruption of the filming of a concert party. “The film
wasn’t quite in charge any more,” Alfred notes, when, in order to boost
morale, the director asks his extras to have a sing-song. After singing a
few former war tunes, Alfred finds himself compelled to break into a
howl: “That was how you started it up and running – the orchestra, the
old, old orchestra. Open your throat and crank your jaws back and let
out the sound of an air-raid siren, that particular climb of warning.” As
in the attack on the Viet Cong village, palliative music finds itself
entangled with the real sound of war, as the rest of the veterans join in,
while the film crew remain emotionally distanced from this uncanny
moment when re-enactment and an actual return of the repressed past
fully coincide: “[…] Alfred […] closed his eyes while the whole place
lifted into the scream of a raid – the scream they’d made to bait the
goons – and old Kriegies started in with the whistles of fluted tail fins,
the whistles of falling bombs: battered their feet down in the
pantomime of bombing, of Bomber Harris sending up his boys to
knock seven shades of shit out of the Fatherland” (Kennedy 2008,
239).
The second storyline in the novel Day, not told in sequence but as a
repeated burst of associations that not only bridge the present with the
past, but also move back and forth in time in the past, involves the
troubling memories Alfred has stored away in his mind. While the film
people’s restaging of the POW camp on a film set is marked as phony,
his own mental restaging of his war experiences rings more true
precisely because it is predicated on the subjective and the elusive
quality of any such representation. Alfred Day recalls a series of scenes,
such as his initial training under Sergeant Pluckrose, how his crew was
put together, the various furloughs he spends with his mates, but also
the home in Ireland he was so desperate to leave that he volunteered
the moment war was declared. These memories have, at their center,
the recollection of Joyce, whom he met in an air raid shelter and who,
unsure what has happened to her husband since the Japanese
vanquished Singapore, enters into a love affair with him. Tender
scenes from this romance are repeatedly pitted against the ubiquitous
presence of death – the bomb missions he flies over Germany, the
death of his buddies, and finally his own capture.
Like Heart of Darkness, Kennedy’s novel traces the psychic passage
through a fascinating wilderness, in this case from the British
perspective on the air battle against Nazi Germany. Somewhat more
optimistic than Conrad or Coppola, however, she can imagine a new
day for her veteran. Having confronted his internal demons, Alfred, at
the end of the novel, can meet up with his lost beloved. The future is
unclear, yet he has, unequivocally, rid himself of all suicidal fantasies.
Salient for the sober restitution Kennedy offers is that it is predicated
on using a false reenactment of the violence of war to call forth a set of
representations that are more true because self-consciously
fragmented and subjective. If Alfred is living a double life, suspended
between a past he cannot forget and a present he cannot fully inhabit,
the novel’s double voiced narrative performs these two chronotopes as
two sides of the same coin. As Alfred himself notes, “Not that reality
wasn’t a funny word: that which exists and is real, but also that which
underlies appearances, that which is true. So that which you see, but
also that which hides inside it.” (Kennedy 2008, 214)
 His war memories are comparable to psychic shrapnel which, in the
form of day-dream sequences, can slowly be ejected. Yet the point is
that these, also, need a pathos formula to contain their ungraspable
traumatic intensity. Most prominent of these are the Gus Kahn lyrics,
“I’ll see you in my dreams,” which repeatedly weld together Alfred’s
memories of Joyce with those of his bombing missions over Germany.
As such, his daydreams may be a more accurate approximation of his
war experience, given the immediacy which his fragmented language
invokes, but they, too, offer a reimagination of the past, appearing on
the pages of the novel as his verbal transcript of a personal war film
playing in his head. On the one hand, then, we have sympathy with
Alfred’s cynical comment on the film people’s restaging of the
penalization for the prisoners picking the locks on their handcuffs.
“Penalty for non-compliance, one hour in the sun with hands up.
They’d be filming that next: trembling British arms and British sweat,
very dramatic – lots of sympathy you’d get with that – now that it
wasn’t happening any more, now that it was a story” (Kennedy 2008,
161). On the other hand, his own, more intimate reenactment also
refigures the world of war in terms of the world of literature. In his
mental restagings, he not only experiences again the loss of his friends
but also has the power to revive them: “And he can believe that if he
opens up his eyes the benches will be full of all the boys lost to the sky
and his friends the closest, his crew the closest, so near that he can
take their hands and know they are well and never were harmed and
never were frightened, never lost.” (Kennedy 2008, 268)
The war scenes Alfred Day reenacts in his daydreams are not only
staged from the position of him as a survivor. They also thrive on the
fantasy that death can be reversed. As such, Kennedy’s novel returns
us to the theoretical claim this essay makes for any mediatization of
war. The traumatic violence of war remains an ungraspable intensity,
even when, or precisely because, any subsequent aesthetic
formalization both stores and contains this force. War literature and
war film, in a series of mutual recyclings, have been shown to be
double voiced above all in regard to the death war forces us to
acknowledge. While this death comes to be arrested on page and on
screen, when, by virtue of the act of reimagination, the past can be
brought to life again, it invariably hovers on the edges of any such
resuscitation. The access which aesthetic refiguration offers,
furthermore, brings a second-degree of violence into play.
Acknowledging the elusiveness of war’s violence is also what allows for
compassion and understanding. Yet any resuscitation of war
experiences involves a translation which is, invariably, no more than
that: an approximation predicated on curtailing, editing, resignifying.
Something remains, invariably, lost.

8 Bibliography

8.1 Works Cited

Bronfen, Elisabeth. Specters of War: Hollywood’s Engagement with
Military Conflict. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012.
Burgoyne, Robert. Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History. Rev.
ed. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2010.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1902. Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1973.
Freud, Sigmund. “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” 1915.
The Standard Edition. Vol. XIV. London: Hogarth Press, 1957. 274–
300.
Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1979.
Herr, Michael. Dispatches. 1977. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.
Jung, C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Ed. Aniela Jaffé. Trans.
Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage Books, 1963.
Kennedy, A. L. Day. New York: Vintage Books, 2008.
O’Brien, Tim. “How to Tell a True War Story.” The Things They
Carried. New York: Broadway Books, 1998. 67–85.
Warburg, Aby. Werke in einem Band. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010.

8.2 Films
A Walk in the Sun. Dir. Lewis Milestone. 20th Century Fox, 1945.
All Quiet on the Western Front. Dir. Lewis Milestone. Universal
Pictures, 1930.
Apocalypse Now. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. United Artists, 1979.
Apocalypse Now Redux. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Miramax, 2001.
Men in War. Dir. Anthony Mann. United Artists, 1957.

8.3 Further Reading

Chapman, James. War and Film. London: Reaktion Books, 2008.
Kaes, Anton. Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of
War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Keller, Ulrich. The Ultimate Spectacle: A Visual History of the
Crimean War. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 2001.
Rollins, Peter C., ed. The Columbia Companion to American History
on Film: How the Movies Have Portrayed the American Past. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. London:
Verso, 1989.
Westwell, Guy. War Cinema: Hollywood on the Front Line. London:
Wallflower Press, 2006.
Eckart Voigts

16 Literature and Television (after

TV)
Abstract: The chapter first discusses media definitions and the
specific mediality of television and literature. Starting from wide
notions of intermediality and adaptation, it subsequently applies
subcategories introduced by Irina Rajewsky, setting off media contact
and system contamination from media combination (also termed
multimodality, plurimediality or an intermedial transposition, transfer
or transcoding). Media contacts are explored in a number of literary
and televisual texts such as Ray Bradbury’s dystopia Fahrenheit 451
(1953), Don DeLillo’s postmodern novel White Noise (1985) and
Donald Barthelme’s short story “And Now Let’s Hear It for the Ed
Sullivan Show!” (1963). Medium-specific approaches to literature and
television are described as problematic as media are subject to rapid
cultural and technological transformations, exemplified here by the
shift from broadcast programmes to platform-based televisual
contents. Based on this investigation of the changing mediality of
television, the essay proceeds to analyse the BBC series Sherlock
(2010–), surveying its intermedial ancestry and discussing it as an
example of a literary adaptation in a situation of transmedia
engagement. The sample analysis seeks to overcome the formal and
aesthetic bias present in predominantly literature-based intermedial
research, connecting it to the cultural studies paradigm in television
studies.
Key Terms: Transmediality, transmedia narratology, convergence,
adaptation, appropriation, television, literature

1 Intermedial Television/Literature: Textual

Discussions and Contaminations
In their introduction to Intermediality and Storytelling, Marie-Laure
Ryan and Marina Grishakova (2010, 2) ask: “What for instance is the
medium of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: is it language, is it
writing, or is it the book?” Or, to expand the question with reference to
the BBC series Sherlock: “Is it a series, is it television, is it audio-visual
content, is it a broadcast TV, a DVD or streamed content?”
Alternatively, one might have paired book vs. DVD (storage device) or
page vs. screen (output device). Language is used in both media – if
you consider captions, even written language in the case of Sherlock
(cf. the detailed discussion of this BBC series in the second part of this
chapter). Asking these questions, we raise the issue of the definition of
‘medium’ and the question of the specific ‘mediality’ of mediums or
media – both the term and its grammatical form remain ill-defined, as
Ryan and Grishakova also note (2010, 2). Mediality can be thought of
as a set of characteristics that define a medium, i.e. the specific
technical, textual, but also cultural conditions of various media. The
term seems synonymous with the idea of ‘media forms and protocols’.
Medium-specific approaches to television would highlight the specific
mediality of television. Are, then, literature and television
media/mediums, and does their pairing in this chapter make sense?
This is the first question that needs an answer. If we roughly define
literature as the aesthetic and imaginative use of language and
television as (uni- or multilinear) transmitted audiovisual content, it
becomes evident that these definitions are based on different sets of
criteria; in the case of literature, predominantly aesthetic – in the case
of television, mainly technological. As Jonathan Culler (cf. 1995, 19–
23) remarks, the terms ‘literature’ and ‘literariness’ suggest, above all,
a way of looking at texts – so that theoretically there can be a ‘literary’
television – a television that exhibits literariness (such as rhetorics,
imagination, narrative complexity, aesthetic form, fictionality etc.).
Conversely, there might also be ‘televisual’ literature – literature
inspired by the mediality of television. Taking the deliberately vague
definition of media as ‘social and cultural practice according to a
shared protocol’, proposed by Lisa Gitelman, as a starting point, the
pairing might make sense because what we define as a ‘medium’ is to a
large extent based on conventions that involve aesthetic, cultural and
technological dimensions:
I define media as socially realized structures of communication, where structures include
both technological forms and their associated protocols, and where communication is a
cultural practice, a ritualized collocation of different people on the same mental map,
 sharing or engaged with popular ontologies of representation. (Gitelman 2006, 7)

Questions of mediality become even more complex when we further

prefix them (tautologically) with the Latin ‘inter-’ (‘between’) – as yet,
both of these terms are less prevalent in English than in German. The
wide concept of intermediality pertaining to “any kind of relation
between media” (Ryan and Grishakova 2010, 3) is thus accompanied
by a narrower notion that sees it as a marked engagement of the
specific features of one medium in another medium. A terminological
offshoot of the term ‘intertextuality’ that emerged in the 1990s,
arguably the term ‘intermediality’ has come to replace the term
intertextuality (at least in German-language contexts) as a useful
descriptor of relationships between media and media contents that
have long since gone beyond the predominance of the written text or
literature. Historically, intermedial analyses of television and literature
are based on the idea that specific medialities of either television or
literature appear in the other medium, becoming evident and even
infiltrating or contaminating it (cf. Rajewsky 2002, 118). This media
contact is intermediality in the narrow sense and different from a
media combination (also termed multimodality, plurimediality, cf.
Ryan and Grishakova 2010, 3). It is also different from intermedial
transposition, transfer or transcoding (literary adaptation). It must be
added, however, that typological distinctions such as these are
compromised by vague definitions distinguishing the media involved –
significantly, ‘opera’ is the standard example of choice for media
combination when it is not even clear that opera is a distinct medium
(problematically opposed to theatre/play, which do not involve
singing, music and elaborate settings, and just as ill-defined as
‘literature’ above). Ryan and Grishakova (2010, 4) further complicate
definitions when they claim that oral “narrative performance” has
always been multimodal (sound, facial expression, gesture). Keeping
these quandaries in mind, I will provide first a few examples of narrow
‘intermediality’ or the ‘contacting’ of television by the ‘contacted’
medium, literature, and then illustrate various aspects of the wider
notion of intermediality in the case of Sherlock.
It would be tedious and superfluous to attempt a representation of
the many ways in which literature is intermedially evoked in television.
Book shows on television, for instance, have attempted to lure viewers
towards reading (Oprah’s Book Club 1996–2011; Richard and Judy
Book Club 2004–2009). As the discussion below indicates, however,
the interrelationship between literature and television became
emblematic during the postmodernism of the 1970s and 1980s, when
distinctions between high and low culture fell apart. Playful,
metafictional intertextuality became a signature device first in avant-
garde literature and then in popular culture, and TV studies and
cultural studies became almost synonymous.
The longest running cartoon sitcom The Simpsons (1989–present) is
one of the key sites of postmodern TV’s engagement with literature and
one of the most intensely intertextual and intermedial shows to be
found on television (with episodes referencing Allen Ginsberg’s
counter-cultural Beat Generation poem “Howl”, Shakespeare, William
Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, Gore Vidal, Robert Pinsky, David
Foster Wallace and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, for a full
list see the web-based Simpsons Archive). The literariness in The
Simpsons is often linked to the oppositional, counter-cultural, nascent
intellectual Lisa in a crossover show that easily transcends age targets
from children to adults. The Simpsons and other ‘literate’ TV shows
seem to forge an intermedial link between literature and television.
However, it was not always so.
After a long period of gestation in which television was deemed too
domestic and culturally marginal to be interesting to writers, television
in the 1960s started to have an impact on literature. Frequently,
television was criticised along humanist, iconophobic terms, for
instance in Ray Bradbury’s dystopia Fahrenheit 451, in which firemen
paradoxically burn abhorred books. Linking literary culture, reading
and memory to liberal individualism, the novel claims that “liberal
humanist ‘civilization’ [was] threatened by postwar developments in
advertising, mass consumption, and television. In Fahrenheit 451, the
‘high culture’ of the literary canon is the means by which mass culture,
television, and state control can be opposed” (Baker 2008, 490).
Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There (1971) featured a mindless gardener
who was reared almost entirely by television, and whose simplistic
slogans brought him into the White House. This television satire was
typical of early ‘Otherings’ of television as deteriorating the public
sphere – with later echoes in the media ecology of Neil Postman
(Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985). In Germany, the Frankfurt
School shaped the critical attitude towards 1950s TV as a prime outlet
of the mind-numbing Ersatz of the culture industries, echoed in
France by Pierre Bourdieu’s 1996 polemics against the corrosive,
censoring, commercialising effects of an inherently conformist and
narcissistic medium.
American postmodernist fiction brings a paradigmatic change in
which television is addressed differently and even begins to infiltrate
the contacting medium, literature. The following passage from Don
DeLillo’s White Noise features a micro-lecture of ex-sports-writer-
turned-university-teacher, Murray Siskind – a fictional representation
of cultural studies’ turn towards television as the key medium in
American culture:
Waves and radiation. […] I’ve come to understand that the medium is a primal force in the
American home. Sealed-off, timeless, self-contained, self-referring. It’s like a myth being
born right there in our living room, like something we know in a dream-like and pre-
conscious way. […] You have to learn to look. You have to open yourself to the data. TV
offers incredible amounts of psychic data. It opens ancient memories of world birth, it
welcomes us into the grid, the network of little buzzing dots that make up the picture
pattern. There is light, there is sound. I ask my students, ‘What more do you want?’ Look
at the wealth of data concealed in the grid, in the bright packaging, in the jingles, the slice
of life commercials, the products hurtling out of the darkness, the coded messages and
endless repetitions, like chants, like mantras. ‘Coke is it, Coke is it, Coke is it.’ The medium
practically overflows with sacred information if we can remember how to respond
innocently and get past the irritation, weariness and disgust. (DeLillo 1985, 50–51)

In this ironic passage from White Noise, TV is mentioned and

discussed (cf. Rajewsky 2002, 78). Possibly, the language of the
contacting medium ‘literature’ is also infiltrated by the patterns of TV
(repetition, self-reference etc.). If, beyond mere discussion, the
language of both narrator and characters in this novel indeed
simulates the language of television (cf. McHale 1992, 119) this is – in
intermedial terms – a system contamination, in which the semiotic
system of literature is ‘infiltrated’ by a form that reproduces the
semiotics of another medium, television. The decision of whether the
medium, which is not present, is merely mentioned or even
systematically infiltrates, reproduces and thus re-shapes a text (or
media content) must ultimately rest with the interpreter.
Siskind’s micro-lecture contains a comprehensive account of TV,
which – in the vein of Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard or Hans
Magnus Enzensberger, who declared television as a Buddhist, zero-
medium of non-meaning – speculates on television as an Ersatz-
religion, focusing on the repetitive force of its messages and the
dominant role of television in American popular culture. Other
significant contributions to the television discourse in American
postmodernist fiction and culture include Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland
(1990), Charles Bernstein’s My Way (1999), Kathy Acker’s Portrait of
an Eye (1992) and David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll
Never Do Again (1997).
The following passage from Donald Barthelme’s short story “And
Now Let’s Hear It for the Ed Sullivan Show!” (1963) shows how the
protocols of television can ‘contaminate’ literature. Here, the narrative
voice – a core element of fiction – imitates the dislocated credit roll of
the eponymous television show: “Produced by Rob Precht. Directed by
Tim Kiley. Music by Ray Bloch. Associate Producer Jack McGeehan.
[…]” (Barthelme 1963, 108). It thus creates a stream-of-consciousness
narration (a flow of contingent, irrelevant data) not necessarily of a
mind, but of a medium (or a medium filtered through a focalising
agent – a mind). Robert Coover’s short story “The Babysitter” (1969)
proceeds along similar lines, featuring a discontinuous collage
narrative that is clearly inspired by the changing channels and
programmed flows of network television. Just as in White Noise, the
short story links television to ontological destabilisation (i.e. death)
and epistemological uncertainty. In “The Babysitter”, a long-time
favourite of narratologists, it becomes difficult to tell whether the
horrific events happen on television watched by the babysitter, in the
character’s imagination, or in the ‘reality’ of the fiction, in the
protagonist’s home. Thus, in postmodern fiction, marked
intermediality is regarded as an aesthetic device that increases the
poetic spectrum of the texts by intermedial system contamination.
However, this kind of intermedial analysis, inspired by literary
scholars such as Irina Rajewsky and Werner Wolf, has obvious
limitations as it is rigorously text-centred. The television intermedially
engaged by DeLillo, Coover and Barthelme is not the television we
encounter today as its mediality is subject to media-historical change.

2 After TV – Television and Transmediality

The terms ‘intermediality’ and ‘remediation’ were born out of the
recognition of a permeable, fluid mediality – they become more apt
and urgent with the paradox of hybridity bred from media
convergence. It is paradoxical that the term ‘convergence’, which
initially denoted low-threshold access to formerly distinct, but now
merged media (TV, news, radio etc.) in one or a few digital devices,
also implies media ‘divergence’: Henry Jenkins’ idea of ‘converged’
media suggests the diversified, hybrid modes of production and
reception of content across media outlets and devices in a post-
broadcast and (in the U.S.) post-network era (Caldwell 2004). Search
engines and content platforms – in shorthand: Google – have become
the “most advanced intermedial system” (Hickethier 2008, 457,
translation mine). Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin say that all
mediation is remediation and relate remediation to the fact that no
“medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do its
work in isolation from other media” (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 15). The
phenomenon, however, is anything but new. In her pioneering study
on Transmedia Television, Elizabeth Evans (2011, 1) points out that
television has never been a technically ‘stable’ medium, and in his
equally groundbreaking essay on TV and intermediality, Knut
Hickethier (2008, 450) remarks that TV emerged from the free
adoption and adaptation of other media, such as theatre (particularly
in the 1950s), film (particularly since the 1960s), radioplay and
literature. The (old and new) intermediality of television has (among
others) technological, formal and aesthetic, as well as cultural and
economic aspects. However, Hickethier’s list of intermedial references
testifies to the fact that, from the beginning, the references were to
aesthetic media and, in particular, to fiction, the “key suspect” of
intermediality (Hickethier 2008, 419).
In general and beyond textual analysis, notions of intermediality
have thus undermined ideas of medium-specificity. Jens Schröter
(1998, 49), for instance, sees an Ur-intermediality as a basic condition
of all media and regards the secondary move to define and demarcate
distinct, singular, media as ancillary. But the current medial fluidity
further undermines secure definitions of what ‘books’, ‘literature’ or
‘television’ really are. Just as the mediality of literature (with the
emerging e-books, e-readers, new forms of reviewing etc.), the
mediality of television is currently very much under debate and in
transition. The absurdity of some intermedial comparisons in the light
of changing medialities becomes clear even in arguments that are
sympathetic to recent television, but have maintained a medium-
specific bias towards the written word. Clearly, the following statement
by Charles McGrath from 1995 could not consider the
companionability and small screens of emerging e-readers and
smartphones:
TV will never be better than reading, thank goodness. It’s hard to imagine a tube, however
small, that could approximate the convenience and portability – the companionability – of
a book. And images and spoken words, no matter how eloquent, lack the suggestiveness,
the invitation to something deeper, of words on a page. (McGrath 1995, 244)

The ‘Aftering’ of TV has become a cliché in recent TV studies,

providing a good example of how problematic and historically
contingent the idea of medium-specificity is. In the past ten years, two
essay collections have declared the end of TV (Turner and Tay 2009:
Television Studies after TV; Spigel and Olsson 2004: Television after
TV) – and the prefix most frequently used in TV discourse is “trans-”,
as in Spigel and Olsson’s subtitle “a medium in transition”, or in the
titles Transmedia Television (Evans 2011) and Transgression 2.0
(Gunkel and Gournelos 2012).
The shift from analog to digital media and the convergence of
various media has had remarkable impact and makes discussion of the
specific TV mediality difficult. Media convergence came with high
hopes at the beginning of the new millennium, when Sturken and
Cartwright predicted that “this convergence will collapse distances and
democratize knowledge. Key to this is the idea that image, text, sound,
and objects also converge in the social production of meaning, and can
no longer be studied in isolation.” (Sturken and Cartwright 2001, 345)
Media convergence has thus made the study of intermediality and
transmediality all the more urgent. The transmedial turn of television
is not limited to the “360 degree commissioning” – i.e. media
producers such as the BBC initiating transmedial development
strategies for their productions (cf. Evans 2011, 34). As Caldwell
(2004, 49) noted, these productions used to be called ‘programmes’
and have now morphed into ‘content’ designed not just as part of a
programming schedule, but for multiple distribution channels,
circulating freely between outlets and platforms (in a first phase, film,
TV, video/ DVD; now: the mobilised and pervasive screens of social
media). What were formerly known as the products transmitted via
television as part of a programmed flow has now been turned into
‘overflow’ (cf. Brooker 2004): ‘text clusters’ that appear across
platforms in conjunction with programmed content. What used to be
‘flow’ (Raymond Williams) or ‘programme segments’ (John Ellis) is
now downloadable or streamable content – another indicator of how
much the mediality of television has changed (cf. Evans 2011, 54–55).
Software mash-ups and mobile, hand-held devices generate low-
threshold accessibility. What has emerged from the death of TV is thus
complex, synergetic television as matrix media, where “distinctions
between production and consumption blur” (Curtin 2009, 19).
Henry Jenkins developed his theory of transmedia storytelling to
account for globally circulated media narratives, such as The Matrix
(1999). As Evans (cf. 2011, 20–21) has pointed out, the term
transmedia storytelling was first used by Marsha Kinder and Mary
Celeste Kearney as a primarily promotional practice involving
merchandising, adaptations, sequels and franchising. Both scholars
specifically use the term to describe processes of cross-platform
adaptation and marketing, and subsequently couch it in discourses of
commercialism. Thus, the “flow of content across multiple media
platforms” described by Jenkins (2006, 282) and the “coherent matrix
of texts distributed on a range of media technologies” (Evans 2011, 24)
are frequently discussed exclusively in technological, narratological or
aesthetic terms, without any critique or challenge of the dominant
economic modes of engagement.
In transmedial serialisation, narratives and environments are
distributed as aggregates across a large variety of media outlets. The
result is a ‘polycentrist’ and ‘neo-Baroque’ (cf. Ndalianis 2004) culture
that generates a great demand for ‘aggregate texts’ (cf. Arnett 2009),
text clusters or text ‘remixes’ (cf. Lessig 2008) that operate in
transmedial story-worlds and create a sustained and intensified
experience of fictional worlds on the part of the consumers. These
aggregate texts unfold in long-term narrative coordination on the part
of the producers, which they undertake with the prospect of long-term
revenues.
Arguably, the “coherent, deliberately cross-platform narrative
experience” of transmedia franchises (Evans 2011, 20) might be a
precondition for quality television fiction to supplant the blockbuster
Hollywood movie or take on the role of the ‘great American novel’ –
one of the more interesting intermedial comparisons that have been
made recently. The rise of risqué, high-quality original series on HBO
cable television and formative HBO shows such as The Sopranos
(1999–2007) and The Wire (2002–2008) indicated that television had
taken on the role of leitmedium – providing seminal, definitive
narratives and myths that shape a nation’s self-fashioning. While the
1980s and 1990s were focused on television auteurs of ‘single plays’
and ‘miniseries’ such as Dennis Potter, the rise of quality TV in ‘weekly
network dramatic series’ as the ‘prime-time novel’ was articulated by
Charles McGrath (1995).
In this vein, Thomas Doherty, for instance, focuses on the mixing of
complex story arcs in shows such as Breaking Bad, Homeland or
Game of Thrones:
Like the bulky tomes of Dickens and Dreiser, Trollope and Wharton, the series are thick
on character and dense in plot line, spanning generations and tribal networks and
crisscrossing the currents of personal life and professional duty. […] Arc TV is all about
back story and evolution. Again like the novel, the aesthetic payoff comes from prolonged,
deep involvement in the fictional universe and, like a serious play or film, the stagecraft
demands close attention. (Doherty 2012, n. pag.)

An article in the New York Times noted that contemporary novelists

were keener on cable TV adaptations of their work than on movie
versions: “[…] what people like about post-‘Sopranos’ cable TV – its
complexity, its density, its moral ambiguity or even depravity – lines
up with what they like about literary fiction” (Fehrman 2011, n. pag.;
cf. also Dreher 2010). Unsurprisingly, this kind of television has
generated interests not just from cultural studies, but also the
traditionally literary, but increasingly trans- and intermedial,
narratology (cf. Mittell 2006; Allrath and Gymnich 2005). Marie-
Laure Ryan affords television much wider exposure in her 2010
extension of the transmedial narratology project of Narrative Across
Media (2004) while it was notably absent in Nünning and Nünning’s
volume on transmedial, transgeneric and transdisciplinary narratology
(2002), before complex transmedia TV ermerged.
One should, however, be wary of premature elegies on medium-
specific approaches to television. Jason Mittell, for instance, has
argued against the intermedial idea of ‘novelistic’ television articulated
by, among others, Charles McGrath: “While some point to this
emerging form as ‘novelistic’ television, I contend that it is unique to
the television medium despite the clear influences from other forms
such as novels, films, videogames, and comic books” (Mittell 2006,
29). In spite of the spreading of televisual contents across media
platforms, some medium-specific aspects persist and have weathered
the fluidity of changes in the production and circulation of television.
As contributions by Kozloff (1992) and Allrath, Gymnich and Surkamp
(2006) and others have shown, classic broadcast television has
generated a specific kind of audiovisual narration (marked by distinct
genres such as sitcom or soap opera) and narrative segments (breaks,
teasers, opening credits, cliffhangers) that is, however, subject to
permanent alteration.
The debates charted above illustrate the fact that television is still
perceived as a predominantly national medium (cf. Turner 2009, 63).
The BBC’s persistent policy to bar international viewers from their
web-based iPlayer content makes this evident. Football games and,
occasionally, fiction or current events still manage to unite a
fragmented national audience in front of their televisual screens. Just
as national literature – and because of the history of territorial
broadcasting maybe even more so – television invites readings that
invoke these imagined communities. A television show such as
Sherlock is just as prone to be mined for issues of
Englishness/Britishness as Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories more than a
century earlier, which renders the Americanisation of Holmes, for
instance the CBS series Elementary (2012–present), set in New York
with intensified heterosexuality via Lucy Liu as a female Joan Watson,
or, more obliquely, in House, MD, problematic (cf. Porter 2012d). Tom
Steward (2011, 134) insists that in spite of the transmedial aspects of
Sherlock, it is vital to explore its intra-medial contexts, such as the
history of Holmes on TV, TV pathology and crime show conventions,
hyphenated co-creator authorship, flexi-narrative combining
overarching serialisation and one-off drama, programming and
scheduling, or heritage TV aesthetics. Steward concludes that
“Sherlock’s medium-specificity can be teased out by studying its
television contexts” (Steward 2011, 146).

3 Case Study: Transmediality and Media

 Transposition in the BBC Sherlock
Adaptation/Appropriation
The current BBC series Sherlock (2010–present) – a reworking of
Conan Doyle’s sixty Sherlock Holmes stories (1887–1927) – will serve
as a case study, discussing transmedial, intermedial and intramedial
aspects of recent television. The Sherlock Holmes stories are an
example of classic realist texts which, in Catherine Belsey’s oft-quoted
terms in Critical Practice, provide a “coherent, non-contradictory
interpretation of the world” (Belsey 1985, 69). Holmes is one of the
best known and most easily recognisable figures of popular culture
around the globe. Interestingly, it is a case study in historicised literary
fandom. Holmes fans, so-called Sherlockians, helped resurrect the
character in 1903, after the author Conan Doyle had killed him off in
“The Final Problem” (1893), illustrating the fact that fan power and
transgressive reading are by no means new phenomena tied to digital
media only. To date, three seasons have been produced, each featuring
the central pairing of Benedict Cumberbatch (as Holmes) and Martin
Freeman (as Watson), and a growing network of supporting actors that
create a recurring character constellation, varying the Holmes canon.
In view of the recent trends within television (as outlined above), the
study of the BBC Sherlock, a literary adaptation of genre fiction
(detective, crime), is an obvious choice with a particularly rich
intermedial history. It is also an excellent example of transmedial
storytelling and transmedial fan engagement – both the inter- and
transmedial dimensions have been thoroughly investigated in the past
three years (cf. Stein and Busse 2012; Porter 2012a; Vanacker and
Wynne 2013). The most obvious intermedial reference is to literature.
The series is a sequence of adaptations of the fictional narratives by
Arthur Conan Doyle on the Victorian master detective Sherlock
Holmes. The series is a central transmedial “‘tent-pole’ production” (to
use O’Flynn’s terminology, cf. Hutcheon and O’Flynn 2013, 182),
extended by a great number of transmedial activities (blogs, Twitter).
This new Sherlock Holmes franchise participates in the Sherlock
Holmes canon, first appearing in the sixty stories, but immediately
subject to textual proliferation, making Holmes one of the most
adapted and appropriated literary characters since the beginning of the
twentieth century. Examples range from countless pastiche stories by
Neil Gaiman, Anthony Burgess, Caleb Carr, Anthony Horowitz and
others (cf. Porter 2012c), numerous radio plays and plays (since
Charles Broomfield’s 1893 musical parody Under the Clock or William
Gillette’s 1899 Sherlock Holmes), board games, videogames (cf.
Mukherjee 2013), museums (cf. Wynne 2013), bio-fictions (cf. Lycett
2013; Pulham 2013), comics (cf. Porter 2012b, 4), to blogs (cf. Harvey
2012), and, most recently, the tie-in smartphone app “Sherlock: The
Network”, which invites users to become part of the homeless network
and travel the urban space of London to help Sherlock solve his latest
case. Media transfers are also transnational – with European pastiches
(cf. Capancioni 2013), significant television and film productions in
Russia (1982), France (1954), Germany (1968), and Czechoslovakia
(1972) (cf. Porter 2012b, 7). The legacy of Holmes television and
movies is rich, from animated movies (Sherlock Hound, 1984–1985,
and Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective, 1986) to the two movies
directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Robert Downey Jr. (Sherlock
Holmes, 2009; Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, 2011). He is
also a staple character in advertising (Field 2013).
The series can be used to discuss the continuum between adaptation
and appropriation in media transposition. Whenever the source text
becomes material in a thorough recontextualisation, such as Sherlock,
we might consider it an appropriation – compared to adaptation, more
subversive and oppositional, an unfriendly takeover or “a more
decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new
cultural product and domain” (Sanders 2006, 26).
As the series has been marketed as a ‘modernised’ adaptation,
however, the producers seeking to forge rather than sever links to the
Conan Doyle Sherlock, the continuing lure of first establishing a
literary pedigree (which can then be treated in ‘appropriation’ for post-
literary audiences) is much in evidence. A wide notion of adaptation
sees it as an umbrella term for secondary intermediality or media
transposition, transfer or transcoding (the secondary media product
transcodes or transfers another, primary product in a different
medium or code; the term ‘transcoding’ requires the synonymous use
of code and medium). In the narrow sense, an adaptation indicates its
allegiance to a source text or source system, often using signposts for
the audience to be read as an adaptation. Occasionally, the literary
legacy is unmarked, as in the case of House, MD (U.S.A. 2004–2012).
The eponymous character, played by veteran British actor Hugh
Laurie, was partly inspired by Holmes stories. Intermedial allusions
include the name (Holmes/House), his drug abuse, his friend (Dr.
Watson/Dr. Wilson), his sociopathic behaviour, and the limp echoing
Dr. Watson’s limp. Holmes, after all, was modelled on a medical
doctor, Joseph Bell. Sherlock, however, while being clearly signposted
as a derivative of the Holmes stories, not only recontextualises the
Holmes stories, but also establishes various other intermedial
references (most prominently to social, digitally networked media).
The shortened title, Sherlock, immediately signifies, by its choice of
the first name, that it seeks to eliminate distance to its main character
and make him palatable to informal, ‘youthful’, post-literary
consumers. The series illustrates the shift from an ‘appointment
model’ that focuses audience interest on a “one-time commodity” to an
‘engagement model’ that builds sustained interest on a permanent,
serialised, continuous, and varied narrative universe (Jenkins, Ford,
and Green 2013, 132–137). The BBC’s Sherlock ‘actualises’ the Conan
Doyle narratives, according to this engagement model, for a
contemporary, ‘converged’ television audience – more than merely
‘transforming’ or ‘transcoding’ them from literature to television.
Ashley Polasek (2012, 47) names cliffhangers, most notably in the final
episode of the second series, as one of the transmedial storytelling
devices that seek to keep fan interest alive after a long series hiatus
necessitated by increasing problems in fitting celebrity actors to the
production schedules. The franchise aims at keeping a coherent
audience across media boundaries. In his book Spreadable Media
(2013, co-authored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green), Jenkins
promotes the ‘spreadability’ model to better represent networked
reception and the individual audience member’s experience:
“Spreadability recognizes the importance of the social connections
among individuals, connections increasingly made visible (and
amplified) by social media platforms” (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013,
6). It follows that only a re-conceptualisation of the term ‘adaptation’,
as an umbrella term for ‘cultural borrowing’ or ‘cultural appropriation’,
will help overcome both the strictures of narrowly aesthetic
comparative studies in the classic ‘novel into film’ paradigm of
Adaptation Studies and the frequently arid formal-typological bias of
traditional Intermediality Studies. Sherlock is a good example of how
popular culture and literariness meet, how the “convergence of
literary, visual, and material cultures” (Collins 2008, 8) changes
literary reading and how literature is performed on television, begging
Jim Collins’ question of “how […] to get a handle on this robust literary
culture fuelled by such a complicated mix of technology and taste, of
culture and commerce” (Collins, 2008, 7).
The appearance of Sherlock-inflected products and narratives is, in
addition, an excellent example of convergence television, and usefully
exemplifies television inter- and transmediality via crossmedial or
transmedial marketing – the economic side of intermediality. The
buzzwords intermediality (literary studies, art; emerging in the 1990s)
and transmediality (media studies, cultural studies; emerging in the
2000s) indicate a shifting focus from the aesthetics to the economics of
remediation – and, what is more, a worrying adjustment from critical
to business-friendly cultural studies in response to growing socio-
economic pressures on the humanities in academia (cf. Voigts
forthcoming).
The creators of the Sherlock series, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss,
deliberately invoke the literary ancestry of their endeavour and claim
that they are paying homage to Conan Doyle (cf. Rixon 2012, 168).
They playfully reference Conan Doyle’s titles (when “A Study in
Scarlet” becomes “A Study in Pink” in the first episode or “A Scandal in
Bohemia” turns into “A Scandal in Belgravia” in the second episode of
the second series); Watson conveniently turns from a veteran of the
Anglo-Afghan war in the late 1870s into a traumatised ‘War on Terror’
soldier; the network of vagrant street children called ‘Baker Street
Irregulars’ turn into homeless graffiti artists.
In general, Conan Doyle allusions for the cognoscenti abound: many
of the in-jokes for the Holmes-literate audience reinforce a bonding
between the deep hermeneutics of the initiated fans and the series
authors keen on preventing alienation from key users and aficionados.
Even the audiences that do not ‘get’ the jokes will be familiar with this
bonus quality and the literary extra credentials of the series. As Hills
(2012, 33) shows, Steven Moffatt’s TV commentary for “A Study in
Pink” directly baits – somewhat condescendingly – Sherlockian
‘fanboys’ with trivia about the ‘original’ stories that found their way
into the series. Hills argues convincingly that the “heretical fidelity”
(2012: 36) of Sherlock attempts to tap into the aficionado territory by
suggesting that the show exhibits the kind of devoted heresy that we
find in fan discourses – with Moffatt and Gatiss as some kind of über-
Sherlockian.
Indeed, über-Sherlockians Moffat and Gatiss increasingly write
fandom into their products, providing an excellent example of the
‘polyprocess’ of adaptation (cf. Voigts-Virchow 2013). The variety of
possible versions and solutions are triggered by the ‘original’ story, but
supersede the traditional interest in fidelity to the Ur-text. It is well-
known that the ending of Conan Doyle’s story “The Final Problem”
(1893) implies that Holmes and his arch-enemy Moriarty have fallen to
their deaths in violent struggle at Reichenbach Falls, Switzerland, in
1891, but that fan pressure persuaded Conan Doyle to bring Holmes
back to life in “The Adventure of the Empty House” (1903). All of this
provides ample space for the polyprocesses of story (and title)
variation in Sherlock: “The Empty Hearse”, the initial episode of the
third series, picks up the unresolved outcome of Sherlock’s supposed
suicide fall from the St. Bartholomew Hospital roof in the “The
Reichenbach Fall”, the finale of the second series. This sequence
culminates in a passionate kiss between Holmes and his arch enemy
Moriarty, which is subsequently shown to be a fan-produced ‘theory’
version of how Sherlock faked his death in “The Reichenbach Fall”.
Clearly, low thresholds to relational audience participation are
increasingly turning cultural reception (as individualised readers or
passive viewers) into networked cultural ‘polyprocess’ performance.
Television audiences are thus transformed into partners in textuality,
even if their activities may be often subsumed as ‘junior’ partnerships.
User-generated texts may not meet aesthetic standards, may not be
visible, and may be transient rather than permanent. Furthermore,
they are frequently supportive of the meanings circulated in franchise
products rather than transgressive and subversive. As I have argued
elsewhere (Voigts 2013), however, user-generated intermediality on
transient video/text platforms and archives (YouTube, Vimeo etc.) and
other activities of a participatory culture are currently changing the
status of the literary and cultural artefact, which turns from an object
of interpretation and perusal into material to be played with. In line
with my term ‘polyprocess’, Linda Hutcheon’s championing of
adaptation as a process (2013, 18–22) and Marie-Laure Ryan’s focus
on intermedial storytelling as ‘performance’, the focus in Adaptation
and Intermediality Studies must be on what people do with texts.
Take the example of ‘Oklahomo’ and ‘Mind Phallus’, two Sherlock
parodies produced by the comedians Vidar Magnussen and Bjarte
Tjøstheim for the Norwegian TV show Underholdningsavdelingen.
Albeit not fan-produced, they exhibit a transgressive awareness of the
‘knowing’ homophobia and misogyny of the show, focusing indeed on
the quirky implausibilities, mannerist mise-en-scène, pseudo-
intellectual dialogue, techno-glorification and sexualised subtexts of
the show. Sherlock fore-grounds Holmes’ homoeroticism only to
disavow it when the kiss between Holmes and Moriarty is dismissed as
a fanfic fantasy in “The Empty Hearse”. The parodies, however, feature
Holmes and Watson as a consistently gay couple, a slash fiction
‘shipping’ reminiscent of old and new Holmes variations, from the
movie American Adventures of Surelick Holmes (1975) to the more
current Gay Sherlock Holmes blog and ‘Holmescest’ – an incestual
‘shipping’ of Holmes and his brother Mycroft. Sherlock’s non-sequiturs
become absurd, and his supposedly smart operation of new
technologies is undermined by his smartphone’s auto-correction that
gives away his gay lifestyle. In Sherlock, whose mise-en-scène is
shaped by a hyper-modern, digitised London, Holmes, alias
Cumberbatch, effortlessly manages the information landscape of
London from the very beginning – undermining, for instance, official
information in a press conference in the initial episode, “A Study in
Pink”. The consistently faulty auto-correction in the Norwegian
parodies also subverts the series’ pro-consumption, pro-technology
message and the deduction routine set-pieces that look like an advert
for Google Maps style geocoding – a transposition of Sherlock’s powers
of scientific rationalism that have become a trademark of the show.
The title ‘Mind Phallus’ subverts by sexualisation the ‘mind palace’
routines of ‘method of loci’ memory activation that have become a
trademark of the series and serve to hyperbolise Sherlock’s cognitive
capability. Francesca Coppa (2012, 211) indeed reads Sherlock as a
Cyborg and, unsurprisingly, in the intramedial referencing of the Star
Trek episode “Elementary, Dear Data” (1988), Holmes is played by an
android. The digital modernisation – one of the most marked
intermedial aspects of the series – also suggests interesting links to the
source text. Matt Hills’ discussion of this aspect of the series begins
with Roberta Pearson’s prescient remark in 1997 that computers and
the Internet are “the logical extension of Holmes’ own practices and
habits of mind” (Pearson in Hills 2012, 27–28).
We find these ‘television’ parodies on video platforms such as
Google’s YouTube, a low-threshold outlet for performances and
another one of Hickethier’s advanced ‘intermedial systems’ that
regulate the intense intertextuality and intermediality emerging
around franchises like Sherlock. YouTube is a special instance of an
affinity space, and the mechanisms underlying the travelling,
legalisation and (mis)use of YouTube performance practices have, if
anything, become culturally more significant. In the work of Jenkins,
the focus is less on criticising than on affirming the ‘technological,
industrial, cultural and social’ contexts of these processes. Praising the
import of ‘participatory culture’ and ‘collective intelligence’ of
contemporary cultural practices, which often involve the processes of
adaptation and appropriation, Jenkins engages with the industries of
social media. Highlighting the surprisingly uncontrolled way in which
audiences rework and appropriate source material, Jenkins’ plea is for
more intelligent marketing that takes participatory culture seriously.
Jenkins et al. (2013) do not engage with ‘processing’, ‘reading’, or
‘interpreting’ texts; they have even less interest in subverting the
underlying economic systems of capitalist text production. What is at
stake in their paradigm is a participating consumer – albeit redefined
as active and authoritative – rather than a rebel or a reader (as in
literary studies). In this model, what else is to be hoped for than a
replenishment of the exhausted aesthetics of popular culture – a
replenishment one may find in the Norwegian Sherlock parodies?
The key debate in cultural studies at the moment is on the
transgressive potential of social media – or on just how transgressive
the spreadable contents of mash-up culture (cf. Gunkel and Gournelos
2012) are. The warnings against fetishising Sherlock fandom may be
expanded in an attack on the aesthetic and political potential of post-
TV television as such. While John Hartley merely alludes to the danger
of ubiquitous silliness as a consequence of low threshold viewer
engagements in the emerging “democratization of productivity”
(Hartley 2009, 30), Graeme Turner (2009) sees the Jenkinsian and
Hartleian vision of cultural democracy replaced by the rule of the
demotic. Even franchises of the so-called quality TV ilk such as
Sherlock acculturate their viewers to reinforce television’s cultural and
economic prowess.
Media responses as well as fan engagements in part replicate the
interest in literary ancestry, although this multi-coded text in typical
hybridity transcends this one-dimensional notion. This begins with the
reviews that associate Sherlock not only with Conan Doyle’s literature,
but more frequently with the pedigree of adaptations, such as the
productions starring Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, Rupert Everett,
Robert Downey Jr. or Jonny Lee Miller as Holmes (1940s, 1980s and
1990s, 2010 and 2012). Sherlock is thus compared not only with the
authentic canon, but with the iconic, visible Holmes character. In this
way, the television series is not even predominantly an adaptation of
Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, but of the entire canon of Holmes
adaptations and appropriations in film, theatre and other media.
Coppa (2011, 210) concludes that this makes the character
performative rather than textual from the very beginning. Clearly,
Sherlock has shed “the ‘fog’ of retrograde Victoriana” (Basu 2012, 197)
in a number of ways, insisting on Holmes being contemporary and
medially up-to-date, rather than cluttered by the standard showcasing
of televisual Victorianness (Watson’s diary has turned into a blog; an
engraved pocket watch turns into an engraved mobile phone). Polasek
(2012, 47) speculates intriguingly that this is a strategy to re-
authenticate Holmes by turning him into Sherlock: in other words, by
avoiding clichéd, iconic addenda that first appeared in Sidney Paget’s
illustrations accompanying the narratives since 1891 or William
Gillette’s stage performance. As in the similar case of John Tenniel’s
Alice illustrations for Lewis Carroll, this serves as a reminder that
literary narratives are frequently intermedial iconotexts, and that
issues of authority and fidelity pertain to the illustrations as well (this
is fully explored in Elliott 2003). The success of the series can be
explained in part by the fact that it has managed to circumnavigate
these issues of fidelity.
Sherlock sheds the iconic deerstalker and pipe, the Inverness cape-
backed great-coat and walking stick absent from the Conan Doyle
stories – not primarily to purify Holmes, but to adapt him to a
contemporary youthful audience. A key deviation is the non-smoking
Sherlock that to date has never been shown to abuse drugs – a
sanitised Sherlock in concession to BBC requirements. The ethical
lugubriousness of Holmes, his decadent ennui fought by consumption
of morphine and cocaine, is toned down, and Benedict Cumberbatch is
a comparatively youthful Holmes. Gatiss and Moffat’s TV pedigree
(Doctor Who, in particular) aligns the series with a young demographic
and contemporary television genres. Its ‘authored’ status, visual polish,
high production values, media savvy and saturation target the
benchmarks of U.S. quality TV, sticking out of the flow, entailing
particularly dedicated audiences, achieving cultish status and inviting
a kind of literary canonisation (cf. Evans 2011, 12–13).
The cult TV and quality TV aspects of Sherlock as “cultural attractor”
have little to do with its status as a medial transfer of the Holmes
stories and more with the show’s embracing of digital modernity. As
Matt Hills sums up, it can be linked to the gendered attractions of
Cumberbatch-as-Holmes (see the ‘Cumberbitches’, ‘Cumber-cookies’,
Cumberbabes’, ‘Cumber Collective’, ‘Cumberbuddies’ fandom) as well
as to “the show’s use of contemporary styling such as its Belstaff coats
or Spencer Hart suits, and its highly stylized televisuality, attributable
to the directorial input of Paul McGuigan” (Hills 2012, 39), but clearly
in evidence even in episodes where McGuigan was not involved. Hills
adds that the verbal usage of ‘sherlocking’ (or ‘sherlocked’) suggests
the aspect of the show as ‘cultural activator’, and this can be ascribed
to the show’s intermediality, metatextuality, contemporaneity, and
fidelity.
On the other hand, Balaka Basu makes a valid case for the series’
conservatism (misogyny, classicism, racism, hyperrationality, cf. Basu
2011, 105), all of which can be linked to a persistent, mirrored
Victorianism that contradicts the contemporary ‘modernisation’ of
Conan Doyle. She also argues that the series is “neo-Victorian in every
sense of the word as it resembles, revives and is reminiscent of the
period” (Basu 2011, 104). The same case could be made for the series’
intermediality – it not only adapts the Holmes stories (resemblance,
media transcoding), but actualises them (revivification) and reminds
the reader of the texts’ mediality (media memory).

4 Conclusion
To sum up, the three tripartite Sherlock series to date are heuristically
fascinating on a variety of levels. Engaging new and old ‘Sherlockians’,
they indicate the historicity of fandom; they provide a model of
spreadabilty and drillability in transmedia engagement; their
“heretical fidelity” (Hills 2012, 34) illuminates issues of fidelity in
adaptation studies; beyond media transcoding, the series is
intermedial as it incorporates other media in a specifically televisual
intermedial art; it illustrates the supremacy of the category
character/actor in adaptation; its literariness (but by no means only
that) contributes to its status as quality TV. While medium-specific
approaches to television continue to be useful, the analysis of Sherlock
illustrates that the changing mediality of television throws the
limitations of this perspective in sharp relief. On the contrary, only
intermedial approaches, investigating the relationship between
television, literature and other media, and transmedial investigations
into the cross-media marketing of a brand will do proper justice to
television series as a key to investigating current media protocols and a
set of highly significant texts and practices.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

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Steward, Tom. “Holmes in the Small Screen: The Television Contexts
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Conan Doyle: Multi-Media Afterlives. Houndmills: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013.
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Voigts, Eckart. “Bastards and Pirates, Remixes and Multitudes: The
Politics of Mashup Transgression and the Polyprocesses of Cultural
Jazz.” The Politics of Adaptation. Ed. Dan Hassler-Forest and
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Voigts-Virchow, Eckart. “Anti-Essentialist Versions of Aggregate Alice:
A Grin Without a Cat.” Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and
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Wynne, Catherine. “Introduction: From Baker Street to Undershaw
and Beyond.” Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle: Multi-Media
Afterlives. Ed. Sabine Vanacker and Catherine Wynne. Houndmills:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 1–18.

5.2 Series
Sherlock. BBC ONE. Dir. Paul McGuigan et al. 2010–.

5.3 Further Reading

Casey, Bernadette, Neil Casey, Ben Calvert, Liam French, and Justin
Lewis. Television Studies: The Key Concepts. New York: Routledge,
2002.
Herkman, Juha, Taisto Hujanen, and Paavo Oinonen, eds.
Intermediality and Media Change. Tampere: Tampere University
Press, 2012.
Williams, Raymond. Television, Technology and Cultural Form.
London: Fontana, 1974.
Guido Isekenmeier

17 Literary Visuality: Visibility –

Visualisation – Description
Abstract: This article sets out to map the emerging field of literary
visuality studies. It delineates the approach from studies in
intermediality and challenges their usual focus on images when
addressing the visuality of literature, making the case for literature’s
constitutive, rather than derivative, role in visual culture. It then
outlines the contours of three separate but related areas of inquiry for
the study of literary visuality: textual visibilities, readerly
visualisations, and visual modes of writing. Concentrating on the most
significant of these modes, description, it goes on to analyse a pre-
eminent example in the history of landscape description, the opening
of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), with regard to its
place in a history of (the visuality of) description, expounding on the
visual cultural work it performs by contributing to the naturalisation of
a picturesque aesthetic.
Key Terms: Literary visuality, visual culture, textual visibility,
readerly visualisation, visual modes of writing, description

1 The Order(s) of Literary Visuality: Textual

Visibilities – Readerly Visualisations – Visual
Modes of Writing
Studies in literary visuality investigate the role of literature(s) in visual
culture(s). The recent consolidation of this approach is the result of a
“fast-developing dialogue of textual studies with visual culture studies”
(Harrow 2013, 1) and constitutes an alternative or complementary
paradigm to intermediality studies in that it posits the larger
framework of visual rather than media culture as the context in which
to analyse the visualities of literature. If we conceive of cultures as
semiotic systems (cf. Posner 2008) combining social practices (which
constitute societies), material artefacts (which constitute civilisations)
and conventional codes (which constitute mentalities), visual culture’s
range extends beyond (the) media and their definition as
“conventionally distinct means of communicating cultural contents”
(Wolf 2005, 253) by including institutions whose primary purpose is to
organise practices of transmission (rather than communication, cf.
Debray 2000), such as monuments or museums, artefacts which serve
to process visibility (rather than contents), such as tele- or
microscopes, and mental codes which are not the means, but the rules
of communicating (about) visuality, such as the discourses of
philosophical aesthetics or art history (for the examples cf. Frank and
Lange 2010, 10–11). In other words: if we think of visual culture as “the
dynamic, contextualising interplay of discourses, practices, and
artefacts connected to vision, sight and seeing, in short: visuality”
(Tripp 2013, 29), the centrality of (the) media in or for visual culture(s)
is put into question. Consequently, a literary studies approach to
visuality has to look or read beyond (the) media in order to elucidate
literature’s participation in visual culture at large.
Literary visuality studies’ concern with the culturality of vision, the
“symbolic form of visual perception” (Davis 2011, 230), also entails a
challenge to the concentration on the ways texts relate to pictures (and
their media) either in praesentia (word and image, media
combination) or in absentia (intermedial reference and its progenitor,
ekphrasis) which is characteristic for intermedial studies of literature’s
engagement with the visual ( 0 Introduction). “Practices of looking”
(Sturken and Cartwright 2001), the “logistics of perception” (Virilio
1989), “scopic regimes” (Jay 1988), “hyper-dispositifs” (Paech 1988) or
the “techniques of the observer” (Crary 1990) are all partly situated
beyond pictoriality and do not completely condense in pictures: “We’ve
been trained to assume that an observer will always leave visible
tracks, that is, will be identifiable in terms of images. But here it’s a
question of an observer who takes shape in other, grayer practices and
discourses” (Crary 1988, 43). This is not to deny the prominent
position of pictures in visual culture(s), but to suggest their
embeddedness in visual practices which may take their effect on “ways
of seeing” (Berger 1972) without a material fixation in images (cf.
Rimmele and Stiegler 2012, 9–10). While it is certainly true that “styles
of depiction […] have materially affected human visual perception”
(Davis 2011, 6), any equation of visual perception with the perception
of images is fallacious: “A picture cannot entirely express the essential
‘symbolic values’ of a visuality, just as a visuality cannot entirely
conceive the essential ‘formal values’ of a picture” (Davis 2011, 233).
Because “visual studies is not the same thing as ‘image studies’”
(Mitchell 2002, 99) due to the complex “interaction of visuality and
pictoriality” (Davis 2011, 231), studies in the visuality of literature as
one of those “grayer practices” shaping seeing cannot be limited to the
study of the relations between literary texts and (media) images ( Part
I: Text and Image).
It is hardly necessary to justify looking at culture from the point of
view of visuality. One need not even go so far as to presume that a
limitation of experience to vision (Kleinspehn 1989) or the isolation of
the eye as prime organ of perception (Pallasmaa 2005) are a signature
of modernity – a presumption variously questioned by mediaeval
studies (Rimmele and Stiegler 2012, 38) and the antivisual strain in
French theory (Jay 1993): “If visual culture is to mean anything, it has
to be generalized as the study of all the social practices of human
visuality, and not confined to modernity or the West. To live in any
culture whatsoever is to live in a visual culture” (Mitchell 2002, 94).
But why of all things are we supposed to study visuality with the help
of literary texts, whose linguistic makeup is allegedly “almost wholly
devoid of actual sensory content” (Scarry 2001, 5)? The answer to this
question can be threefold. First of all, as written or printed matter,
literary texts have to be visually perceived. In ‘our’ phonocentric
tradition of thinking about language (Derrida 1997), this visible aspect
of literature has been largely neglected. However, to “assume that
textual visuality is not and cannot be aesthetically significant to literary
art simply because it was so originally is to fall victim to the genetic
fallacy on a grand scale” (Shusterman 1982, 91). Such “aesthetic
blindness” to textual visibility has recently given way to considerations
of writing’s constitutive combination of attributes of the discursive and
the iconic (cf. Krämer et al. 2012, 14), and literature is increasingly
recognised as the writing scene geared towards “accepting and
aesthetically exploiting the visual medium of the text” (Shusterman
1982, 88). Secondly, precisely to the degree that it is read rather than
seen, deciphered as language rather than perceived as scripture,
literature’s textuality can be seen to enable inquiries into the relations
of vision and the other senses. Given “vision’s inevitable proximity to
other sense perceptions” (Horstkotte and Leonhard 2007, 5), the
interplay of the senses has long caught the attention of visual culture
studies: “use of the problematic term ‘perception’ is primarily a way of
indicating a subject definable in terms of more than the single-sense
modality of sight, in terms of hearing and touch, and, most
importantly, of irreducibly mixed modalities” (Crary 1999, 3).
Perpetuating the “visualist prejudices of art history” that the “primary
object of study must be visual artifacts and ways of seeing them” (Davis
2011, 10), this might be considered a call for analysing pictorial means
of simulating non-visual perception in images (Frank and Lange 2010,
94); but we might just as well focus on literary textuality as the site of
an intersensual (rather than intermedial) dialogue equally far removed
from all perception (cf. Isekenmeier 2011). In fact, as all sensory
experience is “indirectly conveyed through language” (Mitchell 2002,
95) in literature, literary texts lend themselves to the exploration of
synaesthesia, aisthesis across modalities. Thirdly, we depend on ways
of ‘writing seeing’ in order to come to terms with vision, not least
because visuality exceeds pictoriality or indeed visibility: “the
culturality of vision, or true visuality, is not – or at least not exclusively
– a visual phenomenon. Certainly it is not wholly visible” (Davis 2011,
10). Literary texts, then, are one of the means of transmitting (in a
mediological sense) visual conditions or events that do not sediment in
the pictorial representations to which they pertain: “There are more
than a few moments when pictures were negotiated mainly in
literature and journals. These forms […] are the only substitute we
have for the empirical observer who has become invisible since that
period, or indeed who never could have been seen perceiving in the
first place, and who therefore has always already been a textual
observer” (Frank 2007, 84). Add to this that literature is probably the
only textual genre (not to say ‘medium’) that not only talks about that
observer, but actually stages his or her acts of seeing (in linguistic
form), and literary visuality ends up being an invaluable part of any
attempt to (re-)construct historically or culturally distinct ways of
seeing. In each case, literature appears as the privileged textual
practice of engaging (with) visuality that produces a surplus of textual
form (one of the sparse traits which characterise the ‘medium’ of
‘literature’ in its historical continuity since early modern times, cf.
Gumbrecht 1998) – as visibility of the text itself, as indifference to all
sensualities alike, or as mise-en-scène of invisible visualities ( 18
Images in Narrative Literature; 19 Intermedial Framing).
All of which is to say that we should not (or no longer) attribute to
literature “a parasitic quality in its relation to visual culture, only
passively receiving (and profiting) from visual culture” (Tripp 2013, 1)
or think of it as only reflecting (on) visual culture. Literature does not
(only) reenact changes located in a visual culture that precedes it and is
situated beyond its reach (Frank 2009, 384). Rather, it is an
independent variable, a feature of visual culture actively participating
in it. Provisionally maintaining the separation of the two areas of
perception on the one hand and literature on the other, it is possible to
regard literature as both reflex and motive of transformations in the
history of perception (Mergenthaler 2002, 395), as both mimetic
reconstruction and poietic projection of visualities (Mergenthaler
2002, 392). With regard to (visual) media, for instance, the fact that
interactive, ‘osmotic’ processes are at work between literary texts and
their supposed visual other (Mergenthaler 2002, 8) is most obvious in
the phase of what has been termed “primary intermediality” (Leschke
2003, 33–71). In the exploratory moment between the invention of a
technical apparatus and its consolidation as a new medium, literary
texts have long been demonstrated to play a crucial role in envisioning
potential uses for visual devices, sometimes even anticipating their
eventual advent (as in Paech’s 1988 account of the literary prehistory
of film and the latter’s subsequent fictionalisation; 14 Filmic Modes
in Literature). Literature thus “enables visual practices to come into
being” (Frank 2007, 84) and should in no way be thought of as a
critique of mediatised visualities that only traces the effects of visual
mass media post factum (Horlacher 2008, 750).

1.1 Textual Visibility

Thus outlined, the field of literary visuality studies comprises at least
three areas of enquiry, the first of which is textual visibility: this
includes all the options of literary texts to turn attention to their visible
aspects, ranging from calligrams or picture poetry, in which the text as
a whole is arranged to form a graphic shape (Ernst 1991), through
efforts to semanticise different aspects of font and layout of the printed
text or the manuscript (Gutjahr and Benton 2009) to considerations of
the contextualising effects of the different formats in which literary
texts are encountered (Kaminski and Mergenthaler 2015). Textual
visibilities are variously discussed under headings such as the
“iconicity of script” (Hamburger 2011), drawing on the linguistic
concept of iconicity as characterising “signs whose meaning in some
crucial way resembles their form” (Haiman 1992, 191), or the
“materiality of the text” (Gross 1994), drawing on the idea that
“materialities of communication” (Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer 1988)
ground meaning. No matter what we call it, the decisive point is that it
is not the linguistic or printed matter per se that counts, but its
functionality within the symbolic order (Frank and Lange 2010, 45).
Examples of such semantic exploitation of “visible language” (Mitchell
1994, 111) are legion, though there seems to be an increased interest in
textual visibilities from around 1900 (Shusterman 1982, 88), with
Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés Jamais n’Abolira le Hasard
(1897) as pivotal text. And while poetry has always been at the centre
of critical attention in this regard, literary practices of highlighting
visibility certainly extend to longer and narrative texts as well, for
instance “in novels where a blank page hides either a crime […] or an
immeasurable duration of sleep” (Bal 2000, 490).

1.2 Readerly Visualisation

Starting from the premise that verbal visuality is “produced with
language but not usefully locatable in language” (Collins 1991, 1),
readerly visualisation can be defined as “the production of mental
images in the process of reading” (Esrock 2005, 633). Locating the
visuality of literature in the “processual, reciprocal interaction of text
and reader” (Tripp 2013, 82) is to think of the act of reading as “itself
an imaginative procedure” (Collins 1991, ix). Due to the fact that –
despite empirical findings in neurolinguistics and cognitive poetics (cf.
Brosch 2013) that seem to underpin the general thrust of literary
research into “the ways in which the mind processes verbal cues to
form visual images” (Collins 1991, ix) – this is at least partly a
speculative (rather than specular) endeavour of “phenomenography”
(Esrock 1994, 10; cf. Lobsien 1990), major issues tend to centre around
theoretical problems rather than groups of texts to be explored (if
there is a genre that has a particular affinity to the issues addressed, it
is the short story, cf. Brosch 2007). Questions cluster around the
relations of readerly visualisation to visual and pictorial perception:
Does the literary imagination entail a “mimesis of perception” (Scarry
2001, 9), that is, the “formation of percept-like concepts” (Collins 1991,
xxiv), or does it precisely “not aim at the evocation of a particularly
detailed, eidetic, imagined ‘mental image’, nor the memory of once-
experienced sensual data” (Tripp 2013, 61)? Are we to concentrate on
“the reader’s eye” and processes of “visual imaging” (Esrock 1994) or
do the body and its motor-sensory functions play a vital role in reader
response (Esrock 2004)? Finally, in what ways is visualisation affected
by the progressive mediation of visual perception, the colonisation of
vision by media images targeted at programming the eye (Rimmele
and Stiegler 2012, 94)? After all, “when the world is a picture, to see it
is to see what depiction has configured” (Davis 2011, 231). One need
not go so far (rhetorically) as to proclaim “a eugenics of sight, a pre-
emptive abortion of the diversity of mental images” (Virilio 1994, 12) to
wonder whether the formation of interior images might be affected by
the pictorial conventions of exterior ones (Frank and Lange 2010, 37).

1.3 Visual Modes of Writing: Description

Provided that “descriptions are verbal images of perceptual images”, as
Bal (1997, 4) states in both allusion and contradistinction to
Heffernan’s (1993, 3) definition of ekphrasis as “verbal representation
of visual representation” ( 1 Ekphrasis: Theory), the literary mode (or
text-type, Herman 2008) of description should be the centre of interest
when working on visual modes of writing. There are, however, a
number of pitfalls in over-generalising the claim, neatly encompassed
in Mitchell’s dictum that “[w]hatever our reading leads us to ‘see’ not
simply in the visual sense but in the entire field of perception is part of
the field of descriptive space in literary experience” (1980, 283). This
not only reminds us that the visual inevitably has to appear in
transliterated form and (therefore) hardly exists in isolation in the
literary text. It also unwittingly cautions us against inferring that just
because a text offers a ‘view’ of the fictional world (the basal criterion
for its being descriptive), it necessarily makes its readers ‘see’ anything
– a view denounced by studies of readerly visualisation as “mimetic
literalism” (Esrock 1994, 36). In addition, it seems precipitant to
wholly exclude narrative strategies of visualisation (cf. Tripp 2013),
even though this would be a fitting descriptological rejoinder to
narratology’s novercal treatment of description (cf. Fludernik 2006,
131, who deals with description under the heading of “lacunae of
research”). What recommends Mitchell’s statement for an analysis of
the visuality of description, though, is that it puts the emphasis on
what description does rather than what it is.
The problems in defining description are notorious: it is “a
particularly elusive phenomenon” (Wolf 2007, 34). This has resulted in
attempts to delimit the realm of the descriptive in contrast to or in the
context of narrative, including a tendency to reify the difference to
quasi-ontological status. At the heart of such differentiation usually
lies the idea of distributing the basic constituents of literary text space
(cf. Malmgren 1985) – world (actants and topoi) and events (actions) –
to the two modes, and then proceed to accumulate a host of further
dichotomies ranging from their respective location in certain word
classes (descriptive nouns vs. narrative verbs) to more comprehensive
associations with (descriptive) stasis and (narrative) dynamics, all of
which are problematic at best (cf. Mosher 1991). Ultimately, this
approach culminates in seemingly universal relational
characterisations of description as servant, or, alternatively, mother of
narration (cf. Genette 1976 and Riffaterre 1986, respectively). On the
other hand, if we proceed from the functional hypothesis that the task
of the descriptive is not so much to make see (“faire voir”, Robbe-
Grillet 1963, 125) but to give to see (in inverted commas) – which
neatly lines up with definitions of visual culture(s) as practices of
giving-to-see (cf. Schade and Wenk 2011, 9) – in other words: that the
function of description is to visually present the fictional world
(including what is going on in it), it is clear that the relation of
description and narrative is itself dynamic, historically variable, due to
the fact that the need to describe depends on the makeup of the visual
culture(s) surrounding literary texts. It is thus possible to reinscribe
the descriptive-to-narrative ratio into a literary history of visual culture
(cf. Frank 2009, 386) instead of declaring it the singular product of
autonomous works of literary art (cf. Poppe 2007, 38). This also holds
true for the descriptive signature of literary texts, their specific, but not
individual, assortment of descriptive techniques.
While literary visuality studies must ultimately aspire to analyses of
literary texts that take into account the correlations between the three
areas just outlined – as does, for instance, Tripp, whose reading of the
interwar anti-modernists (or indeed ‘intermodernists’) Waugh, Greene
and Orwell ranges from the materiality of their texts (“the negativity of
the ‘white lines’, the media-critical capitalisation of letter or the
politics of italics”, Tripp 2013, 259) to their performing of “scenes of
observation” (Tripp 2013, 84) via narrative strategies of visualisation –
it is the literary history of (the visuality) of description just referred to
which will be further explored in the following. To be sure, that history
in large parts remains to be written: “Some theorists have mentioned
in passing that ‘texts describe differently in different poetic periods’,
but little sustained effort has been made to consider such questions as
which historical changes in the use of descriptions can be observed”
(Nünning 2007, 92, citing Ronen 1997, 275). Which is really no
wonder, given that we hardly know what to look out for. For if literary
techniques of visualisation are inventoried at all, the stocktaking tends
to resemble the “Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge”
(Borges 1999, 231), the fictitious Chinese encyclopaedia grouping
animals in categories from “(a) those that belong to the emperor” to
“(n) those that, at a distance, resemble flies”. In like manner,
Horlacher’s (1998, 25) list runs from (1) detailed descriptions to (6)
eidetic comparisons, as if these were located on the same level. It thus
makes sense to proceed from a general framework outlining the
spectrum of descriptive possibilities towards an analysis of the
descriptive signature of a sample text which tries to assign that text a
place in the history of description as well as to fathom the specific
(visual) cultural work it performs.
In principle, any description, while primarily oriented towards the
depiction of (parts of) a (fictional) world, also at least implies, if not
downright includes, an instance perceiving the (visual) impression of
the respective domain. Description “always presupposes a subject, the
descriptor, and his or her perspective” (Wolf 2007, 26). Descriptive
passages can thus be characterised by their relative arrangement of
processes of perception and their respective objects, or, in other words,
by the way they are focalised: “In practice, a descriptive act could
therefore even be said to be tendentially bi-polar: in it, a dominant
referential, object-centred pole is opposed to a subdominant subject-
centred pole, which determines the perspective of observation but also
contains emotional reactions and evaluations” (Wolf 2007, 26). Every
description is focalised. And as description is usually posited as
narrative’s other (whether servant or mother), it is highly misleading
to deal with focalisation under the heading of narration. That complex
interaction of vision (“perspective of observation”) and interpretation
(“emotional reactions and evaluations”) which constitutes focalisation
is an aspect of the descriptive. And it is not so much a question of ‘who
sees?’ (or ‘sees’ for that matter) – Genette’s (1980, 186) question of
“mood” – but ‘in what way?’. How things are being seen, or indeed
given to be seen, is a question literary texts can answer on two levels:
they can employ different “types of description”, ranging from the
metonymic organisation of objects in spatial juxtaposition, which
emphasises the visual makeup of states of affairs, to their metaphoric
presentation with the help of eidetic comparisons which emphasise
their being subject to evaluative judgement (Lodge 1977); or, they can
explicitly refer to the conditions of (visual) perception of a textual
subject, ranging from the purely perspectival implications of that
subject’s spatial vantage point (cf. Bortolussi and Dixon 2003, 186) to
the more atmospherically loaded circumstances of a scene’s lighting or
its being cloaked in haze (cf. Poppe 2007, 54–58). In the end, it is the
particular combination of such devices that constitutes the descriptive
profile of a passage.

2 Naturalising the Picturesque: the Description

of Landscape in James Fenimore Cooper’s
The Pioneers (1823)
My example will be the first of the Leatherstocking Tales (according to
publication date, not the chronology of the story told across the five
novels), pertinently subtitled “A Descriptive Tale”. Fittingly, it opens
with a longish description of the landscape of the county of Otsego
which is to provide the setting for the novel. Due to its careful
telescoping of historical forms of landscape description into a single
instance which in turn stages a particular moment in their
development, the passage deserves full quotation:
Near the centre of the State of New-York lies an extensive district of country, whose
surface is a succession of hills and dales, or, to speak with greater deference to
geographical definitions, of mountains and valleys. It is among these hills that the
Delaware takes its rise; and flowing from the limpid lakes and thousand springs of this
region, the numerous sources of the Susquehanna meander through the valleys, until,
uniting their streams, they form one of the proudest rivers of the United States. The
mountains are generally arable to the tops, although instances are not wanting, where the
sides are jutted with rocks, that aid greatly in giving to the country that romantic and
picturesque character which it so eminently possesses. The vales are narrow, rich, and
cultivated; with a stream uniformly winding through each. Beautiful and thriving villages
are found interspersed along the margins of the small lakes, or situated at those points of
the streams which are favourable to manufacturing; and neat and comfortable farms, with
every indication of wealth about them, are scattered profusely through the vales, and even
to the mountain tops. Roads diverge in every direction, from the even and graceful
bottoms of the valleys, to the most rugged and intricate passes of the hills. Academies, and
minor edifices of learning, meet the eye of the stranger, at every few miles, as he winds his
way through this uneven territory; and places for the worship of God, abound with that
frequency which characterises a moral and reflecting people, and with that variety of
exterior and canonical government which flows from unfettered liberty of conscience. In
short, the whole district is hourly exhibiting how much can be done, in even a rugged
country, and with a severe climate, under the dominion of mild laws, and where every
man feels a direct interest in the prosperity of a commonwealth, of which he knows
himself to form a part. The expedients of the pioneers who first broke ground in the
settlement of this country, are succeeded by the permanent improvements of the yeoman,
who intends to leave his remains to moulder under the sod which he tills, or, perhaps, of
the son, who, born in the land, piously wishes to linger around the grave of his father. –
Only forty years have passed since this territory was a wilderness. (Cooper 1988, 15–16)

This first paragraph of the first chapter of Cooper’s novel (the phrase
“Our tale begins” will follow soon) firmly locates it in the nineteenth
century. Such “descriptive ‘preliminaries’” (Wall 2006, 216) indicating
a “habit of preparing an elaborately described setting for the characters
to enter and act within” (Wall 2006, 201) are a symptom of the
reformulation of the relation of description and narration in the course
of the eighteenth century. Where in late seventeenth and early
eighteenth-century novels space “remains more often implied than
described” (Wall 2006, 124) and is “predicated on narrative action”
(Wall 2006, 37), that is, generated on the fly according to the needs of
the story, late eighteenth and early nineteenth century specimen of the
genre start to provide fully furnished spaces in the form of set
descriptions before the action even begins (cf. Hamon 1981, 23). Thus,
with regard to interior domestic space, in “Haywood, Aubin, and
Richardson, as well as in most of Defoe’s narratives, physical objects
and structures appear primarily in the immediate service of narrative
action: windows appear when they need to be jumped out of, locks
when they need to be locked. Things come (literally) to hand as the
character requires them” (Wall 2006, 112). In contrast, “Radcliffe and
then Scott [and later Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell, and Trollope] present us
with a fully visualised setting in which events will occur. We are given
the visual world; we no longer extrapolate it” (Wall 2006, 5). And the
same development seems to hold for the transformation of “Defoe’s
unvisualized cityscapes […] into the excruciatingly elaborate
landscapes of The Mysteries of Udolpho” (Wall 2006, 1).
In line with this, the general setup of Cooper’s opening paragraph is
metonymic. From the mountains to the vales to the villages to the
roads, the description traces the elements of the landscape according
to their spatial contiguity. What auction catalogues, country-house
guides, shopping windows and scientific collections did for things
(Wall 2006), tourist guides and travel narratives, topographies (“to
speak with greater deference to geographical definitions”, Cooper
1988, 15) and maps did for the constituents of ‘scapes’ (both city- and
land-): they made their variety and abundance visible in textual spaces
whose model is the list and its metonymic arrangement (cf. Wall 1998,
395–396). Hence, Cooper’s Otsego landscape compares well with that
scene from Dickens in which Oliver Twist is introduced to the cityscape
of criminal London. Having first situated the site with the help of
topographical information in the manner of Defoe, Dickens’
description proceeds to depict the visual impressions of the street, the
shops, and the yards. And “[a]lthough it is not Dickens’s most detailed
description and, in fact, retains a classical flavor in its plurals, […] the
direct description of Oliver looking around changes the pattern of
visualisation, slowing down the moment, and opening the sense of
space, specifically connecting interrelated images in the midst of
Oliver’s hasty pace” (Wall 2006, 37). Similarly, the first two sentences
in Cooper’s landscape are devoted to establishing Otsego county as a
geographically distinct space, not much different from verbal
descriptions of early America around 1700 (cf. Myers 1993, 69–70,
who gives an example from George Alsop’s 1666 Character of the
Province of Maryland). Cooper’s description also “retains a classical
flavor in its plurals” whose use derives from the older regime of
appreciating a view as an “expression of the ordered variety of the
world” (Myers 1993, 71). And finally, it is equally torn between slowing
down the movement of the sleigh in which Elizabeth Temple and her
father, Judge Marmaduke Temple, are travelling, the sleigh “moving
slowly” (Cooper 1988, 16), while its occupants “were hastening”
(Cooper 1988, 19) towards their destination, Templeton (the fictional
equivalent of Cooperstown, founded by Judge William Cooper, James
Fenimore’s father).
Moving closer to the particular constellation in visual history (and
the specifically American concerns) into which it inscribes itself,
Cooper’s text explicitly mentions the aesthetic of the picturesque as its
frame of reference. This corresponds to the common practice of
American Renaissance literature to not only stage a certain aesthetic
effect but to additionally name it (the musings of the narrator of Edgar
Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” on the gothic as a variant
of the sublime omitting its pleasures being another example, cf.
Isekenmeier 2009). The guidelines of the picturesque evoked by its
naming are painstakingly enacted in the opening sequence of The
Pioneers. In the general sense as it develops during the eighteenth
century, the picturesque requires (1) the ability “to organize the visual
elements of natural environments into formally integrated aesthetic
wholes” (Myers 1993, 72), which includes the apprehension of “the
distinctive spatial form of a specific valley”, as Myers (1993, 73)
remarks with regard to William Byrd’s 1738 History of the Dividing
Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina. In the example at hand,
this is achieved by doing away with the plurals by offering another,
briefer description (Cooper 1988, 19) of “[t]he mountain on which they
were journeying” (instead of “[t]he mountains”); and (2) an
appreciation of “the interconnectedness and coordination of the visual
elements that are comprised in that whole” (Myers 1993, 73), which
Cooper orchestrates in the “interspersed” villages and the farms
“profusely scattered”, a method again appealing to a metonymic logic
of organizing his description. In the more specific, late eighteenth and
early nineteenth century meaning of the “didactic picturesque”, it
additionally requires a moralised landscape “interpreted as evidencing
[…] moral truths” (Myers 1993, 74), in particular the “belief that the
‘ordering of God’s providence’ is expressed by the material fecundity of
the landscape” (Myers 1993, 58). This is established in the opening set
piece of the novel by numerous adjectives such as “rich”, “cultivated”
and “thriving”; driven home by the conspicuous littering of the
landscape with the institutions of Puritan piety (“places for the
worship of God, abound with that frequency which characterises a
moral and reflecting people”, Cooper 1988, 15); and ultimately
surpassed in its association with manifest destiny, the yeoman’s
succession to the pioneer being later enshrined as a hallmark of
national expansion in the ideology of the frontier (cf. Turner 1921):
“Only forty years have passed since this territory was a wilderness”
(Cooper 1988, 16).
As the picturesque refers not only to a linguistic (“a new language for
different kinds of sights”, Thomas 2008, 8), but also (and quite
obviously, given the term) to a pictorial regime, landscape painting
constitutes an almost inevitable context for a discussion of Cooper’s
literary landscape. However, it is a context called upon neither in the
form of intermedial reference, let alone one clearly identifiable or
demonstrable (cf. Rajewsky 2002, 37–38), nor in the form of
pictorialist discourse, that is, by a description that deals with the
landscape as if it were a painting in order to evoke its pictorial quality
or effect (cf. Rippl 2005, 26). Rather, painting enters the picture(sque)
in a sister-arts sense of a dialogic counterpart neither thematised nor
imitated, but still implicitly referenced as a cultural technique
performing similar work: in this case, the naturalisation of the
picturesque. The common task of American landscape art and
literature in the 1820s consisted in transforming an acquired, elite way
of seeing into a democratic, popularly available one by obscuring its
codedness and making it appear natural. It was a matter of founding
and consolidating a myth of the picturesque in a Barthesian sense
(Barthes 1972), of replacing the appreciation of landscape under the
aegis of a picturesque aesthetics with a naturalised, seemingly intuitive
perception of the picturesque character of the landscape itself. While
“many well-to-do Americans had learned how to objectify natural
environments as picturesque landscape and to interpret them as
illustrative of moral truths, […] the cultural significance of the
meanings they read into natural scenery was limited by the self-
consciousness with which they approached the act of interpretation”
(Myers 1993, 74). Therefore, the popularisation of the picturesque
“depended on the ability […] to forget the labor of admiring and thus to
(mis)take the meanings they imposed for the fruits of putatively
impersonal insight” (Myers 1993, 74). With regard to painting, this
involves the erasure of all those traces of the touristic heritage of the
picturesque (cf. Yaeger 2006, 20–23) that dominated pictorial
landscapes up to the 1820s and beyond, as Myers illustrates using the
example of the Catskill Mountains (situated in the neighbourhood of
Otsego County): “Most visual representations of the Catskills from the
1820s and 1830s treated them as a tourist resort and used figures of
well-dressed tourists to suggest that landscape appreciation was a
learned ability and that the possession of this ability was characteristic
of the well-bred” (1993, 75). However, in the work of Thomas Cole – as
always Cooper’s painterly analogue – these characteristic elements of
picturing landscape disappear in the course of the 1820s (Myers 1993,
75).
The concern here, though, is not so much the pictorial construction
of landscape experience, but the way literature enacts the shared visual
problematics of naturalising the picturesque, not the Cole of the late,
but the Cooper of the early 1820s, who is at least equal to the task, if
not slightly ahead in time (which is to oversimplify matters given that
the expanded version of the opening paragraph quoted above, which
was established by Lance Schachterle and Kenneth M. Andersen, Jr.,
as the standard text of the novel for Cooper 1980, is derived from later
editions; still, even the 1820s editions include the sentence that
qualifies the landscape as picturesque, though the description ends
there at the time). While accepting the general validity of the interart
parallel suggested by Myers (and others), I doubt that his conclusions
with regard to the literary version of tackling the problem do justice to
the peculiarities of fictional discourse. Myers claims that the
naturalisation of the picturesque is effected by replacing Elizabeth
Temple’s perception of the landscape, representative of the ‘laboured’
version of the picturesque, with Nathaniel Bumppo’s effortless
realisation of the landscape’s picturesqueness: “Natty’s ability to
appreciate the local scenery is presented as an intuitive or natural
response to the inherent beauties of the place” (Myers 1993, 58). This
already seems unlikely given that the narrative works towards a
displacement of Bumppo, the Leatherstocking, further West, such that
the character that supposedly gives voice to a perception of the land in
a picturesque light is eventually driven from that land by its very
picturesque character, that is, by the roads that interconnect the
villages figuratively as elements of a visual whole, but also quite
literally as tokens of the onward movement of the frontier. In addition,
the parallel seems badly drawn if we think of the antagonistic
constellation of two intradiegetic figures as the literary equivalent of
the disappearance of the tourist from the picture. Paradoxically, to
account for the specificity of the novel as ‘medium’ of the
naturalisation of the picturesque is to draw the parallel more closely. If
narrative mediation is one of the defining characteristics of fictional
texts, then the closest thing to the erasure of an intrapictorial figure
(turning the picture into a seemingly unmediated representation) is
the replacement of Elizabeth’s learned way of seeing not by Natty’s, but
by the narrator’s. The picturesque would thus migrate not from one
character to the next, but from a character to the extradiegetic
authorial voice presenting the story.
In fact, Elizabeth’s picturesque frame of mind, if elucidated at all, is
hardly linked with a conscious endeavour to appreciate the landscape,
but appears casually, while thinking of something else: “The reflections
of the daughter were less melancholy [than her father’s], and mingled
with a pleased astonishment at the novel scenery she met at every turn
in the road” (Cooper 1988, 19). Even so, she bears just enough
resemblance to an upper-class tourist with the necessary leisure and
education (“they were journeying”) to be denied a view of her own,
indeed, to be disowned of a view. At no time does the text suggest that
the “viewer’s eye” is “presumably Elizabeth’s” (Anderson 1986, 38).
While her thoughts are “less melancholy”, what the text gives to see
insinuates precisely the kind of impression thus mitigated: “The dark
trunks of the trees rose from the pure white of the snow in regularly
formed shafts, until, at a great height, their branches shot forth
horizontal limbs, that were covered with the meagre foliage of an
evergreen, affording a melancholy contrast to the torpor of nature
below” (Cooper 1988, 19). Eventually, the descriptor (the narrator as
he describes) exposes the fact that his visual reach does go beyond
Elizabeth’s: “To the travellers there seemed to be no wind; but these
pines waved majestically at their topmost boughs, sending forth a dull,
plaintive sound, that was quite in consonance with the rest of the
melancholy scene” (Cooper 1988, 19). Variously assuming the guise of,
in turn, a “[bird’s] eye” (Cooper 1988, 19), a local who knows what lies
“buried beneath the snow” (Cooper 1988, 17) and thus cannot be seen
at all, or, alternatively, “the eye of the stranger […] as he winds his way
through this uneven territory” (Cooper 1988, 15), the disembodied
voice of the narrator presents the landscape not as a visual impression
that can be processed in terms of the picturesque, but as a visible
arrangement said to possess a picturesque air: “The mountains are
generally arable to the tops, although instances are not wanting, where
the sides are jutted with rocks, that aid greatly in giving to the country
that romantic and picturesque character which it so eminently
possesses” (Cooper 1988, 15). And while he is fully aware that his
fiction is an artifice, an act of literary communication (“Our tale begins
in 1793”, Cooper 1988, 16), he is all the more willing to declare that his
description of the landscape is an actual full-blown space that can be
traversed and not ‘just’ a textual representation of that space. Thus,
this is the way the tale begins: “It was near the setting of the sun, on a
clear, cold day in December, when a sleigh was moving slowly up one
of the mountains in the district we have described” (Cooper 1988, 16).
Seen by an authoritative eye no less artificial in its disembodiedness
than, say, the symbolic form of linear perspective (Panofsky 1991), the
land presents itself as picturesquely ‘scaped’ (as picturesque
landscape), and “the effect is to obscure the cultural construction of
landscape experience and to validate the contents of such experiences
as the fruit of a more valuable because putatively unlearned insight”
(Myers 1993, 75).
As to the function of the stratagem of naturalising the picturesque, it
is political. The national landscape having become a cultural
battleground over the meaning of America, to popularise the
picturesque was a way of projecting an interpretation of the landscape
in terms of visual as well as moral abundance, destined to thrive
because of its (visible) nature and its (manifest) destiny. Cooper’s
picturesque can be seen to promote “a liberal ideology that conceived
of national unity as a composition of ‘contending forces’. And
landscape tourism became, in part, the ritualized inter-nalisation of
this ideology” (Bailey 1999, 8). Accordingly, it is not only the “variety
of exterior and canonical government which flows from unfettered
liberty of conscience” (Cooper 1988, 15) that is emphasised, but, above
all, “how much can be done […] where every man feels a direct interest
in the prosperity of a commonwealth, of which he knows himself to
form a part” (Cooper 1988, 15–16). If Cooper was “an elite landowner
trying to imagine the landscape of representative democracy and trying
to shape an aesthetic – a gaze – that could be shared by a broader
citizenry” (Bailey 1999, 8), by “every man”/everyman, his (aesthetic)
weapon of choice had to be the picturesque: “because the picturesque
trained its users to internalize its values, its accessibility offered to
extend participation in a national culture to a broader spectrum of
citizens than previous aesthetics” (Bailey 1999, 8). Later versions of
imposing a picturesque vision betray their political impetus by
increasingly encroaching on the addressee: “Let the reader fancy
himself standing at the mouth of a large bay” begins a picturesque
description in Cooper’s 1842 The Wing-and-Wing (qtd. in Bailey 1999,
9), reminding us that, after all, the novel is one of the prime means of
imagining national communities (Anderson 1991) and its readers the
nuclei of their citizenry.

3 Conclusion
The example helped to illustrate some of the ways in which a
descriptive literary passage might work towards a transformation of a
historically situated visual culture encompassing both an aesthetic
mentality (the picturesque) and a social practice accompanying it
(landscape tourism). It does so by presenting a scene in such a way as
to obfuscate the stance of the observer, who can no longer be identified
as representative of a landed gentry and is thus de-classified to the
extent that the perception of the textual landscape is de-focalised. With
its combination of visual appeal and moralising tone, it bears witness
to the fact that the democratisation of picturesque vision was a
quintessential part of coding America, of constituting a body politic
geared toward the (visual) annexation of a continent.
In addition, Cooper’s literary propagation of a way of seeing
supersedes contemporaneous painterly efforts not only in terms of
popular success, but also with regard to its ability to mediate between
visual representation and discursive processing by both staging the
visible aspects of the landscape and anticipating their appropriation in
explanatory texts soon to follow. Without being itself intermedial in
nature, Cooper’s work thus paves the way for truly intermedial
treatments of the American scenery such as the 1840 volume which
included engravings of William Henry Bartlett’s drawings of, among
other sites, the Catskills and the Hudson River together with Nathaniel
Parker Willis’ commentary musing on the “picturesque views of the
United States” and singling out “river scenery” as the “field for the
artist in this country […] which surpasses every other in richness of
picturesque” (Willis 1840, 1–2).
Clearly, the argument for the agency of Cooper’s novel in the
reconfiguration of American visual culture in the first half of the
nineteenth century rests on the assumption that it is a text training its
readers for producing concordant visualisations sharing (in) its vision.
To test this claim against contemporary readers’ response (as put down
in writing) or against the different versions of the opening description
featured in editions between 1823 and 1851, is, however, beyond the
scope of this article. As is the even more thorough investigation of its
actual appearance in print over the course of its publication history
that would be required by any attempt to elucidate the contribution of
its visibility as printed matter to its interpretation as linguistic
utterance – if only to confirm that the set description is usually set as a
paragraph, no matter to which lengths it might grow, thereby framing
the scene in the most elementary of printerly ways ( 19 Intermedial
Framing).

4 Bibliography

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angloamerikanischer Ikontexte (1880–2000). Munich: Wilhelm Fink,
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2001.
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Spectacle. New York: Routledge, 2008.
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Wall, Cynthia. “Details of Space: Narrative Description in Early
Eighteenth-Century Novels.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 10.4
(1998): 387–405.
Wall, Cynthia. The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in
the Eighteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2006.
Willis, Nathaniel Parker. American Scenery; or, Land, Lake, and
River: Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature. London: Virtue, 1840.
archive.org/details/americanscenery01willrich. (1 July 2014).
Wolf, Werner. “Intermediality.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative
Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan.
New York: Routledge, 2005. 252–254.
Wolf, Werner. “Description as a Transmedial Mode of Representation:
General Features and Possibilities of Realization in Painting, Fiction
and Music.” Description in Literature and Other Media. Ed. Werner
Wolf and Walter Bernhart. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 1–87.
Yaeger, Bert D. The Hudson River School: American Landscape
Artists. New York: New Line Books, 2006.

4.2 Further Reading

Isekenmeier, Guido, and Ronja Tripp, eds. Literary Visualities: Visual
Descriptions, Readerly Visualisations, Textual Visibilities. Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2015 forthcoming.
Klotz, Peter. Beschreiben: Grundzüge einer Deskriptologie. Berlin:
Schmidt, 2013.
Myers, Kenneth. The Catskills: Painters, Writers, and Tourists in the
Mountains, 1820–1895. Yonkers: Hudson River Museum of
Westchester, 1987.
Wall, Cynthia. “Description.” The Encyclopedia of the Novel. Vol. I:
A–Li. Ed. Peter Melville Logan. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
185–191.
Renate Brosch

18 Images in Narrative Literature:

Cognitive Experience and Iconic
Moments
Abstract: The present contribution seeks to open up a new approach
to intermediality by addressing its cognitive effects and functions. For
this purpose it discusses current understandings of cognitive
processing during reading, focusing especially on visualization in the
reading experience and investigating what textual elements intensify
the visual imagination. Intermedial reference is such a textual strategy
for eliciting highlighted visualization. The article tests its claims in
discussion of literary texts by Michel Houellebecq (The Map and the
Territory, 2011) and Robert Coover (A Night at the Movies, 1987). It
concludes that both the description of another medium in notional
ekphrasis as well as the structural imitation of another medium can
serve to unsettle conventional schemata of representation. As a trigger
for cognitive participation, intermedial reference influences reception
in important ways. On the level of the individual reading process it aids
comprehension, memory and emotional response. These individual
benefits can also have larger socio-cultural repercussion when they
impact the formation of cultural memory. For the purpose of analyzing
reception, cognitive models of ‘visualization’ for the study of narrative
texts are a valuable complement to a more traditional hermeneutic
understanding of the reader’s ‘imagination.’
Key Terms: Reading experience, cognition, visualization, mental
representation, iconic moment

1 Visualization: The Interaction of Literary

Images and Reader Response
The following chapter investigates a subcategory of intermediality that
Irina O. Rajewsky calls “intermedial reference.” In intermedial
references only one medium is present which thematizes, evokes or
imitates elements or structures of another medium as, for instance, in
verbal descriptions of visual images (Rajewsky 2005, 53; for a
discussion of the other forms of intermediality listed in Rajewsky’s
model 0 Introduction and 24 Literature and Music: Theory). Jens
Schröter refers to such representation of one medium through another
medium as “transformational intermediality” and points out that it is
doubtful whether this fits the category of ‘intermediality’ at all, because
a represented medium is no longer a medium but a representation.
Yet, as he stipulates: “Insofar as media are always contested terrains,
however, this form is important, because the definition of media
depends on their inter-medial representations” (Schröter 2012, 26).
According to W. J. T. Mitchell and James A. W. Heffernan, dialogue
and paragone, or competition, between the verbal and the visual, is
part of our Western cultural tradition and informs literary visuality
nolens volens (cf. Mitchell 1986, 43). In literary texts, a negotiation of
the respective power of the visual and the verbal is premised on the
absence of the visual. Yet, the visual is never entirely absent, because
“we create much of our world out of the dialogue between verbal and
pictorial representation” (Mitchell 1994, 161). To regard them as an
interaction of two systems of representation is to ignore their textual
nature and to reduce them to contextualization does not fully explain
intermedial phenomena. For greater insight into the problem, we have
to pay attention to their effect on our experience. The real innovation
in any analysis of intermediality lies in approaching its performative
function.
Verbal images in (narrative) literature have agency, they perform
certain functions within their context and beyond. But in order to do
so, they must be envisioned by a viewer; without the receiving mind,
the image does and means nothing at all. Hence, the effect, function
and meaning of images depend on their mental performance or – as
traditional literary studies would have it – on the imagination. This
traditional concept is, however, too loaded in the present context,
which deals with the more narrowly conceptualized visualization.
‘Visualization’ is defined by Ellen Esrock in the Routledge
Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory as the production of mental images
or mental representations in the process of reading (cf. Esrock 2005,
633). This is still a neglected topic, even though Wolfgang Iser in his
early reader response aesthetics already drew attention to the
importance of images in the minds of readers (Iser 1978, 138).
Traditional literary scholars still often resist investigating these
images, arguing that they are too personal and singular to be
generalized (Esrock 1994, 180). But the methods that allow us to
examine the experiential aspects of narrative have received important
impulses from the neurosciences and cognitive sciences since the
1980s. Cognitive approaches supplement later interpretive acts with an
analysis of the transient mental operations that take place
automatically or at a subconscious level in the process of reading. The
burgeoning field of cognitive narratology provides criteria for
analyzing the reader’s mental operations and their corresponding
textual cues. To disregard the experiential process would mean to
ignore a significant facet of intermediality.
Hence, we need to include in our analysis not only what
retrospective reflection produces but also the immediate response that
the structure of the text elicits in the process of reading (cf. Schwarz
2001, 6). Frank Kermode urged his colleagues already in 1974 to
concern themselves with the act of reading “because of what we have
missed by always meditating on what we have read and can survey, as
it were, from a distance which allows us to think it’s keeping still,
rather than upon the ways in which, as we read, we deal with the actual
turbulence of a text” (Kermode 1974, 103). And Norbert Groeben noted
in 1980 that there exists a fundamental difference between the
immediate reading experience (Leseerlebnis) and hermeneutical acts
of interpretation, a difference that is often ignored in literary criticism,
because its goal is interpretation (Groeben 1980, 49). The traditional
privilege that literary theory has assigned to interpretation is based on
the notion that literary criticism should only concern itself with a text
as a fixed and finite entity. A shift towards a more dynamic and
processual understanding of the cultural work texts perform has
already taken place, but it is not nearly widespread enough (cf. Brosch
2013a, 9).
Intermedial reference as a subform of intermediality offers potential
for diverse reading experiences. As Grishakova and Ryan explain, it
can consist of thematizing another medium as is the case in the
Künstlerroman, quoting another medium, describing another medium
or imitating its formal structure (Grishakova and Ryan 2010, 3).
Intermediality can be specially marked with strong intermedial appeal
or merely suggestive, noticeable only on close reading. It can reference
a medium that has existence prior to the transfer into the verbal text,
or it may not describe actual representations in other media at all, but
invent them or imitate their modes of representation and ‘remediation’
(cf. Bolter and Grusin 1999). Hence, the effect and function of different
instances of intermediality can vary enormously. Referencing an actual
and recognizable visual medium relies on the reader’s cultural memory
and may involve homage and celebration or denial and silencing of the
image. Imitating the style or technique of another medium depends on
recreation in the reader’s mind. Both types utilize prior knowledge in
production as well as reception.
These options involving different modes of experience recall John
Hollander’s distinction between “notional ekphrasis,” which references
imaginary works of art, and actual ekphrasis, which references real
works of art (Hollander 1988, 209). In contrast to the notional form,
actual ekphrasis only became plausible in the context of a culture of
public display and mass reproduction of visual images. The
description, and more particularly the descriptive transformation of
real art works, presupposes that the reader can remember the art work
in question fairly accurately. There exists, of course, a zone of overlap
when works of art have been lost or become inaccessible and an earlier
description written from direct experience is now notional in effect.
These historical changes notwithstanding, the two forms are quite
distinct in the reader’s experience: Notional ekphrasis belongs to the
category of the imaginary, its invention of an image to be visualized in
the reader’s mind partakes of the same dependence on context and
convention that any fictional world-making would. A description of a
familiar object, on the other hand, can encounter the problem of
resistant reading, a problem which sometimes encumbers film
adaptations, because the images provided do not correspond to prior
imaginative visualization. According to Tamar Yacobi, actual ekphrasis
nowadays exploits this tendency by deliberately diverging from
verisimilitude in order to create a dialogic tension in the reader’s mind
between the memory of a visual artifact existent in the real world and
its verbal representation (cf. Yacobi 2013, 13). It is this tension exactly
which makes the intermedial reference interesting, and many authors
use it productively to defamiliarize their readers’ habitual
preconceptions. All types of intermedial reference can create such
defamiliarizations and hence appeal to the readers’ special attention by
irritating the boundaries between media, by thematizing their different
relations to reality and by problematizing their degree of fictionality.

2 Visualization: Neuropsychology and Cognitive

Narratology
It is common knowledge that responses to a literary text are not
completely subjective and personal since the structure of the text limits
the number of ways to comply with textual instructions. Moreover, two
different types of reading experience can be safely assumed to be
shared by all readers: When processing a literary text, readers connect
it to their own physical and mental experience and to their cultural
knowledge. With regard to the former, certain features of the reading
experience are shared by all readers because of the way the brain is
hard-wired. The new way of thinking about the mind instantiated by
the cognitive sciences is organized around the idea of ‘4e cognition.’ 4e
cognition characterizes mental processes as (1) embodied, (2)
embedded, (3) enacted, and (4) extended (cf. Rowlands 2010, 3). The
idea that mental processes are embodied means roughly that
they are partly constituted by, partly made up of wider […] bodily structures and
processes. The idea that mental processes are embedded is, again roughly, the idea that
mental processes have been designed to function only in tandem with a certain
environment that lies outside the brain of the subject. […] The idea that mental processes
are enacted is the idea that they are made up not just of neural processes but also of things
that the organism does more generally – that they are constituted in part by the ways in
which an organism acts on the world and the ways in which world, as a result, acts back on
that organism. The idea that mental processes are extended is the idea that they are not
located exclusively inside an organism’s head but extend out, in various ways, into the
organism’s environment. (Rowlands 2010, 3, emphases mine)

Neuropsychological experiments show that mental images are

essential to any act of cognition and that visual thinking is a
component of cognition just like verbal (cf. Kosslyn 1980, 4).
According to Paivio and Sadoski’s ‘dual coding theory of cognition,’
visual and verbal systems function in tandem and readers shuttle
between them (Sadoski and Paivio 2001, 1–2). Johnson-Laird
proposes that there are three kinds of representations for discourse:
the sound or text, a propositional one “close to the surface form of the
utterance” and the mental model which is constructed on the basis of
the truth conditions of the propositions expressed by the sentences in
discourse (Johnson-Laird 1983, 407). Experimental tests of memory in
reading literary narrative find that both the surface structure of the
text and the text base are lost relatively quickly after the meaning is
understood. According to Bertolussi and Dixon, what remains in
memory is the “situation model,” “a spatial or visual representation of
the entities described in the text” (Bertolussi and Dixon 2013, 26, 27).
In other words, the verbal propositional input is transformed into a
mental model or representation, and this is what we remember. Clearly
then, visualization plays a crucial role in text processing. As a result of
the advances made in cognitive narratology, we are able to identify and
explain some important mental operations performed during the
reading process, such as foregrounding, priming, revising, and
blending. All these organizational acts have at least a visual
component, some are completely visual. Both embodied experience of
the real world and cultural knowledge shape and constrain the readers’
mental images.
First, our constantly active faculty for “storying” is linked to bodily
perceptions, especially to visual perceptions, which are again and
again repeated in stories (Turner 1996, 18). And visual elements in
narrative texts are an appeal to embodied experience, because they
produce a recall of actual perceptions, so that their reception
resembles the experiential parameters of perceptions in everyday life.
Since mental images are anchored in sensori-motor perceptions of the
real world, narratives trigger an enactive embodied response. Story
comprehension therefore entails mapping the trajectories of agents
and objects across narrated paths (Herman 2002, 8). Marco
Caracciolo, drawing on the “enactive phenomenology” of Alva Noe,
sees a “fictional recentering” of the reader’s senso-motoric positioning
at work (Caracciolo 2011, 118). This enactment enables readers to
project their minds into the fictional world and to find their way
around there, designating certain figures as “trajectors” whose paths
they follow and certain elements of the ground to become visual
landmarks (Stockwell 2002, 16). But readers are not just able to
mentally map the fictional world and place things and people into it,
they can move around in it themselves and take up different positions
in it via unconscious somatic transfer of sense experience (Fluck 2005,
38). Abbreviating the 4e model of cognition, we may think of this
phenomenon as embodied or enactive visualization.
Second, according to findings in cognitive neuropsychology, images
serve as repositories of information. Texts carry connotations from the
larger cultural imaginary and readers access the cultural memory
archive when making meaning. Literary texts are produced and
received in the context of extensive unconscious associations as well as
deliberate acts of connecting to prior knowledge, memory and
circumstance, all of which constitutes informational material with
which readers invest the represented world. Understanding is not
simply a recognition of meaning which occurs when all the details of
text, context and circumstance have been clarified; reading always
means “blending” the given with a framework of knowledge, ideas and
images, a process which in turn impinges on the latter. “Blending” is a
term suggested by Mark Turner for any act of cognitive interpretation
which necessitates the correlation of disparate elements. The basic
premise of blending theory is that human minds can activate two or
more “sets of information or mental spaces” at the same time and they
can project these input spaces onto one another to produce a blend
with “emergent properties that are not possessed by the input views”
(Turner 2006, 96).
Our understanding of narratives is grounded in cultural knowledge,
a knowledge stored in the mind in visual schemata (or frames) and
scripts, which we automatically recall when making sense of a text.
This aspect of visualization links it to the cultural imaginary in which
each individual participates; it has political implications because
meaning-making is an activity that always occurs within a pre-existing
social field and within actual power relations (cf. Bryson 2001, 5).
Constructing images and sequences and aligning them with the
cultural reservoir of schemata and scripts happens in everyday
communication for reasons of economy. In reading, likewise, the
communicative benefit of schemata and scripts lies in the possibility to
access an entire set of objects and events when only one aspect is
mentioned, so that expressions like “having a check up” or “looking at
the menu” automatically imply manifold aspects of typical situations
(cf. Dancygier 2012, 33). Scripts and frames are historically
determined knowledge clusters that facilitate the production of
meaning in communication whether they are held to be correct or not.
The cultural imaginary provides a store-house of well-known images as
reference points. In the present context, it is significant that frames
and scripts are not exclusively or even primarily language based but
frequently non-propositional visual objects and events. This part of
reading may be designated cultural visualization, since it is culturally
determined and potentially critical.

3 From Transient to Intensified Visualization

While visual imaginings without textual instructions are usually faint
and fleeting, the images generated in reading can be extraordinarily
vivid and affecting. Elaine Scarry claims that the mental
representations which reading generates surpass ordinary imaginings
in vivacity, solidity and spontaneity, because daydreaming images are
“inert,” i.e. they do not grow into other images (Scarry 2001, 33). This
argument emphasizes the dynamic quality of visualization.
Visualizations have different degrees of intensity and the impact a
story makes on readers depends at least in part on the power of
visualization. Most of the stream of images that accompanies a first
reading experience hovers on the threshold of consciousness.
Obviously, this stream of visualizations is dynamic and cannot be
remembered in total once the reading is completed. In consequence,
some scholars insist that the experience of first reading is “inchoate”
and eludes a “blow by blow” description (Phelan 2013, 69). Iser
describes the ongoing “actualization” in the reading process as a
“passive synthesis” that constitutes a series of images built up along
the time axis of reading (Iser 1978, 148, 150). Yet, he also pronounces
against the study of this visualization: “[T]he mental image of passive
synthesis is something which accompanies our reading – and is not
itself the object of our attention, even when these images link up into a
whole panorama” (Iser 1978, 136).
Such reticence may be due to a fundamental iconophobia identified
by W. J. T. Mitchell in Western culture (Mitchell 1986, 46). This
iconophobia, which “has struck deep roots in the human psyche,” is an
unease or distrust of images, particularly mental images, as something
akin to delusion (Collins 1991, x). In a book on ‘textual envisioning,’
Peter Schwenger questions the underlying distinction between vision
and visualization that informs the common distrust of mental images:
“Like all binaries, this one privileges one of its terms. Seeing is
believing, according to popular wisdom, and visualizing is dismissed as
mere fantasy” (Schwenger 1999, 6).
According to cognitive science, visualization and actual perception
share certain brain activities. David Marr’s groundbreaking
neurological study showed how proper vision also proceeds in stages,
on a continuum ranging from a two-dimensional “primal sketch”
through a “2 ½ D sketch,” which establishes the depth and orientation
of certain key points relative to the viewer, to full visual realization of
the perceived object in three dimensions. All these modelling modes
are employed in rapid succession – within less than half a second – to
organize and interpret light’s retinal stimulation (Marr 2010, 354). It
has since been confirmed that the brain manages seeing, remembering
and imagining from a common neural substrate; it does not and
cannot use entirely different circuitry to produce and differentiate the
perception of an object and a mental image of it (Spolsky 2007, 46).
This overlap in brain activity directs Schwenger’s comparison of vision
and visualization: “The visual scenario that emerges will not, of course,
have the vividness of actual perception. It will correspond much more
to the ‘coarse organization’ with ‘one or two details’ […]” (Schwenger
1999, 63). In reading, mental images are assembled through a series of
modelling acts of increasing complexity, yet never completed to the
same degree as in actual physical seeing. Visualization reaches the 2½
D stage at most (cf. Schwenger 1999, 64).
In spite of the similarity between and the shared brain activities in
visualization and perception it is, nevertheless, important to remember
that the two are vastly different phenomenologically. Colin McGinn
lists the main differences: persistence, saturation and distinctness
(McGinn 2004, 26–30). According to Iser, our mental images do not
serve to make anything physically visible; compared to real
perceptions visualization has “optical poverty” (Iser 1978, 138). These
differences are the reason one is so often disappointed by the look of
film adaptations: In the reading experience, the whole stream of
images accompanying a reading never becomes concrete as in a movie,
but remains transient, indistinct and incomplete. This vagueness is not
a lack but an advantage, ensuring the adaptability of images to
information received at a later stage, because some images that we
keep in the “visual short term memory buffer” have to be discarded
later, others modified and only some can be retained (Kosslyn 1980,
82).
The primary advantage of the incompleteness of mental
representation in contrast to actual representation in film or
illustration lies in the ability to merge and fuse various images,
creating new ones. As images qualify and condition each other in the
time-flow of the reading, meaning emerges through largely automatic
passive blending on the part of the reader (cf. Iser 1978, 149). We are
most aware of this process of shape-shifting when the progression of
the narrative is not what we had expected, when facets appear to clash,
when “we are obliged to incorporate new circumstances which means
retrospective changes to our past images” (Iser 1978, 138–139).
For mental images to remain in long-term memory associated with a
particular narrative, visualization needs extra challenge. With regard
to language, it is a truism that indeterminacy and defamiliarization
demand special efforts in processing, but visuality can also present
such challenges. For embodied visualization to contribute to this effect,
the “unconscious somatic transfer of sense experience” must somehow
be disturbed and resist automatic enactment (Fluck 2005, 38). Visual
ambivalence, i.e. conflicting images that must be held in balance by
readers and somehow reconciled or brought to blend in coming to
terms with the narrative, will produce a great cognitive and emotional
effect and lead to a lasting engagement with the world views imagined.
Though the mental models in our cognition processes are dynamic and
in constant flux (as are most of our techniques of representation),
captivated and suspended attention arrests certain images and thus
triggers intensification.
These moments of intense visualization, or iconic moments, occur
when a narrative text compels us to give up images we have formed for
ourselves, when “we are maneuvered into a position outside our own
products and thus led to produce images which, with our habitual way
of thinking, we could not have conceived” (Iser 1978, 188). Such a
clash of images separates us from our own imaginary productions and
challenges us to come to terms with disparate elements of the text.
4 Ekphrastic Reinforcement: Intensified
Visualization in Michel Houellebecq’s
Künstler-roman The Map and the Territory
Michel Houellebecq’s Künstlerroman La carte et le territoire (2010),
The Map and the Territory (2011), is a savage indictment of the
superficiality and commercialism of the contemporary art scene, a
criticism that is paradoxically premised on putting center stage the
vision and visual representation of a contemporary artist. The novel
starts with a vivid description of an exotic hotel room where two
famous artists of today, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, are having a
lively conversation. Nothing warns us that the first paragraph is not a
narrative of events in the fictional world, but then we read: “Koons’s
forehead was slightly shiny. Jed shaded it off with his brush and
stepped back three paces” (Houellebecq 2011, 1). It thus transpires that
a protagonist so far unmentioned is working on a painting called “ Jeff
Koons and Damien Hirst Dividing Up the Art Market” (Houellebecq
2011, 9). One is startled to experience the instantaneous melting down
of a ‘live’ scene into the freeze-frame stasis of a painted picture with
attendant changes from an unbounded visual space to one confined
within the dimensions of a canvas and from a realistic visual scene to a
more blurry appearance made up of brush strokes. All these
modifications – or rather, morphings – of our mental representations
take place in an instant.
In the beginning of a narrative, readers are most alert, paying close
attention to every detail and trying to integrate it into a plausible
coherence. Everything mentioned at the beginning profits from this
primacy effect. Because readers have to attend closely in order to first
constitute the fictional world, these things are more resistant to
revision than information given at a later stage (Abbott 2008, 88). The
surprise of having to change first impressions, when recency effect
overrides primacy effect, is an attention strategy. In the passage from
The Map and the Territory our mental adjustment involves
introducing a new perspective, the focalization of a character whom we
soon identify as the main protagonist. Focalization is usually counted
among the textual attributes contributing to visualization. However, it
is obviously not itself a perceivable phenomenon but a generator of
perspective-taking in the reader. As such, it can produce startling
experiences and hence intensified visualizations. But that is not the
case when the perspective produces little recalcitrance in the reader.
Because of embodied enactment, readers will normally tend to adopt
the perspective of internally focalized passages on grounds of
similarity with their ordinary experience (cf. Coplan 2004, 142–143).
In this case entering the focalizer’s consciousness is delayed and made
strange because an outside perspective has already had primacy effect.
Likewise, the reader’s cognitive mapping of the scene is disturbed
because of the rearrangement of living agents and objects in fictional
space. Normally descriptions of narrative space make an appeal to the
embodied involvement of readers. Since spatial mapping is an ordinary
organizational process in understanding, it facilitates access to the
‘concrete’ setting and location of a narrative, as well as to more
abstract levels of psychological motivation and thematic content. By
recalling the experiential parameters of everyday life, stories prompt
an automatic orientation in the story world. In following the
trajectories of gazes, observations, and movements from one place to
another, visualization constantly resituates the reader. The case of
Houllebecq’s novel demonstrates how these instabilities can be
significantly reinforced through the use of intermedial reference.
In sum the cognitive processing of these first few paragraphs in the
novel has the effect of highlighting the passage in the reading
experience, an effect that is reinforced through ekphrasis. For readers
familiar with the conventions of ekphrasis, another noticeable effect
results from the reversal of common ekphrastic practice, which would
move the description from static to dynamic images. Thus, because of
the impact on embodied as well as cultural visualization, the recency
effect in The Map and the Territory produces vivid and enduring
images. For the above reasons, the scene will be firmly lodged in the
reader’s memory, and indeed it seems to be the most memorable
among many strong visual impressions in the novel if countless
comments on the internet are anything to go by.
Apparently some images do stay in the mind to reappear with each
memory of a text. It seems that certain textual moments are elevated in
making sense of a narrative. In the above example from The Map and
the Territory the reader’s images become more conscious when they
demand a sudden revision. These heightened moments must be cued
by textuality through framing strategies and evocative gaps. Intensified
visualizations which stand out from the passive syntheses of the
reading process are the result of a “reciprocal spotlighting” by text and
reader (Iser 1978, 148). In this way, mobile and still images are
constantly working together in the mental processing of
representations. In the case of long narratives such as the novel, which
is predicated on constant temporal progress, ekphrastic passages can
provide anchor places for the reading mind which serve the purpose of
enargeia and ars memoria with which ekphrasis is associated. This
effect of the quoted ekphrastic passage was further reinforced by
cultural visualization: In changing the two well-known, provocative
figures in the art world from fictional characters to second order
represented characters, the critique of their commercialism, which is
apparent from the title of the fictional painting, receives ironical edge.
The way intermedial reference is employed in The Map and the
Territory dislodges the customary distribution of dynamic and static,
or first and second order, representation; this testifies to the
weakening of the power of the verbal over the visual in contemporary
media society.

5 Attention Management and Textual Cues for

Intensified Visualization
In the reading experience, the interdependent processes of forgetting
and remembering come into play: Forgetting is paradoxically
prerequisite to remembering. While readers negotiate their
visualizations between retention and protention, their attention is
necessarily more engaged with some features of the narrative than
with others. In the reading process, mental images are called into
being by certain textual strategies that can be used to capture the
reader’s attention. Heightened visualization depends on attention; and
attention in turn differs from passive reception in its intentionality.
Attention management is crucial to reader response because it
determines a sense of progression and projection and thereby
influences how far we are involved in a narrative.
 While the mental images which accompany a first reading must
always be indistinct and transient in order to remain adaptable while
the reading is going on, some images that are generated during the
immediate reading process will be especially affecting, hence influence
interpretation and recall. As every avid reader knows, one can become
so engrossed in a book that ordinary life seems temporarily suspended
(cf. Schwenger 1999, 9). But such absorption does not necessarily
intensify the visual imagination. Traditional literary scholarship
attributes visuality to description, metaphor or figurative language and
to perspective and focalization (cf. Bal 2005, 629– 630). However,
these claims have to be qualified with regard to the reading experience.
Though these narrative features invite passive synthesis, none of them
per se elicits intense visualizations.
Detailed description, for instance, which is supposed to encourage
immersive reading and smooth naturalization, does not necessarily
generate intense or enduring mental images ( 17 Literary Visuality:
Visibility – Visualisation – Description; 23 Narratives across Media
and the Outlines of a Media-conscious Narratology). Ellen Esrock
notes: “To suggest that texts encourage visualization is not to imply
that the mere description of landscapes and persons will promote
imaging. The sheer presence of such ‘verbal images’ does not suffice”
(Esrock 1994, 183).
In processing a literary text, readers manage two apparently
contradictory, but in fact interacting and interfering, impulses. On the
one hand, they organize sequence and construe causality and
coherence in the interest of comprehensibility, which involves coming
to terms with cognitive dissonances resulting from gaps,
indeterminacies or inconsistencies, so that unhampered continuity can
be established. On the other hand, as readers attempt to impose
coherence, attention is systematically arrested by a detail that seems
out of place, by a dissonant element that provokes astonishment, or by
a disparity that offers multiple possibilities for understanding a work.
These instances of halting reception produce visual impressions for
future reference by compressing passive syntheses into emotionally
charged visual units (Brosch 2007a, 19). Everything can be organised
mentally as either a sequence or a ‘configuration’; both options are
actualized in reading, so that the flux of processing and the
foregrounding of configurations alternate (cf. Brown 1989, 242). The
formation of these configurations or image clusters seems to be a
fundamental part of cognitive processing. According to Susan Hunter
Brown, readers of literary texts seek to grasp together units in a
“synchronic reflective act” which encodes meaning “iconically” in a
memorable way (Brown 1989, 243). These condensed images or parts
of images have an intensifying effect that enhances memorability and
encourages projection; highlighted visual moments form a (not always
conscious) mnemonic resource (cf. Herman 2002, 85). These iconic
units, which are experienced as particularly intense, are usually
incorporated into later reflections on and interpretations of the text
(cf. Brosch 2007b). In order to avoid the implication that these images
are static, the term “iconic moments” is preferable to Brown’s
“configurations.”
Of course, there are wide differences in individual abilities to
visualize. But some narrative strategies are designed to appeal to
readers in such a way as to increase attention and to intensify
visualization. When a narrative arrests our attention in such a way as
to make us pause and ponder, it will likely produce intensified
visualizations. These will stand out in the reading process and can
produce iconic moments later associated with the text. A secret of high
attention and memorability lies in deviation, in challenging mental
adaptation. In processing images, as in processing language, deviation
from the conventional and the expected is an attention marker, and
therefore an intensifier of visualization. Everything that can be
smoothly naturalized does not usually promote the most vivid
imaginings, whereas extraordinarily lively and lasting images typically
result from special challenges to the reader’s participation. Automatic
enactive and embodied reception does not promote intense
visualization; nor does a facile application or affirmation of cultural
schemata produce iconic moments. Instead, intensified visualization
occurs when there is some cognitive and/ or emotional challenge
because expectations are somehow thwarted by indeterminacy,
complexity and/or novelty.
Both embodied and cultural visualization will draw the reader’s
attention and produce vivid images when some defamiliarizing effect is
introduced. This can consist of unusual and unexpected phenomena
which contradict cultural schemata or of unusual ways of experiencing.
In both cases the reader’s capacity for blending dissonant elements is
called upon. Intermedial reference is such a participatory textual
strategy that can jolt readers out of passive compliance.

6 Reading Intermedial Interference: Robert

Coover’s A Night at the Movies, Or You Must
Remember This
Robert Coover’s collection of short fictions is a conscious and
sustained deployment of all modes of intermedial reference to film (
14 Filmic Modes in Literature). Each of the stories references a
canonical Hollywood production or classic TV feature and negotiates
its mythical and historical particularities. This gives the volume a
special thematic and metaphoric coherence. The “Program,” as the list
of contents is termed, announces a whole range of different filmic
narratives and genres. Each tale in the program directly evokes the
cinematic experience. This transformation of classic U.S. American
movies and TV features into verbal narratives is first and foremost
outrageously comic, it overtly parodies the most popular and
acclaimed movies. Coover is not merely “recycling old movie plots or
drawing on the glamorous atmosphere of Hollywood […] but enlarging
his literary technique by forcing it to assimilate cinematic conventions
and to approximate filmic style” (White 1987, 15). The technique
consists of recreating the filmic images in the reader’s mind so far as to
force a recall of the actual movie and at the same time to modify and
distort it. Readers are able to accommodate the interference by first
activating the relevant film as a reading frame and then blending it
with its textual deconstruction. The specific intermediality is
deliberately and savagely destructive of any nostalgia or aura that
surrounds these popular media products. At the same time, the
collection demonstrates the powerful magic a sustained thematic and
stylistic intermediality can work on the visual imagination. All the
narratives remediate and distort an identifiable genre film. Readers
familiar with Coover’s penchant for exploding U.S.-American myths
will expect change in these remediations, but probably not the ones
that they encounter.
“Gilda’s Dream” is a remake of Charles Vidor’s Hollywood classic
Gilda (1948), but Coover changes Rita Hayworth’s famous provocative
dance in a South American nightclub to a dramatic monologue by a
transvestite haunted by and paranoid about threatening gazes in the
men’s room. “Shootout at Gentry’s Junction” follows the vain attempts
of Fred Zinneman’s sheriff in High Noon (1952) to find men who will
help him against his evil adversary. The story’s significant change to
the film’s moralistic ending is also the climax which makes for an
iconic moment and an indelible visual memory: Just when the heroic
main character is about to disarm the Mexican and – like the readers –
expects a non-violent ending atypical of the genre of the Western, he
“met the silver bullet from his own gun square in his handsome
suntanned face” (Coover 1987, 72). Thus the story disrupts not only the
conventions of a film genre but also the myth of individualism
embodied in the lone, righteous and courageous hero. Likewise, “You
must Remember This” reverses the iconic movie Casablanca (1942) by
turning the romantic implications of a flashback love scene when Ilsa
visits Rick’s apartment into sexual explicitness. Instead of the demure
fade out dictated by the Hollywood convention of the time, we get a
“twenty-page description of orgiastic love making” so explicit that Joel
Black regrets that viewers may not be able to watch the movie
innocently again (Black 1992, 84). Coover’s obsessively sexualized
intermedial adaptation thus destroys and negates the movie’s myth of
heroic self-denial for an ulterior idealistic cause. The story “Cartoon”
refers to Robert Zemeckis’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, taking up the
film’s groundbreaking interaction between live and animated figures
and ending with a visual surprise when the main character sees himself
in the mirror having “grown a pair of cartoon ears” (Coover 1987, 139).
At the heart of this book-length intermedial enterprise is a frontal
assault on Hollywood’s dream factory, achieved by defamiliarizing the
remembered experience of films. In reproducing the style of different
genres and simultaneously introducing controversial and provocative
content, the stories make for an estrangement or alienation in the
reading experience which must hold in balance the contradictory
material of memory and actualization. As in many postmodern literary
texts, reality and fiction are inextricably interwoven. But Coover’s
postmodern strategy does not just aim to demonstrate the porousness
of the boundaries between reality and fiction; rather, it dissolves these
boundaries by blending fictional reality with media reality. Indeed, the
stories’ fictional reality becomes ‘unreal’ through the filmic narration
and the media reality of the actual movie becomes ‘unreal’ through
subversive changes in content. The challenge to the visual imagination
is a radical case of seeing one thing in terms of another: it represents
an interference with a visual memory of iconic status and necessitates
holding in balance the original as well as the adaptation in order to
appreciate the latter’s target. The changes are identifiable as
exaggeration and parody, strategies which deflect and disturb the
source media’s celebrations of American values and belief systems and
create instead nightmarish fantasies that deal fundamental blows to
habitual Hollywood ways of seeing.
This double assault on both the automatic digestion of the narratives
and on the treasured film memories of the reader is an iconoclastic
deconstruction of the classic American movie canon. A Night at the
Movies exposes films as the pervasive medium shaping contemporary
consciousness, memory and perception. In advance of Visual Culture
theories, this literary work reveals how far film has penetrated the
collective sensorium to the point of becoming coterminous with
consciousness, a consciousness that conceives of reality as cinematic.
Given the reader’s familiarity with the films, the full extent of this
intermedial intervention amounts to much more than an evocation of
another medium; it challenges the ideological implications of the
products of the other medium via distorted remediation. It exposes the
collective fantasies informing a culturally dominant spectatorship
position and preferred ways of seeing that impinge upon the
perception of reality. The effect and function of this intermedial
reference therefore extend far beyond the immediate strangeness in
the online processing of the text. The self-reflexive intermediality of
this sequence of narratives can only be assessed in a critical
questioning of one’s own habitual preferences in passive reception.

7 Conclusion
A difficulty in discussing reference to the visual lies in the fuzzy
boundary between intermedial attribution and textual reference. In
other words, readers may recall and visualize another medium when
reading without any clear textual signal. By the same token,
intermedial reference may have been intended by an author, but
readers can fail to recognize it. In most cases, the boundary between
the visualizations that accompany the processing of any narrative text
and the visualizations of intermedial reference will be fluid and
permeable, especially where mobile images are concerned. Therefore,
Rajewsky’s suggestion to use the category of intermedality for concrete
analysis and to concentrate on manifest medial configurations makes
sense (cf. Rajewsky 2005, 51).
The analysis of the textual examples showed how certain narrative
strategies succeed in baffling the reader’s expectations and thus
demand the reader’s creative participation in blending disparate input.
In the example from the novel by Houellebecq above, we could see
ekphrasis as a surprise strategy. In The Map and the Territory the
special case of the artistic gaze, a perspective that has been elevated
into a higher form of seeing in Western culture, makes a belated and
uncertain entrance. A Night at the Movies presents clearly identifiable
techniques and contents of the medium of film only to debunk iconic
heroic figures and actions. Both examples cause defamiliarized
experiential effects as well as long-term cognitive engagement with
their particular ways of seeing and type of gaze. Yet, whereas the
passage from The Map and the Territory is a case of strategic
intermedial reinforcement foregrounding immediate embodied
response, the extended intermedial interference in A Night at The
Movies depends more profoundly on critical reflection about media
specificity.
Intermediality has the potential to provoke a revision of the
schemata brought to bear on the text. These revisions do not just
benefit the individual engagement with a narrative text, but also have a
social/cultural function: By altering individual perceptions and
challenging prior beliefs, they can, in the long run, also impact cultural
memory, because they can little by little undermine conventional
interpretations. The inclusion of intermedial reference can prompt
such an intensifying effect; and the more marked and extended its
contribution to the narrative is, the greater the effect.
When visualization is complicated by intermedial reference, it can
perform work on the cultural imaginary by providing iconic moments
that have great emotional and cognitive effect and which can gradually
have an impact on the formation of cultural memory. The particular
duality and tension inherent in intermedial reference predestines it for
interventions with norms of representation and perception. But, as
both cases exemplified, intensified visualization is prompted not only
by an unexpected or dissonant embodied experience, but also by
critical cultural reading, since these acts of seeing in literature question
and undermine conventional ways of seeing and therefore encourage
an engagement with textual propositions beyond online processing.
Hence, their most significant functions and effects take place outside
the immediate reading experience which are not the subject of most
cognitive approaches to narrative. A cognitive approach is useful for
analyzing mental processes in relation to their textual cues. It can
contribute to an understanding of how far intermediality can produce
intensified visualizations, i.e. how it achieves defamiliarizing effects.
By examining the microstructures of reader-text interactions, it can
systematically account for “unconscious processes that result in
observable and experiential effects” (Stockwell 2009, 11). Rather than
offering a ‘correct’ interpretation, cognitive approaches illuminate the
unconscious mental operations that permeate later interpretations.
While they can prove a valuable supplementary source of insight, they
cannot replace critical reading and hermeneutics entirely.

8 Bibliography

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8.2 Further Reading

Brosch, Renate. “Reading and Visualisation.” Anglistik. Ed. Renate
Brosch. Special Issue: Focus on Reception and Reader Response
24.2 (2013b): 169–180.
Brosch, Renate. “Literarische Lektüre und imaginative Visualisierung:
Kognitionsnarratologische Aspekte.” Handbuch Literatur und
Visuelle Kultur. Ed. Claudia Benthien and Brigitte Weingart. Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2014. 104–120.
Butte, George. “I Know That You Know That I Know: Narrating
Subjects from Moll Flanders to Marnie.” Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 2004.
Herman, David. “Narrative Theory after the Second Cognitive
Revolution.” Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Ed. Lisa
Zunshine. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 155–
175.
Richardson, Alan. “Defaulting to Fiction: Neuroscience Discovers the
Romantic Imagination.” Poetics Today 32.4 (2011): 664–692.
Michael Meyer

19 Intermedial Framing
Abstract: Analyses of intermediality in narrative fiction have mainly
focused on the evocation of images in the main body of the text. More
recently, intermedial research has started to include visual material in
multimodal narratives. The present essay explores an issue neglected
by these two approaches, namely the interplay between visual
illustration and verbal representation as interdependent framing
devices. The examples under scrutiny offer multiple framings and
frame-breaks, provoking reflections on representation, media, and
interpretation.
Key Terms: Art novel, children’s literature, prose ekphrasis,
framing, illustration, paratext, postmodern

1 Theoretical and Conceptual Aspects

Readers judge a book by its cover, which frames their reading, even if
only subliminally and transitorily. In many cases, book covers are
intermedial artefacts. Text-image relationships have been of more
interest in literary studies ( 5 Ekphrasis and the Novel/Narrative
Fiction; 17 Literary Visuality: Visibility – Visualisation – Description)
than the intermedial and paratextual framing of fictional literature,
although analysis of the intermedial paratext complements research on
visuality and ekphrasis (cf. Louvel 2011, 43–51). Here, the analysis
deals with the interplay between visual illustration and verbal
representation as framing devices in the paratext and the interaction
with the initial and terminal framings of the main text. After a brief
overview of major recent approaches to intermediality and framing
and a glance at criteria for analysing pictures, the essay will turn to A.
A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), A. S. Byatt’s Matisse Stories
(1993), and Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton (1987) and discuss them
against the theoretical backdrop developed in the first part.
Since the publication of Erwin Goffmann’s Frame Analysis (1975),
concepts of cognitive frames have been widely used in cognition
theory, psychology, linguistics, and narratology. Cognitive frames are
“culturally formed metaconcepts”, which serve as “basic orientational
aids that help us to navigate through our experiential universe, inform
our cognitive activities and generally function as preconditions of
interpretation” (Wolf and Bernhart 2006, 5). Being subject to
historical change, they “depend on a period’s épistémè, norms,
conventions and the totality of the ‘frames of reference’ […] as ‘basic
units’ of semantic integration” (Wolf and Bernhart 2006, 4). The mid-
1980s saw the seminal publications of Mary Caws’ phenomenological
approach to framing in fiction and Gérard Genette’s semiotic typology
of the framing of fiction.
Mary Caws draws on psychology, philosophy, art history and genre
theory. Her definition of frames in fiction starts out with the
observation that different readers remember the same scenes of action
and vision, which stand out like “a static arrest, within the normal flow
of the text, for the presentation of a scene whose borders are so
marked as to enclose its denser, or more ‘dramatic,’ more pictorial, or
more musical, or sometimes more ‘poetic,’ consistency.” (Caws 1985,
3) These framed scenes seem to be complete in themselves and refer
metonymically to the text as a whole. Due a marked generic shift or
break, the “framed moment is frequently the other in the same” (Caws
1985, 6). Frames define the focus and borders, inclusion and exclusion,
using visual, verbal, gestural, and conceptual borderings to set a
“passage in relief” (Caws 1985, 14). Caws intricately connects visual
and verbal techniques, “the selective or framing look” and “decoupage
or circumscription – writing about and around, cutting and cropping”
(Caws 1985, 5). Frames are “aids to perception […] But all frames are
constantly open to shift and exchange” (Caws 1985, 4–5). In terms of
function, she detects a historical tendency from realist fiction, which
asks readers to reflect on the framed content, to modernist fiction,
which invites readers to reflect on the frames, and postmodernist
fiction, which makes readers ponder on the dissolution of frames (cf.
Caws 1985, 11, 262–265). Caws concentrates on frames in realist and
modernist texts. This essay profits from her insight into frames as a
means of orientation and the shifting of frames as it deals with Milne’s
paratextual use of quasi-realist illustration with a postmodern twist,
Byatt’s use of modernist art and Ackroyd’s postmodernist reflections
on art in twentieth century fiction.
Gérard Genette’s Paratexts shares Caws’ pragmatic interest, but
rather than her focus on frames within texts, he explores the
thresholds readers pass before they read the text. The paratext of
literary works consists of the epitext, comments on the text made
outside the work in question, such as interviews, letters, publisher’s
ads, etc., and the peritext on the covers and on the pages around the
main body of the text, the author’s name, the title, preface,
illustrations, chapter headings, etc. (Genette 1997b [1987], 4–5).
Genette ignores illustrations as the ‘other’ of the text, a ‘continent’ he
prefers to leave unexplored (1997b [1987], 404–406), maybe for a
good reason: Illustrations are probably more ambiguous and difficult
to ‘control’ than writing, a point that will be pursued below.
Wolf and Bernhart build on Genette’s synchronic definition of the
paratext, but they replace Genette’s sequential typology, which follows
the ordinary reading process from cover to text, by a more systematic
typology. They include intermediality as a relevant phenomenon, and
suggest doing research on the diachronic development of the paratext.
For Wolf and Bernhart, paratexts are devices at textual borders, which
form privileged sites of orientation that cite, evoke, or negotiate
generic, social, and cultural frames to mark the border between the
world and the artefact (cf. Wolf and Bernhart 2006, 26). The paratext
provides “introductory, explanatory etc. material that forms a
‘threshold’ to the main text of the work in question”, guides
interpretation, and may have a metareferential function (cf. Wolf and
Bernhart 2006, 20, 31; Wolf 2014, 129). In the context of their project,
the frame ‘artwork’ in Western cultures suggests a non-pragmatic,
aesthetic attitude, often combined with the frame ‘fictional, possible
world’ and the frame of a particular genre (cf. Wolf and Bernhart 2006,
13–14). A transmedial typology of categories serves to analyse framings
in all media (cf. Wolf and Bernhart 2006, 15):
agency (framing through sender, recipient, message/text, context)
– authorisation (authorised, intracompositional versus unauthorised,
extracompositional)
– framing medium in relation to framed (homo- versus
heteromedial)
– extension (total versus partial)
– saliency (explicit versus implicit)
– location (para- versus intratextual)
– reception (initial, internal, terminal)
It is difficult to conceptualise and employ ‘agency’ and
‘authorisation’ as distinct criteria because, after all, framings remain
inert unless the reader/viewer ‘realises’ or constructs them:
intratextual and contextual framings (the latter of which correspond to
Genette’s ‘epitext’)
are intimately linked to both sender- and recipient-based framing activities, which are not
free-floating but dependent on the context as well as on the message: the sender’s framing
activity will be focused on potential recipients and manifests itself in framing markers,
while the recipient’s framing process, which has found some attention in frame theory, is
not an autonomous process either but to a large extent determined by textual framings,
which the recipient is supposed to decode. (Wolf and Bernhart 2006, 17)

Wolf and Bernhart conceive a normative understanding of decoding,

which is expressed in the concepts of ‘the message’, ‘authorised’ versus
‘non-authorised’ framings, textual ‘determination’ and obligatory
requirements of reading. These concepts smack of intentional fallacy
and the fear of “the terror of uncertain signs” (Barthes qtd. in Kress
and Leeuwen 1996, 16). Who controls how readers employ frames and
read signs? The fictional text or the artistic image offer certain data,
and may suggest, refer to, represent, or reflect on particular social or
cultural frames, but readers/ viewers may respond to or resist them, or
deploy different frames. Rather than deciding whether framings are
authorised or unauthorised, it is relevant to analyse whether
relationships within paratextual framings and their interaction with
intra-textual framings invite monologic or dialogic framings.
Wolf comes up with the term ‘defamiliarised framings’ as a deviant
concept that defies the expectations of cognitive orientation, for
example the “intentional paradoxical transgression of, or confusion
between” different subworlds or levels within fiction representations
(Wolf 2006, 320). A case in point is metafiction, which “foregrounds
‘framing’ as a problem, examining frame procedures in the
construction of the real world and of novels” (Waugh 1984, 28). The
inclusion of visions and pictures can confuse ontological levels of
reality and fiction, and “the alternation of frame and frame-break (or
the construction of an illusion through the imperceptibility of the
frame and the shattering of illusion through the constant exposure of
the frame) provides the essential deconstructive method of
metafiction” (Waugh 1984, 31; cf. Wolf and Bernhart 2006, 9, 30, 33).
Instead of trying to pin down or ‘contain’ interpretation (pace
Foucault) as in the semiotic model delineated above, phenomenology
and poststructuralism are more interested in processes that release
‘open’ interpretations. The difference between Wolf’s concept of
defamiliarised framings and a poststructurally inflected concept of
framing is that Wolf’s exception is considered to be the norm, i.e. the
focus is on indeterminacy and instability in all text/image
relationships rather than orientation and determination. In her Poetics
of the Iconotext (2011), Liliane Louvel resorts to phenomenology,
semiotics and poststructuralism in order to construct a comprehensive
theory of intermedial relationships and framings. Psychological
findings about “the experience of the legible and the visible in a
chiasmic mode form a common ground to the interpretation of texts
and paintings” (Louvel 2011, 39): Spectators first see a picture as a
whole, then ‘read’ it in parts, and finally ‘see’ it again as a whole;
readers first read a text sequentially, forming mental images, and then
‘see’ it as a whole in the sense of understanding it. Writing itself, W. J.
T. Mitchell would add, is an imagetext since it needs to be visible in
order to be legible, and gives rise to figurative visuality, just as visual
artefacts contain figurative textuality (1994, 95). Louvel’s term
‘iconotext’ captures “the attempt to merge text and image in a
pluriform fusion, as in an oxymoron”, and to “form a new object in a
fruitful tension in which each object maintains its specificity”, which
“designate[s] the ambiguous, aporetic, and in-between object” of the
analysis (Louvel 2011, 15; cf. Wagner 1996, 1–40; Albers 2010, 24).
Louvel stresses that the infinite intermedial dialogue between image
and text is like an incomplete transposition with “a rest” left to the
imagination (Louvel 2013, 13). The in-between of the iconotext creates
a “pictorial third”, an instable, oscillating process between the visual
and the legible (Louvel 2013, 27).
Louvel transfers the typology of Genette’s Palimpsests (1997a
[1982]) to the “transpictoriality” of iconotexts (2011, 56–67): In
interpictoriality, a pictorial image is ekphrastically described, alluded
to, or evoked, giving the reader the impression of a painter’s style.
Parapictoriality refers to a picture found in the paratext. In
hypopictoriality, an image forms the origin of a text, and can be evoked
explicitly or implicitly without commenting on it. In metapictoriality,
the picture comments on the text or vice versa. Louvel adds as a cross-
category of all the types above “mnemopictoriality, the memory of the
painting in the text” (Louvel 2011, 57). Louvel delineates the basic
functions of an image as ornament and support or contradiction and
disruption of a text, and resorts to Derrida’s concept of the image as a
supplement, “reinforcing the text while contributing its own
specificity”, and as a substitute where the text is defective (Louvel 2011,
101).
In spite of the concepts ‘intermedial’, ‘transmedial’, and
‘transpictorial’, the approaches depicted above mainly prefer the trope
of the text rather than that of the picture. For example, Louvel’s
‘interpictoriality’ has little to do with relationships between pictures,
which need to be included in the term. In “the face of the unreliability
of many pictorial contextual and paratextual framings, intratextual, or
rather intrapictorial, clues obtain an increased importance in the
pictorial arts” (Wolf 2014, 141), and, of course in illustrations in
paratexts. The term ‘unreliability’, which carries a misleading, negative
connotation, should be replaced by ‘openness’. The viewing of pictures
encompasses phenomenological perception as well as socially and
culturally informed interpretation (cf. Wagner 1996, 35; Mitchell
2002, 92; Albers 2010, 8). On the one hand, “traditionally, the
audience construed the physical frame around the canvas as a ‘window’
into the image” (Helmers 2004, 71). The mimetic as-if invites ‘natural’,
naïve aesthetic perception, which should not be condemned as a
“naturalistic fallacy” (Mitchell 2002, 92). On the other hand,
“culturally determined codes of recognition” provide frames that make
the denotations of (mimetic) pictures legible (Bryson 1983, 61).
However, denotative meaning based on iconology is complemented by
fuzzy connotative codes, “distributed through the social formation in a
diffuse, amorphous manner”, for example codes of faces and bodies
(Bryson 1983, 68). Connotative codes, which are “both non-explicit
and polysemic”, vary with the context and can break the interpretive
frames (Bryson 1983, 71). The phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels
points out that viewers re-cognise the familiar, but should also be
aware of seeing something (as) new, of the visual complexity of
pictures that goes beyond the familiar (Waldenfels 1994, 235). Adding
to phenomenological experience and general cultural codes of
recognition, parapictorial and intrapictorial frames provide a limited,
‘partial’ guideline to analysing pictures, such as the following visual or
‘graphic codes’ (Jewitt and Oyama 2001; Moebius 2009, 316–319;
Wolf and Bernhart 2006, 20):
a picture frame and a caption
– size and format (landscape- or portrait-format)
– composition (line, shape, colour, texture, rhythm, contrast,
salience)
– genre and motif
– point of view/perspective, angle, horizon, and space (visible –
invisible, seen – unseen)
– position and size of subject on the page.
Even if the term ‘graphic code’ suggests reading pictures like texts, it
“would be misleading and destructive of the possibility of an ‘open text’
to say that within graphic codes, this particular gesture means one
thing or another, regardless of the specific text” (Moebius 2009, 316).
However, the text does not necessarily complement or ‘explain’ the
meaning of the illustration. Readers/viewers need to take heed of
contradictions, the potential “semic slippage” in the “buffer zone”
between picture and text (Moebius 2009, 313). With reference to
Derrida’s “parergon”, a zone that blurs the boundary between the work
and what is around it, Pirinen argues that a “specific title may
sometimes and to some extent restrict the possibilities of
interpretations, but it may also feed the interpretation processes and
multiply the possibilities” (Pirinen 2013, 244), an option that Wolf and
Bernhart would downplay. After all, “[j]ust like the artwork itself, the
parergon (title) is interpreted.” (Pirinen 2013, 244)
An intermedial approach to paratextual framing demands a
balanced attention to pictures and texts. The subsequent analysis deals
with the framing of quasi-‘realist’ illustrations, modernist paintings,
and a postmodern artwork in fiction.
2 A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926): A
Paratextual tour de force
In his tongue-in-cheek, poststructuralist reading of Winnie-the-Pooh
as “uncompromising in its textuality as well as in its probing self-
questioning”, Christoph Bode (2001, 344) perceptively discusses
several beginnings and endings of the book within the body of the text.
An intermedial reading of the paratext focuses on no less than nine
visual and verbal framings of the main text, and probes the dialogic
framing of the book, which alternatingly invites a naïve and a self-
referential perspective. The ‘defamiliarising paratext’ (cf. Wolf 2006,
2014) of A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh frames the book as children’s
literature in multiple and shifting ways (cf. Caws 1985) from the
comprehensive ‘iconotext’ (cf. Louvel 2011, 2013) of the cover to the
following map, title page, dedication, introduction and no less than
three illustrations.
The roughly realist ‘parapicture’ (cf. Louvel 2011) of a group of
animals is framed by the author’s name, the obscure title, and the
illustrator’s name, who provided the ‘decorations’ (cf. Milne in this
contribution’s bibliography for URL). This term subordinates the
illustration to the text, but the picture in the centre of the page
dominates the front cover, indicating a competition for salience
between text and picture. ‘Decoration’ is an ironic understatement, as
it denotes the least ambitious, nostalgic strand in illustration at the
end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century (cf.
Houfe 1981, 201). Instead, illustrator Ernest H. Shepard revives “the
sketchy, free and caricatured book illustrations” (Houfe 1981, 186) of
the early nineteenth century. Shepard created many cartoons for the
satiric magazine Punch, which is visible in the humour and the
“appearance of spontaneity” of his work (Peppin and Micklethwait
1983, 273). Knowing Shepard’s cartoons from Punch would prepare
informed adult readers for irony in the dialogue between pictures and
text (cf. Wolf and Bernhart 2006: ‘reader’s framing’, ‘contextual
framing’).
The picture appears to be simple, but is ambiguous if the viewer
takes a closer look at the graphic codes. The way the flat bear’s legs are
visibly attached to its hips mark at least the central figure out as a soft
toy. In addition to the central position in the picture, the salience of the
teddy bear is enhanced by its yellowish colour and round shape, which
makes the reader assume that the obscure, nonsensical title refers to
the name of the teddy in the generic frame of children’s literature. Due
to incongruity in size, the other animals seem to be soft toys as well,
because the kangaroo, the rabbit and the owl are about as tall as the
teddy bear, and the little pink piglet wears a blue vest. The situation is
framed as a children’s birthday party because the teddy curiously looks
at a pink box in his hands, surrounded by other animals. An owl is a bit
detached in the back, looking on, two animals are peering across the
bear’s shoulders, and two smaller animals on the right are jumping up
with excitement. The group of animals, all of which focus on the gift, is
placed on a simple green wash of watercolour in front of a light blue
background, framing the group in a simple world. The fact that the
situation is perceived from a slightly upward angle and that the soft
toys are brought to life indicate that the drawing represents the as-if of
a child’s imagined world, following the tradition of children’s book
illustrations. This picture juxtaposes the rather flat drawing of the
yellowish or light brown bear, which turns out to correspond to its
simple mind in the main text, with the more detailed bodily shapes and
the more mimetic colours of the other animals. The iconotext of title,
author, picture, and artist is framed in turn by something like an off-
orange gift wrap with little bees and the icon of Puffin Books,
endorsing the generic framing of children’s literature: Like the gift in
the parapicture, the book is a gift to the readers. The animals represent
the readers’ potential reactions, the detached view of the wiser adult
(the owl), and the curiosity of children concerning the narrative
unfolding of the framed pictorial moment.
On the back cover, in big brown letters, the formula “[o]nce upon a
time” foregrounds and confirms the fictional framing of the front
cover. The contextual information on the blurb gives it a personal
touch because the stories were written by the father for his son
Christopher Robin (biographical ‘grounding’), and values the book as a
captivating classic with “perfectly match[ing]” illustrations (cultural
capital and entertainment). Textual framing raises curiosity by
referring to the various stories and adventures in the book (birthday,
hunting, ‘Expotition’), and provokes new questions concerning the
protagonist’s name: “Edward Bear – better known as Winnie-the-
Pooh”. The complete iconotext on the cover addresses both adult
readers and children, who can easily relate to the iconic drawing
centring around a favourite children’s toy, the teddy bear. The
children’s book addresses a double audience and – at least for non- or
semi-literate children – inverts the idea that pictures are the other of
the text (cf. Genette 1997b [1987]). Here, the enigmatic name appears
to be the strange other of the picture, but both need to be ‘unpacked’
like the box in the picture. The oscillating ‘dialogue’ (cf. Louvel 2011)
between the picture and the title offers more of a riddle rather than
orientation because neither resolves the other without an inexplicable
rest. The iconotext is implicitly ‘metareferential’ (cf. Wolf 2006, 2014)
for two reasons: (1) the picture does not show what the gift is and
needs the story to supplement it, and (2) strange names and words are
foregrounded rather than self-evidently referential ones, a fact that
plays on children’s wonder at and problems with language.
Between the pages with the title and the dedication, a double-page
map extends the information on the cover. The map is interpictorial in
a comprehensive sense that goes beyond Louvel’s definition because it
provides a literally pictorial and verbal bridge between the cover and
the main text. The fact that Christopher Robin is the historical
recipient of these fictional stories (back cover), the artist of the
fictional map (inferred from the caption) and a figure on the map
breaks the conventional boundary between the frames of reality and
fiction, which is easily straddled by children but less so by adult
readers. The illustration reframes geographical norms. The map is
subjective, taking its directions less from the compass (N, E, S, W) but
the letters of the protagonist P, O, O, H, which are complemented by
the naïve perspective and the unrealistic size of different objects. The
interpictorial map locates and gives names to the animals recognisable
from the cover picture. Some traces and inscriptions of places and
events require stories for further understanding: “POOH TRAP FOR
HEFFALUMPS” and “WHERE THE WOOZLE WASN’T”. In sum, the
map comments on the cover, provides orientation, but blurs the
boundary between reality and fiction and raises new questions.
Further illustrations enhance the ambiguity of the cover picture
because the title page juxtaposes a realistically drawn child back to
back with a clearly inanimate teddy bear, which is framed by two
illustrations which show the bear as a live character. In both pictures,
Pooh appears to be troubled by writing, which raises the question to
what extent he is literate and what the conditions of readings are. In
the first picture, he is confronted with two signboards and two
messages (two framings of communication), which are too small to be
deciphered by the real reader, alluding to the necessary visibility of
writing (cf. Mitchell 1994). In the second iconotext, Pooh is puzzled by
the mirror-like inverted writing on an upside-down bath mat,
defamiliarising the difference between iconic and symbolic signs, the
latter of which require decoding a certain combination of lines as
letters and words (cf. Meyer 2013, 168). The doubling of reality and
fiction is repeated again in the juxtaposition of two realistic
complementary pictures at the beginning and the end, showing the
reality of Christopher coming down and going up the stairs, trailing the
teddy bear behind, and the fictional perspective of Pooh’s experience in
the main text. The difference between the real, visual object and the
imagined, ‘live’ subject can also give rise to reflections on the
complementary power and limitation of visual and verbal realism. The
vivid presence of the visual artefact supplements the superior verbal
representation of inner life.
The introduction sets out to ‘explain’ the title, only to complicate
matters further. The unreliable author-narrator plays with the
(children’s) expectation of motivated and referential names. The name
‘Pooh’ was taken from a swan as if the name were a material object,
and the ‘fitting’ name ‘Winnie’ from a brown (!) polar bear.
Christopher spontaneously came up with the idea that Edward Bear
“was Winnie-the-Pooh”, combining the ideas of subjective inspiration
with the magic power of naming as conferring identity. Identity does
not reside in the bear, but is constructed through the name given by
the other and through the stories told by the other: “[T]he subject is
never given, it is constituted as an effect of a discourse” (Bode 2001,
345). What is more, the paratext clearly shows that the subject, Pooh,
and the metareferential subject of the book as a whole is the effect of
the interaction between verbal and pictorial representations.

3 A. S. Byatt’s Matisse Stories (1993): Re-

framing Pictorial Hypotexts
In many illustrated books, the text precedes the illustrations that
complement the stories, an order that is inverted in books that respond
to the visual arts. A. S. Byatt was inspired by Matisse’s pictures, which
serve as ‘parapictures’ and as ‘hypopictures’ (cf. Louvel 2011). Critics
appreciate Byatt’s vivid ekphrastic response to Matisse’s style (Mari
1997; Bigliazzi 1999; Rippl 2005) or the combination of the painterly
aesthetic with female or feminist perspectives (Fernandes 2006; Petit
2005, 2006, 2008). Only one of these critics discusses framing and the
reproductions on the cover page: Laurence Petit employs Caws’
concept to take a closer look at the multiple cultural, social, and
pictorial framings of the paratext, particularly in the first story in
Byatt’s collection, “Medusa’s Ankles”. Petit points out that the cover
joins the name ‘Matisse’ with ‘stories’, conjuring up his art in the
reader’s mind as a frame for the stories, along with the reproduction of
his paintings on the cover:
[A]t least two of these paintings, Le Silence habité des maisons and La Porte noire,
contain frames-within-the-frame in the form of windows and doors, while the Nu rose
presents a multitude of embedded frames in the form of white squares representing the
pattern of the dark blue couch, and slightly larger green squares figuring what might be an
interior or exterior window in the background. Through this abundance of external
frames, the text itself is therefore, from the start, presented as a kind of visual work of art
supported by a framing strategy aimed at offsetting it within the materiality of the book.
(Petit 2005, 118)

Petit is perfectly right, but she does not elaborate on the details and
functions of these frames within the pictures or the paratext as a
whole. Only the parapicture on the cover and that of the most complex
story, “Art Work”, can be discussed here for reasons of space. The
highly saturated blue of the cover and the bright yellow letters echo the
colours of Matisse’s Le silence habité des maisons reproduced between
the title and the author’s name (cf. Byatt in the bibliography of this
entry for URL). The name Matisse appears in the shape of his
signature in large yellow letters, which foregrounds gesture and colour,
modernist style rather than content. The title makes us look at
Matisse’s stories in his paintings and Byatt’s stories in response. The
title situates the book between the arts and fiction, a fact that is
confirmed by the subsequent biographical sketch and the dedication,
which reveals that the famous novelist was an arts teacher, and had
been taught “to look slowly”. It is striking that all of the pictures
selected show women in domestic spaces with windows, but that none
of the women look out the window, skirting a dominant motif in the
visual arts and fiction that is often associated with women yearning for
freedom. Thus, these windows do not serve as female thresholds to
public space, but rather as framed pictures in the vision of the painter,
who is present in the male gaze on women as de-individualised,
decorative objects. The foregrounded frames are very broad and in
marked contrast with the colours of the framed view, which highlights
the importance of the painter’s perspective and framing itself parallel
to modernist fiction (cf. Caws 1985). The rosy nude on the back cover
has stereotypically harmonious facial features, whereas the other faces
are empty, flat shapes. Two of the female shapes almost blend in with
other objects, the bluish table and flowers in Silence, and the bright red
and light brown armchair in La Porte noire. The combination of the
three paintings creates a gendered picture story without words (cf.
Wolf’s ‘cultural frame’): the present situation of the mother and the
child at a table in the first picture is contrasted with the nude lover in
the past, reclining seductively on a sofa, and the future of the ageing
woman after motherhood, who rests on an armchair beneath a black
door symbolising the threshold to death (cf. Bryson’s ‘connotative
code’). The story in pictures follows the hierarchy of women within the
heterosexual matrix: the overwhelming size of the nude – with an
undersized head – almost breaks the frame and stresses her value as
an erotic object of the male gaze. The male frame cuts off or frames out
(cf. Caws 1985) her left hand and her feet, limiting the woman’s
agency, a motif that Byatt inverts in “Medusa’s Ankles”, where the
ageing woman breaks the framing mirrors and frees herself from male
expectations of youth and beauty. The mother and the child as well as
the ageing woman (with her hands folded in her lap) are relegated to
the lower left corners of the pictures, which are dominated by the
explicitly framed views unseen by them. The big book in Silence simply
shows a white page, which indicates the irrelevance of writing and
reading to the painter in juxtaposition to the mother’s and the child’s
involvement in verbal communication. If we take Matisse’s titles into
account, the picture story in Byatt’s selection gives a depressing
account of a women’s life from nakedness to silence and death. Byatt’s
stories are literally inserted between Matisse’s pictures. Byatt echoes
Matisse’s colourful style but reframes the image of women, filling the
pages of the white book in Matisse’s painting with resistant female
protagonists (cf. Petit 2008, 399). Snippets from reviews on the
stunning painterly quality of Byatt’s stories guide the reader from
looking at the paintings to reading the stories with an eye for their
visual evocations and metapictorial comments (cf. Louvel 2011).
The metapictorial story “Art Work” is appropriately framed by
Matisse’s self-reflexive drawing L’artiste et le modèle reflétés dans le
miroir (1937, reprod. in Byatt 1994, 29), which reveals the gendered
process and product of drawing (cf. Meyer 2012, 140). The drawing
establishes a truly ‘interpictorial relationship’ (cf. Louvel 2011) with Le
nu rose, as it foregrounds a nude in a similarly seductive pose, but
adds a portrait of the artist missing in the painting. In the foreground,
the drawing shows a nude as a decorative object in a relaxed,
voluptuous pose. The nude and her reflection in the mirror in the
foreground are opposed to the mirroring of the artist’s upper body.
Behind him, we see decorative fronds and more nudes, mirroring each
other in their sinuous lines. The mirrored artist looks at his easel
rather than at his model, suggesting his absorption in art. This picture
perfectly translates Matisse’s aesthetic interest in the erotic body and
beauty of his composition, which is, as he himself admits, “perhaps
sublimated voluptuousness” (1939, 132). The art historian Marcia
Brennan elucidates this masculine aesthetic: “Matisse’s artworks
presented an implicitly male audience with a privileged, if ultimately
fictive, opportunity to access the sensual aspects of the female body
while simultaneously preserving the option of intellectual detachment”
(2004, 11). Byatt’s metapictorial story responds in three major ways to
Matisse: (1) It introduces an egocentric and reticent male artist, “a
Matisse surrogate” obsessed with his art (Fernandes 2006, 207; cf.
Petit 2008, 398). This character implicitly criticises the artist’s portrait
in the drawing. (2) The story starts with a close description of a fairly
poor black-and-white reproduction of Le Silence, and exhorts readers
to imagine the colours evoked through ekphrastic terms (cf. Rippl
2005, 275–276). In addition, the metapictorial ekphrasis invites the
reader to take a second look at the reproduction on the cover, and to
reflect on similarities and differences between the original painting,
the reproduction, writing, and mental image. (3) As a ‘counter-model’
to the parapictorial, passive and monochrome nudes, Byatt presents
the hard-working cleaner Mrs. Brown. Her interest in vibrant colours
and fabrics recalls Matisse’s work and Byatt’s style, but Byatt’s stories,
as Mrs. Brown’s feminist mixed-media art work, establish women as
subjects of their own in life and art (cf. Rippl 2005, 278–281; Petit
2008, 407–408; Meyer 2012, 144–146). In sum, Byatt’s Matisse
Stories are literally and metaphorically framed by his modernist art,
which they evoke and reframe from the position of women (cf.
Fernandes 2006, 205–206), without, however, substituting them.

4 Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton (1987): A

Metapicture of Writing
Peter Ackroyd’s novel is based on hypotexts written by the Romantic
poet and forger Chatterton, biographical material, and a ‘hypopicture’
(cf. Louvel 2011), Henry Wallis’ painting Chatterton (1856) about the
poet’s early death. Critics agree that this postmodern, intertextual and
metafictional novel dismantles concepts of reference in writing and
painting (Finney 1992, 259; Maack 1993, 319; Delgado 1997, 347–350;
Onega 1998, 34; Nünning 1999, 29–38; Gibson and Wolfreys 2000,
67–69, 123–134). However, nobody discusses its refusal to reproduce
the only extant portrait of Chatter-ton or Wallis’ painting on the cover,
and nobody takes a close look at the postmodern, mixed-media
artwork that frames the novel in radical opposition to the quasi-realist
hypopicture by Wallis. The parapicture (fig. 1) – and the postmodern
novel – dissolve both the Romantic frame of Chatterton’s legend and
the realist frame of the Victorian painting.
Fig. 1: Ackroyd, Chatterton, detail of front cover.
Ackroyd 1993 [1987], n. pag.

The ‘metapictorial cover’ (cf. Louvel 2011) of Ackroyd’s book in the

Penguin fiction series, a prime example of ‘defamiliarising framing’ (cf.
Wolf 2006, 2014), foregrounds framing and writing rather than
painting. The cover by Paula Silcox visualises Ackroyd’s concept of
“language as gestural phrase” rather than reference, content as a
variety of style, and literature as a “display of fiction within
arbitrariness” (Ackroyd 1976, 133–135). The reproduction of the
mixed-media object is located between the author’s name and the title
of the book in different colours and fonts, separating the author from
the text in a postmodern gesture. The cover displays cream-coloured,
meticulous handwriting on a black surface. The writing is neither
contained by the broad, photographed picture frame nor the material
frame of the cover format, which simply cuts off the words in an
arbitrary fashion rather than framing meaningful units. The
fragmented lines are not even parts of one coherent text but repetitions
of smaller fragments in the style of the eighteenth century, which are
partly visible but hardly comprehensible. The picture frame displays an
old manuscript on a creased, damaged sheet without the addressee or
the writer’s signature, a fact that insinuates that the infinite
intertextual process is beyond the control of the writer and the reader.
The frame also contains the photograph of an ink vessel, and the
reproductions of drawings of a hand with a fountain pen and the face
of a watch with Roman numbers. In short, the metapicture of the
whole cover denies the pleasure of mimetic representation and instead
reflects on framing the historical change of the styles and technologies
of writing and media (cf. Meyer 2014, 20–21).
The back cover uses the reproduction of a fragment from a
manuscript as the background of the blurb, visualising the palimpsest
as the basic strategy of the historiographic novel (cf. Onega 1999, 72).
The blurb advertises the generic frame (cf. Wolf and Bernhart 2006) of
Ackroyd’s book as an historical “detective novel”, weaving “back and
forth between three centuries” and inviting the reader to join in the
discovery of what caused the mysterious death of the “poet-forger and
genius”. Four snippets of critics’ comments serve as teasers, repeating
the intertextual circle of reading and writing visualised in the
metapicture.
The paratext continues with a short biographical sketch of
Chatterton and four fragments, which transgress the limits between
paratextual, contextual and textual framings because some passages
turn out to be different versions of parts from the main text. These
multiple ‘beginnings’ stress the rather arbitrary boundaries of the
intermedial palimpsest. The biographical sketch remarks that the most
important sources of Chatterton’s image are fictional, namely
Wordsworth’s praise and Henry Wallis’ painting, for which Meredith
served as a model. These fragments prefigure the novel, re-framing the
biography and Wallis’ painting of Chatterton (cf. Meyer 2014, 22–24):
The first text undermines the prevalent version of Chatterton’s
‘suicide’ as a Romantic tragedy (in biographies and Wallis’ painting) by
suggesting that the ‘departed’ returned as a ‘wanderer’, faking his own
death. The text also undermines historical boundaries as it introduces
the contemporary, failed poet Charles Wych-wood as a modern
wanderer in search of his uncanny double in Chatterton, reminding the
reader of mystery or horror fiction. Ackroyd plays with shifting generic
frames in a defamiliarising way and dissolves them one by one (cf.
Caws 1985), unsettling orientation.
The second text re-frames Wallis’ painting Chatterton and its title.
The ekphrastic narrative shows how the painting is made to undermine
its effect of transparency and its “eternal moment of disclosed
presence” (Bryson 1983, 94). The title simply says Chatterton, but the
scene depicts his early death as the young poet’s claim to fame.
However, the discussion between the painter and his model about how
to simulate death makes us aware of the fact that the painter fails to
render a credible version of death. The question whether the model
will be immortalised in the painting as Meredith or Chatterton
(Ackroyd 1993 [1987], 3) increases the ambiguity of the painting and
the uncertainty of interpretations.
The third passage introduces the twentieth century author Harriet
Scrope, who plagiarises Victorian novels and serves as an ironic,
metafictional comment on Ackroyd’s postmodern palimpsest. The
fourth fragment ridicules the Romantic concept of ‘vision’. Illness
makes the modern poet Wychwood ‘see’ Chatterton. His delusion
serves as an ironic comment on the reader’s visualisation of the two
characters on the basis of a skeleton of words.
Instead of solving the mystery of Chatterton’s death, the main text
generates more versions of Chatterton’s ending, which contradict each
other or dissolve in thin air, such as the fake portrait of Chatterton. In
sum, the metareferential parapicture on the cover visualises the
intertextual process of the novel as a palimpsest, and the metapictorial
fragments undermine the reference and the presence of painting.
Ackroyd’s metapictorial text as a whole prefers unframing to framing,
possibilities of seeing and reading to recognition. Ackroyd
defamiliarises and dissolves framing (cf. Caws 1985; Wolf 2006, 2014),
and releases a play of interpretations in the poststructural, dialogic
sense (cf. Louvel 2011, 2013; Pirinen 2013).
Intermedial framing is not a one-way street, in which the text serves
as the street sign that defines the one and only direction the reader has
to follow in order to make sense of an illustration. The examples of
multiple, intermedial framings in the para-texts analysed above reveal
that the mutual interplay between texts and illustrations generate
possibilities of meaning rather than determining the recipient’s
decoding processes.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Ackroyd, Peter. Notes for a New Culture: An Essay on Modernism.
London: Vision, 1976.
Ackroyd, Peter. Chatterton. 1987. London: Penguin, 1993.
Albers, Stefanie. Verbal Visuality: The Visual Arts in Contemporary
Anglophone Fiction. Trier: wvt, 2011.
Bigliazzi, Silvia. “‘Art Work’: A. S. Byatt vs Henry Matisse, or the
Metamorphoses of Writing.” Textus: English Studies in Italy 12.1
(1999): 185–200.
Bode, Christoph. “Poststructuralist Pooh.” Proceedings Anglistentag
2000 Berlin. Ed. Jürgen Schlaeger. Trier: wvt, 2001. 343–354.
Brennan, Marcia. Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New
York School, and Post-painterly Abstraction. Cambridge: MIT Press,
2004.
Bryson, Norman. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983.
Byatt, A. S. The Matisse Stories. London: Vintage, 1994. Cover:
www.vintage-books.co.uk/books/0099472716/a-s-byatt/the-
matisse-stories. (21 Nov. 2014).
Caws, Mary Ann. Reading Frames in Modern Fiction. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1985.
Delgado, Violeta. “The Death of the Author: A Reading of Peter
Ackroyd’s Chatterton.” Epos: Revista de Filología 13 (1997): 347–
 360.
Fernandes, Isabel. “Matisse and Women: Portraits by A. S. Byatt.”
Writing and Seeing: Essays on Word and Image. Ed. Rui Carvalho
Homem and Maria de Fátima Lambert. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.
201–210.
Finney, Brian. “Peter Ackroyd, Postmodernist Play and Chatterton.”
Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 38
(1992): 240–261.
Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree.
1982. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1997a.
Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. 1987.
Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997b.
Gibson, Jeremy, and Julian Wolfreys. Peter Ackroyd: The Ludic and
Labyrinthine Text. Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 2000.
Goffmann, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of
Experience. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974.
Helmers, Marguerite. “Framing the Fine Arts Through
Rhetoric.”Defining Visual Rhetorics. Ed. Charles A. Hill and
Marguerite Helmers. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004.
63–84.
Houfe, Simon. The Dictionary of British Book Illustrators and
Caricaturists (1800–1914). Woodbridge: Antique Collector’s Club,
1981.
Jewitt, Carey, and Rumiko Oyama. “Visual Meaning: A Social Semiotic
Approach.” Handbook of Visual Analysis. Ed. Theo van Leeuwen
and Carey Jewitt. Los Angeles etc.: Sage, 2001. 134–156.
Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The
Grammar of Visual Design. London etc.: Taylor and Francis, 1996.
Louvel, Liliane. Poetics of the Iconotext. Introd. by Karen Jacobs,
Trans. Laurence Petit. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.
Louvel, Liliane. “From Intersemiotic to Intermedial Transposition:
Exchanging Image into Word/Word into Image.” Picturing the
 Language of Images. Ed. Nancy Pedri and Laurence Petit.
Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. 13–32.
Maack, Annegret. “Der Roman als ‘Echokammer’: Peter Ackroyds
Erzählstrategien.” Tales and ‘their telling difference’: Zur Theorie
und Geschichte der Narrativik. Ed. Herbert Foltinek, Wolfgang
Riehle, and Waldemar Zacharasiewicz. Heidelberg: Winter, 1993.
319–335.
Mari, Catherine. “De tableau en histoire, d’histoire en tableau: le
lecteur-spectateur dans The Matisse Stories de A. S. Byatt.”
Études britanniques contemporaines 12 (December 1997): 31–40.
Matisse, Henri. “Notes of a Painter on His Drawing, 1939.” Matisse on
Art. Revised ed. Ed. Jack D. Flam. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1995. 129–132.
Meyer, Michael. “Antonia S. Byatt’s Intermedial ‘Art Work’: The
Empire Knits Back.” Anglistik 23.2 (2012): 139–147.
Meyer, Michael. “Von visueller und multimodaler Kompetenz über
Bild/Texte.” Teaching Literature and Culture in Higher Education –
Hochschuldidaktik in den Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaften. Ed.
Wolfgang Hallet. Trier: wvt, 2013. 155–172.
Meyer, Michael. “On First Looking Into Ackroyd’s Chatterton: Framing
Pictures.” Representing Restoration, Enlightenment and
Romanticism. Ed. Anja Müller, Achim Hescher, and Anke Uebel.
Trier: wvt, 2014. 17–34.
Milne, A. A. Winnie-the-Pooh. 1926. New York etc.: Puffin, 1992.
Cover: www.penguin.com/book/winnie-the-pooh-by-a-a-
milne/9780525444435. (21 Nov. 2014).
Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Visual and Verbal
Representation. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1994.
Mitchell, W. J. T. “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture.” The
Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. London: Routledge,
22002. 86–101.

Moebius, William. “Picturebook Codes.” Children’s Literature. Ed.

Janet Maybin. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 311–319.
Nünning, Ansgar. “An Intertextual Quest for Thomas Chatterton: The
Deconstruction of the Romantic Cult of Originality and the
Paradoxes of Life-Writing in Peter Ackroyd’s Fictional
Metabiography Chatterton.” Biofictions: The Rewriting of
Romantic Lives in Contemporary Fiction and Drama. Ed. Martin
Middeke and Werner Huber. Columbia: Camden House, 1999. 27–
49.
Onega, Susanna. Peter Ackroyd. Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998.
Onega, Susanna. Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter
Ackroyd. Columbia: Camden House, 1999.
Peppin, Brigid, and Lucy Micklethwait. Dictionary of British Book
Illustrators. The Twentieth Century. London: Murray, 1983.
Petit, Laurence. “‘Truth in Framing’: Medusa’s Defeat or the Triumph
of the ‘Framed’ Self in A. S. Byatt’s ‘Medusa’s Ankles.’” Images
and Imagery: Frames, Borders, Limits: Interdisciplinary
Perspectives. Ed. Leslie Boldt-Irons, Corrado Federici, and Ernesto
Virgulti. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. 117–136.
Petit, Laurence. “Textual and Pictorial Distortions: Sublimity and
Abjection in A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Chinese Lobster.’” Études
Britanniques Contemporaines 31 (2006): 117–126.
Petit, Laurence. “Inscribing Colors and Coloring Words: A. S. Byatt’s
‘Art Work’ as a Verbal ‘Still Life.’” Critique: Studies in
Contemporary Fiction 49.4 (2008): 395–412.
Pirinen, Mikko. “Parergon, Paratext, and Title in the Context of
Visual Art.” Picturing the Language of Images. Ed. Nancy Pedri and
Laurence Petit. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.
241–250.
Rippl, Gabriele. Beschreibungs-Kunst: Zur intermedialen Poetik
angloamerikanischer Ikontexte (1880–2000). Munich: Wilhelm Fink,
2005.
Wagner, Peter. “Introduction.” Icons – Texts – Iconotexts: Essays on
Ekphrasis and Intermediality. Ed. Peter Wagner. Berlin and New
York: De Gruyter, 1996. 1–40.
Waldenfels, Bernhard. “Ordnungen des Sichtbaren.” Was ist ein Bild?
 Ed. Gottfried Boehm. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1994. 233–252.
Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction. The Theory and Practice of Self-
Conscious Fiction. London and New York: Methuen, 1984.
Wolf, Werner. “Defamiliarizing Initial Framings in Fiction.” Framing
Borders in Literature and Other Media. Ed. Werner Wolf and
Walter Bernhart. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 295–328.
Wolf, Werner, and Walter Bernhart. “Introduction: Frames, Framings
and Framing Borders in Literature and other Media.” Framing
Borders in Literature and Other Media. Ed. Werner Wolf and
Walter Bernhart. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 1–40.
Wolf, Werner. “Framings of Narrative in Literature: And the Pictorial
Arts.” Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious
Narratology. Ed. Marie Laure Ryan and Jan Noël Thon. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2014. 126–148.

5.2 Further reading

Elleström, Lars, ed. Media Borders, Multimodality and
Intermediality. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Große, Franziska. Bild-Linguistik. Grundbegriffe und Methoden der
linguistischen Bildanalyse in Text- und Diskursumgebungen.
Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011.
Hallet, Wolfgang. “The Multimodal Novel: The Integration of Modes
and Media in Novelistic Narration.” Narratology in the Age of
Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research. Ed. Roy Sommer and Sandra
Heinen. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009. 129–153.
Herman, David, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, ed. Routledge
Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Rajewsky, Irina O. Intermedialität. Tübingen: Francke, 2002.
Peter Wagner

20 The Nineteenth-century
Illustrated Novel
Abstract: In this contribution to the handbook, I pursue two aims. In
the first part, I begin by examining the problematic nature of three
terms related to my subject and to whose nascency and growing
importance I contributed in several previous studies (Wagner 1995,
1996, 2006). In the second part, I will focus on illustrated Victorian
English fiction, and more precisely on one of the best-known English
novels, Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. The novel will provide a case
study of how text and image function together, albeit not necessarily in
complementary ways, in the genre of the novel. In order to avoid
generalisations about the subtle, intermedial play at work in Oliver
Twist, I will limit my discussion to one particular aspect, the
construction of Fagin the Jew in text and image, as both media draw
on a great variety of verbal and visual representations.
Key Terms: Illustration, illustrated novel, iconotext, Dickens, anti-
Semitic stereotypes

1 Terminology: Iconotext – Intermediality –

Illustration
Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist can be considered as both iconotext and
an example of intermediality. By iconotext (cf. Wagner 2006) I mean
the use of an image in a text or vice versa, by way of reference or
allusion, in an explicit or implicit way (for case studies, cf. Wagner
1995 and 2013). Since the novel contains engravings by George
Cruikshank, we are faced with an iconotext that juxtaposes both verbal
and visual representation. The term iconotext for such constructs was
coined by Michael Nerlich, then adopted by Alain Montandon, and
later applied in critical literature by Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, Klaus
Discherl, and myself, among others (Wagner 1996, 15). In my own
studies, for example of the graphic art of William Hogarth or the
allusion to paintings in fiction, I have extended the notion of iconotext
both chronologically and semantically. Chronologically, in that I want
to see the term applied to examples not exclusively from the twentieth
century (as Nerlich and Montandon do when they discuss collages and
montages). Hogarth’s prints, for instance, urge the reader to make
sense with both verbal and iconic signs in one artefact (cf. various
articles on this eighteenth-century artist listed in Wagner 2013b, 25–
28). In this sense, they can be compared to the traditional emblems of
the Renaissance ( 3 Text-Picture Relationships in the Early Modern
Period), a classical example of iconotexts which are, however, pre-
determined in that the reader was expected to recognise and accept
commonplace assumptions. Hogarth’s graphic art, however, also
subverts and burlesques this tradition.
I have extended the term iconotext semantically by applying it not
only to works that really show the interpenetration of words and
images in a concrete sense, but also to such art works in which one
medium is only implied, for example in the reference to a painting in a
fictional text. Unlike “iconicism”, a term introduced by Richard
Wendorf (1990, 19–20) to designate iconic biography and iconic
portraits in a descriptive system that maintains the separation between
spatial and temporal forms, iconotext refers to a representation10 in
which the verbal and visual signs mingle to produce a rhetoric unified
system of signification that depends on the co-presence of words and
images. W. J. T. Mitchell refers to such works as imagetexts,
distinguishing between such composite works and “image / text” as a
problematic gap, cleavage, or rupture in representation, and “image-
text” as designating relations between the visual and verbal (1994, 89).
It seems to me that iconote xt, in the sense defined above, is a less
cumbersome term we can apply to pictures showing words or writing,
but also to texts that work with images (cf., for instance, Ette 1996 and
Wagner 1992). In the case of Oliver Twi st, discussed below, we have
an example that, at first glance, seems easier to handle because the text
is accompanied by “real” images.
The second term I need to (re)address before starting off my analysis
of the text-image relation in Dickens’ novel is intermediality. Although
repeatedly defined and applied to various iconotexts since the mid-
1990s (cf., for instance, the entry on the term in Nünning 2013), it
remains a contested and important umbrella term that includes
intertextuality. Norman Bryson, surely one of the most influential
critics in the field, has raised the question whether – from an
intertextual point of view inspired by Barthes and Derrida – images
can be “read” like texts. While conceding that there is mobile
intertextuality in the realm of the image too, he claims that visual art
works, unlike texts, “possess embodiment”, a concept that in his view
deconstructs the opposition between matter and information and
which finally accounts for the fact that paintings offer a resistance to
intertextuality (1988, 187 and 92). Helpful as this essay may be, it is
mistaken in assuming an essential difference between texts and images
in their semantic and rhetorical relations in the intertextual field. With
Mitchell, I hold that “there is, semantically speaking (that is, in the
pragmatics of communication, symbolic behaviour, expression,
signification) no essential difference between texts and images”
(Mitchell 1994, 161). Since images, like texts, are rhetorical and must
use signs to express meaning (signs that are verbal, iconic or both at
the same time), they can be studied as intertextual artefacts.
After the pioneering studies of the 1990s by Norman Bryson, Mieke
Bal, James Heffernan, W. J. T. Mitchell and others, literary scholars
have become less reluctant to work in what had previously been
considered alien territory, the borderland between literature and art,
or rather a new field that encompasses both literary and art historical
studies. In the twenty-first century, intermedial studies may not
exactly be the rage in all English departments, yet it is good to see
younger scholars taking the intermedial nature of iconotexts as a given
fact. As attested by recent introductions to the subject matter (in
addition to this Handbook of Intermediality, Helbig 1998, 2009 and
Robert 2014 are examples), a new field of studies – intermediality –
has come into its own.
Finally, a word about illustration as a term that, at first glance,
seems to be quite obvious, especially in the case when a text (Dickens’
novel, for instance) is accompanied by pictures relating to this text.
However, as J. Hillis Miller (1992) has shown in a brilliant analysis of
what illustration entails, we should be aware of the fact that a visual
representation also distorts, obscures and mis-represents the text it
allegedly clarifies and ‘explains.’ This is so because, to begin with, the
‘excess’ of the image – that which cannot be or is not expressed in
words – always changes the denotative context and range of the textual
meaning. Furthermore, a verbal representation cannot be translated as
it were into a visual counterpart without a loss or partial alteration of
meaning. In a series of detailed studies from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
to obscene French texts from the revolutionary period, I have
demonstrated what this means when we read an illustrated text (cf.
Wagner 1995). The following discussion of Oliver Twist may also serve
as a case study of the problematic of illustration in literary texts.

2 Victorian Illustration

2.1 The Victorian Literary Market

As John Harvey has demonstrated in his discussion of Victorian
novelists and their illustrators, Victorians relished illustrated fiction
(cf. Harvey 1970). Fired by an ever-growing readership (especially
women) and the proliferation of journals and magazines, a thriving
cultural-literary industry provided the ground for best-selling novels
both in volume form and in serialisation. From the very beginning of
the century, literary magazines shot up like mushrooms, each decade
seeing new ventures, with quite a few surviving even beyond the death
of Queen Victoria in 1901: The Edinburgh Review (1802–1900), The
Examiner (1808–1866), Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1870–
1980), The Westminster Review (1824–1914), Athenaeum (1828–
1921), and Frazer’s Magazine (1830–1882) are just a few with a longer
run (for a longer list with the titles of serialised novels cf. Vonn 1985).
Novelists sensed immediately that the serialised form was often a way
to literary and financial success. From Sir Walter Scott’s romantic-
historical Waverley novels at the beginning of the century to Thomas
Hardy’s naturalistic fiction in the 1880s and 1890s, many writers had
their fiction published in magazines. Scott even went the other way
round in the 1830s – after first publishing Waverley in book form
(1814), he had it serialised with much success. Half a century later,
Thomas Hardy had a keen eye both on the British and American
markets for serialised fiction. His The Mayor of Casterbridge first
appeared in Harper’s Weekly between 2 January and 15 May 1886. For
The Woodlanders, Hardy negotiated with several American magazines
for the sale of American rights. The novel then saw the light of day in
Macmillan’s Magazine and in Harper’s Bazar in 1887. The publication
history of Hardy’s outstanding Tess of the D’Urbervilles is even more
interesting. Originally, Hardy intended to contract for the serialisation
of Tess by Tillotson & Son, but the manuscript was rejected on the
grounds of its allegedly offensive morality; after the novelist grudgingly
carried out some corrections, the novel was made available in a
bowdlerised form in Graphic between 4 July and 26 December 1891.
Quite a few of these works were also illustrated. In this respect,
Charles Dickens was no exception. Like most of the major and minor
novelists of his time, Dickens collaborated with artists, using eighteen
original illustrators of whom Hablot K. Browne (cf. Patten 1999a, 58–
63), who called himself “Phiz” (for physiognomy), and George
Cruikshank are the most significant and certainly the best known
(Stein 2001, 168). For a long time in the twentieth century, the
illustrations of Dickens’ fiction were left out and ignored in reprints
and paperback editions, even by university presses. This began to
change in the 1980s; however, even contemporary critical editions,
though acknowledging the importance of the visual part of Dickens’
work, only pay lip service to the iconotextual nature of Oliver Twist
and other novels from his pen. Thus the Oxford edition of Oliver Twist
consulted for this article contains an appendix discussing the relevance
of Cruikshank’s etchings (cf. Dickens 1999, 443–445), but the
reproductions of the plates are of a very poor quality, with the captions
providing no information whatsoever about the origin of the
illustrations. Cruikshank illustrated only two of Dickens’ works –
Sketches by Boz and Oliver Twist. One may assume that the enormous
success of Oliver Twist was due in part to its visual elements.

2.2 Stereotypes of ‘the Jew’: Charles Dickens’

Oliver Twist
Like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Charles
Dickens’ immensely popular novel Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s
Progress is deeply embedded in the mentalities of English-speaking
countries. First issued in twenty-four monthly parts in Bentley’s
Miscellany between 1837 and 183911 with images from the period’s
best-known illustrator, George Cruikshank, the novel was in its third
edition by 1841.12 Its continuing appeal is proven by further reprints,
dramatisations, the 1948 film directed by David Lean, and by Lionel
Bart’s musical of 1960. Even at the time of its serial publication, the
popularity of the novel was already substantial. Thus Patten notes that
although Dickens had only reached the midpoint of his novel in May
1838, “C.Z. Barnett staged a production of Oliver at the Pavilion
Theatre on 21 May 1838”, one of the visual highlights being the
dramatic presentation of Cruikshank’s plate “The Burglary” as a
tableau (Patten 1996, 93). Hence Oliver Twist is not only a classic but
also an example of popular fiction that “has passed into the common
stock of fable in the English language” (Gill 1999, vii). It is precisely
because this middlebrow novel has been so influential that its
utilisation of stereotypes deserves more of our attention – for Dickens’
fiction, together with Cruikshank’s illustrations, both absorbed and
sustained ideologies that constructed what might be called the
Victorian mind. One of these is definitely racist, concerning as it does
the alleged nature of the “Jew” in England.
In Chapter VIII of the novel, Oliver makes the acquaintance of John
Dawkins, alias The Artful Dodger, who then introduces him to the boss
of the gang of thieves for whom Dawkins works. This introduction of
the Jew, Fagin (tellingly, his first name is never mentioned nor is he
ever called ‘Mr’), sets the anti-Semitic tone of the novel:
The walls and ceiling of the room were perfectly black, with age and dirt. There was a deal
table before the fire: upon which were a candle, stuck in a ginger-ale bottle: two or three
pewter pots: a loaf and butter: and a plate. In a frying-pan, which was on the fire, and
which was secured to the mantelshelf by a string, some sausages were cooking; and
standing there over them, with a toasting-fork in his hand, was a very old shrivelled Jew,
whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair.
He was dressed in a greasy flannel gown, with his throat bare; and seemed to be dividing
his attention between the frying pan and a clothes-horse, over which a great number of
silk handkerchiefs were hanging. (Dickens 1999, 60–63)

Oliver’s introduction to “the merry old gentleman” (Dickens 1999, 63),

a nineteenth-century coinage for the devil, is highlighted in the novel
by George Cruikshank’s illustration with the caption, “Oliver
introduced to the respectable Old Gentleman” (fig. 1).
Fig. 1: George Cruikshank, “Oliver Introduced to the Respectable Old Gentleman.” Etching.
From Oliver Twist (1837–1839). Bentley’s Miscellany. Repr. in the Oxford University Press
edition.
Dickens 1999, 62.

Having thus outlined Fagin’s repulsive physical features as well as

suggested that he is a bad Jew who will eat pork sausages, Dickens, in
the following chapter, immediately continues the verbal construction
of the Jew’s character. Assuming Oliver to be asleep, Fagin opens a
small box he had hidden away and takes from it a “magnificent gold
watch, sparkling with jewels” (Dickens 1999, 64):
‘Aha!’ said the Jew: shrugging up his shoulders: and distorting every feature with a
hideous grin. ‘Clever dogs! Clever dogs! Staunch to the last! Never told the old parson
where they were. Never peached upon old Fagin! And why should they? It wouldn’t have
loosed the knot: or kept the drop up, a minute longer. No, no, no! Fine fellows! Fine
fellows!’
 […] At least half a dozen more were severally drawn forth form
the same box, and surveyed with equal pleasure; besides rings,
brooches, bracelets, and other jewellery: of such magnificent
materials, and costly workmanship, that Oliver had no idea, even
of their names.
Having replaced these trinkets, the Jew […] muttered, ‘What a
fine thing capital punishment is! Dead men never repent; dead
men never bring awkward stories to light. Ah, it’s a fine thing for
the trade! Five of ’em strung up in a row; and none left to play
booty, or turn white-livered!’ (Dickens 1999, 64–65)
This depiction of Fagin in word and image clearly appeals to the
readers’ knowledge of representations of the Devil, as Fagin sports
flaming hair, a beard, and the trident (on representations of the devil
cf. Link 2003). Not only is the Jew physically repulsive, he conforms to
the popular image of the greedy miser and fence ready at any time to
sacrifice the members of his gang by delivering them into the hands of
the authorities. It must suffice to quote one final passage in this
context that complements the construction of the nature of the Jew as
racially alien, satanic and even non-human. In Chapter XIX, Fagin
steps out into the streets of London’s Spitalfields:
The mud lay thick upon the stones: a black mist hung over the streets […] and everything
felt cold and clammy to the touch. It seemed just the night when it befitted such a being as
the Jew, to be abroad. As he glided stealthily along, creeping beneath the shelter of the
walls and doorways, the hideous old man seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered
in the slime and darkness through which he moved: crawling forth, by night, in search of
some rich offal for a meal. (Dickens 1999, 147)

From the very beginning, the heterodiegetic narrator manipulates the

reader’s view of Fagin. This is achieved, on the one hand, by the
selection of a range of negative adjectives connoting dirt, offal and
decay, and images from the world of predatory animals. On the other
hand, the narrator also introduces Fieldingesque irony when we are
made to share Oliver’s initial mistaken view of the criminal fence as a
“gentleman” when he is clearly not a “respectable old man”. Thus,
narrative perspective, style and irony contribute to the creation of a
non-human character.
Cruikshank’s images further add to the establishing of a reptilian
Other outside the human sphere; they do so not by complementing the
text but through illustration in the sense discussed by J. Hillis Miller
(1992): The pictures put the spotlight on slightly different physical
features of the Jew while leaving some created by the text in the dark.
Thus the engraving entitled “Oliver’s Reception by Fagin and the Boys”
in Chapter XVI sketches a figure without a neck, the head shaped like
that of a rapacious bird and the hands resembling claws (fig. 2).

Fig. 2: George Cruikshank, “Oliver’s Reception by Fagin.” Etching. From Oliver Twist (1837–
1839). Bentley’s Miscellany (November 1837).
Copyright Peter Wagner.

Similarly, the creature crouching on a chair in “The Jew & Morris

Bolter Begin to Understand Each Other” (illustration for Chapter XLII)
suggests a vulture rather than a human being (fig. 3).
Fig. 3: George Cruikshank, “The Jew and Morris Bolter Begin to Understand Each Other.”
Etching. From Oliver Twist (1837–1839). Bentley’s Miscellany. Repr. in the Oxford University
Press edition.
Dickens 1999, 343.

It would be erroneous to assume that the young Dickens, though

already on his way to celebrity as a popular novelist, was the inventor
of such stereotypes marking the Jew as a villainous, repulsive old man,
a reptile and bird of prey, a non-Christian who, at the end of the novel,
even refuses the religious solace offered to him by rabbis (on Dickens’
use of cultural stereotypes cf. Rosenberg 1960, 116–137). If the
construction of the Jew in Oliver Twist occurred in an era and a
literary tradition “which was predominantly anti-Semitic” (Stone, qtd.
in Gill 1999, xxi) and if “Fagin’s Jewishness is part and parcel of his
wickedness” (Gill 1999, xxiii), we must turn to the discourses that
established the stereotype of the Jew as scapegoat. Both Dickens and
Cruikshank (as we shall see) drew on verbal and visual representations
reaching back to the Newgate novel, to Medieval morality plays and to
popular visual satire (Hogarth, for instance) – in other words, on
popular representations Dickens could allude to in order to confirm
the prejudices of his middlebrow audience. But at the same time, we
must also identify the socio-economic reasons behind these discourses,
because the superstructure of Victorian society was imbued with a
racist ideology establishing the Englishman as superman at the cost of
the Other (e.g. the African, the Jew). As an author, Dickens had a great
variety of discourses at his disposition – and when he used them it was
almost exclusively to solidify a construction of the Jew that satisfied
prevailing Victorian expectations.
I will demonstrate the absorption of age-old stereotypes in Oliver
Twist (with the intention of excluding Jews from the public sphere of
bourgeois Victorian England) with a brief look at Hogarth. Both
Cruikshank and Dickens greatly admired the Augustan engraver and
painter. Dickens referred to him in the preface to the third edition of
Oliver Twist, mentioning his realistic street scenes. It was Hogarth’s
naturalistic realism and rough humour as well as the ‘modern moral
subjects’ of the artist’s serial works (e.g. A Harlot’s Progress, 1732; A
Rake’s Progress, 1735; cf. Wagner 2008) that inspired Dickens in spirit
and ironical approach – even to the point of giving Oliver Twist a sub-
title (The Parish Boy’s Progress) that reminds one of Bunyan and
Hogarth simultaneously.13 William Hogarth (1697–1764) was certainly
the greatest English visual satirist of the Enlightenment period. The
marginal figures in his engravings are perhaps as fascinating as the
heroes and heroines at the centre of the serial works. Indeed,
Hogarth’s renderings of the Other(s) in the London of his day and age,
the non-English characters (Africans, the French, Jews) can be read on
several levels (cf. Wagner 2009, 65–90), from the realistic to the
metaphorical. Hogarth’s Jews are at times assimilated citizens, such as
the rapacious merchant in plate 2 of A Harlot’s Progress (1732), whose
claw-like hands might have inspired Cruikshank for his Fagin; or they
are outsiders like the pedlar in the second plate of the series Four
Prints of an Election (1755–1758; fig. 4 and fig. 5):

Fig. 4: William Hogarth, A Harlot’s Progress. Plate 2. Etching and engraving (1732).
Copyright Peter Wagner.
Fig. 5: William Hogarth, Four Prints of an Election. Plate 2. “Canvassing for Votes”. Etching
and engraving. Fifth State. Engraved by Grignion (1757).
Copyright Peter Wagner.

The shape of the head of this figure was clearly a model for
Cruikshank.14 Hogarth’s implicit anti-Semitism is perhaps most
obvious in one of his last engravings, Credulity, Superstition, and
Fanaticism: A Medley (1762; fig. 6).
Fig. 6: William Hogarth, Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism: A Medley. Etching and
engraving. Third State (1762). Copyright Peter Wagner.

Among the crowd gone mad with religious fanaticism, we see an

allegedly converted Jew to the left: He kills lice (an ironic hint at his
former faith) and by his book he keeps a knife inscribed “Bloody”,
which belies his conversion as does the chapter shown in the book, the
intended sacrifice of Isaac in the Old Testament.15
Hogarth’s representations of Jews, then, despite their ironical
dimensions, also support the stereotypes that had been circulating in
English society at least since the Renaissance. Like Shakespeare’s
Shylock, Jews are depicted as greedy and interested in money only,
they are potential killers and a danger to English society. Whence these
ideas which Dickens and Cruikshank were keen to adopt from Hogarth
and other predecessors (cf. Patten 1996 on Hogarth’s influence on
Cruikshank and Dickens)? Patten notes that for their representations
of low life, Dickens and his illustrator
shared a vocabulary for conceptualizing and expressing that culture. The graphic
components derived from Hogarth, Netherlandish genre painting, Bosch, Breughel, Hans
Holbein’s Dance of Death, eighteenth-century English book illustration, and caricature.
The literary conventions derived from Don Quixote and the classic English novel and from
virtually the whole range of theatre, Astley’s and pantomime to Shakespeare and Jonson.
(Patten 1996, 44)

We must remember that Oliver Twist, at its conception, was

embedded in and continually alludes to a variety of discourses
encompassing the verbal, dramatic and visual: Dickens drew on his
“boyhood reading in eighteenth-century picaresque narrative” (David
2001, 9), the chapter-titles of Oliver Twist betraying a direct influence
of Fielding and Smollett, but also on conventions of the gothic, the
Newgate novel (of which Oliver is given an example to read by Fagin),
and on what Curtis calls “the visual market” (Curtis 1995, 213). In
addition, Dickens had his own critical axe to grind, for Oliver Twist is
– apart from being a melodramatic adventure story – also a critique of
the New Poor Law of 1834 (see Appendix 3 in Dickens 1999, 451–454)
and the catastrophic conditions in the work houses. The construction
of Fagin, in other words, must also be seen in the context of Dickens’
reaction to socio-economic discourses, above all Benthamite
Utilitarianism. K. J. Fielding has argued convincingly that Oliver Twist
“is not just about crime but about right and wrong […] it is against
[the] rationalistic Utilitarianism of its particular time (the 1830s), as
shown in Jeremy Bentham’s Deontology (1834)” (Fielding 1987, 50).
Fagin’s characterisation as a villain and, implicitly, even as a pederast
(Wills 1989), occurs within Dickens’ critique of capitalistic selfishness
as championed by Bentham – hence Fagin’s insistence on taking “care
of number one – meaning yourself” (Dickens 1999, 349; cf. Fielding
1987, 51).
 Another historical-economic discourse inspiring the construction of
Fagin may be seen in the legal prohibitions which, in England as well
as in Europe at large, prevented Jews from exercising a great range of
professions – excepting trade and money-lending. The cliché of the
greedy Jew arose in this context and has survived for many centuries.16
Dickens’ description of “the pleasant old gentleman” (i.e. Fagin) as a
greedy hoarder of stolen jewellery in Chapter IX (64–65, quoted
above) is firmly set in this tradition and, in fact, encourages the reader
to nod approvingly at a racist representation.
Politically, the Jews were deliberately kept outside the public
(democratic) sphere. It is telling that a mid-eighteenth-century
attempt in England to naturalise individual Jews with the “Jew Bill” of
1753 met with violent reactions, abetted by intensive propaganda, that
led to the immediate repealing of the act as City merchants in
particular united with Tory politicians.17
Such widely shared fears of “potential circumcisers of English
manhood” and the outlawing of “the eating of pork in England”
(Paulson 1993, 167) found additional support in popular Victorian
visual discourse. The rise of a new, partly racist, anthropology was the
result of the “Victorians’ desire to taxonomically classify the world with
a scientific precision joined with a widespread belief in physiognomic
analysis and phrenology to make the face itself a text” (Curtis 1995,
214). Cruikshank’s vision of “the Jew” as “Mephistophelean tempter of
Christians” is thus far from unique and may have spilled over into
Henry Mayhew’s classic series London Labour and the London Poor,
which he began to publish in 1849 and which also featured Jews as
members of the underclass. Baumgarten is of the opinion that
Mayhew’s visual representations were not racist at all, arguing that
“when he includes Jews as members of the criminal underworld [he]
does not use a stereotyped caricature of a Jew” (Baumgarten 1996, 48);
but the illustration he reproduces (49) belies this attempt to exculpate
a journalist who neither could nor wanted to stand outside the popular
mentality in the way Joseph Conrad did a few decades later (cf.
Conrad’s ironical critique of Victorian phrenology in his Heart of
Darkness, 112, first published in 1899). It is Dickens’ giving in to the
racist discourses produced by the dominating zeitgeist of his time18
that ultimately makes Oliver Twist a middlebrow novel – unlike
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness which questions such discourses.
It is precisely because such anti-Semitic ideological forces and
prejudices unite in Oliver Twist that Fagin must be hanged at the end
of the book. As John Sutherland notes, Fagin has trained boys in
pickpocketing and worked as a fence; he has been an accessory before
and after the crime of house-breaking; he has connived with Monks to
deprive Oliver of his inheritance; and he has verbally provoked Sikes to
kill Nancy. But Fagin has committed no capital crime that would
deserve hanging:
Fagin richly deserves punishing: but a longish term of imprisonment or a term of
transportation (such as his original, Ikey Solomon, received in 1831) would seem a
condign sentence. ‘What right have they to butcher me?’ he plaintively asks his jailer. It is
a good question. (Sutherland 2000, 55)

Not least because the so-called Bloody Code, “by which fences might
conceivably be hanged for handling stolen goods, was – since Peel’s
1828 reforms – a thing of the past” (Sutherland 2000, 54). If we
discover a rush to execute Fagin and an unwarranted knowledge of the
crowd that the criminal will be hanged on Monday “before the judge
has put on his black cap and pronounced sentence” (Sutherland 2000,
54), it is because the novel operates with, and appeals to, the strongest
Victorian anti-Semitic prejudices. Fagin is presented to us
as old, ugly, racially alien, and is monotonously associated with dirt, grease, and physical
uncleanliness. [We] want the world to be rid of him. The reader is […] prejudiced by
Dickens’s rhetoric. He knew what he was doing. In his various revisions of the scene of
Fagin in the cell, Dickens judiciously interchanged ‘Fagin’ and ‘Jew’, so that the loaded
word echoes most effectively in the reader’s ear. (Sutherland 2000, 59)

In the course of an anti-Semitic and vastly overdone poetic justice that

horrifies young readers of the novel to this very day, Fagin’s allegedly
“natural” character is established as that of a reptilian vermin, an
immoral Jew who is a corruptor of boys and a potential pederast.
Fagin, “we are made to feel, is the unclean denizen of an unclean lair”,
and it is indeed almost unthinkable that Fagin should not come to any
other end than the rope (Sutherland 2000, 60).
As a nod to the dominant anti-Semitic feelings of the time, Dickens
produced a pen-ultimate chapter with the number LII (“The Jew’s Last
Night Alive”) which, powerfully illustrated by Cruikshank’s equally
gothic engraving (fig. 7), engenders the emotional dynamics of the
narrative by confronting good and evil.
Fig. 7: George Cruikshank, “Fagin in the Condemned Cell.” Etching. From Oliver Twist
(1837–1839). Bentley’s Miscellany (November 1838).
Copyright Peter Wagner.

The excessive style, and the intensity of emotion conveyed here, can be
explained less in terms of the tradition of the Newgate novel and
melodramatic crime fiction than as the just killing of what the text
terms “a snared beast” (Dickens 1999, 434):
He cowered down upon his stone bed, and thought of the past. He had been wounded with
some missiles from the crowd on the day of his capture, and his head was bandaged with a
linen cloth. His red hair hung down upon his bloodless face; his beard was torn, and
twisted into knots; his eyes shone with a terrible light; his unwashed flesh crackled with
 the fever that burnt him up. […]

The condemned criminal was seated on his bed, rocking himself

from side to side, with a countenance more like that of a snared
beast than the face of a man. (Dickens 1999, 430–434)
Half mad, Fagin, imagining himself back in his old trade, orders
Billy Sykes to kill Oliver: “Saw his head off!” (Dickens 1999, 434), a
command one would by now expect from a creature whom the text has
completely dehumanised.
It is true that Dickens, a few decades later, began to regret this
outright racist characterisation. Reprimanded by an eminent English
Jewish couple for his portrayal of the diabolical Fagin, he even went as
far as creating “the gentle, innocent Mr. Riah and some other
sympathetic Jewish characters in Our Mutual Friend (1865)” in order
to make amends (Brantlinger 2001, 151), and even eliminated “a great
many references to Fagin as ‘The Jew’” in the 1867 edition of Oliver
Twist (Gill 1999, xxi; cf. also Stone 1959). But even in the toned-down
versions, Fagin’s Jewishness places him outside English society, so
much so that “for Oliver to claim his rightful place in society Fagin
must die” (Baumgarten 1996, 45). In addition, even if Dickens slightly
altered his text, Cruikshank’s equally perturbing illustrations always
remained part of what might be termed a true Victorian iconotext. If
these images are “not an optional decoration to the novel but a vital
part of the experience offered by the whole art-work Oliver Twist”, we
need to read Cruikshank’s etchings as carefully as the text (Gill 1999,
44–45).

2.3 The Dickens-Cruikshank Collaboration

The collaboration between Dickens and his illustrator was not an
entirely satisfying experience. “An artist of Cruikshank’s stature did
not expect to be enslaved to words; Dickens, though still a novice, did
not expect to be upstaged by images” (Gill 1999, 443) and resented
such ambiguous praise as the Spectator’s characterisation of him as
the “Cruikshank of writers” (Cohen 1980, 20). They were equally
egotistical and stubborn, but the collaboration on Oliver Twist finally
worked out with just one dispute over the final illustrations in the first
edition of the novel in book form (on the collaboration between
Dickens and Cruikshank cf. Patten 1996, vol. 2, 50–94). In their
struggle for creative authority, Dickens was of the firm opinion, not
only that words could be transposed into images without loss or
change of meaning, but also that “control belongs to the writer, that
the ‘project’ is his property” (Stein 2001, 169). But despite Dickens’
unprecedented authority and detailed letters of instruction to
Cruikshank, the artist managed to carve out a terrain for his own work.
In fact, it is now generally agreed that Cruikshank “originated some of
the characters and situations of Oliver Twist” (Stein 2001, 168) and
was “instrumental […] in pushing the movement of the novel’s plot
towards low-life London” (Gill 1999, 444). Patten discusses
Cruikshank’s (partly justified) claim to creative authority in detail
(1996, 53–54), arguing that “the artist’s influence materially affected
the course of the novel” (56). The ‘excess’19 of Cruikshank’s visual
representations has been discussed by some critics, Stein noting, for
instance, that in the illustration entitled “Oliver’s Reception by Fagin
and the Boys” (fig. 2), the artist’s “touch is in gestures and expressions”
with a pervasive darkness, producing two special effects that heighten
the dramatic effect of the scene and might have influenced Dickens in
his planning of the plot (Stein 2001, 171–172).
As far as Cruikshank’s utilisation of anti-Semitic stereotypes is
concerned, it is worthwhile focusing in more detail on two etchings he
produced for the novel. The first is the one illustrating an incident in
Chapter XXXIV, an eerie occurrence and a “very difficult scene (to
illustrate) in which Oliver, between waking and sleeping, incorporates
external events into his visions” as Fagin and Monks observe the boy
drowsing and then escape (Patten 1996, 78–79; fig. 8).
Fig. 8: George Cruikshank, “Monks and the Jew.” Etching. From Oliver Twist (1837–1839).
Bentley’s Miscellany (June 1838). Copyright Peter Wagner.

Providing no details of Fagin’s physical appearance, the text gives free

range to Cruikshank’s imagination. To achieve his intended effect of
danger and gothic terror, the artist worked with distortions of size to
“image a psyche’s subconscious sense of its vulnerability” (Patten 1996,
79) while simultaneously appealing to the reader’s knowledge of
stereotypes of ‘the Jew’. The visual rendering of Fagin again underlines
a repulsive physiognomy (his unkempt appearance is stressed by his
hair and beard) while also suggesting notions of dangerous animals:
the hooked nose connotes, among other ideas, a bird of prey, and the
staring eyes and the fingers clutching a stick make one think of a
reptile lurking for its victim.
 My second example is considered “the most celebrated etching
Cruikshank ever made and among the most famous book illustrations
of all time” (Patten 1996, 88–89). Much as the text of Chapter LII
reduces Fagin to the state of non-human vermin (a creature that must
be killed because it is dangerous for society), Cruikshank’s
complementary plate (fig. 7) can be seen as a last step to eliminate
Fagin’s human side. Rather than illustrating the text, which Dickens
insisted on in his quarrels with Cruikshank, it tries to capture in one
picture what had been said about the Jew’s animal-like nature – for
example in Chapter XLVII where Fagin is described as “crouching […]
wrapped in an old worn coverlet […] his right hand raised to his lips
[…] he bit his long black nails, he disclosed among his toothless gums a
few such fangs as should have been a dog’s or rat’s” (Dickens 1999,
377–378). It is perhaps telling that Cruikshank was somewhat
obsessed by Jewish fences, as Patten notes (1996, 89), and that he took
“aspects of Fagin’s last appearance from his own posture” and “spying
his own image in a cheval glass” (89–90, 91; cf. fig. 9).20
Fig. 9: George Cruikshank, “George Cruikshank Frightening from His Presence Those
Unacquainted with Him.” Wood-engraving by J. Thompson (May 1841). From George
Cruikshank’s Omnibus.
Copyright Peter Wagner.
What makes the illustration so immeasurably powerful, however, is not only the
physiognomy of the figure but also its evocation of Fagin’s psychic terror, communicated
on the one hand through all the elements of pose, gesture, and facial expression – derived
as much from theatrical and graphic conventions as from naturalistic mimesis – and on
the other through the poetry of light, texture, and space configured by the unyielding,
blotchy stone walls, arched roof, doubly barred window, and bare furnishings. (Patten
1996, 91)

Dickens’ friend and first biographer, John Forster, did not like the
illustration, but his verbal description of Fagin as a “tail-less baboon”
(Patten 1996, 92) only confirms contemporary popular ideas.
Cruikshank’s illustration reinforces these by suggesting that what we
see is not a human being but a rat caught in a cage and about to be
killed.
So what ultimately survives of the “nature” of the Jew in Oliver
Twist is an iconotextual construction that is tremendously disturbing
and, it seems, influential. Borrowed from verbal, visual and dramatic
representations, its foundational stereotypes resurfaced in the
twentieth century in the visual political propaganda of European
Fascism. They culminated in such Nazi films as Veit Harlan’s Jud süß
(1940), political pornography which, as we all know, prepared the
ground for the killing of real people in Treblinka and Auschwitz.
* * * * *
A true iconotext combining word and image in a juxtaposition that is
more intriguing than a first glance unveils, Dickens’ Oliver Twist, then,
draws on verbal and visual representations available to the writer and
his illustrator. As this chapter demonstrates, it would be wrong to
separate the verbal from the visual as if they were separate entities of
their own. What they have in common is the borrowing from various
forms of cultural representations that ultimately fed the construction
of cultural stereotypes, prejudices, and generally held ideas. Dickens
did not limit himself to the literary tradition, nor did Cruikshank work
exclusively in a visual realm. Both artist and writer tapped into the
cultural unconscious of their age precisely by drawing on literature and
art simultaneously. This is the raison d’être of intermedial studies
which, if aptly applied to illustrated Victorian narrative fiction, can lay
bare not only the interaction between word and image, but also their
common ground in the area of representation.

3 Bibliography

3.1 Works Cited

Bal, Mieke. Reading ‘Rembrandt’: Beyond the Word-Image
Opposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Baumgarten, Murray. “Seeing Double: Jews in the Fiction of S. Scott
Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot.”
Between ‘Race’ and Culture: Representations of ‘the Jew’ in
English and American Literature. Ed. Bryan Cheyette. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1996. 44–61.
Brantlinger, Patrick. “Race and the Victorian Novel.” The Cambridge
Companion to the Victorian Novel. Ed. Deirdre David. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001. 149–168.
Bryson, Norman. “Intertextuality and Visual Poetics.” Style 22.2
(1988): 183–193.
Bryson, Norman, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, eds. Visual
Theory: Painting and Interpretation. Cambridge: Polity Press,
1991.
Cohen, Jane R. Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980.
Conrad, Joseph. “Heart of Darkness.” 1899. Heart of Darkness and
Other Tales. Ed. Cedric Watts. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002. 101–188.
Curtis, Gerard. “Dickens in the Visual Market.” Literature in the
Marketplace: Nineteenth-century British Publishing and Reading
Practices. Ed. John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995. 213–249.
David, Deirdre. “Introduction.” The Victorian Novel. Ed. Deirdre
David. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 1–16.
Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and
Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. [French
original La vérité en peinture, 1978].
Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress. 1837–
1839. Ed. Kathleen Tillotson, with an introduction and notes by
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Endelman, Todd M. The Jews of Georgian England 1714–1820:
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Fielding, K. J. “Benthamite Utiliatarianism and Oliver Twist: A Novel
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Helbig, Jörg, ed. Intermedialität: Theorie und Praxis eines
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Dickens Studies Annual 2 (1972): 98–118.
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Wagner, Peter. “Swift’s Great Palimpsest. Intertextuality and Travel
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Wagner, Peter. Reading Iconotexts: From Swift to the French
Revolution. London: Reaktion Books, 1995.
Wagner, Peter. “Nachwort.” Lesen ist wie Sehen: Intermediale Zitate
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Wagner, Peter. “Hogarth’s Modern Moral Subjects.” The History of
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Yale Center for British Art, 2008.
Wagner, Peter. “Hogarth and the Other.” Word and Image in Colonial
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Wagner, Peter. “Repräsentation.” Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und
Kulturtheorie. Ed. Ansgar Nünning. Stuttgart: Metzler, 52013a. 649–
650.
Wagner, Peter. “William Hogarth als Apokalyptiker – eine
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Schiefer Ferrari, Peter Wagner, and Christoph Zuschlag. Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, 2013b. 25–35.
Wagner, Peter, ed. Icons – Texts – Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and
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Wagner, Peter, ed. William Hogarth: Das Graphische Werk. Ein
kommentierter Auswahlkatalog. Trier: wvt, 2013c.
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 Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
Wills, Gary. “Love in the Lower Depths.” The New York Review of
Books. 26 Oct. 1989. 60–67.

3.2 Further Reading

Brake, Laurel, and Marysa Demoor, eds. The Lure of Illustration in
the Nineteenth Century: Picture and Press. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009.
Brazell, Derek, and Jo Davies. Understanding Illustration. London:
Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2014.
Goldman, Paul, and Simon Cooke, eds. Reading Victorian Illustration
1855–1875. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.
Hodnett, Edward. Five Centuries of English Book Illustration.
Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1988.
Katz, Bill, ed. A History of Book Illustration: 29 Points of View.
Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1994.
Johanna Hartmann

21 Intermedial Encounters in the

Contemporary North American
Novel
Abstract: Both contemporary American and Canadian literature show
a shift towards the representation of concrete life realities. This
manifests itself in the subjectivized description of the individual’s life-
world. This phenomenon manifests itself in literary texts in forms of
intermedial narration. In the first part of this article I will outline the
importance of the visual paradigm in contemporary North American
literature before analyzing four American and two Canadian novels.
The readings of these six novels suggest that intermedial narration as
integration of various forms of images in contemporary prose
literature serves to represent individual as well as collective crises by
reconnecting incomprehensible events to the embodied experience of
single individuals. This shift to life can be interpreted as characteristic
of a contemporary, post-postmodernist literature that employs –
especially in its intermedial dimension – neo-realistic modes of
narration that are, however, determined by the postmodernist insights
into the contingency and contiguity of experience.
Key Terms: Intermedial narration, literary visuality, image, word
and image, ekphrasis

1 The Visual Paradigm

The renewed focus on phenomena related to the visual sense in
literature, which Gabriele Rippl calls the “visual paradigm” (Rippl
2005, 12, translation mine), is paralleled with an increasing academic
interest in the visual constitution of our culture. The proclamations of
various ‘turns’ – an “imagic turn” (Fellmann 2000), an “iconic turn”
(Boehm 1994), and a “pictorial turn” (Mitchell 1994, 16) – imply a shift
from language to predominantly visual forms of signification. The
latest “pictorial turn” is however just one in a history of various
pictorial turns – a “trope” that signifies a “shift towards the pictorial”
(Mitchell 2009, 320, translation mine) and marks a radical change in
visual practices. The development of new forms of seeing, however, has
always called for a reevaluation of systems of signification and the
repositioning of the relationships between them. This fundamentally
concerns the relationship between word and image, each of which is
considered a way to access oneself and the world (cf. Rippl 2005, 31–
35).
These developments have led to a wave of interdisciplinary research
in literary studies that is concerned with the analysis and theorization
of phenomena related to visuality. This includes the analysis of
phenomena like the gaze between characters, intermedial references,
strategies that relate to media that are predominantly perceived via the
visual sense, ekphrasis as the description of visual art, and
combinations of texts and images, to name just a few (cf., e.g., Rippl
2005; Drügh 2006; Eykmann 2003; Horlacher 1998). Jay David Bolter
observes a “breakout of the visual in contemporary prose and
multimedia” which he claims “is a denial of ekphrasis. Popular prose
and multimedia are striving for the natural sign in the realm of the
visual rather than through heightened verbal expression” (Bolter 1996,
265). Indeed, literary culture as we know it undergoes radical
transformations that can be interpreted as reactions to changes in our
contemporary culture resulting from technological inventions, the
digital revolution that has resulted in a proliferation of images in our
lives, and an increasing global interconnectedness. However, Bolter’s
prediction that literature would progressively transform itself and
become more visual in the form of combinations of text and images has
to be at least partially revised. An analysis of contemporary American
and Canadian literature requires a more differentiated evaluation of
varied forms of intermedial narration. Rippl suggests that
“[c]ontemporary texts convincingly demonstrate that instead of simply
proclaiming the death of the verbal and the victory of the pictorial or
visual, today the verbal ought to be carefully questioned about its
collaboration, interaction and competition with the visual and vice
versa” (Rippl 2010, 49–50). In a similar vein, Schmitz-Emans even
claims that, since Modernism, literature has proven to be especially
“sensitive toward the suggestive power of visual structures and
strategies of representation” (Schmitz-Emans 2008, 20, translation
mine). The ubiquity of images spurs and fuels the literary imagination
and the emergence of literary practices in ways that allow for an
evaluation of the role of intermedial narration as an integral part of
contemporary narratives in American and Canadian prose literature.
In the following, I will first outline a model of contemporary
intermedial narration and then analyze concrete examples by the
contemporary American authors Siri Hustvedt, Don DeLillo, Jonathan
Safran Foer, and Richard Powers, and two examples of Canadian
literature: Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, and Jane Urquhart’s The
Underpainter.

2 Conceptualizing Intermedial Narration

Since the 1980s American literature displays a seeming return of
realistic modes of writing that is reminiscent of literature at the turn of
the century. However, in contrast to nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century realistic prose literature, the resurgence of this new form of
writing, which can be labeled ‘post-postmodernist,’ or ‘neo-realist,’
reconnects to and emerges from earlier literary traditions. Therefore,
this new form of realistic writing should not be mistaken for a regress
into the late nineteenth century as it is “disconnected from its own
metaphysics, epistemology, and claims of representation” (Claviez
2004, 11). Various “discoveries” (Klepper 2011, 6–7) and developments
in the sciences, humanities, and philosophical thinking during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries have resulted in a “metaphysical
skepticism of postmodernism” (Claviez 2004, 11) that paradoxically
results in realistic modes of narration in order to represent in a new
way the “postmodern celebration of fragmented selves and multiple
worlds, […] involv[ing] deeper problems of isolation, rootlessness and
emotional displacement” (Zapf 2007, 143). Contemporary fiction is
thus again taking a more pragmatic stance in order to explore the
contemporary conditio humana. This “merg[ing of] postmodernism
[…] with new forms of realist writing about American everyday life” is
evaluated by Hornung as “renaissance of storytelling” (Hornung 2010,
305, translation mine). Similarly, Zapf diagnoses a “shift from text to
life” (Zapf 2008, 171) that can be interpreted as a reaction to
postmodernism, which, as Mitchell pointed out, can
lead […] to a perception of the mise en abime, a nauseating void of signifiers in which a
nihilistic abandonment to free play and arbitrary will seems the only appropriate strategy.
Or it can lead to a sense that our signs, and thus the world, are a product of human action
and understanding, that although our modes of knowledge and representation may be
‘arbitrary’ and ‘conventional,’ they are the constituents of the forms of life, the practices
and traditions within we must make epistemological, ethical, and political choices.
(Mitchell 1984, 519–520)

Literary visuality in the contemporary novel has to be understood and

evaluated in this context that coincides with various turns that
announce the shift towards the visual. Despite the poststructuralist
insight into the “fickle nature of the sign” (Wagner 1996, 7), the
individual’s acting and interacting in the world can and must happen
based on information gleaned from the individual’s lived reality. In
contemporary literature this manifests itself in strategies of
subjectivization that draw on the characters’ individual embodied
experience and a heightened contestation with her material
surrounding, thereby simultaneously acknowledging and subverting
postmodernist insights into the “indeterminacy and impossibility to
determine both reality and the subject,” the “fluid boundary between
reality and fiction” (Hornung 2010, 328–329) and, in a nutshell, the
postmodernist principles of uncertainty and contingency. In order to
categorize intermedial narration in the contemporary North American
novel I would like to combine Rippl’s models of the forms of
intermediality with Mitchell’s taxonomic definitions of different forms
of images. Following Rippl, three forms of intermedial relationships in
literature can be differentiated. In the first case, both image and text
are present at the same time, as in literary texts that include prints of
photographs or paintings; in the second case “text and image may be
simultaneously present and actually form a unit,” as in e.g. concrete
poetry; and in the third case one (absent) medium is “evoked” by a
present medium (Rippl 2010, 42–43), as in ekphrastic or pictorialist
descriptions, the former in a very general sense meaning the literary
description of visual art and the latter concept meaning the
aestheticized description of images that are not considered art
(Heffernan 2004, 3–4).
Although the question of how to define an image is still under
dispute, Mitchell subcategorizes different forms of images. He
laconically remarks that “we still do not know exactly what pictures
are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on observers
and on the world, how their history is to be understood, and what is to
be done with or about them” (Mitchell 1994, 13). However, both Scholz
and Rippl make us aware that the question of what an image is cannot
be answered unless the question itself is replaced with a more refined
and contextualized set of interpretative guidelines (Scholz 2004, 14–
16; Rippl 2005, 17–18). Mitchell subcategorizes the “family of images”
into “graphic” (pictures, statues, designs), “optical” (mirrors,
projections), “perceptual” (sense data, “species,” appearances),
“mental” (dreams, memories, ideas, fantasmata), and “verbal”
(metaphors, descriptions, writing) images in order to grasp “the
incredible variety of things that go by this name” (Mitchell 1984, 503–
507; cf. fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Synopsis from “What Is an Image?”

Mitchell 1984, 505.

As a principle of categorization, he looks at their medial concretization

and the various academic disciplines that are particularly interested in
one or the other category. However, he also makes us aware that a
clear-cut differentiation between various forms of imagery is
impossible and also that all images are only accessible through the
perceptional process of an individual person (cf. Mitchell 1984, 504–
506). The latter refers to the idea that the concreteness we ascribe to
graphic and optical images is illusory: “Real, proper images have more
in common with their bastard children than they might like to admit.”
(cf. Mitchell 1984, 507) Scholz, in a similar vein, claims that images
necessarily depend on some form of activity, be it in the form of
producing, understanding, or using them for a certain purpose (cf.
Scholz 2004, 140). Belting also insists on the fact that “[i]mages are
neither on the wall (or on the screen) nor in the head alone. They do
not exist by themselves, but they happen; they take place whether they
are moving images […] or not. They happen via transmission and
perception” (Belting 2005, 302–303). This ties in with the
phenomenological recognition of the central importance of acts of
consciousness as they relate to the respective phenomena (cf.
Thompson and Zahavi 2007, 67). Although Mitchell’s differentiation is
useful, various modifications seem necessary in order for it to suffice
for the analysis of intermedial narration in contemporary prose
literature that wants to take seriously semiotic and medial implications
that are inherent in the crossing of medial boundaries (cf. Wolf 2008,
327–328). Firstly, as Mitchell himself notes, the delineation between
the established categories is rather difficult to draw, particularly in the
case of perceptual and mental images. Furthermore, Rippl suggests
that a model of the year 1984 should be complemented by forms of
images that came into existence since then, e.g. images that are
produced by new computer technologies. She furthermore points out
the problems intrinsic to the undifferentiated category of “graphic
images” that include two-dimensional works of art (e.g. paintings) as
well as three-dimensional art (e.g. sculptures) (Rippl 2005, 18–19).
These forms differ significantly in terms of the conditions of
production, the experience they provide, and in possibilities of literary
description. I would supplement Rippl’s suggestions with dynamic,
that is, moving forms of images (e.g. video art) ( 14 Filmic Modes in
Literature; 28 Contemporary British Theatre and Intermediality;
29 Intermediality and Performance Art). Moreover, the reproach of a
lack of differentiation also holds for the classes ‘mental images’ and
‘perceptual images’ that comprise a variety of phenomena. These are
the result of different acts of consciousness, e.g. thinking, imagining,
seeing, remembering, (Thompson and Zahavi 2007, 67–68; cf. also
Zahavi 2012, 100–104), a notion which is only indirectly addressed by
Mitchell when he juxtaposes graphic images as “proper” forms of
images – understood in a literal sense – with verbal images as
“improper,” using the word “image” in a metaphorical sense (Mitchell
1984, 506–507). Furthermore, he differentiates between “image” and
“picture,” “[a]n image [being] what appears in a picture, and what
survives its destruction – in memory, in narrative, and in copies and
traces in other media” (Mitchell 2008, 16).
In contemporary literature we can observe a return to an extremely
subjectivized form of narration that deals with the concrete visual
experience of individual characters. This results in a form of what can
be called ‘phenomenologically refocused form of intermedial narration’
in which images are drawn on and integrated in ways that are
intricately connected to the describing individual and his acts of
consciousness. On the one hand, this can be interpreted as a strategy of
authentication that is however subverted by the simultaneously staged
fallibility, contingency and contiguity of acts of seeing, remembering
and imagining. Defining intermedial narration as a form of narration
that transgresses medial boundaries in the act of description but at the
same time distances itself from description as the seemingly more
objective form of literary narration, the analysis of the narrative
situation and focalizations is central for contemporary narratives. I
would like to suggest that in contemporary narratives in which a turn
towards the visual can be observed, the embodied experience of the
single individuals has to be at the center of the literary analysis (cf.
Hartmann 2015; Stemmler 2008, 49–52). The representation of visual
perception of various forms of images is highly subjective, resulting
both in shifting aesthetics of the texts but also in a metaphorization of
the unreliability of processes of perception and memory. As such, it is
not surprising that contemporary literature has been described as
“phenomenologically refocused realism” that “is motivated in part by
the evolutions of postmodernity itself” (Den Tandt 2005, 75–76). The
resulting subjectivized aesthetic in contemporary North American
literature can be evaluated as “epistemopoetics” (Malinowski 2013,
127, translation mine) – an aesthetics that entails epistemological
insights and in turn is illuminating concerning the contemporary
episteme. This emerging form of writing is insightful concerning an
evaluation of the changed aesthetics of the contemporary novel but
also results in changed prerequisites of a potential reading experience.

3 Case Studies

3.1 Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved (2003) and

Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007)
In the following I will look first at the implementation of the visual
paradigm in individual novels of American and Canadian literature.
Siri Hustvedt’s novels are centrally determined by subjectivized forms
of literary description. Central to her work is the aestheticized staging
of processes of perception of various forms of images, but moreover
the staging of processes of transformation and translation between
semiotic systems that result from the description of visual experiences.
Literary descriptions in her works are never an end in themselves but
are crucially connected to the thematic dimensions of her novels.
Moreover, descriptions of visual art serve as a structuring principle
and centrally determine the aesthetics of her works. The above
mentioned subjectivized dimension of literary descriptions in her
novels manifests itself in her work not only in changing interpretations
of (predominantly fictional) works of art but also in the integration of
phenomena of visual impairments. These described characteristics can
be observed in all of Hustvedt’s works in changing ways.21 Here I want
to refer to her fifth novel, What I Loved (2003), which serves as an
instructive case in point. What I Loved is the first novel in which the
acts of looking at art and describing aesthetic experiences become the
novel’s central themes, and at the same time function as a poetological
and structuring principle which is not least due to the fact that the
novel is set in the New York art scene between the 1970s and the year
2000.
What I Loved is a Künstlerroman, which draws on elements of the
psychological thriller and can also be classified as fictional
autobiography as it is told by the autodiegetic narrator Leo Hertzberg,
an almost blind art historian who, at the end of his life, reflects on – as
the title suggests – what he loved in his life: his wife Erica who leaves
for the West Coast after the death of their son Matt, his closest friend
and visual artist Bill Wechsler, and Bill’s second wife Violet Blom with
whom Leo falls in love. The visual works of art by Bill Wechsler –
mainly multi-partite installations, painting series, or collages – are
meticulously described by Leo Hertzberg whose narrative is structured
by Bill’s various art cycles. Moreover, the subjective descriptions
function as a device to characterize single characters and their
relationships to each other. In the novel, intermedial narration that
manifests itself in the form of literary descriptions is further
complemented by the integration and juxtaposition to academic
discourses on phenomenology, perception, consciousness, and the
embodied experience of human beings. In this respect the novel stages,
articulates, and eventually deconstructs the tensions between body and
mind, life and art, the conscious and the unconscious, memory and
forgetting, and is in this way able to retain the tensional relationship
between the postmodernist skepticism in the construction of meaning
but at the same time shows a pragmatic stance towards concrete
contemporary life realities. Zapf, for example, appraises What I Loved
as narrative that constitutes a space for the representation and
negotiation of ethical issues which need “some kind of transindividual
and intersubjective perspective, a more beyond the self-referential
aporias of language towards an involvement of texts in questions of
‘life’” and as a “complex and highly self-reflexive narrative process
characterized by the double dynamics of connectivity and alterity, of
dialogicity and difference, of familiarity and strangeness” (Zapf 2008,
173–174). Leo Hertzberg’s macular degeneration is introduced in the
act of describing a painting that constitutes the opening of the novel
and thus sets the melancholic tone for the entire narrative: “My
pictures of the past are still vivid. It’s the present that’s been affected,
and those people who were in my past and whom I still see have turned
into beings blotted by clouds.” (Hustvedt 2003, 19). His impaired
vision also becomes a metaphor for his impaired, distorted, and
unreliable memory. This aspect of narration is complemented by other
metaphorizations of the narrative perspective that also touch on the
notion of the literary representation of staged processes of memory
and forgetting in visual terms which contradict Leo’s statement. The
limitation of the narrator’s vision becomes a metaphor for his
perspectivized view on the world. However, this
perspectivism does not imply an epistemological solipsism that sees the external world as
a mere construct of the perceiving and understanding self; it rather emphasizes how the
subject position involves a partial, limited and even distorted view of the world and one’s
self. (Zapf 2008, 177)

Whereas Hustvedt’s What I Loved centrally evolves around fictive and

historical works of art, Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man (2007) draws
on a different set of aesthetically determinant images that centrally
deals with the attacks of 9/11. Falling Man juxtaposes the literary
description of the iconic photograph The Falling Man by Richard Drew
with various media, namely: video footage of the second plane crashing
into the South Tower of the World Trade Center; the performance art
of the fictive artist David Janiak, who under the alias “Falling Man,”
reenacts Drew’s photograph; and still lifes by Morandi. In these
various intermedial descriptions stillness and movement, existence
and destruction, life and death, fragmentation and wholeness are
transformed into aesthetic strategies that bear specifics of these images
and explore the interrelations and interdependences of individual and
collective, psychological, and physiological traumas and in this way
become forms of intermedial narration.
Through intermedial framing and individualized experience, the
novel as a depragmatized form of narration functions as a counterforce
that demythologizes and criticizes the dominant media discourse and
stands in contrast to the susceptibility to manipulation and
ideologization of visual representations in non-fictionalized media.
Beuthner e.g. states that “the power of media images has made 9/11
not only an indelible apocalypse in the minds. As a matter of fact, the
ephemeral catastrophe was visually recorded and locked in” (Beuthner
2003, 11, translation mine). Like Hustvedt’s novel, Falling Man
contains no representations of actual images. However, intermedial
narration is realized in various aesthetic strategies that transfer
specifics of visual imagery into the narratological realm and so results
in a subjectivized form of intermedial narration that relies on the
singular perspective of individual characters. The novel’s protagonists,
Keith Neudecker, a survivor of 9/11, Lianne, his wife, and their son
Justin have all experienced the attacks in various ways: Keith has
managed to escape from the WTC before it collapsed, Lianne has seen
the attacks on television, and their son has been informed about the
attacks by friends. All characters are traumatized by their experiences.
Keith begins an affair with a fellow survivor and eventually becomes a
professional poker player, Lianne engages in the compulsive behavior
of watching the television footage of the attacks over and over again,
and their son Justin creates the myth of “Bill Lawton” (a mishearing of
“Bin Laden”). Photographer Richard Drew shot the iconic image
referred to by the title of DeLillo’s novel. It records the fall of one
unidentified victim whose posture suggests in its straightness and
bearing a certain dignity during his last seconds alive (Weichert 2008,
686–687; Janzing 2008, 694–696). In Falling Man, the linked
concepts of the body as means to memorize trauma (DiPrete 2006, 10–
11) and the use of media techniques are simultaneously staged as
aesthetic strategies. The photograph The Falling Man shows a man
that is situated almost exactly between the darker North Tower and the
lighter South Tower, and, to this vertical contrast, the color of his
clothing introduces a horizontal contrast into the picture. As the
background consists only of vertical lines and no other landmark, he
appears to be static in front of an upward moving background. On the
one hand, the photograph The Falling Man is transferred into
horizontal and vertical movements and counterpointing moments of
stillness in the form of a narrative strategy within the text. On the
other hand, the imagery is taken up in the performance art of David
Janiak, an artist who jumps from various places in New York in the
posture of the falling person in Drew’s picture.
The novel opens with Keith Neudecker walking north, away from the
WTC:
He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past […].
They ran and fell, some of them, confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around
them, and there were people taking shelter under cars. […] Things inside were distant and
still, where he was supposed to be. It happened everywhere around him, a car half buried
in debris, windows smashed and noises coming out, radio voices scratching at the
wreckage. (DeLillo 2009, 3–4)

Keith has just escaped the North Tower and is walking north,
seemingly oblivious to the danger of the situation. He is still in a state
of shock, which is narratologically staged as relative stillness within a
collective horizontal movement. The people around him run for their
lives, overtake him, and so stand in analogy to the simultaneity of
moving background and static protagonist in Drew’s picture. This
stillness becomes paradigmatic for Keith’s life after the attacks. The
integration of Drew’s photograph in the form of an aestheticized
strategy is juxtaposed with the descriptions of the performances by
David Janiak, who jumps down from various sites all over New York
and so reenacts the above described photograph. He is dressed in black
and white like the man in Richard Drew’s picture and during his
performance remains fully erect with his arms pressed to his side and
one of his legs bent. His performance art can be interpreted as
dangling sculpture as his downward movement is brought to an abrupt
and violent halt. The reenactment of The Falling Man reproduces,
comments on and simultaneously subverts the coverage by the media
industry. “He brought it back, of course, those stark moments in the
burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump” (DeLillo
2009, 40–41). These images, on the one hand the photograph The
Falling Man but on the other hand the performance art by David
Janiak, are juxtaposed and contrasted with still lifes by Morandi, and
TV footage of the attacks. Footage broadcast on television plays a
decisive role in Falling Man as it initiates traumas but also becomes a
trigger for the renewed experience of trauma. Lianne watches the same
video tape over and over again, mimics TV mechanisms, and at the
same time follows her trauma-induced compulsion to repeatedly
expose herself to the television images and thus relive her traumatic
experiences. Kaplan interprets these media images as “part of the
traumatic symptom already evident in the media’s constant repetition
of the Towers being struck. Given trauma’s peculiar visuality as a
psychic disorder, this event seemed to feed trauma by being so highly
visual in its happening” (Kaplan 2005, 13).
The world that has vanished is still present not only in medial but
also in artistic imagery. Giorgio Morandi’s still lifes, all named Natura
Morta, are recurring motifs within the novel. One character sees the
twin towers in the bottles depicted in one of the still lifes: “I’m looking
at these objects, kitchen objects but removed from the kitchen, free of
the kitchen, the house, everything practical and functioning […] I keep
seeing the towers in the still life.” (DeLillo 2009, 61) Lianne joins him
in looking at the pictures and adopts Martin’s perception of the
painting:
Two of the smaller items were dark and somber, with smoky marks and smudges, and one
of them was partly concealed by a long-necked bottle. The bottle was a bottle, white. The
two dark objects, too obscure to name, were things that Martin was referring to. […] She
saw what he saw. She saw the towers. (DeLillo 2009, 62)

Lianne inserts the skyline of New York into the composition of the still
life and through the interpretation of the bottles as towers the former
world becomes alive again. Yet the novel also presents a contradicting
perception in the response by Lianne’s mother: “These shapes are not
translatable to modern towers, twin towers. It’s work that rejects that
kind of extension or projection. It takes you inward, down and in.
That’s what I see there, half buried, something deeper than things or
shapes of things” (DeLillo 2009, 139). Through the intermedial
narration of various forms of images, DeLillo’s novel itself becomes a
place for the collective negotiating of the aftereffects of 9/11. It
includes the representation of trauma which is banned from
mainstream media coverage that “translate[d] [the initial sense of
shock and incomprehensibility] into new moral-ideological purpose
and aggressive self-assertion” (Zapf 2011, 163). The novel thus
functions as a counterforce to the official political and media
discourses in which individual or collective traumatizations are absent.

3.2 Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud &

Incredibly Close (2006) and Richard
Powers’s Three Farmers on Their Way to a
Dance (1992)
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close can also be
called an example of post-9/11 literature. The plot can be summarized
as the protagonist Oskar Shell’s search for a lock that fits a key he
thinks his father, a victim of 9/11, has left for him. In this novel the
three forms of intermedial narration that were differentiated above are
all present. In opposition to the preceding texts, this novel displays a
large number of photographs (especially a photograph of a falling
man), notes, letters, drawings, and typographic arrangements in which
word and image are simultaneously present. Intermedial narration is
juxtaposed with inserted photographs in order to stage the possibilities
and limitations of processes of narrativization as conventionalized
strategy to install meaning into incomprehensible events that ruptured
the characters’ continuity of experiences. Foer himself explains his use
of intermedial strategies with the concrete experience of the 9/11
attacks:
I […] think using images makes sense for this particular book […] because September 11
was the most visually documented event in human history. When we think of those
events, we remember certain images – planes going into the buildings, people falling, the
towers collapsing. That’s how we experience it; that’s how we remember it. And I want to
be true to that experience. (Mudge 2005, par. 7)

Oskar Shell magnifies images of falling victims just to realize the

futility of his endeavor to identify his father in them: “I started
thinking about the pixels in the image of the falling body, and how the
closer you looked, the less you could see” (Foer 2009, 193). Inserted
into the novels are various stills of falling victims in reversed order, so
that a quick flicking through results in the dynamized upwards
movement of the figure, analogous to a flip-book. This upward
movement epitomizes Oskar’s wish for a reversal in time that would
miraculously resurrect his father. Interspersed images in the novel are
interrelated with the narrative in ways that stage the discontinuity of
experience and the futility of installing meaning into eventually
incomprehensible events. Oskar Shell and his grandfather document
their lives by taking photographs that doubly serve as a strategy to
authenticate their experiences but and to preserve their memory. The
novel draws on these images that interrelate text and image but at the
same serve to stage dissociated and fragmented forms of the traumatic
experience of the attacks of 9/11.
A further example of intermedial narration in contemporary
American literature that draws on photography is Richard Powers’s
first novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1992). The
eponymous photograph by the German photographer August Sander is
the novel’s central symbol, the driving force of the three strands of plot
that are set in 1914 as well as the 1980s, but also the source of
inspiration for the novel itself. The narrator in one of the
contemporary strands of plot encounters Sander’s photograph in the
Detroit Institute of Arts and develops an obsession with it, its
producer, and the depicted men that are on the way to a dance
presumably briefly before the outbreak of World War I. The narrator’s
obsession is complemented by the strand of plot that is set in Germany
in 1914 and tells of the imagined circumstances of production. The
third strand of plot evolves around a young computer specialist and
journalist whose quest to relocate a young woman results in an
encounter with Sander’s photograph. Intermedial narration is realized
by the evocation of various forms of images. However, in all editions of
the novel August Sander’s photograph is printed on the front side of
the cover and thus interconnects the paratextual dimension of the text
with the intradiegetic level of the novel. In Powers’s novel, the narrator
recognizes in the photograph “a great discovery, caught, by talent and
chance, an image of great importance, and that no one would have
rescued that moment from obscurity if he had not arrested it on film”
(Powers 1992, 37). For him it captures the sentiment of the early
twentieth century that is marked by an unfounded optimism that leads
into the catastrophe of World War I. This atmosphere is juxtaposed
with the thematization of Henry Ford’s biography and the setting of
Detroit, which has become a symbol for economic decline. The
cultural-critical dimension of the novel already becomes apparent in
the first chapter. The narrator visits the Detroit Institute of Arts where
he encounters Diego Rivera’s murals, which deeply disturb him. The
“[s]trings of interchangeable human forms [that] stroked the assembly
line – a sinuous, almost functional machine – stamping, welding, and
finally producing the finished product – an auto engine” (Powers 1992,
14) epitomize the functionalization of both man and machine, and the
shared sentiment of “Detroit and Diego […]: both were in love with
machines” (Powers 1992, 13), a sentiment that stands in juxtaposition
to the cultural-critical dimension of Rivera’s murals that anticipate the
city’s decline. The intermedial narration of Rivera’s murals is
determined by the narrator’s embodied experience whose emotional
response and sensualized description of the depicted factory symbolize
his own life-situation, combining nervous agitation with a paralyzing
death-in-life situation.
These examples of contemporary American prose literature draw on
a wide variety of images to negotiate and explore individual, societal
and collective stages of traumatization which are centrally achieved by
the narration of the subjectivized and embodied experience of various
forms of images.

3.3 Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye (1988) and

Jane Urquhart The Underpainter (1997)
Canadian literature has developed under similar but also very different
conditions. Canada’s vastness, bilingualism, lack of an ethnic and
cultural center, regionalism, and complex history of colonialization
and state formation that “hovers between the national and the
postnational […] with an affinity towards postmodernism” (Rosenthal
2005, 235, 238, translation mine) make it impossible to give a
comprehensive overview. The following exemplary analyses of the
novels Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood and The Underpainter by Jane
Urquhart will shed light on intermedial narration in contemporary
Canadian literature that is rooted in a Canadian tradition of the
Bildungsroman and Künstlerroman (cf. Kuester 2005, 244). In
contrast to American literature, the question of a genuine Canadian
character of Canadian literature has been resolved only recently. In
contradistinction to the ‘American Renaissance’ of the mid-nineteenth
century, a “Canadian Renaissance” can be located only in the 1950s
(Kuester 2005, 242).22 It has been observed that Canadian literature is
defined by its distinct multicultural character, the “experience of
immigration and cultural pluralism” as a prevalent theme of Canadian
literature, and the striking number of female writers (Groß et al. 2005,
vii, translation mine). From a theoretical point of view, Northrop Frye
was especially influential in interconnecting the national character of
Canadian literature with a set of images, themes, and symbols, a
practice that has, in the form of “thematic criticism,” become a
tradition of literary interpretation and scholarship (Groß 2005, 234).
Visuality in Canadian literature can be observed in various
dimensions that are closely connected to and result from the
specificities of various forms of theoretical approaches but also the
specific contexts in which Canadian literature has evolved. Also, the
obsession of Canadian literature with spatiality that results from the
vastness of the country and the contested and problematic concept of
borders, which is inherently visual, is a dimension in which the visual
becomes concrete in Canadian prose literature (cf. Sarkowsky 2007).
In the following I will analyze Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye and Urquhart’s
novel The Underpainter as novels that are rooted in the Canadian
Künstlerroman, but which also show the post-postmodernist turn
towards the intermedial narrativization of the individual and
embodied experience of individual characters.
The work of Margaret Atwood, one of the most noted contemporary
Canadian authors, is characterized by its diversity in thematic scope
and genre, Atwood being a writer of long and short prose fiction but
also a poet. Next to her fictional work she has centrally determined the
scholarly and public discussion on Canadian literature (cf. Atwood
2004 [1972]). The visual dimension in both her prose works and her
poems seems not least connected to her work as a painter and
photographer. Both her writing and her visual art can be interpreted as
interacting forces that Wilson describes as “gothic, super real, or
distorted in the direction of surrealism” (Wilson 1988, 208). Within
the scope of this chapter, we will focus on her novel Cat’s Eye as a
prime example for intermedial narration in her works. The novel
focuses on the visual artist Elaine Risley, who, in the form of a fictional
autobiography, tries to find a coherent narrative for her life. The
narrative covers the span of approximately 50 years from the 1930s to
the 1980s, and closes in a final retrospective exhibition in which her
works are shown. The fictional self-narrative is structured along the
production of her various pieces of art, her early works and five later
and larger pieces of art. The description of her art is juxtaposed with,
and at times contradicts, her narrative. This allows for a doubled vision
of her life which epitomizes her struggle for self-definition, the
inevitable contingency of memory, and the fallibility of a reconstructed
self-narrative. The resulting staged multiplicity and variability of self-
narratives – present in the narrative and the autobiographically
inspired works of art – is complemented with the retrospective
exhibition in the last part of the novel. This exhibition constitutes an
authoritative external position that is realized both visually and
verbally. On the one hand, the exhibition has been arranged without
consulting her; on the other hand, the exhibition is accompanied with
interpretations that are included in a catalogue that accompanies the
exhibition. As a result, she takes the stance of a detached visitor who
attempts to find her work in the exhibition and the descriptive and
interpretative catalogue entries. The search for her identity and her
coming to terms with an at times hurtful past are the central themes of
the novel. In the descriptions of her works the reader can detect
objects that belong to certain situations in her life and which she has
integrated into her work by transforming them into fictionalized forms
of visual art. The autobiographical dimension of her work acquires
over the course of the novel an imaginary dimension: “Until now I’ve
always painted things that were actually there, in front of me. Now I
begin to paint things that aren’t there” (Atwood 1988, 353). To
visualize the present becomes apparent, and is epitomized in the
ekphrastic description of Brueghel’s The Fall of Icarus, which Atwood
has integrated into her work Picoseconds. In this work she processes
the felt abandonment by her parents. In contrast to this personal
dimension, the catalogue describes it as “‘reconstruct[ing] their vision
of landscape in the light of contemporary experiment and postmodern
pastiche.’ […] This landscape takes up much of the painting. In the
lower right-hand corner […] my parents are making lunch” (Atwood
1988, 427–428). The integration of “iconic-looking symbols” however
“call[s] into question the reality of landscape and figures alike”
(Atwood 1988, 428). The motif of falling is then taken up in Elaine
Risley’s artwork Falling Women which shows three women (in the
novel three women attempt to commit suicide, among them Elaine
herself) and in the work Half Wing, an attempt to immortalize her
brother Stephen who was killed and thrown out of a plane by hijackers.
The eponymous cat’s eye is her personal talisman, a blue marble,
which eventually turns into a trigger of past memories that appear like
a vision in front of Elaine’s eyes. After having forgotten about it, she
finds it in the cellar in an old purse: “Something rattles. I open it up
and take out my blue cat’s eye […] I look into it and see my life entire.”
(Atwood 1988, 418) In the shimmering surface of the cat’s eye she can
see herself. Cat’s Eye is therefore also the title of her self-portrait.
However, the fact that through public exhibitions her works are
available for processes of appropriation and interpretation by others
results in feelings of disempowerment: “I can no longer control these
paintings or tell them what to mean. Whatever energy they have came
out of me. I’m what’s left over.” (Atwood 1988, 431) The simultaneity
of perspectives that are integrated into each of Elaine Risley’s art
works undergo changes in interpretation with every new act of
perception, and, expanded by the multi-layeredness of the narrative,
results in a narrative that combines the postmodernist insight about
the futility of the attempt to install meaning into a life, but at the same
time shows a concrete turn towards life. In this respect, Cat’s Eye can
be compared to Hustvedt’s What I Loved (see above).
Jane Urquhart’s novel The Underpainter also focuses on the oeuvre
of an individual artist – Austin Fraser. Underpainting is an aesthetic
technique which implies the application of various layers of color onto
a canvas with the result that the underlying structures and motifs can
no longer be recognized as they are overlaid by the surface that has
been applied last. In The Underpainter, the technique of
underpainting can be interpreted as central symbol but also as a
poetological principle of the text. The palimpsestic structures of the
paintings as well as the narrative can be interpreted as a surface that
simultaneously contains, but also conceals, the underlying dimensions.
In this respect the described technique of painting allows for a
characterization of the novel’s protagonist who is unable to develop
emotional feelings for the people in his life. Like Hustvedt’s What I
Loved, the novel is narrated in retrospect by the lonely, 83 year-old
protagonist. The novel opens with Austin Fraser visually imagining
how his lover and model Sara leaves the house on Lake Superior in
order to come to him at Port Arthur, several decades prior to the time
of narration. This opening chapter is followed by an account of his
learning of her. He resolves to paint her applying the technique of
underpainting:
Tomorrow I will begin the underpainting for my next picture. I will paint Sara, the
inherited house, the fist of Thunder Cape on the horizon, the frozen lake, her hands, the
Quebec heater, the slowly fading fires. I will paint the small-paned window, the log walls,
a curtain illuminated from behind by winter sun, the skein of grey I never saw in Sara’s
hair. Then carefully, painstakingly, I will remove the realism from it, paint it all out.
(Urquhart 1997, 15)

This passage encapsulates the following narrative about the time they
spent together and how he eventually abandons her, which is
manifested in the process of painting her and then erasing at least her
visual appearance on the canvas. The narrator’s inability to
emotionally relate to others is epitomized in his act of seeing others
which takes the form of an intermedial, subjectivized narration: “[…]
Sarah became a series of forms on a flat surface, her body a
composition adapting to a rectangle, her skin and hair gradients of
tone. […] [W]hen the work was finished, I lost sight of her completely.”
(Urquhart 1997, 96) When he is looking at his own sketches of Sara
and is unable to recall her face, only his paintings of her:
I could no longer picture these things [the details of her face] with my inner eye […]. But if
I could picture them, I could only see the way I had painted them; the ice-white dot in the
middle of the pupil, how this alone makes the eye alive, various pale flesh tones, rose and
beige, and the yellow ochre of her hair. (Urquhart 1997, 101)

His underpainting series that focus on his life and the people
surrounding him is consequentially termed The Erasures by critics in
an attempt to describe the act of deletion when concealing the
palimpsestic structure of the painting with a final, opaque layer.
However, having realized at the end of his life that his emotional
distance is the reason for both his felt imperfection of his work and his
unfulfilled life, he resolves to paint a visual autobiography without the
final concealing layer. This last descriptive passage that constitutes the
ending of the novel can be termed projective ekphrasis, as he describes
the pictures he will paint: “[…] Sara’s skin glowing in the yellow light
emanating from a thousand autumn birch leaves. Then I will paint
myself with the love I could not accept coming towards me […]. […]
And when it is finished […] I may look at the images there, from time
to time.” (Urquhart 1997, 340) The archeological principle of
interpretation that is provoked by the described strategy of
underpainting results in a reading process that is akin of excavating
deeper layers of a self-narrative, which ties in with the description of
the imagined realistic painting which the protagonist, in his other art,
tried to cover.

4 Conclusion
Intermedial narration is a characteristic of contemporary North
American literature that allows for the observation of a “renaissance of
storytelling,” (Hornung 2010, 361) a term that refers to a shift to the
literary representation of the concrete life realities of individual human
beings and American everyday life. The narrativized integration of
images, paintings, and works of art as a strategy to evoke visuality
cannot be separated from the attempt to install meaning into
incomprehensible events that hallmark the traumata of the twentieth
century – among them World War I and World War II, the Holocaust,
and 9/11. Drawing on these events in the form of subjectivized,
intermedial forms of narration that are inherently determined by the
embodied experience of individual human beings allows for a
topicalization of these events, but also represents the impossibility of
narration. In a more general sense, intermedial narration in
contemporary literature can be thought as the narrative attempt to
describe the contemporary conditio humana that is marked by a
certain rootlessness, fragility, and insecurity, without losing itself in an
endless chain of signification. The interrelation between life and art
especially seems to achieve the at least momentary possibility to open
up spaces for ethical contemplations and epistemological dimensions
that – despite or rather due to their subjective nature – seem to be
crucial for contemporary life realities. Literary strategies that draw on
the whole spectrum of images result in a diachronic anchoring in past
traditions, but are also a reconnecting force that at the same time
explores the shifting boundaries between various forms of images, and
between word and image, which is crucial for ongoing processes of a
historicized characterization of the relationship between the verbal and
the visual in contemporary American and Canadian literature.
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Sarkowsky, Katja. AlterNative Spaces: Constructions of Space in
Native American and First Nations’ Literatures. Heidelberg:
Winter, 2007.
Schmitz-Emans, Monika. “Im Reich der Königin Loana: Einführende
Bemerkungen zum Stichwort ‘Visual Culture.’” Visual Culture. Ed.
Schmitz-Emans. Heidelberg: Synchron, 2008. 9–27.
Scholz, Oliver R. Bild, Darstellung, Zeichen: Philosophische Theorien
bildhafter Darstellung. Freiburg im Breisgau: Alber, 2004.
Stemmler, Susanne. “Wider die Unmittelbarkeit des Visuellen:
Merleau-Pontys Konzept des leibgebundenen Sehens – eine Skizze
zur visual culture-Debatte.” Visual Culture. Ed. Monika Schmitz-
Emans. Heidelberg: Synchron, 2008. 49–60.
Thompson, Evan, and Dan Zahavi. “Philosophical Issues:
Phenomenology.” The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness. Ed.
Philip David Zelazo, Morris Moscovitch, and Evan Thompson.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 67–87.
Urquhart, Jane. The Underpainter. New York: Viking, 1997.
Wagner, Peter. “Introduction: Ekphrasis, Iconotexts, and
Intermediality – the State(s) of the Art(s).” Icons, Texts,
Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality. Ed. Peter
Wagner. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1996. 1–40.
Weichert, Stephan A. “Aufmerksamkeitsterror 2001: 9/11 und seine
Inszenierung als Medienereignis.” Das Jahrhundert der Bilder. Ed.
Gerhard Paul. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 2008.
 686–693.
Wilson, Sharon R. “Sexual Politics in Atwood’s Visual Art.” Margaret
Atwood: Vision and Forms. Ed. Kathryn VanSpanckeren and Jan
Garden Castro. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1988. 205–214.
Wolf, Werner. “Intermedialität.” Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und
Kulturtheorie: Ansätze – Personen – Grundbegriffe. Ed. Ansgar
Nünning. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2008. 327–328.
Zapf, Hubert. “New Directions in American Literary Studies.
Ecocriticism and the Function of Literature as Cultural Ecology.”
English Studies Today: Recent Developments and New Directions.
Ed. Ansgar Nünning and Jürgen Schlaeger. Trier: wvt, 2007. 139–
164.
Zapf, Hubert. “Narrative, Ethics, and Postmodern Art in Siri
Hustvedt’s What I Loved.” Ethics in Culture: The Dissemination of
Values Through Literature and Other Media. Ed. Astrid Erll,
Herbert Grabes, and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008.
171–194.
Zapf, Hubert. “Trauma, Narrative and Ethics in Recent American
Fiction.” Other People’s Pain: Narratives of Trauma and the
Question of Ethics. Ed. Martin Modlinger and Philipp Sonntag.
Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011. 145–168.

5.2 Further Reading

Carroll, Rachel. Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual
Infidelities. London: Continuum, 2009.
Heinen, Sandra, and Roy Sommer. Narratology in the Age of Cross-
disciplinary Narrative Research. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter,
2009.
Kleinberg-Levin, David Michael, eds. Sites of Vision: The Discursive
Construction of Sight in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1997.
Mergenthaler, Volker. Sehen schreiben – Schreiben sehen: Literatur
 und visuelle Wahrnehmung im Zusammenspiel. Tübingen:
Niemeyer, 2002.
Mersmann, Birgit, Martin Schulz, and Nicola Behrmann, eds. Kulturen
des Bildes. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006.
Daniel Stein

22 Comics and Graphic Novels

Abstract: This entry turns to comics as a test case for intermedia
theory. It suggests a pragmatic understanding of comics as a medium
that conventionally narrates through the combination of images and
words as they unfold in sequences of panels and are determined by the
materiality of the page as well as different publication formats (such as
comic strip, comic book, graphic novel). The entry uses Bill
Sienkiewicz’s comic book adaptation of Herman Melville’s novel
Moby-Dick to test the explanatory potential of some of the central
classifications developed by intermedia theory (media combination,
media transposition, intermediality, intramediality, transmediality),
endorsing a notion of intermediality that is broad enough to
incorporate theories and methodologies from the field of comics
studies.
Key Terms: Media combination, media transposition, adaptation,
sequentiality, speech balloons

1 Definition, Historical, Theoretical, and

Conceptual Aspects
While comics have been around for over a century, academic interest
in them is a more recent phenomenon (cf. Stein, Meyer, and Edlich
2011). Building on early analyses (Waugh 1947; Becker 1959; Eco 1964;
Laccasin 1971), an interdisciplinary field of inquiry has emerged over
the past decades that Heer and Worcester call “comics studies” (2009,
xi; cf. also Bachmann, Sina, and Banhold 2012) in analogy to literary
studies, media studies, and film studies. Within this field, intermedia
theory has been a latecomer, beginning to offer its expertise when
comics had already been widely theorized (Ahrens 2012, 18). We must
therefore ask in what ways conceptualizing comics as “intermedial
narratives based on words and images” (Rippl and Etter 2013, 191)
may deepen our understanding of this medium of visual-verbal
storytelling. If comics are an “ideal test case” for intermedia theory
(Rippl and Etter 2013, 191), we should also test intermedia theory’s
validity for the study of comics.
Intermedia theory distinguishes between broad and narrow
conceptions of intermediality. According to Rajewsky, a broad
conception “concentrates on intermediality as a fundamental
condition or category while the […] [narrow conception] approaches
intermediality as a critical category for the concrete analysis of
specific individual media products or configurations” (2005, 47).
Wolf speaks of intermediality in a broad sense as “any phenomenon
involving more than one medium” (1999, 36) and in a narrow sense as
the “direct or indirect participation of two or more media in the
signification of a human artefact” (1999, 37). Grishakova and Ryan
describe intermediality in a broad sense as “any kind of relation
between different media” and in a narrow sense as “the participation of
more than one medium – or sensory channel – in a given work”
(Grishakova and Ryan 2010, 3). For these critics, the main interest of
intermedia theory lies in narrow conceptions – in the “particular
relation […] between conventionally distinct media of expression”
(Wolf 1999, 37). Yet as we will see, we must combine broad and narrow
notions of intermediality in order to grasp the media-specificities of
comics.
For the project of an intermedial comics studies, Rajewsky’s narrow
conceptualization of intermediality provides a first conceptual grid.
Here, Rajewsky identifies three basic types: a) media combination as
“the combination of at least two medial forms of articulation”; b)
media transposition as “the transformation of a given media product
[…] or of its substratum into another medium”; c) intermedial
reference as the evocation and imitation of one medium with the
means of another medium (2005, 51–52). In Wolf’s terminology
(2011), we can further distinguish among cases of intramediality, such
as when a comic references another comic; transmediality, designating
phenomena (themes, motifs, genres) that are not specific to any
particular medium; and intermediality, which entails the three types of
intermediality encapsulated in Rajewsky’s model (Rippl and Etter
2013, 196).
Comics can be usefully studied under the rubrics proposed by
Rajewsky and Wolf. They are a form of media combination because
they integrate images and words into one storytelling apparatus; they
thrive on exchanges with other media (film, radio, television,
literature, painting); and they practice intermedial referencing,
evoking (and provoking) literary styles, imitating (and influencing)
cinematic techniques, or suggesting sound. Moreover, comics are
intramedial because they frequently reference other comics as well as
their own medial form, back-referencing preceding panels and
pointing forward to upcoming panels. In superhero comics, such
referencing may go as far as to include one hero joining another one
and fighting in the pages of the same comic book, while serial forms of
comic book narrative (superhero comics, newspaper strips, etc.) are by
definition intramedial, with each new installment referencing previous
installments (Schmitz-Emans 2013b, 319). Finally, comics are
transmedial because they share non-media-specific elements with
other media (tension management, heroic characters, serial
storytelling), and they are intermedial because they often reference
other media by importing specific techniques such as camera
perspectives from film or verbal forms of narration from literature (
14 Filmic Modes in Literature). One of the advantages of an
intermedial approach is that it does not restrict its focus to the
semiotic analysis of comics’ verbal-visual sign system, but compels us
to ask “how th[e] material side of the sign / semiotic system is involved
in the production of narrative meaning” (Rippl and Etter 2013, 193;
Hoppeler, Etter, and Rippl 2009; Rippl 2004). After all, media “are not
hollow conduits for the transmission of messages but material
supports of information whose materiality […] ‘matters’ for the type of
meanings that can be encoded” (Ryan 2004, 1–2).
Scholars have long tried to identify the essentials of comics. For
David Kunzle, the comic strip of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries was marked by “a sequence of separate images” in
“a mass medium” and told “a story which is both moral and topical”
through a “preponderance of image over text” (1973, 2). For Will
Eisner, comics are a sequential art premised on “the arrangement of
pictures or images and words to narrate a story or dramatize an idea”
(2001, n. pag.), while Scott McCloud defines them as “juxtaposed
pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey
information and / or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer”
(1993, 9). Robert C. Harvey calls comics “pictorial narratives or
expositions in which words (often lettered into the picture area within
speech balloons) usually contribute to the meaning of the pictures and
vice versa” (2001, 76). These exemplary definitions are both insightful
and problematic. They are problematic because they are reductive. We
can easily picture a comic strip that is not printed in a mass medium,
perhaps one that was drawn for private purposes or one that was
intended for mass printing but was never published. Arguably, we
would still call such a work a comic strip, regardless, too, of whether it
contains a moral message or deals with topical issues. Moreover, many
comics are produced, marketed, and received as popular
entertainment; to label them sequential art – sequential because they
unfold as a series of framed images – means to disentangle them from
their status as commercial goods and to associate them with an
ostensibly more legitimate field of cultural production (cf. Becker
2011). Furthermore, some comics – abstract ones, for example – might
not tell stories, dramatize ideas, or convey information. Finally, comics
produce aesthetic reactions in their viewers (who are also readers,
perusing verbal narrative and dialogue while looking at the graphic
construction of the story), but they can produce other reactions as well,
including psycho-semiotic, cognitive, and multi-sensory ones (cf.
Packard 2006; Kukkonen 2013a, 2013b; Hague 2014).
Despite these shortcomings, the definitions by Kunzle, Eisner,
McCloud, and Harvey are useful because they point out characteristics
that the majority of works we would think of as comics possess: a
peculiar mixture of images and words; a sequential form of narrative
organization and an interest in telling stories; a historical affiliation
with mass media; and a form of storytelling that is closely tied to its
carrier medium (the newspaper that delivered the comic strip to its
audiences, the monthly comic book periodical that popularized
superhero comics from the late 1930s onwards, and the book-bound
format of the graphic novel since the late 1970s). Nonetheless,
attempts to advance a universal definition run into a crucial problem:
The more restricted a definition is, the more works that we would
intuitively view as comics would have to be excluded. Yet the broader
the definition is, the more of its explanatory potential it might lose (cf.
Groensteen 2007, 12–20; Schüwer 2008, 10; Meskin 2007). If
everything that combines images and words in sequences is a comic
(cf. McCloud 1993), we would have to exclude the single-panel cartoon
(because it is not sequential), but would have to include, at least
technically, film, since film also narrates through sequences of images
and words, even though these sequences pass by so rapidly that the
human eye receives them as continuous motion. If we take “the
arrangement of pictures or images and words to narrate a story or
dramatize an idea” as the definitive element of comics (Eisner 2001, n.
pag.), illustrated books would also count as comics, even though most
readers would not consider them as such ( 20 The Nineteenth-
century Illustrated Novel). Even Eisner’s addition that “image and
dialogue give meaning to each other” (2001, 59) may be too limited
(not all comics contain dialogue) and too broad (consider dialogue
printed as captions in an illustrated book) at the same time. Thus, it
makes sense to advance a pragmatic characterization of comics that is
a) aware of typical formal features and narrative structures in works
designated as comics without insisting that each of these features and
structures has to be present in every case; b) considers the materiality
and mediality of works conventionally viewed as comics, ranging from
production processes and technological affordances to publication
formats and the media ecology in which comics interact with other
media; and c) examines the specific historical, social, political,
economic, and cultural conditions under which comics have been
produced, received, and discussed (Rippl and Etter 2013, 193; Schüwer
2008, 9–10).
Since their inception in the late nineteenth century, when
newspaper, magazine, and book illustration as well as popular forms of
literature such as dime novels became the breeding ground for a new
form of storytelling, comics have developed a set of recognizable
formal devices. In their ideal type, they are based on the intermedial
interaction of words and images (in the sense that images and words
can each be considered a primary medium of expression) arranged in a
sequential order, most often through the progression of panels that
feature narration in square boxes and verbal expression in speech
balloons (cf. Hoppeler, Etter, and Rippl 2009, 54; Heyden 2013, 281).
Chute and DeKoven speak of a “cross-discursivity” (2006, 768), while
Kress and Van Leeuwen conceptualize comics as multimodal: “several
semiotic codes in the design of a semiotic product […], together with
the particular way in which these codes are combined” (2001: 20).
Whether we think of images and words as media, discourses, or modes
is ultimately a matter of theoretical preference. What unites these
approaches is the recognition that comics do not communicate through
separate verbal and visual channels but rather by inextricably
combining these channels. Words are always visually rendered (often
hand-lettered), and they participate in the overall look of a panel, page,
or story – consider Frank Miller’s Sin City series, with its display of
oversized bullet sounds (“BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!”) – while images
exceed their iconic and indexical functions. Think of the media-
reflexive narratives of Marc-Antoine Mathieu in works such as
L’origine and Le Processus, in which the visual design of each page
even affects the materiality of the work (a hole in the page instead of a
panel; a maelstrom of panels that folds out into a spiral when the page
is flipped) (Lohse 2008). An intermedial approach is particularly
useful here because it focuses on the “material side” of narratives as
“that which mediates” (Rippl and Etter 2013, 191, 193) in conjunction
with the semiotic codes of comics.
One of the most significant formal devices of comics is the speech
balloon. Speech balloons display spoken dialogue as part of the
diegesis, but they present this dialogue in a space that is not part of the
diegesis. Characters are meant to hear the words but not actually see
the graphic device itself, a formal convention that was popularized by
the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries
in some of the Yellow Kid strips drawn for competing newspapers by
Richard Felton Outcault and George Luks as well as in popular serial
strips such as Rudolph Dirks’s Katzenjammer Kids, Frederick Burr
Opper’s Happy Hooligan, and Bud Fisher’s Mutt & Jeff (cf. Balzer and
Wiesing 2010; Gardner 2012; Gardner 2013; Meyer 2012). Obviously,
some comics do without speech balloons – wordless graphic novels like
Erik Drooker’s The Flood or Shaun Tan’s The Arrival come to mind.
Instead of excluding such works from the roster of comics, an
intermedial approach allows us to interpret them as narratives that
effectively recalibrate conventional visual and verbal forms of comics
signification.
Framed panels and the negative space between them – the gutter –
are a second major building block of comics. Comics narration
generally unfolds through a series of still images that capture
individual moments distilled from a fluid – yet never fully rendered –
narrative: a series of “pregnant moments” (Lessing 1984, 23) chosen
by the creator(s) and translated into an ongoing succession of events
through a reading process that entails establishing “causal
connections” (Carrier 2000, 14) through a process of “closure”
(McCloud 1993, 63–73). Gardner (2012) speaks of an imaginative
projection that each reader must perform in order to translate
individual images into a story, an activity that leads to a heightened
degree of narrativization on the part of the recipient (cf. Wolf 2002;
Hoppeler, Etter, and Rippl 2009; Rippl and Etter 2013). This spatio-
temporal construction – the representation of time through the
techniques of panel design and sequencing – enlists readers to invest
the gutters with meaning: to provide the links between panels by way
of imagining what must have happened between one scene and the
next. Different panel designs, from regular waffle-grid structures to
more flexible shapes and sizes, further impact the process of readerly
projection. Comics scholarship has offered numerous ways to theorize
these and other formal features, with some studies conceiving of them
as a kind of visual language (cf. Cohn 2013; Frahm 2010; Varnum and
Gibbons 2001; Miodrag 2013; Saraceni 2003) and others – more in
line with an intermedial approach – focusing on media-specific forms
of narration (cf. Herman and Gardner 2011; Kukkonen 2013a; Stein
and Thon 2013; Rippl and Etter 2013).
In historical terms, some scholars have traced the origins of comics
back to early forms of sequential pictorial narrative (cave painting, the
Bayeux Tapestry, the works of William Hogarth and James Gilray),
while others have located their beginnings in the final decade of the
nineteenth century, when comics appeared in serialized form as
sequential narratives in newspapers (Gordon 1998; Harvey 1994;
Kelleter and Stein 2009). Whether comics originated in the United
States (the standard example is Outcault’s Yellow Kid), in Great
Britain (the Ally Sloper cartoons), in Germany (Wilhelm Busch’s
picture stories), or in Switzerland (Rodolphe Töpffer’s histoires en
estampes) depends on one’s definition of comics. From an intermedial
perspective, with its emphasis on the material base of narration, we
can situate the emergence of comics at the turn of the twentieth
century, when technological advances in print production and the
multiculturalism of American popular culture facilitated the rise of the
mass newspaper as the carrier medium whose specific affordances
(color, page size, serial publication) co-determined the evolution of
formal features, aesthetic properties, and story contents.
The production processes of comics range from single-creator work
(as in many underground and alternative comics) to author-artist
collaborations (as in the works of Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Neil
Gaiman, etc.), to more or less fragmented multi-authorial forms of
comics creation (as in many superhero comics). In terms of their
materiality and mediality, comics have been, for the longest time,
produced by hand on paper. Even as digitized production techniques
have become widely available, many comics still take their shape and
form through the visible slant of the creator’s hand (cf. Gardner 2011).
Publication formats include the daily and weekly newspaper strip, the
monthly or bimonthly comic book, and, since the 1970s and 1980s, the
graphic novel as the book-bound and increasingly bookstore-bound
format that now dominates the market. Webcomics, despite their
many medial affordances, remain the exception rather than the rule
(cf. Gardner 2012). The term ‘graphic novel,’ by now almost as well
known as ‘comics,’ was popularized (though not coined) by Will Eisner
as a means of promoting his collection of comics vignettes, A Contract
with God. As such, it has always been a marketing term in addition to
being a specific publication format, promising high production values
as well as a certain degree of ‘literariness’ in search of cultural
legitimation (cf. Groensteen 2000; Baetens 2001). Today, the term
reigns as a common denominator of book-length comics that may or
may not be novelistic in nature. Ho Che Anderson’s comics biography
King, for instance, has been called a graphic novel, as have Joe Sacco’s
ventures into comics reportage (Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza, etc.),
even though these publications are essentially non-fiction. What
should be noted, too, is that the comics formats and labels just
mentioned are mostly specific to the U.S.-American and British
markets, with European comics production (e.g. Franco-Belgian
bandes dessinées) favoring the album, while manga production in Asia
traditionally involves initial magazine serialization and subsequent
paperback collections. In that sense, terms such as ‘comic’ and ‘graphic
novel’ are predominantly Anglo-American in their usage, whereas a
less culture-specific term like ‘graphic narrative,’ defined rather
narrowly by Chute as a “book-length work in the medium of comics”
(Chute 2008, 453; Chute and DeKoven 2006), has the potential to
embrace the medium on a transnational/transcultural as well as
transhistorical scale, including all narratives that stake their mode of
meaning production in the combination of visual and verbal
signification (Denson, Meyer, and Stein 2013; Stein and Thon 2013).

2 Analysis of Primary Sources

While the preceding remarks have indicated that comics are indeed a
valid test case for intermedia theory, the question remains which new
insights an intermedial analysis of specific comics can produce. In
order to answer this question, this section studies Bill Sienkiewicz’s
Moby-Dick (1990), a comic book adaptation of Herman Melville’s
canonical nineteenth-century novel that strains conventional
conceptions of comics storytelling, thus constituting a border case for
comics studies (cf. Inge 2000) but a central case for intermedia theory.
In general, intermedia theory can work with all kinds of comics, but it
works particularly well with adaptations because the very process of
adaptation is premised in the transposition of material from one
medium to another ( 13 Adaptation – Remediation – Transmediality).
To boot, as Vanderbeke maintains, “[t]he history of comics is also a
history of adaptation” (2010, 104), especially if adaptation is
conceptualized as both a process and a mode of revisionary
engagement (Hutcheon 2013, 16–27).
The adaptation of Moby-Dick assessed in the following was created
by artist Bill Sienkiewicz, writer Dan Chichester, and letterer Willie
Schubert, and it was published as the fourth installment of the revived
Classics Illustrated series. One of the aims of this series was to move
the format of the Classics Illustrated comics from its original
conception of the 1940s, according to which the comics were meant to
bring young readers into contact with “great” literature, into a new era
of comics storytelling, when comics are seen as complex creations in
their own right (cf. Jones 2002). When the series was revived in 1990,
it enlisted a new generation of creators (Kyle Baker, Dean Motter, Bill
Sienkiewicz, etc.) who saw themselves as artists rather than craftsmen.
The title of the series – Classics Illustrated – already foregrounds two
central areas of intermedial investigation: the transposition of a work
from one medium (literature) to another medium (comic) and the
combination of words (the texts of the classics) and images in the same
cultural artifact. Moreover, the front cover challenges established
hierarchies of taste associated with different media. It lists Herman
Melville, Moby-Dick, and Sienkiewicz in that descending order, but
this order is quickly questioned by the additional signature “B.
Sienkiewicz © 1989” below the bench on which Captain Ahab is sitting,
as it gestures toward Sienkiewicz as a painter who authorizes his own –
and copyright protected – version of the story.
The cover illustration features a dark image of brooding Ahab with
his eyes set on a barely visible white whale. As a painting, it differs in
terms of visual design from conventional comic book covers, and to a
degree also from the kinds of superhero series on which Sienkiewicz
had worked previously (Fantastic Four, Elektra: Assassin, Batman).
Yet it also announces a particular kind of intermediality, with the
wordless, page-size painting being surrounded by what may be
construed as a panel frame but what may also represent the
longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates on Ahab’s obsessive mapping
of Moby-Dick’s traveling patterns. In addition, the cover introduces the
quest for knowledge that occupied Melville’s epistemological and
ontological meditations in visual terms: Ahab’s knee and ivory leg
reach out of the panel frame to his right and at the bottom, suggesting
that he can neither be contained by social norms nor by the very media
– novel and comic – through which the story is told. Finally, the cover
captures a sense of sequentiality through a red dotted line that extends
from Ahab’s right eye all the way to Moby Dick, and thus diagrams the
whole plot of the novel.
Approaching the Sienkiewicz adaptation of Moby-Dick through
Rajewsky’s model allows us to trace intermedial adaptive processes on
three levels. First, as a type of media combination that blends images
and words into an intermedial narrative rather than merely featuring
them as separate tracks or a form of parallel signification. Yet this
version of Moby-Dick differs from earlier comic book adaptations
(such as Louis Zansky’s 1947 Classics Illustrated version) in that it
absents speech balloons and panel-gutters structures, creating special
demands on readerly provisions of closure and acts of projection (cf.
Inge 2000, 163; Schultz 1995, 83). Second, as a case of media
transposition that refashions a literary source text into a comic book.
Third, as an artifact riddled with intermedial references beyond its
literary source text: to illustrations and comic book adaptations of
Moby-Dick, to John Huston’s 1956 movie adaptation, and to other
forms of visual culture, mainly painting.
In addition to foregoing speech balloons and panel grids, which
positions Sienkiewicz’s Moby Dick in-between comics, illustration, and
painting, this adaptation also departs from the “action-driven plots
and dialogue-centered narratives” that are “the predilection of comics”
(Boschenhoff 2013, 45). Sienkiewicz chooses a limited number of
action scenes that readers would have known from earlier comic book
adaptations and movies: Ahab forging his harpoon in Queequeg’s,
Tashtego’s, and Daggoo’s blood and “baptizing it in the name of the
devil” (Sienkiewicz, Chichester, and Schubert 1990, 27), for instance,
which is based on Melville’s chapter “The Quarter-Deck. Ahab and all”
and depicts Ahab as a mad sorcerer splashing blood (in the form of red
paint splotches) across the ship/canvas/comic book page. But this
scene is more dramatic than action-driven in the novel; rather than
“fill[ing] out [its] visual space with commotion, gesticulation, and
conversation” (Boschenhoff 2013, 45), the adaptation takes a more
abstract and metaphorical slant by relegating conversation to
Ishmael’s narration (instead of casting it as speech balloon dialogue)
and by substituting action scenes with a more introspective,
expressionist visualization of the novel’s psychological subtext(s).
The depiction of the three-day chase of Moby Dick is especially
noteworthy in this regard. The fight scenes that illustrate the chase
only receive six pages of story space in the comic (Sienkiewicz,
Chichester, and Schubert 1990, 36–41), which correlates with
Melville’s swift coverage of the chase in three short chapters. The page
that launches the first day of the chase (Melville 2007 [1851], 35)
depicts a distorted insert of mad Ahab, a feature that appears at
different times throughout the comic. This insert is overlaid on what
looks like indifferent background matter with a profusion of lines on
the bottom, but reveals itself, upon further inspection, as an abstract
painting of Moby Dick. We can read this image as Sienkiewicz’s visual
abstraction of Melville’s reflections on the nature of perception and the
difficulties of seeing beyond mere surfaces. Schmitz-Emans’s
assessment that Sienkiewicz “stages adventures of a gaze that ventures
back and forth but never really ‘grasps’ anything” (2012, 355,
translation mine) comes to mind here, which is also borne out by an
earlier scene (Sienkiewicz, Chichester, and Schubert 1990, 9) in which
Ahab is first introduced as he is gazing through a telescope in search of
the white whale. He is looking forward (to the right-hand side of the
image) but also focusing his gaze outside of the picture. We are asked
to contemplate Ahab’s ivory leg as the devil’s hoof, an association
supported by the accompanying narrative, excerpted from Ishmael’s
characterization of “moody, stricken Ahab” as “standing there erect
with an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable
willfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that
glance…” (Sienkiewicz, Chichester, and Schubert 1990, 9; Melville
2007 [1851], 126). Once we flip over page 35, we come upon a double
page spread (36–37) of Moby Dick rising from the sea and smashing a
whaleboat to pieces. The image draws us back from the abstract, sepia-
toned painting of Moby Dick of the previous page into a more
realistically rendered world dominated by a blue color scheme,
perhaps signifying a change from introspection to action. Significantly,
this splash page establishes an interpictorial (cf. Isekenmeier 2013)
reference to one of Seymour Fleischman’s illustrations of the novel
from 1948 (“Moby Dick Breaches,” repr. in Schultz 1995, 79),
reminding readers of the fact that Sienkiewicz’s artistic frames of
reference transcend the medium of comics.
The second day of the chase is presented in the form of a triptych
(Sienkiewicz, Chichester, and Schubert 1990, 38–39) that does not
align with the page break in the middle of the comic book, creating the
sense of a storyworld that has become unhinged. This sense is
increased by white splotches of paint that signify water splashing out
of the frame, suggesting that the watery element is sucking the
characters as well as the viewer into the storyworld. Indeed, it feels as
if we had become part of the action, which is emphasized further by the
intermingling of different perspectives, ranging from a low-angle shot
of Ahab standing in his whaleboat with his harpoon reaching into the
next panel, which takes a high-angle perspective, to the final
underwater image of Moby Dick dragging Fedallah to his death. The
first of these panels establishes an intermedial reference to John
Huston’s Hollywood adaptation, with Sienkiewicz’s Ahab looking very
much like the Gregory Peck of the movie, while Moby Dick looks more
like a creature out of Ridley Scott’s Alien films than a white whale.
Adaptation, here, is a multi-directional process that is not beholden to
the transposition of a single literary source text but taps into a
reservoir of media-crossing images and narratives that enrich both the
adaptation and (retroactively) reshape our understanding of the source
text (Hutcheon 2013; Bryant 2014).
These and other scenes remind us that all narrative elements of the
novel undergo a process of transposition, a process that brings with it
several media-specific problems. One of these problems concerns the
retention of Melville’s first-person narrator, Ishmael. First-person
narrative is difficult to maintain in comics because of the intermedial
nature of visual-verbal narration, in which the spoken discourse of a
first-person narrator can be represented as narration in square boxes,
but where the visual construction of the narrative – the creation of a
whole storyworld from scratch – is much less easily attributed to a
first-person narrator (cf. Thon 2013). Sienkiewicz foregrounds this
problem by including an image of an aged Ishmael on the first page,
whom we must assume to be the older narrator of the story rather than
the younger participant observer, even though he is presented as part
of the story-world (cf. Boschenhoff 2013; Vanderbeke 2010). In terms
of narrative transmission, Ishmael would be responsible for all the
images in the comic, which would cast him in the double function of
verbal narrator and visual creator, turning him from a gifted storyteller
into a comic book artist (an adapter of Melville’s novel, in fact).
The very first page of this comic thus indicates that we are dealing
with a work that thrives on the intermedial combination of images and
words but departs from two of comics’ most central elements. As Inge
argues, Sienkiewicz offers “a series of variegated paintings, full-page or
less, […] abandon[ing] word balloons and the usual panel structures,
[…] keep[ing] the reader’s eye roving mainly from top to bottom in a
series of vertical drawings rather than left to right horizontally” (Inge
2000, 162–163). Page 6 assembles several images of different sizes and
frame-like borders into a single visual construct, a mise-en-page (cf.
Peeters 1991), in which a comic book page is determined both by the
progression of sequentially arranged panels and the instantaneous
look of the whole page. Pages 10–11 feature six horizontal panels that
are connected across the page spread by the sepia color scheme of all
panels except for the black-and-white fourth one (or the first one on
page 11, depending on whether we view this as a double splash page or
two individual pages). These panels again explore the effects of
different perspectives, suggesting motion through the sequential
principle on page 10, depicting the Pequod receding farther and farther
back toward the horizon and placing the implied reader/viewer either
in the middle of the ocean or on another ship that is not depicted. The
third panel on this page shows Ahab’s pipe as it sinks into the depths
of the ocean, thrown away because it no longer gives him comfort in
his “devot[ion] […] to the terrors of the unknown sea –– and the white
whale he kept a sharp eye for” (10). It affords the viewer two
viewpoints that, in reality (as well as in other media, for instance,
film), would be impossible to take simultaneously: the above-water
image of the Pequod as well as the underwater shot of the pipe which
together encapsulate Melville’s inquiries into the sublimity of the
ocean. The white whale as the “terror […] of the unknown sea” that
challenges Ahab’s quest for vengeance and control and is also the
source of Ishmael’s metaphysical meditations.
While Inge’s point about Sienkiewicz’s abandonment of comic book
panels is correct, panel successions do remain visible, and some panel
structures even unfold in a conventional left to right, top to bottom
sequence (cf. Sienkiewicz, Chichester, and Schubert 1990, 2–7). This
adaptation does not so much do away with the sequential principle of
comic book narration as it acknowledges it as the story grid (and thus
the medium) against which this particular narrative unfolds its
signifying power – much like Melville’s Moby-Dick pushed the
envelope in terms of what a nineteenth-century novel could
accomplish. The absence of speech balloons, in turn, may be explained
by the fact that this graphic device is closely tied to the comedic
element of comics: to newspaper funnies with their typically witty
dialogue and humorous repartee. The omission of speech balloons thus
becomes a sign that we are dealing with a serious effort to bring
Melville’s novel into a medium traditionally laden with heavy comical
baggage. Thus, since we are dealing with an adaptation that repeatedly
gestures beyond the confines of traditional comics storytelling, there
are good reasons to think of this adaptation in broad terms as a
graphic narrative, and less as a comic book or graphic novel, even
though it was labeled as such.
If Sienkiewicz’s version of Moby-Dick lacks common panel grids, it
makes up for them on a larger scale: the single page as well as the
double page spread functioning as macro-panels into which several
smaller panels are inserted, in keeping with Ishmael’s boast that “[t]o
produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme” (Melville
2007 [1851], 401). Single and double splash pages can appear as one
image expanding across the space of two consecutive pages (cf.
Sienkiewicz, Chichester, and Schubert 1990, 36–37, 42, 43) or as a
succession of panels extending across pages into a single narrative
macro-unit (cf. 4–5, 10–11, 38–39, 40–41). Pages 4 and 5, for example,
explore the theme of religion, specifically the relationship between
Christianity and “heathenism” and its supporting functions for
nineteenth-century politics of empire (as developed in Melville’s
novel). They move from Father Mapple’s sermon on the story of Jonah
and the Whale, which establishes an intermedial nod to Orson Welles’s
dramatic performance of the role in the John Huston movie, to
Ishmael’s paean to religious relativism and his humoring of Queequeg
by pretending to worship his pagan god Yojo on page 4, to Queequeg’s
biography (evoking visual forms of religiously tinted exoticism and
primitivism) and, finally, to his act of (savage) nobility when he saves a
white passenger from drowning on page 5. This last act entices Ishmael
to announce the overarching theme of this two-page spread when he
describes Queequeg as “casual in his heroism, as if saying to himself,
‘it’s a mutual, joint stock world…we cannibals must help these
Christians.’” These four panels are connected thematically rather than
structurally, separated by gutters (which might signify the ideological
rifts between cultures and religions) but connected by the theme of
religion.
Sienkiewicz uses white gutter spaces sparingly, but he uses more
experimental and narratively charged separations between panels (or
loosely framed images that recall comic book panels). Page 8 is split in
half by an uneven grey line overlaid with green triangles (or shards),
with each half being further subdivided by long grey vertical lines that
connect the upper and lower parts of the page into a single image. In
visual terms, each half is structured similarly. While the upper half
depicts a single image of a white whale swimming behind the grey lines
(and thus a single moment: Moby Dick in the murky waters, looking
like a shark behind the bars of a shark tank and thus reiterating the
intermedial reference to Steven Spielberg’s Jaws that is first issued on
the contents page), the lower half depicts five smaller images and thus
five consecutive moments in Ishmael’s accompanying narration: the
“Knights and Squires” chapters from the novel that introduce the
mates Starbuck, Flask, and Stubb as well as the harpooners Queequeg,
Tashtego, and Daggoo. If “Melville had created a portrait gallery in
Moby-Dick” (Schultz 1995, 22), referencing a visual medium through
literary means, then Sienkiewicz’s portraits can be viewed as
intermedial re-transcriptions of an already intermedial gesture ( 17
Literary Visuality; 18 Images in Narrative Literature).
The yellow narrative boxes that contain all verbal expression in this
comic connect issues of sequentiality and framing with questions of
image-text interaction. They cite, paraphrase, and summarize the
opening chapters of Moby-Dick – condensation being a vital media-
specific component because of the discrepancy between the length of
the novel and the shortness of the comic book format (in this case, a
total of 44 pages). That Chichester frequently uses Melville’s original
text reinforces the novel as an authoritative precursor text in order to
import some of its cultural capital into the comic book. Examples of
condensation are pages 6 and 7, which depict, in ten images, Ishmael
and Queequeg’s selection of the Pequod as their whaling ship; their
argument with the ship owners, Captains Bildad and Peleg, about
whether they might be allowed to join the ship’s crew on the upcoming
journey; the clandestine boarding of Fedallah and his Parsee
companions; Elijah’s prophesy about the demise of the ship;
Starbuck’s call to set sail; as well as a panoramic shot of the Pequod
leaving Nantucket. What we find here is the result of questions all
adaptations that are not the first ones to transpose a work must
consider: which elements of the source text might be known to the
prospective recipients of this new adaptation? What can be left out
because it might appear redundant, having been retold too many
times? And what should be repeated because audiences simply expect
it? The pleasure of perusing a new adaptation lies in unraveling the
palimpsests of meanings that have accumulated over time and across
media: to decode the complex intertextual, interpictorial, and
intermedial network within which the new adaptation becomes active
and which it, in turn, also (re-)activates (cf. Hutcheon 2013; Bryant
2014).
Schultz discusses Sienkiewicz’s “gestures toward creating
conventional framing” through the use of tape or thick lines that serve
as makeshift boxes, or frames, for individual images, thus giving them
an irregular, unstable, and permeable shape, “suggesting the fluidity of
both events and meaning in Moby-Dick” (Schultz 1995, 83–84). Some
of these frames give the impression of having been added retroactively,
after the act of painting had been completed, almost as if Sienkiewicz
(or the implied creator) had gone back to look at the images in search
of a deeper level of meaning and had highlighted what he conceived to
be the focal points of the visual depiction (cf. Sienkiewicz, Chichester,
and Schubert 1990, 16). If the panel structures in this comic book
remain ambiguous, the narrative boxes that deliver the verbal
information also resist any stable logic. While the vast majority of
these boxes contain black ink on yellow background, different colors
(blue, red, green, white) appear infrequently when they represent
speech. Examples of differently colored backgrounds are Queequeg’s
“Who-e debel you? You no speak-e, dam-me, I kill-e!” (Sienkiewicz,
Chichester, and Schubert 1990, 3), represented in a scraggly light blue
narrative box; a snippet from Father Mapple’s sermon (4); Elijah’s
prophecy (7); Tashtego’s sounding out, “Thar she blows!” (13); the final
statement from mad Gabriel’s warning to the Pequod (16); Captain
Boomer’s answer to Ahab’s question about Moby Dick (23); Ahab’s
reverie after splitting his ivory leg in a whale chase (24, 25); passages
consisting of Ishmael’s first-person narrative and some of Ahab’s
statements quoted by Ishmael (28, 29, 31, 39, 41); and Ahab’s frantic
cry for Moby Dick (35). There is no logic according to which we may
decode the meaning of these color changes other than the transmedial
notion that in this comics adaptation, as in Melville’s novel, things do
not always operate logically and no ontology is stable.
This uncertain ontology and the repeated frustration of conventional
expectations extend into the realm of image-word combinations. As
Inge writes, “the words and pictures are not always integrated and
painting has replaced cartooning” (2000, 163), creating a work that
oscillates back and forth between painting, illustration, and comics.
This in-between status is announced through the use of hand-painted
page numbers that appear on many of Sienkiewicz’s painted pages, but
it would be more typical of sequentially arranged comic books than of
paintings. The comic thus registers a significant bifurcation of text and
image. The text, presented in the yellow boxes, reiterates the basic
plotline and key passages from Melville’s novel in a mixture of direct
citation and paraphrase. The images add Sienkiewicz’s revisionary
interpretation of the novel’s “little lower layer[s]” (Melville 2007
[1851], 159) as well as its essential allusiveness when it comes to
characterizing central figures such as Ahab (Schultz 1995, 23). In the
narrative universe of the novel, this allusiveness is indebted to its
presenter, Melville’s subjective and possibly unreliable narrator
Ishmael. By sticking rather closely to the source text and allocating
narrative and imaginary freedom largely within the visual domain of
the paintings, Sienkiewicz acknowledges the intermedial quality of his
work, with the textual domain being governed by Melville’s novel and
the visual domain constituting the playing field for Sienkiewicz’s
experiments with style and form: the quest for an idiosyncratic
expression that manifests itself on different levels of narration. This
includes leitmotifs such as Ahab’s and Queequeq’s spade-shaped,
phallic, harpoons (cf. the cover illustration and pages 2, 3, 6, 8, 27, 33,
34, 38, 39) as well as the white shards that appear throughout the story
in various guises and functions, sometimes as ornamental elements of
a frame (on page 21, Ahab’s pained, half-obscured, and death mask-
like face is imperfectly framed by several lines of white shards that
seem to be breaking away from the image, as if the intensity of Ahab’s
torment had blown them to pieces), sometimes as visual signifiers of a
madness brought on by the white whale whose teeth they symbolize.
On page 16, the shards/teeth evoke the whale’s gaping mouth, wholly
enveloping the “crazed zealot” Gabriel on the whale ship Jeroboam
(Gabriel’s hand has also morphed into a white miniature whale); on
page 34, the face of monomaniacal Ahab staring directly at the viewer
is enshrouded by a triangle of shards that again evokes the whale’s
mouth.
As these examples indicate, the intermediality of Sienkiewicz’s
adaptation follows not so much from the integration of words and
images than from the emphasis of an essentially unbridgeable gap
between the discourse of the novel and the visual storyworld-making of
the comic book. Take the thin rectangular middle panel on page 3,
which depicts a horrified Ishmael in the far right corner and overlays
the murky sepia-toned rest of the panel with four yellow narrative
boxes that relate the events following Ishmael’s plea to the innkeeper,
Mr. Coffin, to protect him from Queequeg. There is a meaningful
disconnect between Ishmael’s narration (four sentences in four boxes
that describe several actions as well as Ishmael’s reactions, which
unfold over the course of many hours) and the single frozen image that
does not really illustrate the narrative but rather contrasts Ishmael the
character’s horrified look with Ishmael the narrator’s more self-
controlled retroactive depiction of the events. This, then, is another
way in which Sienkiewicz transmediates Melville’s use of a first-person
narrator into comics form.
All in all, Sienkiewicz builds on the foundations of Moby-Dick as a
novel that is filled with references to images of all kinds, including the
ekphrastic description ( 0 Introduction; 1 Ekphrasis: Theory; 5
Ekphrasis and the Novel/Narrative Fiction) of a painting of a whaling
scene at the wall of the Spouter-Inn, where Ishmael stays for the night.
The inclusion of this painting marks a metareferential moment in the
comic: “The painting on the wall did nothing to lighten the mood – it
was a boggy, soggy, squitchy picture, truly enough to drive a nervous
man distracted” (Sienkiewicz, Chichester, and Schubert 1990, 2). The
second part of the sentence is taken verbatim from the novel; it is part
of Melville’s tongue-in-cheek reflections on the nature of perception,
such as when Ishmael asks himself whether “there [was] a sort of
indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly
froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find
out what that marvellous painting meant” (Melville 2007 [1851], 31).
As part of the comic’s intermedial construction, Melville’s words attain
a new layer of significance. For one, they indicate how the comic book
adaptation aspires to be received: freezing its readers in bewilderment
and enlisting them in the process of comic book meaning making by
way of offering their own readerly projection into the story. But they
also establish an interpictorial reference to Joseph Mallord William
Turner’s painting The Whale Ship (1845) and thus inscribe themselves
into a chain of interpictorial as well as intermedial transformations:
Melville transposing Turner into literature, and Sienkiewicz
referencing both Turner and Melville (cf. Schmitz-Emans 2012, 355),
reminding us that adaptation is a multi-directional process that cuts
across media, production cultures, and time periods.
The transmedial strain of the Sienkiewicz adaptation comes across
in Inge’s suggestion that it “retain[s] as much of the spirit and mood of
the original as possible” and “attempt[s] to capture some of the deeper
symbolic and ontological inquiries of the novel” (2000, 162). And
indeed, the comic possesses a generally dark atmosphere, with black-
and-white, sepia, and blue, as well as occasional splotches of red and
green dominating the color palette, and individual pages or double
pages receiving a common tonality that identifies them as units of
meaning. Inge further speaks of “scenes which are richly symbolic and
more suggestive than explicitly detailed” (2000, 162), which is another
way of suggesting that Sienkiewicz’s responds to Melville’s often
allegorical character sketches with equally allegorical images. But
viewed from a transmedial perspective, Sienkiewicz’s interpictorial and
intermedial allusions to popular culture – Ahab looks like Gregory
Peck in the John Huston movie (Sienkiewicz, Chichester, and Schubert
1990, 9, 11, 25, 27, 38, 40–41), while Captain Boomer of the Samuel
Enderby looks like Disney’s Captain Hook – much less “disturb […] the
integrity of Sienkiewicz’s otherwise singular and independent vision”
(Inge 2000, 164) than heighten the comics’ intermedial self-awareness
as being the latest interpretation – or revision – of the novel in a long
line of adaptations (cf. Bryant 2014). Through these allusions, the
comic recognizes itself as part of the Classics Illustrated series as well
as part of a medium that began its modern career as a serial form of
storytelling and has refined, as well as expanded, its storytelling
abilities over the course of more than a century. Moreover, it becomes
part of a chain of Moby-Dick adaptations that have no stable point of
origin, no stable source text (Melville was already profusely adapting
materials from many genres and media), and that will, in all likelihood,
not find any stable end point either. These insights move us from
narrow to broad conceptions of intermediality: from the close reading
of Sienkiewicz’s comic book adaptation of Moby-Dick presented here
to the analysis of a whole history of Melville adaptations across epochs
and media. Once we conduct such a broader analysis, we will soon
realize that intermediality is indeed “a fundamental condition or
category” (Rajewesky 2005, 47) of modern media cultures, including,
but certainly not limited to, novels and comic books.

3 Bibliography

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Languages of Storytelling. Ed. Ryan. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2004. 1–40.
Saraceni, Mario. The Language of Comics. London: Routledge, 2003.
Schmitz-Emans, Monika. “Heldenbilder zwischen Affirmation und
Demontage: Herman Melvilles Moby Dick und der Comic.” Die
Helden-Maschine: Zur Aktualität und Tradition von Heldenbildern.
Ed. LWL-Industriemuseum. Essen: Klartext, 2010. 137–154.
Schmitz-Emans, Monika. “Interpiktorialität im Literaturcomic: Zur
Funktion von Bild- und Stilzitaten in Comic-Adaptionen
literarischer Texte am Beispiel von Stéphane Heuets Recherche.”
Interpiktorialität: Theorie und Geschichte der Bild-Bild-Bezüge.
Ed. Guido Isekenmeier. Bielefeld: transcript, 2013. 319–340.
Schmitz-Emans, Monika, ed. Literatur-Comics: Adaptionen und
Transformationen der Weltliteratur. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012.
Schultz, Elizabeth A. Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and
Twentieth-Century American Art. Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 1995.
Schüwer, Martin. Wie Comics erzählen: Grundriss einer
intermedialen Erzähltheorie der grafischen Literatur. Trier: wvt,
2008.
Sienkiewicz, Bill (artist), Dan Chichester (writer), and Willie Schubert
(letterer). Herman Melville: Moby Dick. Adapted By Bill
Sienkiewicz. New York: Berkley First Publishing, 1990.
Stein, Daniel, Christina Meyer, and Micha Edlich, eds. American
 Comic Books and Graphic Novels. Special issue of
Amerikastudien/American Studies 56.4 (2011).
Stein, Daniel, and Jan-Noël Thon, eds. From Comic Strips to Graphic
Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic
Narrative. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013.
Thon, Jan-Noël. “Who’s Telling the Tale? Authors and Narrators in
Graphic Narrative.” From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels:
Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative. Ed.
Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. 67–99.
Vanderbeke, Dirk. “It Was the Best of Two Worlds, It Was the Worst of
Two Worlds: The Adaptation of Novels in Comics and Graphic
Novels.” The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature:
Critical Essays on the Form. Ed. Joyce Goggin and Dan Hassler-
Forest. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010. 104–118.
Varnum, Robin, and Christina T. Gibbons, ed. The Language of
Comics: Word and Image. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2001.
Waugh, Coulton. The Comics. 1947. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1991.
Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory
and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.
Wolf, Werner. “Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, bildender
Kunst und Musik: Ein Beitrag zu einer intermedialen
Erzähltheorie.” Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial,
interdisziplinär. Ed. Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning. Trier: wvt,
2002. 23–104.
Wolf, Werner. “Narratology and Media(lity): The Transmedial
Expansion of a Literary Discipline and Possible Consequences.”
Current Trends in Narratology. Ed. Greta Olson. Berlin: De Gruyter,
2011. 146–180.

3.2 Further Reading

Berndt, Jaqueline, and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, eds. Manga’s
 Cultural Crossroads. New York: Routledge, 2013.
Ditschke, Stephan, Katerina Kroucheva, and Daniel Stein, eds.
Comics: Zur Geschichte und Theorie eines populärkulturellen
Mediums. Bielefeld: transcript, 2009.
Duncan, Randy, and Matthew J. Smith, eds. The Power of Comics:
History, Form and Culture. London: Continuum, 2009.
Eder, Barbara, Elisabeth Klar, and Ramón Reichert, eds. Theorien des
Comics: Ein Reader. Bielefeld: transcript, 2011.
Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of
American Comic Books. 2005. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.
Groensteen, Thierry. Comics and Narration. 2011. Trans. Ann Miller.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013.
Miller, Ann, and Bart Beaty, eds. The French Comics Theory Reader.
Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014.
Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic
Art. London: Phaidon, 1996.
Smith, Matthew J., and Randy Duncan, eds. Critical Approaches to
Comics: Theories and Methods. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Williams, Paul, and James Lyons, eds. The Rise of the American
Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2010.
Jan-Noël Thon

23 Narratives across Media and the

Outlines of a Media-conscious
Narratology
Abstract: Narratives are not confined to the realm of literary texts but
can also be realized in the form of films, television series, comics,
theatrical performances, and video games (among others). Moreover,
during the last few decades, contemporary media culture has come to
be increasingly defined by intermedial adaptations and transmedial
entertainment franchises that arrange narrative works across media in
interesting and occasionally rather complex ways. In order to
appropriately analyze the wealth of narrative representations across
media and further our understanding of the latter’s place in
contemporary media culture, we need a media-conscious narratology
that combines medial, intermedial, and transmedial perspectives on
narratological analysis.
Key Terms: Narrative, narratology, mediality, intermediality,
transmediality

1 On the Outlines of a Media-conscious

Narratology

1.1 Medial, Intermedial, and Transmedial

Narratology
Independently of the more complex and perhaps somewhat more
controversial questions aiming at their commercial, aesthetic, and
socio-cultural relevance, most scholars will by now agree that
narratives indeed are everywhere (cf. Barthes 1966; Richardson 2000).
Not only literary texts (cf. e.g. Genette 1980; Schmid 2010), films (cf.
e.g. Branigan 1992; Kuhn 2011), and television series (cf. e.g. Mittell
2015 forthcoming), but also comics (cf. e.g. Kukkonen 2013; Schüwer
2008), theatrical performances (cf. e.g. Breger 2012; Korthals 2003),
and video games (cf. e.g. Backe 2008; Domsch 2013) are now
commonly described as narrative forms. Interestingly, however, while
there is a broad consensus that narrativity is an inter- as well as a
transmedial phenomenon, much of current literary and media studies
tends to focus on strategies of narrative representation in specific
media, neglecting the question to what extent these strategies share an
intermedial or, more generally, a transmedial dimension.
In order to get a clearer picture of what Jan Christoph Meister calls
“transgeneric […] and intermedial approaches” (2009, 340) and
Ansgar Nünning describes as “trans-generic and transmedial
applications and elaborations of narratology” (2003, 250), then, it will
be helpful to draw a distinction between the concepts of mediality,
intermediality, and transmediality. Building on Werner Wolf’s earlier
works (1999, 2002, 2004), Irina Rajewsky has repeatedly proposed to
define this relation as follows: The term ‘(intra)mediality’ refers to
phenomena that only involve a single medium, the term
‘intermediality’ refers to a variety of phenomena that transcend medial
boundaries and involve at least two media, and the term
‘transmediality’ refers to medially unspecified phenomena that are not
connected to a given medium or its mediality and can, hence, be
realized by means of a large number of different media (cf. Rajewsky
2002, 2005, 2010).
Obviously, these distinctions could be – and in fact often are –
drawn differently, but they still allow us to more clearly define the aims
and scope of what may be described as medial, intermedial, and
transmedial narratology, respectively. Gérard Genette’s Narrative
Discourse (1980), Edward Branigan’s Narrative Comprehension and
Film (1992), Jason Mittell’s Complex TV (2015 forthcoming), Karin
Kukkonen’s Contemporary Comics Storytelling (2013), and Sebastian
Domsch’s Storyplaying (2013) may use similar terms and concepts
from time to time, but Genette’s book is a work of literary narratology,
Branigan’s book is a work of film narratology, Mittell’s book is a work
of television narratology, Kukkonen’s book is a work of comics
narratology, and Domsch’s book is a work of what may, perhaps, be
called ‘ludo-narratology.’ They are all primarily interested in the
specific mediality of their respective media, and, therefore, none of
them are overly concerned with the development of a genuinely
transmedial perspective.
Similarly, studies such as François Jost’s L’Oeil-caméra (1987) or
Sabine Schlickers’ Verfilmtes Erzählen (1997) focus on the intermedial
relations between literary and audiovisual narrative just as studies
such as Holger Korthals’s Zwischen Drama und Erzählung (2003) or
Claudia Breger’s An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance (2012) focus
on the intermedial relations between literary texts and theatrical
performances. Hence, all of these works should be considered as
contributions to the project of an intermedial rather than a genuinely
transmedial narratology. Against this background, the term
‘transmedial narratology’ appears to be best used to refer mainly to
“those narratological approaches that may be applied to different
media, rather than to a single medium only” (Rajewsky 2005, 46 n. 6)
and, accordingly, are primarily interested not in narrative media per
se, but in transmedial strategies of narrative representation (and other
transmedial phenomena) that manifest themselves across a range of
narrative media (cf. Thon 2016 forthcoming).
It should be noted, however, that ‘transmedial narratology’ is often
used as a more general umbrella term for narratological practices that
focus on media other than literary texts. In the glossary of Basic
Elements of Narrative, for example, David Herman limits himself to
stating that transmedial narratology is concerned with “storytelling
practices in different media” (2009, 194). Likewise, Marie-Laure Ryan
uses the term ‘transmedial narratology’ interchangeably with
expressions such as “[t]he study of narrative across media” (2004, 1),
“narrative media studies” (2004, 33), “the study of the realization of
narrative meaning in various media” (2005, 1), and/or “the
transmedial study of narrative” (2006, 4). In these as well as in many
other cases, it remains largely unclear whether the label ‘transmedial
narratology’ is meant to denote a more distinctly transmedial
perspective than an expression such as ‘narrative media studies.’
Even if the term ‘transmedial narratology’ is used in the narrow
sense sketched above, referring to those narratological approaches that
are primarily interested in transmedial strategies of narrative
representation (and other transmedial phenomena) that are “not
bound to a specific medium” (Rajewsky 2005, 46 n. 6), though, the fact
remains that the realization of these strategies in literary texts, films,
television series, comics, theatrical performances, and/or video games
is “in each case necessarily media-specific” (Rajewsky 2005, 46 n. 6).
Indeed, the problem of ‘media expertism’ remains a major pragmatic
problem of the still emerging field of transmedial narratology, since
pursuing narratological theory and analysis from a transmedial
perspective necessitates familiarity with a broad range of narrative
forms across media, yet most scholars of narrative specialize in one or
two of these media.

1.2 Media Blindness, Media Relativism, and

Media Consciousness
Even when leaving the pragmatic constraints of ‘media expertism’
aside, there may be good reasons for the limitation of many
narratological approaches to one or two media. In the introduction to
Narrative across Media, Marie-Laure Ryan names three of the
methodological challenges a transmedial narratology (in both the
broad sense of ‘narrative media studies’ and the narrow sense sketched
above) has to face. First, there “is the temptation to regard the
idiosyncrasies of individual texts as features of the medium” (Ryan
2004, 33). Second, there is the problem of “media blindness: the
indiscriminating transfer of concepts designed for the study of the
narratives of a particular medium […] to another medium” (Ryan
2004, 34; cf. also Hausken 2004). Third, there is the problem of
“radical [media] relativism,” that is, the assumption “that, because
media are distinct, the toolbox of narratology must be rebuilt from
scratch for every medium” (Ryan 2004, 34).
Of course, there is some controversy within media studies regarding
the question what a medium is and in what ways media should be
conceived of as distinct. Still, at least in a narratological context, there
seems to be an emerging consensus that the term is best understood as
referring to a multi-dimensional concept, combining at least a
semiotic-communicative, a material-technological, and a cultural-
institutional dimension (cf. e.g. Ryan 2006; Schmidt 2000). While the
mediality of many newspaper cartoons and webcomics, for example,
will be rather similar with regard to their semiotic-communicative
dimension – i.e., both prototypically use combinations of words and
pictures in sequences of panels –, there are some striking differences
not only with regard to their material-technological dimension – i.e.,
one is printed and the other is published online – but also, and
perhaps more importantly, with regard to their cultural-institutional
dimension – i.e., one is published as part of one or several newspapers,
and the other is most likely (self-)published on a dedicated website.
Hence, the term ‘medium’ will commonly be used to refer to
“conventionally distinct means of communication or expression” (Wolf
1999, 40) that are “conventionally perceived as distinct” (Rajewsky
2010, 61) even though these conventionally distinct media may “lack
[…] a distinct semiotic system or technological identity” (Ryan 2006,
23). It would go beyond the scope of the present chapter to discuss the
specific mediality of contemporary feature films or television series (as
prototypical forms of audiovisual narrative), graphic novels or comic
books (as prototypical forms of graphic narrative), theatrical and other
kinds of performances (as prototypical forms of corporeally performed
narrative), or singleplayer video games of certain genres (as
prototypical forms of interactive narrative) in any detail, but it is still
clear that any narratology concerned with these media – whether from
a medial, an intermedial, or a transmedial perspective – would need to
acknowledge the medium-specific ways in which they narrate ( the
section Literature and the Moving Image, as well as 22 Comics and
Graphic Novels; 28 Contemporary British Theatre and
Intermediality; 29 Intermediality and Performance Art; 31
Performing Games).
Accordingly, one of the core tasks of a transmedial narratology
would be to aim at the middle ground between media blindness and
media relativism, acknowledging both similarities and differences in
how media narrate. More specifically, most narratologists will agree
with Fotis Jannidis’s statement that “[a]ll representation takes place in
a medium, and the characteristics of each particular medium dictate
key properties of any representation that takes place in that medium”
(2003, 39). However, Jannidis’s addendum – “with the result that it is
simply not possible to discuss representation in abstract terms” (2003,
39) – seems problematic in its apparent absolutism. After all, it is
obvious that one cannot but discuss representation in abstract terms:
Just like the notion of a map using a 1:1 scale, the demand to examine
narrative representation without some degree of abstraction is
paradoxical. Yet what Jannidis aims at is the simple fact that the
storytelling possibilities of conventionally distinct media are very
different.
While one can analyze narrative representation from a transmedial
perspective, then, every attempt at a transmedial narratology has to
acknowledge that “stories are shaped but not determined by their
presentational formats” (Herman 2004, 54). Hence, it appears that
one core condition for transmedial narratology to remain media-
conscious is an awareness of the granularity of its concepts. On the one
hand, it should be obvious that many of the terms and concepts
developed for the analysis of literary texts cannot be directly applied to
other media. On the other hand, this does not mean that our
understanding of films, television series, comics, theatrical
performances, and video games cannot at all benefit from concepts
originating from literary narratology. A truly radical media relativism
that insists on the general impossibility of transferring or adapting
narratological concepts across object domains is incompatible with the
project of a transmedial narratology, but we are evidently not
confronted with a simple either/or choice between media relativism
and media blindness here.
More specifically, Ryan may be right in remarking that “the
distinction of story/ discourse, as well as the notions of character,
event, and fictional world” are “narratological concepts that apply
across media” (Ryan 2006, 6). But even then, these concepts do not
apply in exactly the same way to every conventionally distinct
medium. Not only are the properties ascribed to the discourse-side of
the story/discourse-distinction generally rather medium-specific, but
the worlds represented by, for example, contemporary novels, films,
television series, comics, theatrical performances, and video games
also tend to differ in significant ways that cannot be reduced to
“idiosyncrasies of individual [media] texts” (Ryan 2004, 33).
Hence, it not only seems that whether narratological approaches not
exclusively concerned with literary texts are best described as medial,
intermedial, or transmedial is largely a matter of the breadth of their
scope – with medial approaches focusing on a single medium,
intermedial approaches comparing at least two media, and
transmedial approaches examining strategies of narrative
representation that can be realized in a broad range of media – but it
could also be argued that a transmedial perspective on narrative
strategies of representation and other transmedial phenomena
necessarily entails medial and intermedial perspectives. However, the
fact remains that not only literary texts, films, and television series but
also comics, theatrical performances, and video games may be used to
realize strategies of narrative representation and that, therefore, the
narrativity of the respective works can be considered to be
transmedial, if only on a certain level of abstraction.

1.3 Narrative Representation and Storyworlds

across Media
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the question of when something can (or
should) be considered to be a narrative (or a narrative representation)
and/or to have the quality of narrativity has been one of narratology’s
most stubbornly recurring problems. Without going into too much
detail, it is worth emphasizing recent attempts to develop prototypical
definitions of narrative, which allow for gradual conceptualizations of
narrativity (cf. e.g. Fludernik 1996, 15–52; Jannidis 2003; Ryan 2006;
Wolf 2004). This view is perhaps best encapsulated in Marie-Laure
Ryan’s proposal to regard “the set of all narratives as fuzzy, and
narrativity (or ‘storiness’) as a scalar property” (2006, 7) that can be
defined by eight more or less salient properties. Still, even relatively
weak “do-it-yourself definitions” (Ryan 2006, 9) will usually maintain
that prototypical narratives are representations of worlds located in
space and time as well as populated by characters.
Accordingly, recent narratological practice has increasingly focused
on story-worlds as “the worlds evoked by narratives” (Herman 2009,
105; cf. also Herman 2002; Ryan 2014). But while David Herman in
particular has contributed a great deal to popularizing the concept of
storyworld in contemporary narratology, he was by no means the first
to discuss (narrative) representations in terms of their represented
worlds. As Herman himself remarks, “[o]ver the past couple of decades
[…], one of the most basic and abiding concerns of narrative scholars
has been how readers of print narratives, interlocutors in face-to-face
discourse, and viewers of films use textual cues to build up [mental]
representations of the worlds evoked by stories, or storyworlds”
(2009, 106). Despite a common conceptual core, various approaches to
represented worlds/storyworlds that are located within different
research traditions not only use a variety of terms to refer to them, but
also conceptualize them rather differently (cf. e.g. Doležel 1990; Ryan
1991; Walton 1990 on ‘fictional worlds’; as well as Gerrig 1993 on
‘narrative worlds’; and Werth 1999 on ‘textual worlds’).
Among other things, there is some confusion as to the ontological
status of storyworlds. On a very general level, storyworlds may be
understood as “imaginable scenarios or sets of states of affairs
constructed and expressed by means of artefacts (semiotic objects), but
not identical with these objects” (Margolin 2000, 355). Positioning
themselves against claims that storyworlds “exist objectively” (Doležel
1998, 24), cognitive narratologists such as Richard Gerrig (1992) or
Herman (2002, 2009) emphasize the mental models of the
storyworlds that recipients construct on the basis of a given narrative
representation. Despite the importance of reception processes for our
understanding of what storyworlds are, though, conflating “imaginable
scenarios” with their imagination is just as unsatisfactory as conflating
them with their narrative representation (cf. also already Ryan 1991).
It remains important, then, “not to confuse the worlds of games that
appreciators play with representational works with the worlds of the
works” (Walton 1990, 58) and to distinguish as clearly as possible
between the external medial representation of a storyworld, the
internal mental representations of that storyworld, and the storyworld
itself. Building on intentionalist-pragmatic theories of narrative
representation such as those developed by Gregory Currie (2010) or
Richard Walsh (2007), storyworlds are hence best conceptualized as
intersubjective communicative constructs. Or, as Jens Eder specifies,
“every fictional world is a communicative artefact that is constituted
through the intersubjective construction of mental representations
based on fictional texts” (2008, 78, translation mine, German original:
“Jede fiktive Welt ist […] ein kommunikatives Artefakt, das durch die
intersubjektive Bildung mentaler Repräsentationen mithilfe fiktionaler
Texte entsteht”; cf. also Thon 2016 forthcoming).
Yet, despite the still common confusion regarding their ontological
status, some aspects of storyworlds are well-established by now: On
the one hand, while narrative representations are necessarily realized
within the specific mediality of conventionally distinct media, the
concept of storyworld is genuinely transmedial. This does not
necessarily mean that storyworlds across media are all alike, but most
theorists agree that there is a common core to the concept, which
makes it equally applicable to a range of media (cf. e.g. Herman 2009;
Ryan 2014; Thon 2016 forthcoming). On the other hand, both
narrative representations of storyworlds and these storyworlds
themselves are necessarily incomplete, but recipients use their (actual
as well as fictional) world knowledge to ‘fill in the gaps,’ to infer
aspects of the storyworld that are only implicitly represented (cf. Ryan
1991; Thon 2016 forthcoming; Walton 1990).
The necessity of giving due attention to the processes of
comprehension that play a role in the (subjective as well as
intersubjective) construction of storyworlds also leads to the
observation that these worlds consist not only of existents, events, and
characters, but also of the spatial, temporal, and causal relations
between them, which are essential for understanding the various
locally represented situations as part of a more global storyworld (cf.
Thon 2016 forthcoming). Furthermore, in some cases, the global
storyworld will consist of several ontologically disconnected sub-
worlds. Following the work of Gérard Genette on ‘diegetic levels,’ one
can, in these cases, distinguish between (intra)diegetic primary
storyworlds, hypodiegetic secondary storyworlds, hypo-hypodiegetic
tertiary storyworlds, etc. (cf. Genette 1980, 1988; the criticism in Bal
1997, 43–75; Rimmon-Kenan 2002, 87–106).
Incidentally, the ubiquity of occasionally rather complex ‘multi-
leveled’ story-worlds in contemporary media culture also serves to
emphasize the existence of more optional, but nevertheless genuinely
transmedial strategies of narrative representation. Following Genette’s
well-known distinction of “the question who sees? and the question
who speaks?” (1980, 186), the most important of these strategies can
be described as the use of subjective representation to provide ‘direct
access’ to characters’ consciousnesses (cf. Thon 2014a) and the use of
narratorial representation that is attributable to some kind of narrator
(cf. Thon 2014b). While both of these general strategies – which are
commonly used to establish the kind of ontologically disconnected
sub-worlds mentioned above – are equally interesting from an
intermedial as well as a transmedial perspective, an in-depth
discussion yet again appears beyond the scope of the present chapter.
Instead, let us now consider in slightly more detail some of the areas of
applications of a media-conscious narratology that combines medial,
intermedial, and transmedial perspectives (cf. also Ryan and Thon
2014).

2 On the Mediality, Intermediality and

Transmediality of Narrative

2.1 The Mediality of Narrative: Video Games

Much could be said on the narrative affordances and limitations that
the specific medialities of contemporary films, television series,
comics, or theatrical performances provide. However, it would seem
that the mediality of video games is most interesting when it comes to
the challenges that medium specificity poses for a transmedial
narratology. Even though most video game theorists will by now agree
that the singleplayer modes of contemporary video games regularly
represent spaces, events, and characters, and tend to locate these
elements in increasingly complex story-worlds (cf. e.g. Aarseth 2012;
Jenkins 2004; Juul 2005; Ryan 2006, 181–203), the fact remains that
what could be roughly described as video games’ interactivity and
nonlinearity results in a number of specific challenges when it comes
to the intersubjective construction of these storyworlds (cf. Thon 2016
forthcoming). At first glance, the representation of simulated gameplay
may appear to cue players to construct mental representations of
something resembling a storyworld, but most players will recognize
that the resulting mental representations may differ significantly from
player to player and from playing session to playing session.
On the one hand, this suggests that perhaps not all elements of a
video game’s interactive gameplay are meant to contribute to the
representation of the intersubjective communicative construct of the
game’s storyworld to the same extent. Put bluntly, it seems somewhat
unlikely that a player’s decision to let the avatar of Bungie’s first-
person shooter Halo run in circles for half an hour contributes to the
representation of the character of the Master Chief in the same way as,
for example, the game’s cut-scenes do. On the other hand, nonlinear
narrative structures such as those found in Bioware’s role-playing
game Dragon Age: Origins lead to a virtual arrangement of
storyworlds, only one of which can be actualized in any given
playthrough, depending on the player’s performance, the player’s
choices, and similar parameters.
Against this background, it seems particularly noteworthy that
contemporary video games increasingly use their narrators in self-
reflexive and metareferential ways (for further discussion, cf. Thon
2014b; as well as e.g. Wolf 2009), thereby further underscoring the
medium-specific limitations and affordances that arise from their
interactivity and nonlinearity. On the one hand, this can be observed
rather well in the narratorial representation that is attributed to the
‘interactive narrators’ of games such as Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia: The
Sands of Time and Supergiant Games’ Bastion. From the perspective
of the actual game mechanics, player actions in these games lead to
ludic events which, under certain conditions, ‘trigger’ various ‘pieces’
of the narratorial representation. However, within the game’s
representational logic, the gameplay contributes to the representation
of the storyworld evoked by the verbal narration – i.e., it is initially
represented as being caused by the narratorial representation instead
of the other way around.
This mildly paradoxical situation is metareferentially emphasized
when the player is unable to meet the various challenges that the
gameplay of both games provides: When the player-controlled
experiencing I of the unnamed Prince in Prince of Persia: The Sands of
Time dies, the Prince’s narrating I regularly corrects himself with
remarks such as “No, no, no… that’s not how it happened” before the
game resets to the last save point. Similarly, in Bastion, when the
player lets the player-controlled character The Kid fall from the edge of
what remains of the world after the man-made catastrophe referred to
as the Calamity, only to have him reappear from above, the narrator,
an old man named Rucks, sometimes comments on this with pieces of
highly unreliable verbal narration such as “And then he falls to his
death… I’m just fooling!” While Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
and Bastion use their narrators to emphasize and reflect on the
interactivity of video games’ gameplay, then, there are also video
games whose use of narrators foregrounds their nonlinearity instead.
The narrator of Hothead’s action role-playing game DeathSpank and
its sequel, Deathspank: Thongs of Virtue, eventually reveals herself to
be Sandy Bravitor, the mentor of the player-controlled character,
DeathSpank. This is only one of two possible endings that
DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue offers, though: Just before the final
cut-scene, Sandy’s experiencing I asks DeathSpank to sacrifice himself
in order to save the world from the supposedly corrupted Thongs of
Virtue, but the game gives the player a choice here, and he or she can
choose to let DeathSpank fight Sandy. Hence, in this case, DeathSpank
can kill the character who, if she is not killed, turns out to have become
the narrator from whom DeathSpank otherwise takes the narratorial
reigns in order to go on narrating his own story. While this potential
‘twist’ does not, strictly speaking, cause logical inconsistencies within
the storyworld of DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue, it still serves to
emphasize the medium’s specific affordances with regard to the use of
nonlinear narrative structures.
This is not the end of the line, though: While perhaps closer to what
is sometimes called ‘interactive fiction’ than to mainstream video
games, Galactic Café’s The Stanley Parable has recently used the
unfolding dynamic between a highly metareferential and self-aware
narrator and the player-controlled character Stanley to launch an even
more forceful critique of the “illusion of agency” (Fendt et al. 2012,
114) that video games with a nonlinear narrative structure offer their
players. More specifically, there is a predetermined path that the
narrator wants Stanley to take, but the player can make Stanley choose
differently, leading the narrator, who evidently still has a large degree
of control over ‘the way the story goes,’ to become increasingly irritated
and, in most playthroughs, to arrange for Stanley to die in a variety of
more and more gruesome ways. The Stanley Parable’s gameplay is
comparatively bland, with Stanley only being able to walk and interact
with some objects in the game spaces, but the game’s metareferential
and self-reflexive use of narratorial representation – with one of the
possible paths even adding a second narrator, who comments on the
relation between the first narrator and Stanley – nevertheless makes it
not only one of the most interesting available ‘meta games,’ but also a
thoroughly enjoyable experience.
Of course, considerably more could be said not only on the mediality
of contemporary video games but also on the ways in which these
games may use narrators and narratorial representation to self-
reflexively and metareferentially examine the affordances and
limitations that their necessary interactivity and optional nonlinearity
provide. Still, even the comparatively brief examination that the
present chapter was able to provide should already have served to
illustrate the challenges a media-conscious narratology has to face.
Independently of the extent to which they limit themselves to a single
medium, compare two media, or pursue even broader transmedial
perspectives, narratological analyses will have to acknowledge the
medium-specific ways in which strategies of narrative representation
are realized – whether that realization takes place within the specific
mediality of literary texts, films, television series, comics, theatrical
performances, or video games.

2.2 The Intermediality of Narrative:

Adaptations
As has already been mentioned, the distinction between medial,
intermedial, and transmedial narratology (or, rather, between medial,
intermedial, and transmedial narratologies) primarily captures
differences in the perspective(s) from which narrative works across
media are analyzed. While medial approaches emphasize the specific
mediality of a single conventionally distinct medium, intermedial
approaches compare the mediality of (at least) two conventionally
distinct media, and transmedial approaches focus on strategies of
narrative representation that are not bound to the mediality of a
specific medium (though they necessarily have to be realized within
the mediality of conventionally distinct media, as well). Despite the
fact that intermedial and transmedial approaches are not limited to
specific sets of narrative works in the same way that medial
approaches are, however, certain kinds of narrative works more readily
suggest an intermedial and/or a transmedial approach to their analysis
than others.
Before providing some examples of narrative works that suggest an
intermedial approach to narratological analysis in particular, it might
be helpful to further differentiate between some basic forms of
intermediality. While there is no dearth of different conceptualizations
of the term ( 0 Introduction; as well as e.g. the contributions in Paech
and Schröter 2008), Rajewsky’s work on “intermediality as a critical
category for the concrete analysis of specific individual media
products or configurations” (2005, 47) once more seems like a good
starting point. More specifically, Rajewsky distinguishes between
intermediality as referring to “ medial transposition (as, for example,
film adaptations, novelizations, and so forth),” intermediality as
referring to “media combination, which includes phenomena such as
opera, film, theatre, performances […], comics, and so on” (2005, 51),
and intermediality as referring to “intermedial references, for example
references in a literary text to a film through, for instance, the
evocation or imitation of certain filmic techniques such as zoom shots,
fades, dissolves, and montage editing” (2005, 52).
The question how films, television series, comics, theatrical
performances, and video games combine different semiotic systems in
what could alternatively be described as a form of multimodality
(which is particularly well-researched in the context of comics; 22
Comics and Graphic Novels; as well as e.g. Hoppeler, Etter, and Rippl
2009; Rippl and Etter 2015) seems just as interesting as the question
to what extent these media may employ more or less overt reference to
each other’s mediality. This is particularly relevant for the analysis of
contemporary video games, which are capable of ‘reproducing’ or
‘remediating’ the multimodal configurations characteristic of most of
the more established narrative media ( 31 Performing Games; as well
as e.g. Bolter and Grusin 1999; Thon 2016 forthcoming). However, the
present chapter will focus on the first of the three forms of
intermediality that Rajewsky distinguishes, since intermedial
adaptations have not only become increasingly influential in
contemporary media culture but also tend to be particularly well-
suited for narratological analysis.
 More specifically, while current adaptation studies have
increasingly, and for good reasons, moved away from the question of
‘fidelity’ ( 13 Adaptation – Remediation – Transmediality; as well as
e.g. Constandinides 2010; Hutcheon 2013), a narratologically
informed comparison of adaptations and their ‘ur-texts’ may still
provide interesting perspectives on questions such as how Frank
Miller’s comics series Sin City relates to Miller and Robert Rodriguez’s
film adaptation (which combines several of the original ‘storylines’ in
intriguing ways and employs a rather distinct visual style that is
evidently influenced by the comics) or how the Tomb Raider video
game series relates to Simon West’s film adaptation Lara Croft: Tomb
Raider (which opens with a sequence that self-reflexively represents
Lara Croft doing things that appear very similar to what the video
game version of her character does during the gameplay of the video
game series, only to subsequently mark the sequences as having
merely represented a training simulation).
However, a narratological analysis of adaptations may also focus on
the presence or absence of more optional strategies of narrative
representation. Zack Snyder’s film adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave
Gibbons’ Watchmen, for example, tells roughly the same story as its
‘ur-text,’ but does so without employing any of the complex strategies
of narratorial representation that all but define the graphic novel.
More specifically, the verbal-pictorial representation of the graphic
novel is alternately framed by written verbal narration from the
journal of one of its main characters, Rorschach, written verbal
narration from a diegetic comic book, The Black Freighter, spoken
verbal narration from various diegetic characters, and what is arguably
best described as thought verbal narration from yet another one of
Watchmen’s main characters, Dr. Manhattan. Moreover, all but the
last of the twelve chapters of the graphic novel are concluded by
various kinds of ‘excerpts’ from diegetic texts, ranging from the
autobiography of Hollis Mason, The Nite Owl, via various newspaper
clippings to a selection of business correspondence of the story’s arch
villain, Adrian Veidt.
While Snyder’s film adaptation has enjoyed considerable
commercial as well as a decent amount of critical success, the fact that
the graphic novel’s multitude of narratorial voices is largely absent in
this case seems noteworthy, since it not only silences a significant part
of what constitutes the graphic novel’s appeal but also prevents Snyder
from launching the kind of subversive critique of the superhero genre
that Moore has so masterfully constructed. Despite these lacunae,
however, the film is still considerably closer to the aesthetic and
political impetus of the graphic novel than, for example, the tie-in
video game Watchmen: The End is Nigh, whose main function seems
to have been the promotion of the film, but which ultimately turns out
to be not much more than an uninspired beat-‘em-up with some
Watchmen-related textures and cut-scenes tacked on to it. Still, this
comparatively unfortunate entry in the Watchmen franchise at least
serves to illustrate the ultimate limitation of the concept of intermedial
adaptation, since it is intended as a sequel to, rather than a
straightforward adaptation of, the film and/or graphic novel’s story.
As a more aesthetically rewarding example illustrating these
limitations with regard to contemporary media culture, one might turn
toward the various incarnations of The Walking Dead, which have
recently received a lot of attention: At first glance, AMC’s television
series may appear to be an adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s comics
series and Telltale’s adventure game series may, in turn, appear to be
an adaptation of the television series, but the differences of the stories
these series tell turn out to be quite striking and do, in fact, seem to
make a description of the television series’ storyworld as a
modification of the comics series’ storyworld appear more appropriate.
In contrast, the adventure game series takes even more liberties, but
does so in a way that makes it appear as a largely consistent expansion
of the comics series’ storyworld. And finally, the recently-published
first-person shooter The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct aims at
expanding the storyworld of the television series rather than that of the
comics series (cf. also Parody 2011; Thon 2015 forthcoming).

2.3 The Transmediality of Narrative:

Convergence
Indeed, the development commonly described as media convergence
(cf. e.g. Jenkins 2006; Jensen 2010) has led to the continuing rise of
transmedial entertainment franchises such as The Lord of the Rings,
The Matrix, Doctor Who, or Tomb Raider, the internal structure of
most if not all of which tends not to be appropriately grasped by an
overly exclusive reliance on the concept of adaptation. Rather, in these
cases, it appears to be helpful to distinguish between the local
storyworlds of ‘single narrative works,’ the glocal but noncontradictory
transmedial storyworlds that may be constructed out of local work-
specific storyworlds, and the global and often quite contradictory
transmedial universes that may be constructed out of glocal
transmedial storyworlds in turn (cf. Thon 2015 forthcoming). In order
to describe the relations between the local work-specific storyworlds,
the glocal transmedial storyworlds, and the global transmedial
universe of a given transmedial entertainment franchise, Marie-Laure
Ryan’s concept of transfictionality provides a good starting point, with
transfictionality being defined “[a]s a type of relation between two
works” that “requires resemblance as well as difference […] on the level
of the fictional world” (2008, 389).
Building on Lubomír Doležel’s discussion of “postmodernist
rewrites” (1998, 206), Ryan further distinguishes between three kinds
of transfictional relations: Transposition “preserves the design and the
main story of the protoworld but locates it in a different temporal or
spatial setting” (Doležel 1998, 206); expansion “extends the scope of
the protoworld by filling its gaps, constructing a prehistory or
posthistory, and so on” (Doležel 1998, 207); and modification
“constructs essentially different versions of the protoworld,
redesigning its structure and reinventing its story” (Doležel 1998, 206).
While it seems that Ryan’s “transposition” – a term that she uses to
refer to a much more specific phenomenon in the context of
transfictionality than, for example, Linda Hutcheon does in her
influential definition of adaptation as an “acknowledged transposition
of a recognizable other work or works” (Hutcheon 2013, 8) – goes
beyond what can commonly be observed in transmedial entertainment
franchises, expansion and modification appear to be the dominant
functions in these franchises’ representation of local work-specific
storyworlds, glocal transmedial storyworlds, and global transmedial
universes.
As the brief discussion of the franchise of The Walking Dead above
has already illustrated, however, this is only partially true, since most
transmedial entertainment franchises also entail salient cases of what
may be described as forms of ‘retelling’ or, perhaps less restrictively,
adaptation. It would seem, then, that two ‘single narrative works’
within a transmedial entertainment franchise can be defined, first, by a
relation of adaptation, when one is trying to represent the same
elements of a storyworld that the other represents; second, by a
relation of expansion, when one is trying to represent the same
storyworld that the other represents, but adds previously
unrepresented elements; and third, by a relation of modification, when
one is trying to represent elements of the storyworld represented by
the other, but adds previously unrepresented elements that make it
impossible to comprehend what is represented as part of a single,
logically consistent storyworld.
Take, for example, the video games in the particularly complex Star
Wars franchise: It is clear that the six feature films represent the
‘canonical core’ of the Star Wars universe, yet there are not only games
such as Lego Star Wars and Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy
that primarily aim to ‘retell’ the films’ stories and, hence, can be
described as adaptations (without thereby negating the various
complications that arise from their ‘lego-ization’ and which would
make describing them as ‘mere retellings’ appear inappropriate), but
also games such as those in the Star Wars: Knights of the Old
Republic series that aim not at a ‘retelling’ of the films’ stories but,
rather, at a logically consistent expansion of the storyworld that the
latter are representing. This is not to say that there are no minor
inconsistencies in both series, but most of the more recent Star Wars
games – as opposed to the early Star Wars comics, for example – do
not aim at a modification of the transmedial storyworld that is at the
core of Star Wars’ transmedial universe. However, Star Wars boasts a
considerably more sophisticated ‘canon system’ that encompasses
various different transmedial storyworlds which are all part of the
‘expanded universe,’ but may be more or less distant to the
transmedial world that resided at its ‘canonical core.’
Another example of a particularly long-running and complex
transmedial entertainment franchise that has recently garnered more
mainstream attention via a series of high-profile feature films
(including the Iron Man trilogy, Thor and Thor: The Dark World, and
The Avengers) is the so-called Marvel Universe, within which the
stories (and work-specific storyworlds) of most comics published by
Marvel are located. In contradistinction to the transmedial universe of
Star Wars, whose ‘canon system’ offers exclusively external
explanations regarding the complex relations of the various work-
specific as well as transmedial storyworlds that it contains, the
transmedial universe of Marvel Entertainment is significantly more
self-reflexive, offering both external and internal explanations as to
how its various sub-worlds relate to each other. Apart from the
transmedial storyworld of “Earth-616” (the main ‘continuity’ of the
Marvel Universe), there are a variety of other transmedial storyworlds,
including those of “Ultimate Marvel,” “X-Men-Adventures,” and the
so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe. More interestingly, though, the
sub-worlds of the Marvel Universe tend to be aware of each other,
allowing for different forms of travel between ontologically distinct
domains of the transmedial universe. In a nutshell, the Marvel
Universe’s more self-aware take on the problem of multiple work-
specific as well as transmedial storyworlds allows for a ‘re-entry’ of the
franchise’s external structure into the transmedial universe that it
represents.
While there are quite a few other areas of application for a
transmedial approach to narratological analysis, the transmedial
entertainment franchises that have increasingly come to define
contemporary media culture provide a particularly instructive case for
the heuristic value of conceptualizing narratological terms and
concepts such as the storyworld from a transmedial perspective.
Furthermore, as the present chapter should have also made clear, we
need the full range of ‘narrative media studies’ in order to come to
terms with the breadth of contemporary storytelling to be found in
literary texts, films, television series, comics, theatrical performances,
video games, and other conventionally distinct media. While
narratological approaches may focus on the mediality of a single
conventionally distinct medium, examine the intermedial relations
between two (or more) conventionally distinct media, or further
expand their scope by asking how certain transmedial strategies of
narrative representation are realized across a broader range of
conventionally distinct media, all of these approaches should be
understood as essential building blocks of a media-conscious
narratology.
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Wolf. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. 1–85.

3.2 Further Reading

Alber, Jan, and Per Krogh Hansen, eds. Beyond Classical Narration:
Transmedial and Unnatural Challenges. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014.
Grishakova, Marina, and Marie-Laure Ryan, eds. Intermediality and
 Storytelling. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010.
Hühn, Peter, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, eds.
Handbook of Narratology. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009.
Hühn, Peter, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, eds. Point of View,
Perspective, and Focalization: Modeling Mediation in Narrative.
Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009.
Kindt, Tom, and Hans-Harald Müller, eds. What Is Narratology?
Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory. Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2003.
Olson, Greta, ed. Current Trends in Narratology. Berlin: De Gruyter,
2011.
Page, Ruth, and Bronwen Thomas, eds. New Narratives: Stories and
Storytelling in the Digital Age. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2011.
Ryan, Marie-Laure, ed. Narrative across Media: The Languages of
Storytelling. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.
Ryan, Marie-Laure, and Jan-Noël Thon, eds. Storyworlds across
Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology. Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2014.
Stein, Daniel, and Jan-Noël Thon, eds. From Comic Strips to Graphic
Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic
Narrative. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 22015.
____
Part II Music, Sound and Performance
Werner Wolf

24 Literature and Music: Theory

Abstract: This chapter is a revised and adapted version of previous
publications (in particular Wolf 2005 and Wolf 2008) and attempts to
map the wide field of musico-literary relations on a typology of
intermediality which draws on Scher and Rajewsky. This typology
comprises, within the variant of ‘intracompositional intermediality’,
the subforms ‘plurimediality’ as well as ‘intermedial reference’ through
‘thematization’ and ‘imitation’ of other media (with imitation again
being subdivided into ‘evocation’, ‘formal imitation’ and ‘[partial]
reproduction’). In accordance with a broad sense of ‘intermediality’,
denoting any kind of relationship between conventionally distinct
media, ‘extracompositional’ forms are also addressed (with the
subforms ‘transmediality’ and ‘intermedial transposition’). All forms
presented are shown to be of relevance for the investigation of musico-
literary relations in literature in English. The chapter concludes by
discussing perspectives of research beyond typological concerns.
Key Terms: Intermediality, literature and music, plurimediality,
transmediality

1 Introduction
Literature is a verbal form of art that does not only refer to reality in
various ways but can also establish a plethora of contacts between
individual literary works and genres as well as to other, non-literary
discourses and other arts and media. The various relations between
literature and music, on which the present chapter focuses, obviously
belong to this latter, ‘intermedial’ potential of literature.
Even if one accentuates the verbal side of intermedial relations
between literature and music – which is advisable in a handbook series
dedicated to English and American studies – there is such an
abundance of possible forms and phenomena that a typological survey
is a necessary first step in order to come to terms with the richness of
the field, before one can address other and no less necessary
approaches to it.

2 Extra- vs. Intracompositional Intermediality

and Scher’s Typology of Musico-literary
Relations
One of the most frequently used typologies in the field of musico-
literary relations was Steven Paul Scher’s triadic distinction between
‘literature in music’, ‘music and literature’ and ‘music in literature’,
which he devised long before the emergence of intermediality studies
(Scher 1968; also Scher 1970 and Scher 1984). Although it has elicited
several modifications, for instance by Gier (1995) and myself (Wolf
1999a and Wolf 1999b, ch. 4), its basic features have remained
recognizable throughout all typological rewritings – and most so in
conceptualizations which are based on a narrow sense of ‘interart
relations’ or intermediality as a direct or indirect participation of more
than one medium in the signification and/or structure of a given
semiotic entity (a ‘work’), an involvement that must be verifiable
within this entity. The main trait that characterizes Scher’s approach is
precisely such a focus on relations that can be documented within a
given work of literature or musical composition. It applies as much to
program music as a specimen of ‘literature in music’ as to vocal music
as a combination of ‘literature and music’, and to instances of ‘music in
literature’ (this variant can be found in what Scher called ‘word music’,
i.e. a foregrounding of the acoustic dimension of verbal signifiers
reminiscent of musical sound, but also in ‘structural analogies to
music’, i.e. the creation of patterns in a verbal text so that they
resemble structures in musical compositions, e.g. a theme with
variations). Scher’s typology actually charts what I have termed
‘intracompositional intermediality’. I myself have privileged this type
of ‘intermediality in the narrow sense’ (Wolf 1999b, 36–37) in part of
my research. However, this excludes a substantial part of what
nowadays (cf. Rajewsky 2002) is also frequently viewed as belonging
to relations between media, namely what I term ‘extracompositional
intermediality’, that is, relations between media that transcend
individual works or compositions.
Integrating this second basic form into the general concept of
intermediality necessitates a broader definition of the term. In this
broader sense, ‘intermediality’ applies to any transgression of
boundaries between what is conventionally perceived as distinct media
of communication. Such transgressions can occur not only within
individual works, texts or performances but also as a consequence of
relations or comparisons between different semiotic complexes. This
broader sense of intermediality is desirable in particular for cultural-
historical and media-comparative approaches such as those carried out
e.g. by Lawrence Kramer and others, in whose research music and
literature are repeatedly viewed from a comparative point of view,
including “manifest analogies” between different media as well as
“deep-structural convergences” (1989, 161) among them. While in
intermediality in the narrow, intracompositional sense the
transgression of boundaries between different media appears to be a
‘given’ of the works under scrutiny, the analysis of which can largely be
carried out within the confines of one discipline, one must be aware
that the discussion of intermediality in this broader sense is to a large
extent dependent on the choice of, and willingness to adopt, a
comparative and interdisciplinary approach. In other words, while
intracompositional intermediality is predominantly a matter of the
given material (work, composition, text), the extracompositional
variant depends more on the critic’s perspective. This also affects the
discernibility of intermediality, which in its intracompositional
variants is generally higher than in its extracompositional ones.

3 Forms of Extracompositional Intermediality

and their Relevance to Musico-literary
Relations
Basically, there are two variants of extracompositional intermediality,
both of which are relevant to musico-literary studies. The first is
transmediality (Rajewsky 2003, ch. iv.3.4, although she does not
subsume it under ‘intermediality’). This concerns phenomena that
appear in more than one medium without being (viewed as) specific to,
or having an origin in, any of them. Transmediality is thus the result of
an essentially media-comparative perspective and appears, for
instance, on the level of ahistorical formal devices that occur in more
than one medium. Examples of this highly fruitful intermedial
perspective include the occurrence of motifs and variation, of framing
structures and descriptivity in both literature and music. Of particular
interest in this context is also the fact that in recent narratology,
narrativity as the defining quality of narratives is no longer restricted
to verbal, narrator-transmitted stories alone, but from a transmedial
perspective is considered to extend to various other media such as
opera and film, ballet, the visual arts and, as Neubauer (1997) and
others have argued, to some degree even instrumental music (Micznik
2001; Wolf 2002, 76–94). Another interesting field of transmedial
research is the investigation of self-reflexive irony (Bonds 1991) and
generally ‘metareference’ in (metafictional, metadramatic or
metapoetic) literature and what one may call by analogy ‘metamusic’
(Wolf 2007, 2010). Such transmedial analogies can, for instance, be
observed in the ‘self-conscious’ use of musical styles in the four
movements of Louis Spohr’s symphony no. 6 (the “Historical”, 1840),
in which he attempted to compose in the styles of four consecutive
periods (Bach, Haydn/Mozart, Beethoven, and the present) and
chapter 14 (“Oxen of the Sun”) of Joyce’s Ulysses (1918/1922), which
reads like a review of literary styles from a latinate language and one
reminiscent of Old English texts to various literary styles of the
nineteenth century.
Yet further instances of transmediality concern characteristic
historical traits that are shared by either the formal or the content level
of several media in given periods, such as the emotional expressivity
characteristic of the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility, which can be
traced in drama, fiction, poetry, opera, instrumental music and in the
visual arts.
Finally, transmediality can equally appear on the content level alone.
This is, for example, the case in certain archetypal subject matters and
‘themes’, such as the unfolding of romantic love or the conflicts
between generations and genders, all of which can be observed in
verbal texts, the visual arts, film, the opera or – as far as the gender
tension is concerned – even in the classical sonata form, at least in its
genderized reading by Adolf Bernhard Marx in his treatise Die Lehre
von der musikalischen Komposition (third part 1845, 273). What
marks these content phenomena as transmedial is the fact that they do
not have an easily traceable origin which can be attributed to a certain
medium or that such an origin does not play a role in the gestation of
the works in question.
There are, however, cases in which discernibly similar contents or
formal aspects appear in works of different media and where at the
same time a clear origin can be attributed to them in one of them. In
these cases a transfer between two media can be shown to have taken
place. This type of intermediality is intermedial transposition (or, in
other terminologies, ‘media change’ [Medienwechsel], Rajewsky 2002,
22; Gess 2010, 141). As with all forms of intermediality, intermedial
transposition from a ‘source’ to a ‘target’ medium can apply to parts or
to the entirety of individual semiotic entities and also to larger units
such as genres. As with transmediality, intermedial transposition can
moreover occur with respect to both formal and content phenomena.
An instance of partial intermedial transposition in the field of formal
devices would be the employment of a narrator – originally a typical
component of the medium of verbal fiction – in film (resulting in
‘voice-over’). According to Halliwell’s study “Narrative Elements in
Opera” (1999), the operatic orchestra can in part also be regarded as
fulfilling narratorial functions and could to this extent be seen as a
transposition of a narrator, at least of his or her commenting function,
into music.
The most common variant of intermedial transposition in
contemporary culture does not, however, apply to elements of specific
media but to entire works, in particular to their content, as happens in
filmic adaptations of novels. Music, or rather the musical theatre, also
frequently plays a role in this type of intermediality, as exemplified by
‘literature operas’ such as Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw
(1954, libretto by Myfanwy Piper), an operatic version of Henry James’
gothic story of 1898 (cf. Halliwell 2005, 117–159). As is typical of
extracompositional intermediality in general, in all of these cases the
intermedial quality is primarily located in the space between the two
works: in the process of gestation, but not in the end product. Thus
Britten’s opera can be understood without previous knowledge of
James’ pre-text, which thus does not essentially contribute to the
signification of the opera as such.
 As we have seen, intermedial transposition and transmediality go
beyond musico-literary relations, but both of these extracompositional
forms of intermediality are also relevant to this specific field, when one
approaches it with an interest in cultural studies, in general aesthetics,
in interart periodization, and in comparative media studies.

4 Forms of Intracompositional Intermediality

and their Relevance to Musico-literary
Relations
The second main form of intermediality, and hence also of musico-
literary relations, is in my terminology intracompositional
intermediality. Like its extracompositional counterpart, this form can
also occur in two main forms: ‘plurimediality’ and ‘intermedial
reference’. In both cases, intermediality is an integral part of the
signification and/or the semiotic structure of individual works, texts or
performances.
The most obvious form of such intracompositional intermediality is
multi- or plurimediality. As far as musico-literary relations are
concerned, plurimediality corresponds to Scher’s form ‘literature and
music’ and is best exemplified in opera, as a synthesis of drama and
music, and in song, as a union of poetry and music. Generally, this
variant of intermediality applies whenever two or more media with
their typical or conventional signifiers are overtly present in a given
semiotic entity in at least one instance (“overt intermediality”, Wolf
1999b, 39). In plurimediality, the original components of the
intermedial mixture, and thus intermediality itself, are directly
discernible on the surface of the work, that is, on the level of the
signifiers and without being semiotically dependent on each other (as a
verbal text would be on the medium of painting, if a text were
reproduced as part of a picture). As a consequence, the individual or
original media of a plurimedial mixture or hybrid appear to belong to
heterogeneous semiotic systems. In many cases they can be ‘quoted’
separately, for instance, when reciting the text of a song and humming
its melody, yet this need not always be the case (as in a pattern poem
in which the visual and the literary media are inextricably interlinked).
 The range of plurimedial variants, which have been explored by
Walter Bernhart (2008) for the Lied and include the possibility of one
medial component interpreting or even imitating elements of another
component, can be located between the poles of pluri- or multimedial
‘combination’ and intermedial ‘fusion’. With reference to opera, Claus
Clüver has rightly pointed out that ‘multimedial’ separability applies
here to the textually fixed aspects only, namely to the libretto as
opposed to the musical score, whereas the performance of an opera
constitutes a form of medial fusion whose components cannot be
separated without losing the performative character of opera (cf.
Clüver 2000/2001, 25). Similarly, a song may theoretically be split into
melody and text, yet it goes without saying that a song is more than a
mere juxtaposition of words and music. This is why the singing of a
song is rather a synthesis than a combination of media, although for
the sake of analysis, the two medial components can still be clearly
distinguished. An even closer medial fusion occurs in the performance
of ‘sound poetry’, as also discussed by Clüver (2002). Other examples
of plurimediality that involve literature or words and music include the
various genres of vocal music, as well as melodrama and the insertion
of musical notation in novels (as in Ulysses) or other literary texts. As
is the case with the other basic types of intermediality, plurimediality
is, of course, not restricted to relations between words and music but
may extend, for instance, to ballet as a synthesis of dance, non-verbal
dramatic elements and music, or to comic strips and illustrated novels
as combinations of words and images. In all of these cases the various
forms of combination or fusion allow us to consider plurimediality as
resulting in medial hybrids, even if the regular use of such hybrids may
lead to the creation of a new syncretistic medium, such as the sound
film or the opera.
As opposed to plurimediality, the second form of intracompositional
intermediality, intermedial reference, does not give the impression of
the medial hybridity of the signifiers nor of the heterogeneity of the
semiotic systems used but rather of medial and semiotic homogeneity.
The reason for this is that intermedial reference exclusively operates
on the basis of the signifiers of the dominant referring ‘source’
medium. This means that it can only incorporate signifiers of another
medium where these are already part of the source medium (see below,
the referential variant ‘[partial] reproduction’). Thus, while in
‘plurimediality’ intermediality is directly or overtly perceptible, in
‘intermedial reference’ the involvement of another medium occurs only
indirectly and covertly (“covert intermediality”, Wolf 1999b, 41),
namely through the signifiers and signifieds of the work in question
pointing to the non-dominant ‘target’ medium. A monomedial work
that includes intermedial references therefore remains monomedial
and displays only one semiotic system. Consequently, the target
medium is actually only ‘present’ as a concept rather than ‘physically’.
Intermedial reference can indicate another medium in general
(termed ‘system reference’ in intertextuality theory). Alternatively,
intermedial reference can also point to an individual heteromedial
work (‘individual reference’; for the analogies between intertextuality
and intermediality cf. Wolf 1999b, ch. 3.4).
In both system and individual reference, intermediality can occur in
explicit or implicit form. In explicit reference (intermedial
thematization or the mode of ‘telling’, a term which is most
appropriately used in the context of verbal media, Wolf 1999b, 44–46)
the heteromedial relation resides in the signifieds of the referring
semiotic complex, while its signifiers are employed in their usual way
and do not contribute to heteromedial imitation. In verbal media,
explicit reference is easiest to identify. In principle, it is present
whenever another medium (or a heteromedial work) is mentioned or
discussed (‘thematized’). Explicit reference can also appear in
representations of heteromedial artists, such as painters or musicians,
as characters in a novel, and the same applies, of course, to recipients
of altermedial works in fiction (all of these variants are, for instance, to
be found in Vikram Seth’s novelistic homage to music and musicians
An Equal Music, 1999).
Since music, as a rule, cannot unambiguously refer to a reality
outside itself, let alone to an abstract concept such as a different
medium, explicit reference does not strictly speaking have a musical
equivalent. This is why in musico-literary relations Scher’s type ‘music
in literature’ can include ‘thematization’, but the reverse case,
‘literature in music’, can hardly do so. However, music can point to
another medium by a (partial) quotation or ‘reproduction’, provided
this other medium is a composite and comprises music itself. Thus, an
instrumental composition may refer to an opera by ‘quoting’ a melody
from it. As a result, the entire heteromedial work (here, the opera
quoted from) may be suggested to the listener by means of association.
As reference by (partial) reproduction of features or elements
associated with an altermedial artefact or another medium implies
some kind of heteromedial mimesis, it does not belong to explicit
intermedial reference but constitutes one of three subforms of ‘implicit
intermedial reference’ (Rajewsky 2002, 114) or intermedial imitation.
This differentiation between ‘thematization’ and ‘imitation’ (or ‘telling’
and ‘showing’) was already prefigured by the coiner of the term
‘intermediality’, Hansen-Löve, in his opposition of “thematisieren” and
“realisieren” as modes of literary reference to painting (Hansen-Löve
1983, 305). In all implicit subforms, the intermedial signification is the
effect of some kind of imitation or iconicity with regard to another
medium or a heteromedial artifact, at least to (some of) its features
(concerning its nature, content, effects or structure). If successful, this
iconicity leads to a re-presentation of the heteromedial entity in the
recipient’s mind (for the relation between intermedial imitation and
iconicity cf. Wolf 2003a). While explicit intermedial reference
primarily appeals to the recipients’ cognitive faculties (it must be
‘deciphered’), implicit, imitative reference, in addition, permits them
to experience the other medium in imagination as if it were present in
the work in question to some extent. As Rajewsky rightly points out,
the ‘as-if’ quality of such imitative intermedial reference produces a
kind of heteromedial illusion (Rajewsky 2002, 87–91).
(Partial) ‘reproduction’ is a liminal case of ‘imitation’ and is easiest
to discern when either the source medium or the target medium of the
reference is a composite, so that both media have a common medial
denominator. This common denominator is then used as a means of
realizing the intermedial reference. As the reproduction of the other
medium (the medium referred to) can be carried out with the existing
means of the source (or referring) medium, intermediality does not
here imply a pluralization of media, which distinguishes intermedial
reproduction from plurimediality. Reproduction can further be
distinguished from explicit intermedial reference by the fact that this
implicit form does not exclusively rely on the activation of the concept
of the other medium, but in some way ‘quotes’ (parts of) it.
Reproduction can occur as total reproduction, in which case a
composite source medium permits the integration of (partially) alter-
medial works, as, for instance, when a painting or a piece of music is
integrated into the composite medium sound film. Reproduction can
also occur in the form of a partial reproduction, in which case it is (at
least) the target medium which is a medial hybrid. Examples would be
the stills of a film (photography referring to film) or, as far as the
relationship between literature and music is concerned, a novel that
contains a quote of the text of a well-known song, thereby presenting
the entire song (including the music) to the (informed) reader’s mind
(e.g. in the aforementioned novel An Equal Music, the reference to
Schubert’s song “In einem Bächlein helle” [In a clear brook], Seth
1999, 5). In all of these cases of partial reproduction, the intermedial
reference operates on the basis of association. The ‘quotation’ of a part
of the heteromedial entity triggers this target entity in its entirety and
therefore also the part that is not covered by the source medium (for
the partial reproduction of “vocal music through associative quotation”
as a device in ‘musicalized’ novels cf. Wolf 1999b, ch. 4.5; also Viol
2006, who erroneously considers this form as having escaped the
notice of scholars in the field and emphasizes the importance of ‘sound
tracking’ as a form of reference to pop music in contemporary fiction).
The second variant of implicit reference is evocation. It imitates the
effects of another medium or heteromedial artifact by purely
monomedial means (without necessarily involving heteromedial
quotation). As opposed to explicit reference, which points to another
medium in a non-imaginative, denotative and cognitive way, it appeals
to the recipient’s imagination. Evocation is highly relevant for the
relation between literature and music. Thus, instrumental program
music can create a musical equivalent for the atmosphere of a literary
scene, and novels can evoke a specific musical composition in the
reader’s mind by describing its effects on certain characters. Such
musical effects can, for instance, be emotional responses or images
that are described in the text and ideally form an imaginary content
analogy to elements of the music referred to. A locus classicus in this
respect is chapter five of E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End (1910)
with its evocation of Beethoven’s fifth symphony through the – highly
idiosyncratic – associations in the stream of consciousness of one of
the characters, Helen (for such “imaginary content analogies” as an
evocative form of intermedial imitation and its affinities with Scher’s
category of ‘verbal music’ see Wolf 1999b, 63). In contrast to
intermedial transposition, evocation requires the awareness of a
heteromedial phenomenon and thus of intermediality, since it is part
of the immediate signification of the work in which the reference
occurs (in this case the evocation contributes, among other things, to
highlighting a specific character). In order to preclude
misunderstandings, and in particular when the reader is meant to
identify a specific musical composition, intermedial evocations (again
as opposed to intermedial transposition) are, as a rule, combined with
some explicit marking (notably intermedial thematization, as in the
case of Howards End).
The necessity of marking intermediality in some explicit way also
applies to formal intermedial imitation, the third subtype of implicit
reference. This is an especially interesting phenomenon because in this
case the intermedial signification is the effect of a particularly unusual
iconic use of the signs of the source medium. In fact, as opposed to
explicit reference, as well as the implicit variants of partial
reproduction and of evocation, the characteristic feature of formal
imitation consists in the attempt to shape the material of the semiotic
complex in question (its signifiers and in some cases also its signifieds)
in such a manner that it acquires a formal resemblance to typical
features or structures of another medium, at least to some extent.
As examples of formal intermedial imitation involving literature and
music, one may mention the well-known literarization of music in
nineteenth-century program music. Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique,
for instance, unfolds the stages in a literary biography, as detailed in
the composer’s program, and by trying to imitate ‘episodes in an
artist’s (love) life’, and thus formally imitating a narrative sequence by
its movements, goes beyond a merely ‘atmospheric’ or ‘imagistic’
evocation of individual literary scenes. Conversely, one may also think
of the device of musicalizing literature, as exemplified by Aldous
Huxley’s novel Point Counter Point. Here, as in most intermedial ‘-
izations’ (denoting the attempt to approach the condition of another
medium), formal imitation is, however, not necessarily the only
imitative device employed. The ‘musicalization of fiction’ in the
‘polyphonic’ novel Point Counter Point, for instance, also uses
‘evocation’. And one of the most daring instances of musicalization, the
chapter “Sirens” in Joyce’s Ulysses, makes use of partial reproduction
(by repeatedly quoting texts of vocal music) besides formal imitation
by means of structural analogies to musical composition practices and
‘word music’.
In some instances ‘formal imitation’ may appear to have affinities
with intermedial transposition, since both intermedial forms involve a
kind of translation. However, the effect of translation differs in each
case: In formal imitation, the translated phenomena leave discernible
(and often strange) traces and the result is – in successful cases – a felt
reference to the target medium as part of the significance of the
referring whole, while in intermedial transposition, the preservation of
traces of the original medium or altermedial work is accidental and in
most cases negligible, since it does not substantially contribute to the
significance of the work or performance in question.
With respect to musico-literary relations, intermedial formal
imitation is clearly a part of Scher’s complementary categories ‘music
in literature’ and ‘literature in music’. Formal imitation is of special
interest, as it contains unusual, often innovative, and hence historically
significant experiments with the potential of individual media, and it is
no coincidence that Scher has dedicated a considerable part of his
interart studies to the exploration of techniques and forms that
contribute to imitating music in literature. As a result of this research,
we now possess some helpful concepts and means for analysing formal
imitations of music in literature, in particular terms such as ‘word
music’ and ‘structural analogies to music’ (see subsection 2 above). Of
course, the application of these, as well as of other devices of formal
imitation, can only lead to intermedial ‘-ization’ processes or forms
that will always remain mere approximations to, or metaphors of, the
medium referred to, because it is factually impossible, e.g. for a novel
to ‘turn into’ a musical composition. Thus, the mere ‘as-if’ quality of
the ‘presence’ of another medium, which is in fact typical of all forms
of implicit, imitative intermedial reference is – except for partial
reproduction – most discernible here and well illustrates what
Rajewsky has pointed out concerning these forms, namely, that they
elicit a kind of illusion, or more precisely a ‘heteromedial illusion’ in
the recipient (Rajewsky 2002, 88).
At the end of this survey of musico-literary intermedial forms it
should be mentioned that none of these forms necessarily occur
separately in individual works; rather they can be combined in various
ways. Thus, an opera, which is by definition a plurimedial form, can be
the result of a medial transposition (from drama to opera) and may in
addition contain transmedial elements, perhaps even traces of
intermedial imitation (in cases where, for instance, overtures appear to
have affinities with program music).
As a summary of the typology presented here, fig. 1 gives a survey of
the main forms of intermediality with examples from the field of
musico-literary relations, arranged according to (from left to right) the
increasing discernibility of intermediality in given literary works.
Fig. 1: Typology of intermedial forms illustrated with musico-literary examples

5 Beyond Typology: Perspectives of Musico-

literary Research
Typologies could be regarded as reminiscent of an outmoded
structuralist approach with its notorious emphasis on static, ahistorical
models. In addition, typologies may appear to some as heuristically
barren and generally problematic, since they inevitably create
‘artificial’ boundaries and categories, which may raise difficulties for
borderline cases or allow multiple classifications. Moreover, the
typology presented above does not exhaust all the possible aspects
under which forms in which the relation between music and literature
is apparent could be investigated. One could, for instance (cf. Wolf
2013), also differentiate according to a) the (total or partial) extent of
intermedial contacts in a given work, b) the genesis of intermediality
(it can be ‘primary’, that is, belonging to the original conception of the
work in question, or ‘secondary’, i.e. added later on) or c) the
dominance or non-dominance of one medium in an intermedial
contact (this refers to the old question of whether, in a specific opera –
or in opera in general – words and music are on an equal footing,
whether words are dominant or whether the metareferential title of
Antonio Salieri’s opera Prima la musica, poi le parole [1786] applies).
The heuristic value of typologies, like the definitions of the concepts
that are incorporated into them, is certainly limited and will vary with
the purpose and focus of interpretation. On the other hand, attempts at
defining essential concepts and phenomena are a sine qua non of
scholarly research. Typologies are indispensable when it comes to
charting a field and making us see similarities and differences between
the phenomena it contains. Sometimes they reveal the very existence
of phenomena that have hitherto been overlooked in the first place.
Nevertheless, they are no end in themselves, and we must in fact go
beyond attempts at merely mapping musico-literary relations. In
conclusion, some ways will therefore be shown in which the preceding
typology may be used for further research, and a number of
perspectives will be addressed which seem particularly interesting.
The typology presented above is indeed limited in that it deals with
intermediality in cultural artifacts, that is, with given ‘products’ or
‘productions’ as static semiotic entities. Artifacts – or, in the
terminology of communication theory, the ‘messages’ – are, however,
only one constituent of a communication process. Focusing on the
message means that other constituents, the ‘sender’ (authors), the
‘receiver’ (recipients, readers, listeners etc.) and the context remain
outside the scope of reflection, as do the dynamic aspects of the
functioning and interplay of these factors. All of these other
constituents and their workings merit detailed attention as well.
However, I can here only adumbrate some aspects of these
constituents and facets that may prove useful for intermediality
research, including research on musico-literary relations.
Author-centered facets of intermediality would, for instance, include
the phenomenon of Doppelbegabung (the fact that some authors, such
as Anthony Burgess, are gifted and productive in more than one medial
field, in his case literature and music) as well as questions of authorial
intention in the use of intermediality (as voiced by Burgess in the
postscript to his musicalized novel Napoleon Symphony).
As far as the important discussion of recipient-centered aspects is
concerned, these would include questions such as: How do
multimedial complexes coalesce into a unified experience in the
recipients’ minds in the course of reception? How are intermedial
imitations discovered and processed by the recipient? Using a
cognitive approach as furnished by Turner and Fauconnier’s theory on
“conceptual integration” would be particularly interesting here, as
demonstrated in Frédérique Arroyas’ pioneering study (2001) on
forms of musicalized fiction, a study which draws on Turner and
Fauconnier (1995).
As far as the consideration of the context and in particular the
medial context of intermedial phenomena is concerned, an obvious
aspect that merits attention is certainly the emergence of new media
and in any case the evolution and interaction of individual existing
media at a given period.
In connection with this, a further limitation of the typology
presented above must be mentioned: owing to its aforementioned
focus on static entities, it cannot account for dynamic processes in
media history and cultural history at large. This is an aspect which
Schröter (1998) emphasizes in his typology (which shows some
overlapping with the typology presented above), while at the same time
criticizing essentialist conceptions of media. (Inter)medial processes
include, for instance, the competition between media (as can be seen in
historical discussions of the paragone) and the various constellations
that emerge from it (with music, for instance, occupying a privileged
position in Romanticism and nineteenth-century aestheticism, which
led to early attempts at approaching the condition of music in
literature). Moreover, such processes also refer to large-scale
remediations, i.e. developments that lead from individual media (e.g.
the theatre and instrumental music, or silent film, verbal text, sound
and music) through regular combination to (new) hybrid media such
as the opera, nineteenth-century melodrama or the sound film. Thus,
what is typologically classified as ‘plurimediality’ is often the outcome
of a historical (technical, institutional) development which transforms
the media landscape by adding a new medium to it.
Another highly important concern of intermediality studies as well
as of the subfield of musico-literary relations is, of course, the
investigation of the functions of intermedial relations and processes. It
can focus on ‘intracompositional’ aspects that concern predominantly
the respective artifact in which intermediality occurs (this includes,
e.g., the effects of intermediality on the aesthetic economy of the
artifact under discussion or its effects on the reader etc.), but could
also embrace ‘extracompositional’ functions by linking intermedial
phenomena to historical and other cultural contexts.
While all of these aspects transcend the typology developed above, it
is nevertheless justified to start reflections on mapping a field with the
works themselves, since it is the intermedial nature of texts,
compositions and artifacts that constitutes the field in the first place.
Yet even within the confines of this ‘message-centered’ mapping there
remains a lot to be done for musico-literary research.
In the extracompositional section of transmediality, a systematic
comparative investigation into phenomena and concepts shared by two
or more media, including music, is still a desideratum. One possible
step towards closing this gap would, for instance, be a dictionary of
musico-literary terminology. By clarifying the often deceptively similar
terms used for the description of both fields and providing insights
into the definition of certain concepts as seen from more than one
discipline, such a dictionary could contribute to preparing the ground
for interdisciplinary and intermedial research on a very basic level.
Another, transmedial line of research could be to follow the model of
existing explorations (concerning narrativity, cf. Wolf 2002; framing
devices, cf. Wolf and Bernhart 2006; description, cf. Wolf and
Bernhart 2007; meta-reference, cf. Wolf 2009; and aesthetic illusion,
cf. Wolf et al. 2013) by applying such transmedial reflections to yet
further phenomena of general, interdisciplinary relevance.
As for intermedial transposition, this has to date mainly been
discussed by scholars of literature and film studies. With the exception,
e.g., of Halliwell (2001, 2005), this is still a field to be discovered by
musico-literary research. The investigation of the transposition of
novels or plays into opera in particular is not merely a matter of
librettology and would certainly profit from an intermedial approach.
Lastly, at least for intermediality scholars with a literary
background, text-centered intracompositional intermediality still
forms an area which wants exploration in many respects. This is, for
instance, true with reference to experiments with a musicalization of
fiction, a field in which there are still many texts waiting to be analyzed
in depth. In spite of some problematic aspects in their theoretical
approaches, Alder and Hauck (2006) and Viol (2006) provide
interesting material for yet further investigations in the field (cf. also
Rippl 2006; Petermann 2014). Moreover, intriguing discoveries are to
be expected in neighboring areas such as musicalized poetry and
drama (with Beckett’s later dramatic oeuvre providing a particularly
promising mine). Last but not least, the literary use of music as a
reservoir of concepts and metaphors for the illustration of literary
aesthetics is an area which merits attention, as Fekadu (2013) has
recently shown for the period of modernism.
As can be seen, musico-literary relations is a wide and exciting field
of studies. It would certainly be rewarding for scholars to further
explore individual sections of the typological ‘map’ provided in this
chapter as well as to address issues for which this ‘map’ may be used as
a provisional orientation only, but which ultimately will transcend it.

6 Bibliography

6.1 Works Cited

Alder, Erik, and Dietmar Hauck. Music and Literature: Music in the
 Works of Anthony Burgess and E. M. Forster – An Interdisciplinary
Study. Tübingen: Francke, 2006.
Arroyas, Frédérique. “When Is a Text Like Music?” Word and Music
Studies: Essays on the Song Cycle and on Defining the Field. Ed.
Walter Bernhart and Werner Wolf. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. 81–
99.
Bernhart, Walter. “What Can Music Do to a Poem? New Intermedial
Perspectives of Literary Studies.” Literatures in English: Priorities
of Research. Ed. Wolfgang Zach and Michael Kenneally. Tübingen:
Stauffenburg, 2008. 41–46.
Bonds, Mark Evan. “Haydn, Laurence Sterne, and the Origins of
Musical Irony.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 44
(1991): 57–91.
Clüver, Claus. “Inter textus/Inter artes/Inter media.” Komparatistik:
Jahrbuch der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Allgemeine und
Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft (2000/2001): 14–50.
Clüver, Claus. “Concrete Sound Poetry: Between Poetry and Music.”
Cultural Functions of Intermedial Explorations. Ed. Erik Hedling
and Ulla-Britta Lagerroth. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. 163–178.
Fekadu, Sarah. Musik in Literatur und Poetik des Modernismus:
Lowell, Pound, Woolf. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2013.
Gess, Nicola. “Intermedialität reconsidered: Vom Paragone bei
Hoffmann bis zum Inneren Monolog bei Schnitzler.” Poetica 42.1–2
(2010): 139–168.
Gier, Albert. “Musik in der Literatur: Einflüsse und Analogien.”
Literatur intermedial: Musik – Malerei – Photographie – Film. Ed.
Peter V. Zima. Darmstadt: WBG, 1995. 61–92.
Halliwell, Michael. “Narrative Elements in Opera.” Word and Music
Studies: Defining the Field. Ed. Walter Bernhart, Steven Paul
Scher, and Werner Wolf. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. 135–153.
Halliwell, Michael. “‘Singing the Nation’: Word/Music Tension in the
Opera Voss.” Word and Music Studies: Essays on the Song Cycle and
on Defining the Field. Ed. Walter Bernhart and Werner Wolf.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. 25–48.
Halliwell, Michael. Opera and the Novel: The Case of Henry James.
Word and Music Studies 6. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005.
Hansen-Löve, Aage A. “Intermedialität und Intertextualität:
Probleme der Korrelation von Wort- und Bildkunst – Am Beispiel der
russischen Moderne.” Dialog der Texte: Hamburger Kolloquium zur
Intertextualtiät. Ed. Wolf Schmid and Wolf-Dieter Stempel.
Vienna: Gesellschaft zur Förderung slawistischer Studien, 1983.
291–360.
Kramer, Lawrence. “Dangerous Liaisons: The Literary Text in Musical
Criticism.” 19th-Century Music 13.2 (1989): 159–167.
Kramer, Lawrence. “Musical Narratology: A Theoretical Outline.”
Indiana Theory Review 12 (1991): 141–162.
Marx, Adolf Bernhard. Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition
praktisch theoretisch. Dritter Theil. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel,
1845.
Micznik, Vera. “Music and Narrative Revisited: Degrees of Narrativity
in Beethoven and Mahler.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association
126 (2001): 193–249.
Neubauer, John. “Tales of Hoffmann and Others on Narrativization of
Instrumental Music.” Interart Poetics: Essays on the Interrelations
of the Arts and Media. Ed. Ulla-Britta Lagerroth, Hans Lund, and
Erik Hedling. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997. 117–136.
Petermann, Emily. The Musical Novel. Rochester: Camden House,
2014.
Rajewsky, Irina O. Intermedialität. Tübingen: Francke, 2002.
Rajewsky, Irina O. Intermediales Erzählen in der italienischen
Literatur der Postmoderne: Von den giovani scrittori der 80er zum
pulp der 90er Jahre. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2003.
Rippl, Gabriele. “‘If we want pure sound, we want music’ (Ezra
Pound): Zur intermedialen Ästhetik der angloamerikanischen
klassischen Moderne.” Literatur und Musik in der klassichen
Moderne: Mediale Konzeptionen und intermediale Poetologien.
Ed. Joachim Grage. Würzburg: Ergon, 2006: 87–105.
Scher, Steven Paul. Verbal Music in German Literature. New Haven:
 Yale University Press, 1968.
Scher, Steven Paul. “Notes Toward a Theory of Verbal Music.”
Comparative Literature 22 (1970): 147–156.
Scher, Steven Paul. “Einleitung: Literatur und Musik – Entwicklung
und Stand der Forschung.” Literatur und Musik: Ein Handbuch zur
Theorie und Praxis eines komparatistischen Grenzgebietes. Ed.
Steven Paul Scher. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1984. 9–25.
Schröter, Jens. “Intermedialität: Facetten und Probeme eines
aktuellen medienwissenschaftlichen Begriffs.” Montage AV 7.2
(1998): 129–154.
Seth, Vikram. An Equal Music. London: Phoenix, 1999.
Turner, Mark, and Gilles Fauconnier. “Conceptual Integration and
Formal Expression.” Journal of Metaphor and Symbolic Activity
10.3 (1995): 183–204.
Viol, Claus-Ulrich. Jukebooks: Contemporary British Fiction, Popular
Music, and Cultural Value. Heidelberg: Winter, 2006.
Wolf, Werner. “Musicalized Fiction and Intermediality: Theoretical
Aspects of Word and Music Studies.” Word and Music Studies:
Defining the Field. Ed. Walter Bernhart, Steven Paul Scher, and
Werner Wolf. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999a. 37–58.
Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory
and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999b.
Wolf, Werner. “Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, Musik, und
bildender Kunst.” Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial,
interdisziplinär. Ed. Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning. Trier: wvt,
2002. 23–104.
Wolf, Werner. “Intermedial Iconicity in Fiction: Tema con variazioni.”
From Sign to Signing. Ed. Wolfgang G. Müller and Olga Fischer.
Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2003. 339–360.
Wolf, Werner. “Intermediality.” The Routledge Encyclopedia of
Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-
Laure Ryan. London: Routledge, 2005. 252–256.
Wolf, Werner. “Metafiction and Metamusic: Exploring the Limits of
Metareference.” Self-Reference in the Media. Ed. Winfried Nöth
 and Nina Bishara. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007. 303–324.
Wolf, Werner. “Relations between Literature and Music in the
Context of a General Typology of Intermediality.” Comparative
Literature: Sharing Knowledges for Preserving Cultural Diversity in
Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS). Developed under
the Auspices of the UNESCO. 2008. Ed. Lisa Block de Behar, Paola
Mildonian, Jean-Michel Djian, Djelal Kadir, Alfons Knauth, Dolores
Romero Lopez, and Marcio Seligmann Silva. Oxford: Eolss, 22009.
www.eolss.net. (21 Oct. 2014).
Wolf, Werner. “Metamusic? Potentials and Limits of ‘Metareference’
in Instrumental Music – Theoretical Reflections and a Case Study
(Mozart, ‘Ein musikalischer Spaß’).” Self-reference in Literature
and Music. Ed. Walter Bernhart and Werner Wolf. Amsterdam and
New York: Rodopi, 2010. 1–32.
Wolf, Werner. “Intermedialität.” Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und
Kulturtheorie. Ed. Ansgar Nünning. Stuttgart: Metzler, 52013. 344–
346.
Wolf, Werner, ed. in collaboration with Katharina Bantleon and Jeff
Thoss. Metareference across Media: Theories and Case Studies. In
Honor of Walter Bernhart on the Occasion of his Retirement.
Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009.
Wolf, Werner, and Walter Bernhart, eds. Framing Borders in
Literature and Other Media. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.
Wolf, Werner, and Walter Bernhart, eds. Description in Literature
and Other Media. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007.
Wolf, Werner, Walter Bernhart, and Andreas Mahler, eds. Immersion
and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013.

6.2 Further Reading

Bernhart, Walter, Steven Paul Scher, and Werner Wolf, eds. Word and
Music Studies: Defining the Field. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991.
Brown, Calvin S. Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts.
 Hanover: University Press of New England, 1948/1987.
Caduff, Corina. Die Literarisierung von Musik und bildender Kunst
um 1800. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003.
Genette, Gérard. “Romances sans paroles.” Figures IV. Collection
Poétique. Paris: Seuil, 1999. 109–118.
Meyer, Michael J., ed. Literature and Music. Amsterdam and New
York: Rodopi, 2002.
Shockley, Alan. Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint
in the Twentieth-Century Novel. Farnham and London: Ashgate,
2009.
Sichelstiel, Andreas. Musikalische Kompositionstechniken in der
Literatur: Möglichkeiten der Intermedialität und ihrer Funktion
bei österreichischen Gegenwartsautoren. Essen: Die Blaue Eule,
2004.
Smyth, Gerry. Music in Contemporary British Fiction: Listening to the
Novel. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Vratz, Chrisoph. Die Partitur als Wortgefüge: Sprachliches
Musizieren in literarischen Texten zwischen Romantik und
Gegenwart. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002.
Vuong, Hoa Hoï. Musiques de roman: Proust, Mann, Joyce. Brussels:
P. I. E./Peter Lang, 2003.
Wolf, Werner. “The Role of Music in Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg:
Variations.” Style 37.3 (2003b): 294–317.
Wolf, Werner. “Language and/or Music as Man’s Comfort? Beckett’s
Metamedial Allegory Words and Music.” Word and Music Studies:
Essays on Music and the Spoken Word and on Surveying the Field.
Ed. Suzanne Lodato and David Francis Urrows. Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2005. 145–163.
Philipp Schweighauser

25 Literary Acoustics
Abstract: Bringing together sound studies and intermediality theory,
this essay revisits the notion of ‘literary acoustics’ to inquire into the
usefulness of intermediality studies for analyzing the relations between
literature and sound. The second part of the essay is dedicated to an
illustrative analysis of Ben Marcus’s highly experimental, noisy book
The Age of Wire and String.
Key Terms: Intermediality studies, sound studies, information
theory, literary acoustics, noise

1 Literary Acoustics and Sound Studies:

Theoretical Approaches and Concepts
Focusing on the concept of ‘literary acoustics’ that I introduced in The
Noises of American Literature, 1890–1985: Toward a History of
Literary Acoustics (2006), this essay combines sound studies and
intermediality theory to probe the usefulness and limitations of
intermediality studies for thinking about the relations between literary
texts and the acoustic world.23 From its beginnings in the World
Soundscape Project (WSP), sound studies has been an
interdisciplinary field. Initiated by Canadian composer and music
educator R. Murray Schafer in the late 1960s, the WSP brought
together musicians and scholars from a variety of disciplines to
research soundscapes past and present. Driven by serious concerns
about acoustic pollution, early soundscape studies described, critiqued,
and suggested remedies for an acoustic world that has undergone
fundamental changes since the industrial revolutions. Schafer’s The
Tuning of the World (1977) and Barry Truax’s Acoustic
Communication (1984) are the major monographs that have come out
of this first wave of sound studies. More recent scholarship since the
early 1990s has moved away from Schafer’s focus on acoustic ecology
to combine an even wider array of disciplines and approaches, ranging
from architecture and cultural geography to philosophy and media
studies. In its analyses of artistic and non-artistic, human and non-
human sonic practices, research done under the heading of ‘sound
studies’ today is finely attuned to the social, cultural, and technological
contexts of sound production and reproduction. Most of the research is
fueled by a desire to provide a corrective to the visualist bias of much
scholarship on modern and postmodern culture, and for over a decade,
there has been talk of an ‘acoustic turn’ as a much-needed supplement
to the iconic/pictorial turn (Meyer 2008). By now, there are three
major anthologies and a handbook that give splendid overviews of the
wide variety of approaches in sound studies, among them Michael
Bull’s four-volume Sound Studies: Critical Concepts in Media and
Cultural Studies (2013), Jonathan Sterne’s The Sound Studies Reader
(2012), Bull and Les Back’s The Auditory Culture Reader (2006), and
Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld’s The Oxford Handbook of Sound
Studies (2012).
In my own contribution to sound studies, The Noises of American
Literature, I study the acoustic imagination of American literary texts
from Stephen Crane’s novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) to
Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985). My focus is on the changing literary
representations of noise – an acoustic phenomenon that, for the time
being, we can gloss with the definition we find in the New Oxford
American Dictionary: “a sound, especially one that is loud or
unpleasant or that causes disturbance.” In analyzing how writers from
different literary periods resorted to various representational strategies
in their efforts to capture something of the acoustic worlds of their
time, it became obvious that inquiries into the relationships between
literature and the soundscape should not be restricted to issues of
representation. This was most evident in the modernist texts under
consideration – texts such as Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), John Dos
Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925), and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood
(1936). Not only these texts but also earlier, naturalist texts such as
Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), and later, postmodernist
texts, such as Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and
Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), go beyond an attempt to
represent the soundscapes of their time and place. In their rhythmic
structures; their jarring juxtapositions of different media, genres, and
styles; and their textual dislocations and fragmentations, these texts
themselves become sounding objects.
This discordant quality of some literary texts can be captured with a
second notion of ‘noise’ that was introduced in the mathematician and
engineer Claude E. Shannon’s influential 1948 paper “A Mathematical
Theory of Communication.” This notion of noise was further developed
in German sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory and made
useful for the study of literature, music, and culture by French
philosopher Michel Serres, French music theorist Jacques Attali, and
U.S. literary scholar William R. Paulson among others. In their more
technical understanding of the term, ‘noise’ is defined as both a
communicative disturbance and the signal that exhibits the highest
amount of information because it is the most unpredictable, most
entropic signal and thus diverges most radically from what we already
know. In this model, noise is the direct opposite of redundancy: While
redundancy is perfectly intelligible but contains no information
whatsoever, noise is unintelligible but maximally informative (cf. also
Schweighauser 2010).
Shannon and his co-author Warren Weaver still sought to exorcise
noise from information theory by stating that it is maximum but
useless information:
Uncertainty which arises by virtue of freedom of choice on the part of the sender is
desirable uncertainty. Uncertainty which arises because of errors or because of the
influence of noise is undesirable uncertainty. It is thus clear where the joker is in saying
that the received signal has more information. Some of this information is spurious and
undesirable and has been introduced via the noise. To get the useful information in the
received signal we must subtract out this spurious portion. (Weaver 1963, 19)

Later thinkers, however, stressed the potentially beneficial effects and

innovative force of noise. In Luhmann’s understanding, noise and
error are indispensable for the evolution of social systems. For Serres,
noise is a welcome disruption of death-dealing forces of unity and
order. Most pertinent to the concerns of literary scholars, Paulson, in
his splendid book The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of
Information, conceptualizes literature as the productive noise of
culture in the sense that in its willful departures from established ways
of communication, in its poetic alterity, literature functions as a force
of cultural perturbation that may trigger new ways of speaking and
thinking in an information age that values decidedly non-literary,
machine-readable, and immediately intelligible language uses above all
others. In modernity and postmodernity, the noise of literature
productively disrupts the sea of redundancy in which we are
immersed:
Literature is not and will not ever again be at the center of culture, if indeed it ever was.
There is no use in either proclaiming or debunking its central position. Literature is the
noise of culture, the rich and indeterminate margin into which messages are sent off,
never to return the same, in which signals are received not quite like anything emitted.
(Paulson 1988, 180)

It is this kind of information-theoretic and systems-theoretic

valorization of noise that prompts me to claim that literary texts do not
merely represent noise; they also generate noise. And it is this kind of
conviction that underlines the understanding of literary acoustics that
I develop in The Noises of American Literature. There, I argue that
literary texts are “sites of both the cultural production and the
representation of noise, and it is this convergence which a history of
literary acoustics addresses” (Schweighauser 2006, 19). Later on, I add
that “[t]o claim that literature can, in the work of certain writers,
become the noise of culture suggests that literary texts at times do
make noise. From the double perspective of a history of literary
acoustics, noise both designates the communicational and systemic
force of literature and one of its objects of representation”
(Schweighauser 2006, 194).
Admittedly, I am working with two different understandings of noise
here: as an object of literary representation, noise for the greatest part
denotes discordant, unwanted sound; as a systemic force, it must be
understood in an information- and systems-theoretic sense. But in my
understanding of literary acoustics, these two senses of noise come
together due to the fact that noise in the ordinary, everyday sense of
the word is, strictly speaking, unrepresentable. For as soon as we put
noise into text, it is no longer noise but something more ordered and
codified. Thus, any literary attempt to represent noise must grapple
with its unrepresentability. As students of literature know, one way of
representing the unrepresentable – be it noise, death, or genocide – is
to invent special language uses. Think of Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate
(1923–1932), William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), and Cynthia
Ozick’s “The Shawl” (1989). And such inventions of a specifically
literary language that differs radically from established ways of
communicating are precisely the precondition for literature to assume
its systemic force as the noise of culture.
 To my mind, this combined focus on the representation and
production of noise is crucial because it allows us to think about the
cultural effects of literary representations of sound; in other words, it
makes us think about the forms of literature and their functions. On a
more pragmatic level, taking the systemic force of literary
representations of sound into account prevents literary scholarship
from slipping into too narrowly descriptive modes. At the same time,
while I continue to believe that my two-pronged notion of literary
acoustics has heuristic value, my characterization of it has never left
me quite satisfied for two reasons: first, there is no sustained
distinction between different types of literary representations of
sound; second, whether the relationships between literature and sound
should be captured in representational terms is at least doubtful.

2 Intermediality Studies and Literary Acoustics

How, then, to approach the question concerning different types of
literary representations of sound? For my own thinking about this
issue, intermediality studies has been of great value. Intermediality
studies as practiced by scholars such as Werner Wolf, Irina O.
Rajewsky, and Gabriele Rippl emerged in German-speaking academia
in the 1980s ( 0 Introduction). These scholars are concerned with
textual as well as non-textual artifacts in which a crossing of the
boundaries between different media can be observed. In his entry on
‘intermediality’ in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory,
Wolf writes, “Intermediality […] applies in its broadest sense to any
transgression of boundaries between media and thus is concerned with
‘heteromedial’ relations between different semiotic complexes or
between different parts of a semiotic complex” (2008, 252). This is a
very broad definition that invites both synchronic studies of multiple
types of relations between media and diachronic studies of processes
captured by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s notion of
‘remediation,’ i.e. “the formal logic by which new media refashion prior
media forms” (1999, 273; 13 Adaptation – Remediation –
Transmediality). Rajewsky opts for a similarly broad definition of
‘intermediality’; for her, the term is “[a] hyperonym for the totality of
all phenomena that transgress media boundaries, […] i.e., all those
phenomena that are, as the prefix ‘inter’ suggests, in some way situated
between media” and involve “at least two media conventionally
perceived as distinct” (2010, 12–13; my translation). Both definitions
encompass an exceptionally wide range of phenomena: from cinematic
adaptations of novels and transmedial storytelling to ekphrases and
musicalizations of literature ( 1 Ekphrasis: Theory; 6 Ekphrasis in
the Age of Digital Reproduction; 24 Literature and Music: Theory;
26 The Musicalization of Poetry). Most pertinent to literary scholars’
concerns are instances of the latter two types, which occur within
specific works; Wolf calls these ‘intracompositional intermediality.’

2.1 Plurimediality and Literary Acoustics

Wolf speaks of ‘plurimediality’ (or ‘multimediality’) when a given work
overtly (or ‘directly,’ i.e., on the level of the signifiers) includes more
than one medium (Wolf 2008, 254–255; Wolf 1999, 39–41). This
phenomenon, which manifests itself in a broad spectrum of artifacts
and performances ranging from comic strips and computer games (
31 Performing Games; 22 Comics and Graphic Novels) to radio plays
and ballet performances, goes well beyond Marshall McLuhan’s often
quoted phrase that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another
medium” (McLuhan 1994, 8). Take the cases of illustrated novels or of
poems that contain musical scores, where one medium is literally
present within another ( 20 The Nineteenth-century Illustrated
Novel). Ezra Pound’s Canto LXXV (1975 [1948]) is a good example (see
fig. 1).
Canto LXXV is a poem that consists of seven lines of verse that is, as
Carroll Franklin Terrell has pointed out, followed by the musical score
of Pound’s German friend Gerhart Münch’s setting for violin of
sixteenth-century Italian composer Francesco da Milano’s
transcription for lute of a somewhat earlier popular chanson by the
Frenchman Clément Janequin named Le chant des oiseaux (cf. Terrell
1993, 388–389). And indeed, it was the song of birds that Pound heard
which inspired him to write this poem as he languished in the
American Disciplinary Training Center near Pisa, where he was
interned for treason during World War II. Perhaps, the endurance of
variations on this musical piece across centuries, nations, and
languages – the fact that it comes “not of one bird but of many” – gave
Pound some solace, some way of imagining others and probably also
himself coming out of Phlegethon, this river of fire in Hades. In any
case, depending on our knowledge of Pound, and our ability to read
musical scores, we may hear birdsong, a chanson, or a melody in our
inner ear as we engage with Canto LXXV.

Fig. 1: Ezra Pound, Canto LXXV. Copyright 1948 by Ezra Pound.

Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Pound 1975 [1948], 450–451.

2.2 Intermedial Reference and Literary

Acoustics
Other forms of intermediality – Wolf and Rajewsky call them
‘intermedial references’ – are covert (or ‘indirect’). Here, we have no
encounter between different media; everything happens within one
medium and only one type of signifier is used: From within one
medium, another medium is referenced, evoked or alluded to. Wolf
identifies several categories and subcategories of intermedial
references and the most basic distinction he draws in the Routledge
Encyclopedia is between explicit and implicit intermedial references.
In explicit intermedial reference (or ‘intermedial thematization’),
another medium, a work in another medium, or a maker of other
media such as a musician or a sculptor is thematized in the mode of
‘telling’ (Wolf 1999, 44–46, 55–57; Wolf 2008, 254–255). Thus, in
Pound’s Canto LXXV, the names “Gerhart,” “Buxtehude” (Dietrich
Buxtehude, a seventeenth-century Northern German organist and
composer), “Klages” (Ludwig Klages, a twentieth-century German
anthropologist whose work Münch had introduced to Pound), and
“Sachs” (Hans Sachs, the sixteenth-century German Meistersinger,
best known for his Ständebuch, a beautifully illustrated collection of
poems on the various trades) are such explicit intermedial references,
however oblique they may appear to individual readers. Pound’s Canto
LXXV, then, would have an intermedial dimension to it even if it did
not include a musical score.
In the second type of intermedial reference, implicit intermedial
reference (or ‘intermedial imitation’), no medium, work, or artist is
mentioned explicitly (Wolf 1999, 44–46, 57–67; Wolf 2008, 255).
Instead, a given medium evokes, partially reproduces, or formally
imitates another medium in the mode of ‘showing.’ Wolf distinguishes
between three subtypes of implicit intermedial reference. The first is
evocation (or ‘imaginary content analogy’). In evocation, the cognitive
or emotional effects of a medium are evoked (Wolf 1999, 63–64; Wolf
2008, 255). The classic visual example here is ekphrasis, the literary
description of a visual work of art, which may be purely descriptive or
designed to evoke in the readers’ minds the effects that the work of art
has on its spectators. In the realm of sound, one possible equivalent
would be a description – or evocation – of the effects a musical
performance has on a character. At the beginning of Edith Wharton’s
The Age of Innocence (1920), we get an evocation by proxy as Newland
Archer watches a young girl being affected by an opera singer’s voice:
As Madame Nilsson’s “M’ama!” thrilled out above the silent house (the boxes always
stopped talking during the Daisy Song) a warm pink mounted to the girl’s cheek, mantled
her brow to the roots of her fair braids, and suffused the young slope of her breast to the
line where it met a modest tulle tucker fastened with a single gardenia. She dropped her
eyes to the immense bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley on her knee, and Newland Archer saw
her white-gloved finger-tips touch the flowers softly. He drew a breath of satisfied vanity
and his eyes returned to the stage. (Wharton 1920, 3)
What we get here is less a description of a musical piece than an
evocation of its effects on one fictional audience member – and of the
effects of those effects on another, somewhat voyeuristic audience
member.
The second type of implicit intermedial reference is partial
reproduction. Here, parts of one medial artifact are reproduced in
another without involving more than one kind of signifier. One
example that springs to mind are quotes of parts of song texts in
literary texts that may trigger both the melody of the song and the
remaining words in the reader’s inner ear. Take this passage from John
Dos Passos’s novel The Big Money (1936), the third part of his U.S.A.
trilogy, as an example:
I find your column interesting and need advice. I have saved four thousand dollars which I
want to invest for a better income. Do you think I might buy stocks?
POLICE KILLER FLICKS CIGARETTE AS HE GOES TREMBLING TO DOOM
PLAY AGENCIES IN RING OF SLAVE GIRL MARTS
MAKER OF LOVE DISBARRED AS LAWYER
Oh the right wing clothesmakers
And the Socialist fakers
They make by the workers…
Double cross
They preach Social-ism
But practice Fasc-ism
To keep capitalism
By the boss
MOSCOW CONGRESS OUSTS OPPOSITION
(Dos Passos 1969 [1936], 520, typography in the original)

By quoting parts of a radical labor song – here rendered in italics –

Dos Passos strives to implant both its melody and the rest of its words
in his readers’ minds. Even if we do not know the song, Dos Passos’s
rendition of it may evoke in us an audiovisual representation of
protestors marching down a street singing some kind of protest song.
Thus, as we read the text, the optic and the acoustic imagination are
both set to work in our minds simultaneously.
Yet Dos Passos does something additional here. As he does
throughout all of his newsreel sections in his U.S.A. trilogy, he lets a
variety of text types and media collide to create a montage that
reproduces in textual form the weekly news features that he and his
contemporaries were watching at the movie houses. And in doing that,
he engages in a third and – for the purposes of this essay – final type of
implicit intermedial reference: formal intermedial imitation. In this
subtype of implicit intermedial reference, the formal features of a
medium are partially or fully imitated by another medium so that the
object medium (literature in this case) is iconically related to the
reference medium (newsreels) (Wolf 1999, 44–46, 57–63; Wolf 2008,
255). In the literary passage at hand, what is reproduced in the text are
not only the public events commented on in 1920s newsreels but also
some of the newsreels’ formal features: their rapid succession of topics,
their montage of different voices, their disjointed nature (cf. also
Spindler 1981; Seed 2009).
Let us take our cue from both Wolf’s and Rajewsky’s talk about
‘reference’ rather than ‘representation’ and stay with the passage from
The Big Money to ask: How adequate is the language of representation
that I employ in my original definition of ‘literary acoustics’ to describe
what happens here? Consider Dos Passos’s use of newsreels. To be
sure, we can make the argument that what is represented here are both
the themes and the forms of 1920s newsreels. At the same time, Dos
Passos creates something entirely new that has no precedent in
empirical reality. He creates a verbal work of art whose sheer visual
presence on the page produces a sense of fragmentation that cannot
easily be mapped back onto the situation of someone watching a
newsreel in a movie house. What Dos Passos does here is at least as
much a response to earlier, more realist forms of writing as an attempt
to represent the cinematic real. Even the noisy quality of this passage
does not owe everything to its incorporation of a protest song. It owes
at least as much to the collisions that Dos Passos stages between
different genres, text types, font types, and styles. This creates a set of
interferences that we can rightly call noise. And the result of that
internal noise is the text’s radical dissociation from ways of speaking
that we are accustomed to in our everyday lives. In other words, it is its
internal noise that allows a text such as Dos Passos’s The Big Money to
assume its systemic, communicational, and external function as the
noise of culture.

2.3 Internal and External Productions of Sound

and Noise
Importantly, we can give such an account of The Big Money without
resorting to the language of representation. Instead, we can speak of
the literary presentation, staging, production, or performance of sound
and noise in literature. And we can add that this performance of sound
and noise has both an internal and an external dimension to it. It is
internal in the sense that it creates interferences within the text; and it
is external in the sense that the text as a whole opts out of and disrupts
the conventionalized forms of communication that circulate in our
culture. Perhaps, then, the doubleness of literary acoustics that I insist
on above is less a doubleness of literary representation than of
production. Perhaps ‘literary acoustics’ is a bivalent notion primarily
because it subsumes two forms of production: an internal, literary
production of sound and noise and an external, cultural production of
sound and noise. Thus, we can arrive at a revised definition of ‘literary
acoustics,’ now reconceptualized as an approach within sound studies:
Literary acoustics is the systematic study of the literary production of
sound and noise in two distinct but related senses of ‘production’: It
studies both the staging of acoustic worlds within the confines of
literary texts and the communicational, cultural functions that
literary texts assume as a result of that staging.
To my mind, the fact that the word ‘representation’ no longer occurs
in this definition is felicitous for two reasons. The first reason is that,
the longer we think about literary negotiations of sound and noise, the
less sure we can be that they are most adequately captured via the
notion of ‘representation.’ I have already outlined some of the reasons
for my unease with a mimetic account of literature above, but my
unease relates to larger questions concerning the being of literary
texts. After all, forever scarred by Plato, many critics eschew the idea
that literature is a mimetic form of art. Instead, they argue that
literature is performative in the sense that it brings hitherto non-
existent textual artifacts and fictional worlds into being rather than re-
presenting already existing subjects, objects, and events.
In German, there are two ways of translating the English word
‘representation’: the first comes as no surprise: Repräsentation. For
the purposes of the present essay, the second translation is the more
interesting: Darstellung. Literally translated, Darstellung means
‘placing there’ or, given that the roots of the prefix ‘dar-’ are in acts of
public transfer, we could also translate Darstellung as ‘placing before
the public.’ Darstellung, then, does not suggest that literary texts re-
present already existing entities. Instead, it suggests that something
new is brought to the fore. This is why the German literary theorist
Wolfgang Iser suggests that what literature engages in is precisely
Darstellung, not representation:
The English term representation causes problems because it is so loaded. It entails or at
least suggests as given that the act of representation duplicates in one way or another.
Representation and mimesis have therefore become interchangeable notions in literary
criticism, thus concealing the performative qualities through which the act of
representation brings about something that hitherto did not exist as a given object. For
this reason I am tempted to replace the English term representation with the German
Darstellung, which is more neutral and does not necessarily drag all the mimetic
connotations in its wake. (Iser 1989, 236)

These reflections put in a nutshell my first reason for opting for a new,
non-mimetic definition of ‘literary acoustics.’ My second reason relates
more specifically to the argument I develop in The Noises of American
Literature. In my earlier characterization of the doubleness of literary
acoustics as concerned with a) the literary representation of noise and
b) the cultural production of noise, I not only had to resort to the
rather unwieldy topos of ‘the representability of the unrepresentable’
to bring both the two foci of literary acoustics and my two uses of the
word ‘noise’ together; my earlier definition of literary acoustics also
only really worked with noise as opposed to sound more generally. And
it goes without saying that not everything we hear in our inner ear as
we read literature is noise. With our new definition of ‘literary
acoustics’ in place, these problems largely vanish, allowing us to focus
on the intricate relationship between the intraliterary and extraliterary
production of sound and noise. But what role should intermediality
studies play in all of this?

2.4 Literary Acoustics and the Limitations of

Intermediality Studies
Intermediality studies is of great heuristic use and also highly
amenable to my new understanding of literary acoustics because
intermediality studies is an approach that does not conceive of the
relationship between literature and sound in terms of representation.
Instead, it conceives of that relationship in terms of an intricate
network of relations and references between different media – which is
why Rippl critiques James A. W. Heffernan’s influential definition of
ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of visual representation”
(Heffernan 1993, 2) in Beschreibungs-Kunst: Zur intermedialen
Poetik angloamerikanischer Ikontexte (1880–2000) (Rippl 2005, 96–
97).
However, I would not go as far as proposing intermediality studies
as a guiding paradigm for literary acoustics. Consider the examples I
have discussed with the help of intermediality studies. In most cases,
the intermedial relations pinpointed were relations between different
forms of art: between literature and music, between literature and film.
This is no coincidence since, as Wolf notes, “‘[i]nterart relations’ is […]
a formerly much used synonym of ‘intermediality’” and “this
collocation is often felt to be problematic since its connotation of ‘high
art’ might lead to the exclusion of artefacts, performances, and new
media whose status as art is doubtful” (Wolf 2008, 252). In The
Musicalization of Fiction, Wolf gives examples of what new media he
has in mind here: “new forms of communication that have not or not
yet advanced to the status of an ‘art’ such as computerized ‘hypertexts’
and ‘virtual realities’” (Wolf 1999, 36). From the vantage point of my
own, more general inquiry into the relationships between literature
and sound, intermediality studies has not dissociated itself enough
from the study of interart relations. This also comes out clearly in
Rippl’s choice of examples in her highly useful definition of
intermediality as “a field of studies dealing with interrelations between
different media – in the case of the philologies, such relations can exist
between texts and paintings, texts and sculptures, texts and
architecture, texts and films, and texts and various forms of music”
(Rippl 2012, 318– 319). For that reason, even though factory whistles,
automobiles, and tumble dryers would count as media in McLuhan’s
broad sense of the term as “any extension of ourselves” (McLuhan
1994, 7), one should not expect from intermediality studies insights
into the intermedial relations between literature and factory whistles,
literature and automobiles, or literature and tumble dryers. If, as Wolf
insists, any comparability between music and literature rests on their
conceptualization as semiotic, signifying systems (1999, 14–15), then
the sounds and noises produced by the means of industrial production,
by traffic, and by household appliances do not fit the intermediality
model neatly: unlike literature, these media do not appear to
contribute to processes of meaning-making in any straightforward
fashion; instead, they more often than not disturb such processes. And
yet, these sounds and noises should have a place in our explorations of
the literary acoustic imagination – as should the non-media of nature.
For that reason alone, sound studies scholars cannot depend solely on
intermediality studies for their work; instead, we need to continue to
do what we are already doing: engaging with a rich variety of theories,
methodologies, texts, and other media in an inherently
interdisciplinary field.

3 A Reading: Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and

String (1995)
It is, then, with an awareness of both the usefulness and the limitations
of intermediality theory for sound studies that I turn to this essay’s
case study. My tutor text is American writer Ben Marcus’s magnificent,
highly experimental book The Age of Wire and String, which was
originally published in 1995 by Knopf and reissued in 2013 by Granta
Books in an edition richly illustrated by Catrin Morgan. Marcus’s book
consists of an introductory “Argument” followed by eight sections
labeled “Sleep,” “God,” “Food,” “The House,” “Animal,” “Weather,”
“Persons,” and “The Society.” The first seven sections contain five
stories each that range from half a page to twelve pages in length; the
final section contains six stories. The stories, many of which are so
short that they can be classified as vignettes, carry strange titles such
as “Intercourse with Resuscitated Wife,” “Ethics of Listening When
Visiting Areas That Contain Him,” and “The Food Costumes of
Montana.” Each section ends with a glossary labeled “Terms” that
defies the purpose of a glossary in that it is as enigmatic as the stories
themselves. The Age of Wire and String is hard to categorize in generic
terms: It is a collection of stories, perhaps a novel, that comes across as
a catalog or encyclopedia of a fictional world called “The Age of Wire
and String.” As we read in the “Argument,”
This book is a catalog of the life project as prosecuted in the Age of Wire and String and
beyond, into the arrangements of states, sites, and cities and, further, within the small
houses that have been granted erection or temporary placement on the perimeters of
 districts and river colonies. The settlement, in clusters and dispersed, has long required a
document of secret motion and instruction – a collection of studies that might serve to
clarify the terms obscured within every facet of the living program. (Marcus 2013, 16)

For the most part, the tone of the book is like this: matter-of-fact,
detached, and cold, resembling that of an ethnographic treatise, a
theological tract, or a technical manual. Yet in some passages, it is
lyrical and pathetic in the best sense of the word. Witness the uneasy
mixture of both tones in the book’s gloss on ‘sadness’: “SADNESS –
The first powder to be abided upon waking. It may reside in tools or
garments and can be eradicated with more of itself, in which case the
face results as a placid system coursing with water, heaving” (Marcus
2013, 32). Above all, though, The Age of Wire and String is a radical
experiment in language: This is writing as poetic as Gertrude Stein’s
prose and as hard and precise as imagist poetry. It is writing that
works with pristine, short, and often paratactic sentences; that
prolifically invents new nouns such as ‘gersh,’ ‘kerm,’ and ‘frusc’ as well
as new concepts such as the ‘air tattoo,’ the ‘fudge girdle,’ and ‘weather
birthing’; that regularly transforms proper nouns into common ones
(“NAGLE – Wooden fixture which first subdued the winter Albert,”
Marcus 2013, 46); and that intimates that everything in its fictional
world is linked through wires and strings while leaving us pondering
the nature and indeed existence of those links in a universe that
remains utterly strange and does not allow us to distil from it any
coherent narrative. First and foremost, Marcus’s text performs work
on language itself, making it strange to allow us a fresh experience of
the world we think we already know. The Russian Formalist Victor
Shklovsky has a word for this: ostranenie, or enstrangement. And
indeed, Marcus enstranges for us a world that we have become all too
familiar with because we perceive it in automatized, habitual ways. The
Age of Wire and String jolts us out of our linguistic and perceptual
complacency to make us see and hear the world anew (cf. also
Chénetier 1997; Vernon 2001; Evenson 1996).
Focusing on the presence of sound and noise in this text, we see that
its acoustic imagination significantly contributes to this enstranging
effect. Witness the beginning of the “Hidden Ball Inside a Song”
section:
Mutilated Stephen on horseback chased into the forest, a game referred to as the “hidden-
ball game” or the “bullet game” by the analysts. It is known that certain figures will chase
circular objects when a song is played; the wider the song’s structure, the longer the
 person will hunt for the ball, stone, or bullet. Built into each song’s melody is a capacity
for mutilation that can only emerge when the lyrics are excluded (the melody’s force is
often muted by nonsensical words rattling at the surface). In hidden-ball, when the lyrics
are forgotten (due to irretrievable dance steps that erase the memory for words), the
melody slips unbridled to the foreground and crushes the horseman’s torso. […] Games of
musical mutilation last as long as musicians can sustain the song’s repetition, inventing
songs within songs when the need arises. (Marcus 2013, 166)

What is peculiar about the song that resounds in this section is not
only its violent impact but also that ‘song’ is well-nigh a misnomer at
least as far as the music’s most essential quality, its mutilating force, is
concerned: It is the melody that maims while vocal elements, which
are traditionally parts of songs, curb the music’s destructive impact.
The ‘song’ in question here is not sung, it “is played,” and it is
performed not by singers, but by “musicians.”
What we have here is a case of both explicit and implicit intermedial
reference: It is explicit in the sense that a piece of music is explicitly
referred to, and it is implicit in that Marcus here evokes the (deadly)
effects of another medium. More than that: Marcus here stages a
medial competition in the sense that he asserts that the reference
medium (music) is particularly destructive when it is shorn of the
linguistic signifiers that make up the object medium (literature). What
is also of interest is that Marcus here references not a song that exists
in empirical reality but an imagined song, thus further adding to the
non-mimetic quality of his text. When it comes to music, this method
is sustained throughout The Age of Wire and String: We read about
“leg songs” (Marcus 2013, 164, 170) and learn that “[t]he spicules of
skin in most insects approximate musical notation when unwound”
(2013, 185), but never encounter actually existing musical pieces. For
this reason, too, intermediality studies, with its focus on ‘reference’
rather than ‘representation,’ is very well suited to the analysis of the
relations between literature and music in experimental, non-mimetic
texts such as Marcus’s.
More often, though, the sounds that permeate The Age of Wire and
String are not musical but noisy: we read about a man “maul[ing]” a
house “with noise and steam” (Marcus 2013, 76); we discover that
“[c]oughing” is defined as a “device for transporting people of goods
from one level to another” (2013, 86); we learn that “ Sinter is an
acronym for sky interception andnoise transfer of emergent rag forms
” (2013, 113); and we listen to the sound of wind growing so “high-
pitched” that “[m]any became deaf or their ears blackened” (2013,
118). For the analysis of these types of sounds, intermediality studies is
less suited since it tends to focus on (artistic) media in a more
conventional sense (paintings, sculptures, architecture, films, and
music in Rippl’s list quoted above). This is no flaw in the approach but
does suggest that intermediality studies cannot be our only
methodology when it comes to exploring the relations between
literature and sound.
This becomes particularly obvious as we shift our attention to noise.
In The Age of Wire and String, the most potent source of noise is the
sun:
There was no season. The sun began to make a noise. There was no rain. Birds began to
fly, spooked by the sound. […] The sun’s tumult blasted in through holes they had dug
with a wire. […] The babies’ shelters slowly popped under pressure of the sun, and wood
was sent splintering into the warm wind. Horses collapsed. Their ears bled. […] When the
grain was depleted, the youngest ones piled out of holes and ran in the grass. The noise
could be seen, and yellow waves pushed down on them. Some collapsed and died. […] The
sun was small and hard. Its noise became a new kind of wind. Trees grew soft and crumbly
under it. […] The wind grew strong and reversed. Birds were jerked upward, beyond their
ability. The sun became smaller and louder. Holes formed in the earth. Air blasted forth.
[…] The morning sun was loud, and they ran into the open and gouged at their ears with
wire. […] The sun could be a tiny dot and it could be anywhere. […] The sun made a
sound. He heard it coming. He pushed the whole structure toward the river. After he died,
they spoke to his body. (Marcus 2013, 119–124)

Here, in “The Weather Killer” section, Marcus unfolds a quasi-

apocalyptic scenario in which the sun’s noise – which we could
describe in representational terms as referring to what NASA scientists
have identified as the extremely hot gaseous pressure waves that
noisily speed across the sun’s surface (cf. Sample 2013) – threatens,
maims, and destroys life on earth. What gives this and other passages
about the sun’s noise a strongly non-mimetic slant is both their
dystopian and their fantastic, imaginary quality. This sun and this
noise are products of the literary text we read rather than
representations of pre-existing phenomena. Equally importantly, the
style in which the sun and its noise are brought into existence
introduces a second kind of perturbation, a communicational, cultural
noise in that the jagged diction, anaphoric quality, and unconventional
collocations (“holes they had dug with a wire”; “[t]he sun was small
and hard”; “they spoke to his body”) of this text radically dissociate it
from ordinary, everyday ways of speaking to inject noise into our
culture’s channels of communication. It is precisely this convergence of
two kinds of literary productions of sound and noise – internal and
external – that literary acoustics helps us appreciate and describe.
Literary acoustics also helps us understand that Marcus’s definition of
the sun in this section’s glossary has a strongly self-reflexive quality in
that it alerts us to the intricate relationship between the sun’s noise on
the thematic level and the text’s noise on the functional,
communicational level:
SUN, THE – origin of first sounds. Some members of the society still detect amplified
speech bursts emanating from this orb and have accordingly designed noise mittens for
the head and back. A poetic system was developed based on the seventeen primary tonal
flues discharging from the sun’s underskin. (Marcus 2013, 137)

By way of concluding, let us turn to Catrin Morgan’s copious

illustrations: diagrams, charts, maps, enstranged photographs, and
abstract as well as figural drawings. These images add a plurimedial
dimension to Marcus’s book. At times, they perform an illustrative
function, allowing readers to visualize Marcus’s strange fictional world.
Most often, though, the relation between the images and Marcus’s
decidedly non-mimetic prose remains entirely unclear so that the text-
image combinations create further interferences – noise – that add to
the enigmatic feel of the book as a whole. In the context of the present
essay’s interest in the intersections between literature and sound,
Morgan’s design of the section titles is of special interest (see fig. 2).
There are at least two thematic relationships between Morgan’s
section title pages and Marcus’s text in that the latter is, as we have
seen, suffused with reflections on death and noise. Moreover, Morgan’s
visual work enacts caesurae in the text whose inherent noisiness both
adds to and reiterates the fragmented, recalcitrant, noisy quality of the
text itself. Most importantly, though, from the perspective of
intermediality studies, the succession of section titles and text formally
imitates the switching of channels on an old analog television set. It is
important to note that while there is a mimetic dimension to Morgan’s
design of the section title pages, the relationship between the book as a
whole – including Morgan’s illustrations – and television is not one of
representation. Instead, television is referenced and its formal features
are reproduced in intermedial forms. This strongly non-mimetic
dimension of The Age of Wire and String, which both intermediality
studies and literary acoustics help us grasp, is apparent everywhere.
Fig. 2: Catrin Morgan, design of section title page in Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and
String.
Reproduced by permission of Catrin Morgan and Granta Books.
Marcus 2013 [1995], 114–115.

Though there is a Midwestern, Ohioan quality to Marcus’s landscapes,

and though Marcus liberally includes names of real-life family
members – already the book’s second epigraph is from his father, the
mathematician Michael Marcus (“Mathematics is the supreme
nostalgia of our time,” Marcus 2013, 13) – neither his topographies nor
his biographical references are mimetic. While real place names
abound (Ohio, Utah, Arkansas, Detroit, and Buffalo, to name but a
few), Marcus’s descriptions of these places, of the humans and animals
that live in them, and of the events that occur there do not resemble
anything that we already know: Ohio, for instance, is glossed as “[t]he
house, be it built or crushed” (Marcus 2013, 94) and Jason Marcus, a
character who bears the name of Marcus’s real-life deceased brother, is
described as being “built from food, in the manner of minute particles
slowly settling or suspended by slight currents, that exist in varying
amounts in all air” (2013, 58). Marcus’s prose is a textbook example of
literature as Darstellung rather than representation, of intermedial,
noisy, recalcitrant literature that conforms to the famous dictum of
another experimental writer, John Hawkes, who in 1965 noted that he
“began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the
novel were plot, character, setting and theme” (Enck 1965, 141).

4 Bibliography

4.1 Works Cited

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Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. 1936. Introduction T. S. Eliot. New York:
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Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding
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Bull, Michael, and Les Back, eds. The Auditory Culture Reader.
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Bull, Michael, ed. Sound Studies: Critical Concepts in Media and
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Chénetier, Marc. “‘Ostranenye Goes Gevortsing,’ or, ‘The
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Crane, Stephen. “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.” Maggie: A Girl of
the Streets and Other Stories. 1893. New York: Bantam, 1986. 3–
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Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. 1895. Harmondsworth:
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DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Viking, 1985.
Dos Passos, John. The Big Money. 1936. New York: New American
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Dos Passos, John. Manhattan Transfer. 1925. London: Penguin, 1987.
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Evenson, Brian. “Rewiring the Culture.” Rev. of The Age of Wire and
String, by Ben Marcus. Postmodern Culture 6.2 (1996): 4.
Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. 1930. The Collected Works of
William Faulkner. London: Chatto and Windus, 1970.
Heffernan, James A. W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis
from Homer to Ashberry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993.
Iser, Wolfgang. “Representation: A Performative Act.” Prospecting:
From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1989. 236–248.
Luhmann, Niklas. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1997.
Luhmann, Niklas. Social Systems. Trans. Eva Knodt. Stanford:
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Marcus, Ben. The Age of Wire and String. 1995. Illustrated by Catrin
Morgan. London: Granta Books, 2013.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.
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]
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Stevenson and Christine A. Lindberg. Oxford: Oxford University
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en_us-msdict-00006-1271725?rskey=yfqOWd&result=108081. (7
Oct. 2014).
Ozick, Cynthia. The Shawl. 1989. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
Paulson, William R. The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World
of Information. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Pinch, Trevor, and Karin Bijsterveld, eds. The Oxford Handbook of
Sound Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Pound, Ezra. “Canto LXXV.” 1948. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. London:
Faber and Faber, 1975. 450–451.
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. 1966. London: Picador, 1979.
Rajewsky, Irina O. Intermedialität. Basel: Francke, 2002.
Rajewsky, Irina O. “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.
Reed, Ishmael. Mumbo Jumbo. 1972. New York: Scribner, 1996.
Rippl, Gabriele. Beschreibungs-Kunst: Zur intermedialen Poetik
angloamerikanischer Ikontexte (1880–2000). Munich: Wilhelm Fink,
2005.
Rippl, Gabriele. “Film and Media Studies.” English and American
Studies: Theory and Practice. Ed. Martin Middeke, Timo Müller,
Christina Wald, and Hubert Zapf. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler,
2012. 314–332.
Sample, Ian. “‘The sun makes one heck of a noise’: Soundwaves Are
Providing Fascinating Evidence of What’s Actually Going on Inside
Our Noisy Neighbour.” The Guardian. 24 July 2003.
Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the
Tuning of the World. Rpt. of The Tuning of the World. Rochester:
Destiny, 1994.
Schweighauser, Philipp. The Noises of American Literature, 1890–
1985: Toward a History of Literary Acoustics. Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2006.
Schweighauser, Philipp. “Information Theory.” Routledge Companion
to Literature and Science. Ed. Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini.
New York: Routledge, 2010. 145–156.
Schwitters, Kurt. Die Ursonate. 1923–1932. Edewecht: Dada Research
Center, 1984.
Seed, David. “John Dos Passos and the Art of Montage.” Cinematic
Fictions: The Impact of the Cinema on the American Novel up to
World War II. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009. 128–150.
Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Trans. Lawrence R. Schehr. Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press, 1982.
Serres, Michel. Genesis. Trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Shannon, Claude Elwood. “A Mathematical Theory of
Communication.” The Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948):
379–423, 623–56.
Shannon, Claude Elwood, and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical
Theory of Communication. Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
1963.
Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Device.” Trans. Benjamin Sher. Theory of
Prose. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009. 1–14.
Spindler, Michael. “John Dos Passos and the Visual Arts.” Journal of
American Studies 15.3 (1981): 391–405.
Sterne, Jonathan, ed. The Sound Studies Reader. New York:
Routledge, 2012.
Terrell, Carroll F. A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Vol. 2
(Cantos 74–117). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Toomer, Jean. Cane. 1923. New York: Liveright, 1993.
Truax, Barry. Acoustic Communication. Westport: Ablex, 22001.
Vernon, Peter. “Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String.” The
Yearbook of English Studies 31 (2001): 118–124.
Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. New York: D. Appleton, 1920.
Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory
and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.
Wolf, Werner. “Intermediality.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative
Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan.
New York: Routledge, 2008. 252–256.

4.2 Further Reading

Berry, Ralph M. “Experimental Writing.” The Oxford Handbook of
 Philosophy and Literature. Ed. Richard Eldridge. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009. 199–220.
Hayles, Katherine N. “Information or Noise? Economy of Explanation
in Barthes’s S/Z and Shannon’s Information Theory.” One Culture:
Essays in Science and Literature. Ed. George Levine. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. 119–142.
Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Voice, Sound, and
Aurality in the Arts. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.
Russolo, Luigi. The Art of Noises. Trans. Barclay Brown. New York:
Pendragon Press, 1986.
Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound
Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Erik Redling

26 The Musicalization of Poetry

Abstract: The article examines a variety of relationships between
music and poetry in four major music genres that emerged in the U.S.:
blues, jazz, rock, and rap. Devoting a section to each music genre, it
provides brief descriptions of historical developments and main
characteristics of the four music styles as well as discussions of salient
music-poetry interactions. Each section gives emphasis to a specific
topic: the blues stanza in blues songs and blues poetry, bebop music
and the beat generation’s jazz poems, rock music and Edgar Allan
Poe’s poetry, and rap music as contemporary urban poetry. A few
references to musicalizations of poetry around the world conclude the
essay.
Key Terms: Musicalization, poetry, blues, jazz, rock, rap

1 Introduction: Poetry and Music Relations

Poetry and music were intimately conjoined in Ancient Greece where
poems and verses of drama were sung to the accompaniment of a lyre
or kithara (Gr. λυρική = lyric poetry/“poetry that belongs to the lyre”).
Since then a broad spectrum of music-poetry relations has emerged,
ranging from musical ballads turned into poems or lyric poetry set to
music (e.g. the Minnesang in the medieval period) to poems with
explicit musical references (e.g. some of Paul Celan’s poems collected
in Mohn und Gedächtnis, 1952, or Atemwende, 1968, contain
references to music or songs) and to written poems that are turned
into popular songs (e.g. the lyrics of Sheryl Crow’s megahit and multi-
platinum song “All I Wanna Do” from her 1993 debut album Tuesday
Night Music Club are based on Wyn Cooper’s 1984 poem “Fun”; cf.
Cooper 2011, 135–137).
In order to chart the wide field of music-literary relationships,
Werner Wolf has developed a typology of intermediality in which he,
drawing on the models by Steven Paul Sher and Irina Rajewsky,
distinguishes between intermedial relations documented by a single
work of art (“intracompositional intermediality”) and “relations
between media that transcend individual works and compositions”
(“extracompositional intermediality,” 24 Literature and Music:
Theory). With respect to the category “intracompositional
intermediality” in literature, Wolf also employs the expressions
“musicalization of fiction” and “musicalized poetry” to denote the
music-literary relations in general and the music-poetry relations in
particular.
In this chapter, the focus will be on the musicalization of poetry.
Rather than trying to give an overview of the historical development of
music-poetry relations in different countries and cultures around the
world or chart all possible musicalizations, it will explore a variety of
relationships between music and poetry in four major music genres
that became popular in the U.S.A. and have spread worldwide: the
blues, jazz, rock, and rap. Each section will give a brief description of
the respective music genre’s development and provide a commented
presentation of several music-poetry examples.

2 “I Got the Weary Blues”: Langston Hughes

and Blues Poetry
Like the European poetic “ballad,” the American blues poem had its
origin in a song form, the blues song, which became popular in the
1920s and almost simultaneously became a rich source for African-
American poetry and other kinds of music-poetry relations.
Originating in the rural areas of the South, the blues song evolved from
African-American spirituals, ring shouts and chants, field hollers, and
work songs, and spread to the North when more than one million
African Americans, among them hundreds of blues singers and
musicians, migrated to Northern cities such as Chicago and New York
during the first wave of the so-called ‘Great Migration’ in the 1910s and
1920s (cf. Porter 2000, 64). The first recording of vocal blues, Mamie
Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” on August 10, 1920 for Okeh Records, became a
huge bestseller, selling more than 75,000 copies in the first month,
launching a veritable blues craze in the subsequent decade (cf. Porter
2000, 68). Difficult to define, the early blues (like the blues poem)
often expresses a state of being, a feeling of sadness and despair, but,
ultimately, it also conveys the singer’s resolution to keep on going in
the face of personal woes and hard times (cf. Young 2005, 11). As
Ralph Ellison aptly puts it: “The blues is an impulse to keep the painful
details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching
consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the
consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-
comic lyricism” (Ellison 2001, 103). The verbal form of the song
usually consists of three-line stanzas which feature an AAB-pattern:
the first line (A) is repeated once (A) and then followed by a concluding
third line that brings home the rhyme (B). The first stanza from Bessie
Smith’s classic blues song “Backwater Blues” (1927) will illustrate the
AAB-format:
A When it rains five days and the skies turn dark as night
A When it rains five days and the skies turn dark as night
B Then trouble’s takin’ place in the lowlands at night

Other basic stanzaic patterns are AAA and ABB. Typically the lyric
stanzas of traditional blues songs are set to eight or twelve bars in a
4/4 time signature and tell loose stories about themes ranging from
problems in love, loneliness, sex, poverty, drinking, gambling, and
violence to white oppression and social protest. In order to express the
generally sad or melancholic emotions in musical terms, blues
musicians utilize, for instance, rhythmic techniques such as
syncopation as well as ‘bent’ or ‘blue’ notes (e.g. a flattened 7th) to
create the desired ‘blue’ sound.
The early blues inspired budding poets like Langston Hughes, who
was the first person to recognize the artistic and commercial value of
blues in writing. Born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902, he heard the blues
as a child in Kansas City and later, as a young adult, at nightclubs
located on Lenox Avenue in Harlem, at Le Grand Duc during his
temporary stay in Paris in the spring of 1924, as well as at clubs and
bars on 7th Street in Washington, D.C. “I felt very bad in Washington
that winter [in 1924],” Hughes recalls in his autobiography The Big
Sea (1940), “so I wrote a great many poems. […] I began to write
poems in the manner of the Negro blues and the spirituals” (Hughes
1993, 205). Only two years afterwards, at the age of twenty-four, he
published his first book, a collection of poems entitled The Weary
Blues (1926), which features what is perhaps his most famous blues
poem, “The Weary Blues.” The poem begins with an anonymous
speaker’s recollection of seeing an African-American piano player at a
bar “on Lenox Avenue the other night” (Hughes 1994b, 50) playing the
blues:
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,

I heard a Negro play.

Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway… .
He did a lazy sway… .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues. (Hughes 1994b, 50)
The poem makes use of several literary devices, such as alliteration and
long vowel sounds (e.g. “Droning a drowsy”), an AAB-end rhyme
pattern (e.g. “tune”/“croon”/“play”), the repetition of the same line
with long vowels (“He did a lazy sway”), as well as explicit references to
the blue sound of the music (e.g. “drowsy syncopated tune,” “mellow
croon,” and “tune o’ those Weary Blues”) to recreate the musical flow,
the sluggish tempo, and the melancholic tone of the blues piece all
while alluding to the blues stanza.
Additionally, the speaker relates two different blues stanzas (put in
quotation marks) sung by the piano player:
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—

“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,

Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
And put ma troubles on the shelf.”
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more—

“I got the Weary Blues

And I can’t be satisfied.
 Got the Weary Blues
And can’t be satisfied—
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.” (Hughes 1994b,
50)
Accompanied by the personified piano which moans (“that old piano
moan”), i.e., expresses the “melancholy” of the piano player (and
possibly of the speaker as well), the first blues stanza follows an eight-
bar, ABB-blues pattern and conveys a hopeful note in the last line:
Although the singer feels lonely, he wants to quit his lamenting and
come to terms with his troubles or at least forget them for a while
(“And put ma troubles on the shelf”). After an onomatopoetic
rendering of the pulse established by the musician’s rhythmically
beating foot (“Thump, thump, thump”) and a few chords played by the
piano man, the speaker quotes the second blues stanza which
represents a twelve-bar blues structure in an AAB-format. The shift
from an eight-bar, ABB-stanza to a twelve-bar, AAB-stanza coincides
with a change from a more hopeful mood to utter despair (cf. Tracy
1988, 222): Lacking satisfaction and happiness, the singer has the
“Weary Blues” and wants to die. In the penultimate line of the poem,
the speaker speculates that the “Weary Blues” still lingers in the
singer’s mind long after he stopped playing the tune (as the blues piece
probably did in the mind of the speaker) and concludes the poem with
the powerful, end-focused line that echoes the weariness and the desire
to die: “He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead” (Hughes 1994b, 50).
Hughes’s use of blues music and blues stanzas allowed him to create
a new kind of poetry that is firmly rooted in the African-American
experience and the blues tradition. In addition to his blues poems, of
which many evince the twelve-bar blues format (cf. Tracy 1995, 59), he
made a few recordings of his blues poems to jazz and blues music.
Following the poetry-to-jazz trend of the late 1950s, Hughes performed
his work at the renowned Village Vanguard jazz club in New York on
several Sundays in the spring of 1958, accompanied first by Charles
Mingus and Phineas Newborn and then by Ben Webster’s group
(Rampersad 2002, 280). The outcome of his poetry-to-jazz
performances was the recording of the album The Weary Blues with
Langston Hughes (1958), which featured the jazz trumpeter Henry
Allen and the Charles Mingus Quintet (280). “The Weary Blues”-
performance, for instance, begins with a one-minute long slow twelve-
bar blues and a whining trumpet solo by Allen before Hughes reads his
poem while, fittingly, a piano accompanies his words and concludes
the piece.
A final example of the musicalization of Hughes’s poems is the black
singer Nina Simone’s version of one of Hughes’ last civil rights protest
poems: “The Backlash Blues.” Published in The Panther and the Lash
in 1967, the blues poem in the AAB-pattern addresses the racist white
backlashes experienced by African Americans and ends with a coda
(also in an AAB-structure) in which the speaker tells Mister Backlash
(i.e., the white man) that he will have the next “backlash blues”:

Nina Simone recorded a modified version of Hughes’s protest poem for

her album Sings the Blues (1967) and probably relied on a slightly
different version of the poem which was published in the official
NAACP magazine The Crisis in June 1967, because, like the Crisis-
version, she consistently omits the second line of the AAB-blues
pattern and concludes her song with the lines “Not me – / Wait and
see.”
Hughes paved the way for blues poetry, and ever since, the blues has
had a tremendous influence on subsequent poets. Drawing on four
categories established by Bernard Bell, Stephen Tracy explains the
variety of ways in which poets have used blues in their poetry. The first
of Bell’s four categories, “conventional and organic uses of the blues,”
includes blues poems that display, for instance, structures, motifs, and
language found in the blues tradition (Tracy 1988, 249). According to
Tracy, this category may overlap with the second category,
“experiments with the blues motif and form,” as poems can evince
traditional and experimental aspects at the same time (Tracy 1988,
249). While poems such as A. B. Spellman’s “The Joel Blues,” Ishmael
Reed’s “Betty’s Ball Blues,” and Sherley Anne Williams’s “Any
Woman’s Blues” all document the use of the traditional AAB-blues
stanza, other poems such as Allen Ginsberg’s “Sickness Blues” and
William Waring Cuney’s “Let Me Tell You Blues Singers Something”
are more experimental: Ginsberg uses the less common ABC-stanzaic
pattern and Cuney employs the AAB-blues stanza to contest the blues
(Tracy 1988, 249). In order to describe “jazz-influenced blues poems”
that “draw more on the improvisation and beat of the music rather
than the structure,” Tracy introduces a third category, “the blues
tradition as an emotional, psychic, or spiritual touchstone or center”
(Tracy 1988, 250). It comprises poems that mention the word “blues”
in the title such as Jayne Cortez’s “A Blues,” Bob Kaufman’s “Heavy
Water Blues,” and Michael Harper’s “Blues as Prematurity,” poems
that refer to blues and use phrases from blues songs such as Amiri
Baraka’s “Look For You Yesterday, Here You Come Today” and Colleen
McElroy’s “Caledonia,” and poems that discuss the blues such as Don
L. Lee’s “Don’t Cry, Scream” and Jayne Cortez’s “True Blues” (Tracy
1988, 250). The last category, entitled “biographical,” encompasses
poems about blues singers and musicians such as Robert Hayden’s
“Homage to the Empress of Blues” and Stanley Crouch’s “Howlin’
Wolf: A Blues Lesson Book” (Tracy 1988, 250– 251).
Tracy’s classification system helps to chart a wide array of
intermedial relationships between blues music and poetry and is still
valid today, but there are other creative uses of blues music in poetry
as well. The bluesy conversational style in blues poems by the
contemporary poets Kevin Young and Yusef Komunyakaa, for instance,
testifies to the vitality of the blues aesthetic in the present poetic scene.

3 “Thrivin’ on a Riff”: Beat Generation, Bebop,

and Intermedial Translation
In the 1920s, jazz music, like the blues song, began to serve as another
source of inspiration for poets. And, like blues, jazz music quickly
moved poets to respond to this new music style and write about it. Carl
Sandburg was probably the first poet to publish a jazz poem (“Jazz
Fantasia,” 1922), but it was once again Langston Hughes who set the
foundation for jazz poetry by writing a number of jazz poems, such as
“Jazzonia” (1923), “Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret” (1925), and “The
Cat and the Saxophone (2 a.m.)” (1926), in which he rendered jazz
performances, le jazz hot, and jazz solos played by individual jazz
musicians and jazz bands in American and Parisian nightclubs. While
the subsequent swing era (1930s and early 1940s) saw the creation of
only a few “swing”-poems, the emergence of bebop jazz in the 1940s
and 1950s and the almost simultaneous rise of the beat movement
created an extraordinary upsurge of music-poetry interactions.
In this section, I will focus on poetic samples from the beat poets or
the ‘beats’ like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who were regular
visitors of the New York jazz club Minton’s Playhouse where influential
bebop players such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious
Monk developed the innovative bebop jazz style that is characterized
by complex rhythmic syncopation and fast-paced improvisational solos
over altered harmonic chord progressions. For Kerouac, Ginsberg, and
other members of the beat movement, bebop, however, was not only
an intriguing new jazz style, it was also a way of life: “In this modern
jazz, they heard something rebel and nameless that spoke for them,
and their lives knew a gospel for the first time. It was more than a
music; it became an attitude toward life, a way of walking, a language
and a costume” (Holmes 2006, 161). They adopted the non-conformist
attitude of beboppers, borrowed slang expressions (“jive talk”) such as
“cat,” “hip,” and “dig,” performed their poems to it, and saw analogies
between the improvisational style of bebop musicians and their poetic
creative process.
There were three prevalent ways in which poetry was musicalized
during the bebop and beat generation era: first, the “poetry-and-jazz”
sessions made famous by the German born ruth weiss; second, the
beat poets’ analogies between bebop music and writing as put forth by
Kerouac and Ginsberg; third, intermedial translations of bebop jazz
into poetry as documented, for instance, by Paul Blackburn’s poem
“Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot” (1964). This last example
will include a brief discussion on intermediality and literature and
promote a cognitive theory of intermedial translation to gain a better
understanding of musicalized jazz poetry.
When Langston Hughes jumped on the “poetry-and-jazz”
bandwagon in 1958, the poetry-jazz sessions were already in full swing.
One year after the three musicians Jack Minger, Sonny Nelson, and
Wil Carson opened The Cellar in 1955, a jazz joint in North Beach, San
Francisco, ruth weiss joined them and, bringing modern jazz and
poetry together, “innovated poetry with jazz as a regular Wednesday
night feature” (Spandler 2011, xvi). In an interview conducted on April
2, 2002, weiss mentions her spontaneous process of creating haiku-
like poems and describes her performance with jazz musicians as
follows:
My phrasing and rhythms depend on what I hear. It’s a dialogue with the musicians. I
never use music as a background. I give the musicians room to come up with riffs of their
own. I lower my voice, raise my voice. I may repeat phrases. I may make up sounds. (weiss
2004, 66)

Video clips of her most recent performances on youtube.com (e.g. at

the “Porgy & Bess” jazz club in Vienna, Austria, in 2013) show that her
dialogues with jazz musicians include gestures that underscore the
music, a varying reading speed which is in unison with the tempo of
the music, and small signs given to the musicians in order to indicate
that they can step forward and play a solo or quiet down a bit so that
her voice can become more prominent. Other poets, like Kenneth
Rexroth and Jack Kerouac, picked up her idea of performing poems to
jazz music and recorded them (for instance, Kerouac made the record
Blues and Haikus with Zoot Sims and Al Cohn, in which he spoke
haiku poems to jazz music), making such “poetry-and-jazz” sessions a
hallmark of the beat movement.
In addition to performing poems to jazz music, beat poets, like
Kerouac and Ginsberg, linked the creative process itself to jazz
improvisation. In his often-cited manifesto “Essentials of Spontaneous
Prose,” Kerouac refers several times to jazz music as a way of
illustrating the method of writing “spontaneous prose”: For instance,
“PROCEDURE Time being the essence in the purity of speech,
sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal
secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image”
(Kerouac 1992, 57). Drawing on Kerouac’s idea of comparing the
spontaneous process of expressing an idea on paper to the “blowing” of
jazz musicians on a theme, Ginsberg extends it to poetry: “I have
adapted, for myself, the single breath-unit as the measure of how much
material I can handle-notate-compose at one continuous stroke”
(Ginsberg 2000, 256). He even claims in an interview entitled
“Improvised Poetics” that his famous poem “Howl” was largely
influenced by Lester Young’s jazz saxophone improvisations: “Howl is
all ‘Lester Leaps In’” (Ginsberg 1980, 43). A brief reading of the first
few lines of “Howl” may serve to illustrate Ginsberg’s assertion:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
[…]
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural
darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering
on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-
light tragedy among the scholars of war, […]. (Ginsberg 2003, 62)

The ‘solo’ begins with the introduction of the topic (“I saw the best
minds…”) and then, like a jazz saxophone player, Ginsberg ‘blows’
several improvisational phrases with varying length, taking the relative
pronoun “who” as the starting point for his “single breath-unit”
improvisations. Like Kerouac and other beats, Ginsberg harbored a
great admiration for bebop jazz and created loose correspondences
between the process of writing spontaneous poetry (and prose) and the
technique of jazz improvisation (cf. Redling 2008).
A final example of musicalized poetry is Paul Blackburn’s poem
“Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot” (1964), which reflects the
author’s intermedial translation of a bebop solo into a written form.
Proceeding from the notion that music and writing are two different
media, I have argued that the translation of the medium ‘music’ into
the medium ‘writing’ is a cognitive process that can be explained with
the help of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) developed
primarily by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (cf. Redling
forthcoming). In Metaphors We Live By (1980), they regard metaphor
no longer as a mere linguistic device, but as a basic cognitive
mechanism that guides our everyday life and the way we think and act.
In “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor” (1992), Lakoff states that
“the locus of metaphor is not in language at all, but in the way we
conceptualize one mental domain in terms of another” (Lakoff 2007,
267). If we think or reason about the concept of ‘life’ and say, for
instance, “I took a wrong turn somewhere,” “She’s come a long way,”
or “We have a rough road ahead,” our statements indicate the largely
unconscious cognitive process of conceptualizing the mental domain
‘life’ in terms of the domain ‘journey.’ Likewise, many jazz poets
conceptualized the domain ‘jazz music’ in terms of the domain ‘writing’
and translated musical elements of jazz, such as improvisation,
dynamics, mood, pitch, tone color, and rhythm, into a written form
with the help of punctuation, small and upper case letters and words,
and a special layout of the poem. The reader, in turn, is meant to (re-
)translate the written poem into imagined jazz music or, in other
words, to conceptualize the poem in terms of music. In analogy to
Lakoff and Johnson, I refer to the conceptualization of one domain
(e.g. ‘jazz’) in terms of another domain (e.g. ‘writing’) as a “conceptual
metaphor” and, drawing on their convention of writing conceptual
metaphors in small capitals, present the intermedial conceptual
metaphors in small capitals as well (e.g. jazz music is writing).
Blackburn’s jazz poem “Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot”
provides readers with several clues that the poem is the product of an
intermedial translation process. The title of the poem gives readers the
first clue: It asks them to envisage a performance of the jazz
saxophonist Sonny Rollins at the New York nightclub “Five Spot Café.”
The literal meaning of the text helps them to identify (perhaps via an
online search) the first line of the poem as the first line from the song
“There Will Never Be Another You” (1942): “There will be many other
nights like this / And I’ll be standing here with someone new / There
will be other songs to sing […]” (Warren and Gordon 1988, 355). Both
clues and the typographical experiments point towards the idea that
Blackburn translated a version of Rollins’s improvisation on the
melody of the tune “There Will Never Be Another You” into a written
solo with the aid of the song’s lyrics. A close analysis of the ways in
which the poet used dashes, commas, and other typographic devices to
render the solo in writing will allow readers to create further
correspondences between the poetic text and Rollins’s style of
improvisation that includes elements such as loud intros, two-note
tonal variations, and “stuttering” (see the conceptual metaphors in the
right column below):
These conceptual metaphors indicate musical elements like dynamics
or melody and permit readers to envisage a bebop solo played by
Sonny Rollins on his tenor saxophone. We thus are led to imagine that
after a loud intro (“THERE WILL”), Rollins plays a few melodic
phrases, skipping a few notes in-between (“this / And I’ll”), before he
begins to play with two notes (“some / one / someone …”) followed by
a melodic part again (“there will be other songs…”) that abruptly
changes into Rollins’ notorious stuttering (“a-noth, noth / anoth / noth
/ anoth-er”).
The above-mentioned approach of understanding the process of
translation between two different media as a metaphorical one enabled
me, in my own study, to establish a spectrum that ranges from
primarily literal to primarily metaphorical jazz poems (cf. Redling
forthcoming). Elegiac narrative poems about former jazz giants, for
instance, tend towards the first pole, that is, such poems primarily tell
anecdotal stories about jazz musicians, while poems like Blackburn’s
“Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot” move towards the second
pole, as they manifest their authors’ effort to translate aspects of jazz
music (e.g. style of improvisation, dynamics, mood, pitch, tone color,
and rhythm) into a written form. The publication of several
anthologies of jazz poems, such as The Jazz Poetry Anthology (1991)
or, more recently, Jazz Poems (2006), is evidence of the immense
range of creative intermedial translations that characterizes the ever
vibrant genre of jazz poetry.

4 “Nevermore, Never”: Rock Music, Concept

Albums, and Poe’s Poetry
The emergence of rock music around the mid-1950s paved the way for
further musicalizations of poetry by turning poems into rock songs.
Having its origins in the ‘rock’n’roll’ genre of the 1940s and 1950s, rock
music became highly popular in the 1960s and developed a wide array
of distinctive subgenres such as soul rock, surf rock, folk rock,
psychedelic rock, and hard rock. By the late 1960s, a new genre
appeared out of this mix of styles that intended to move rock music
away from consumer-oriented ‘bubblegum’ music and towards the
level of art: progressive rock. Abandoning the short radio-friendly pop
singles in favor of longer formats, progressive rock – sometimes
conflated with art rock – attempted “to combine classical, jazz, and
rock forms, and many of the performers were classically trained
musicians” (Shuker 2012b, 266). Progressive rock musicians
experimented with compositional arrangements and musical styles
and, as Roy Shuker points out, consciously imitated classical music
prototypes, explored longer instrumental forms, and borrowed from
symphonic forms (Shuker 2012b, 267). Against this backdrop, it comes
as no surprise that progressive rock artists often made concept albums
that displayed an overarching unified theme and a set of connected
songs.
What is surprising, however, is the frequency with which progressive
rock bands based their concept albums on the life and work of Edgar
Allan Poe (1809–1849), and thereby created novel music-poetry
relationships. The following brief discussion will focus on several
musicalizations of Poe’s poetry such as The Alan Parsons Project’s first
concept album Tales of Mystery and Imagination – Edgar Allan Poe
(1976) and Lou Reed’s musical POEtry, which was first staged by
Robert Wilson at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg (2000) and turned
into the concept album The Raven (2003) as well as the concept book
The Raven (2011) with illustrations by Lorenzo Mattotti.
Progressive rock reached new heights with the release of the concept
album Tales of Mystery and Imagination – Edgar Allan Poe by The
Alan Parsons Project in 1976. Made up by the engineer and producer
Alan Parsons and the songwriter, musician, and manager Eric
Woolfson, The Alan Parsons Project brought together a large group of
musicians and vocalists from rock, pop, and classical music, including
Arthur Brown of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Terry Sylvester
of The Hollies, to work on the album. Focusing on the overall theme of
Poe’s prose and poetry, the first side of the record, which received its
title from a 1908 collection of Poe’s work titled Tales of Mystery &
Imagination, consists of an instrumental piece (“A Dream Within a
Dream”) and four songs (“The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The
Cask of Amontillado,” and “(The System of) Dr. Tarr and Professor
Fether”), while the second side contains the long instrumental “The
Fall of the House of Usher” (divided into five parts: “Prelude,”
“Arrival,” “Intermezzo,” “Pavane,” and “Fall”) and one song entitled
“To One in Paradise.” Parsons and Woolfson also wrote the lyrics in
which they transformed the original texts into short, songlike
retellings. Perhaps the best example to illustrate their musicalization of
Poe’s work is the poem “The Raven”:

Parsons and Woolfson turn the narrative poem “The Raven” with its
eighteen stanzas into a rock song that has three strophes with shorter
lines (5-5-8/5-5-8 syllables) and the slightly varying refrain “Quoth the
raven, nevermore.” Borrowing a few selected words from the original
poem (italicized above), they reduce the story to a bare minimum
(midnight, a raven taps at the door, enters the room and never leaves
the room again) and, in a recurring refrain at the end of the rock song,
give strong emphasis to the word “nevermore”: for instance,
“Nevermore, nevermore, nevermore, never / Nevermore, nevermore,
never.” Famously, Parsons used an electronic EMI vocoder (that is,
voice encoder) for the first two stanzas of “The Raven” to give his voice
a mechanical, robot-like sound. Apart from keyboards, E-guitars, and
drums, the song also features the lead vocals of the actor Leonard
Whiting, a choir, and a symphonic orchestra conducted by Andrew
Powell.
In the tradition of progressive rock, Lou Reed, like The Alan Parsons
Project, extends the boundaries of pop and rock to include literature
and art with his rock musical POEtry (2000). Loosely based on Poe’s
œuvre, the musical is divided into two acts and features different
versions of Poe as a narrator, a few songs (e.g. Reed’s “Perfect Day”
sung by Lenore and a “Broadway Song” about Poe), and a mix of short
retellings of Poe’s prose and poetic texts. Sticking more to Poe’s
recurring themes (e.g. murder, guilt, rage, revenge) than to the
author’s texts, Reed creates a postmodern pastiche, freely
experimenting with the source texts, mixing Poe’s words and phrases
with his own, and giving speeches to formerly silent characters in Poe’s
work. In “The Tell-Tale Heart, Part I,” for instance, he changes the
short story told by a nameless narrator into a two-part dialogue
between Old Poe, Young Poe, and a Poe Ensemble (Poe 1 to Poe 5):
OLD POE
True! Nervous, very nervous.
POE 1
Madman!
YOUNG POE
Why will you say that I am mad? The disease has sharpened my senses – not destroyed –
not dulled them.
POE 5
Madman! (Reed and Mattotti 2011, 79)

Sandwiched in-between the two parts of the story is the piece “Blind
Rage” which is performed by the ‘voiceless’ blind man in Poe’s text
“The Tell-Tale Heart.” Curiously, Reed leaves Poe’s poem “The Raven”
unchanged. In an interview for Der Spiegel, he states that he did not
touch the poem because, on the one hand, it is one of Poe’s best-known
texts and, on the other hand, he has an incredible respect for the poem
(cf. Reed 2000, 222). On stage, a man (the narrator “Poe”) and two
women are dressed in black and perform the poem to electronic music
on a dark blue stage. On the album The Raven, the actor Willem Dafoe
reads the poem to music played by a cello.
The legacy of Poe’s work in rock music is vast. Not only did Parsons
and Woolfson include remakes of “The Raven” on their respective
albums A Valid Path (“A Recurring Dream Within a Dream,” 2004)
and Edgar Allan Poe: A Musical (2009), but many other pop, rock,
punk, and metal bands, especially due to the rise of gothic-inflected
music styles (e.g. dark wave and dark ambient), have paid homage to
Poe in their music. Some examples include the American musical duo
Nox Arcana’s album Shadow of the Raven (2007), the Spanish power
metal group Opera Magna’s concept album Poe (2010), and the
American death metal band Conducting from the Grave’s song
“Nevermore” (Revenants, 2010). Not limited to any kind of music
genre, Poe’s prose and poetry even serve as a source for rap music (see,
for instance, MC Lars’s song “Mr. Raven” on the album The Laptop EP,
2004), which will be considered below.

5 “Rhymin and Rappin”: Rap Music as Urban

Poetry
As a part of hip hop culture, rap music emerged from “a dance style
that began in the late 1970s among black and Hispanic teenagers in
New York’s outer boroughs” (Shuker 2012a, 170). A local phenomenon
at first, it increasingly attracted “a wider audience, including white
youth, and, by the late 1990s, was a part of mainstream musical
culture” (171). The Oxford English Dictionary (cf. entry “Rap,” def. 8c)
describes rap music as “[a] genre of popular music in which lyrics
(typically rhyming and sometimes improvised) are spoken
rhythmically, and usually rapidly, over an instrumental backing which
has a strong background beat.”
Recent criticism and comments on rap music, however, promote the
notion that rap is not merely lyrics but poetry, which in turn raises the
question of music-poetry relationships. In Decoded, for instance, the
famous rapper Jay-Z states that “hip-hop lyrics – not just my lyrics,
but those of any great MC – are poetry, if you look at them closely
enough” (Jay-Z 2010, 233). His view of great rap as poetry agrees with
statements made by Adam Bradley in his 2009 study Book of Rhymes:
The Poetics of Hip Hop in which he argues that “[e]very rap song is a
poem waiting to be performed” (Bradley 2009, xi) and “[r]ap is poetry,
but its popularity relies in part on people not recognizing it as such”
(xii). In an effort to highlight the poetics of rap and give rap “the
respect it deserves as poetry” (xix), Bradley uses the tools of poetry
criticism to analyze rap poetry’s rhythm, rhyme, word play, style,
storytelling, and signifying. In his chapter devoted to rap rhymes, for
instance, Bradley examines “multisyllabic rhymes” (or simply “multis”)
in several rap songs to celebrate the art of rhyming in rap.

Both examples display sophisticated rhyming schemes, “multis” with

perfect and slant rhymes (e.g. “fearless”/”hear this” and “goal”/“gold”),
which, for Bradley, illustrates the creativity and skill of such rap poets.
Together with Andrew DuBois, he buttresses his argument with a
hefty, 867-page collection of rap lyrics, The Anthology of Rap, in which
lyrics from four different periods (“1978–1984: The Old School,”
“1985–1992: The Golden Age,” “1993–1999: Rap Goes Mainstream,”
and “2000–2010: New Millennium”) and from a plethora of rap
artists, including Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Beastie
Boys, Public Enemy, Queen Latifah, Run-DMC, Arrested Development,
Lil’ Kim, Nas, Snoop Dogg, 2Pac, Eminem, 50 Cent, and Kanye West,
just to name a few, establishes and documents the development of a
rap tradition from the late 1970s to the present. As Henry Louis Gates,
Jr. writes in his foreword to the anthology: “[The book] calls attention
to the artistry, sense of craft, and striking originality of an art form
born of young black and brown men and women who found their
voices in rhyme, and chanted a poetic discourse to the rhythm of the
beat” (Gates 2010, xxvi).
Whether or not rap can be considered as urban poetry lies in the eye
of the beholder, for the texts can be regarded as both, lyrics and poetry.
Reading and analyzing the printed texts clearly helps to discover and
appreciate the intricate rhyme schemes, the witty and surprising word
plays, and the complex ‘flow’ of the lines to a beat pattern, but rap
lyrics or poems gain full force when spoken or chanted to music. In
fact, rap texts, music, and the whole rap culture (e.g. rap performers,
video clips of rap songs, and the clothing style and fashion labels of
rappers) have formed a dazzling alliance that has moved beyond
mainstream American culture, fascinating audiences worldwide. Tony
Mitchell, for instance, argues in his introduction to Global Noise: Rap
and Hip-Hop Outside the USA (2001) that “[h]ip-hop and rap cannot
be viewed simply as the expression of African-American culture; it has
become a vehicle for global youth affiliations and a tool for reworking
local identity all over the world” (Mitchell 2001: 2). Urban poetry or
not, rap music and its myriad of subgenres (e.g. Country rap, Gangsta
rap, and Psychedelic rap) have gone global.

6 Musicalized Poetry Today

The overview of musicalizations of poetry in blues, jazz, rock, and rap
could only provide a few glimpses at the rich diversity of the ways in
which music and poetry interact. Often poems are recited to music or
transformed into lyrics; at other times, music is translated into poetic
texts. What is important to note is that all four music genres not only
inspired American poets and musicians to create innovative
musicalizations of poetry, but also many other poets and musicians
around the world as well. Jazz, for instance, has served as the muse for
a multitude of jazz poems written in diverse languages, including
Dutch, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish. In addition to the
music genres discussed above, there are also numerous other music
genres, Western and non-Western, that gave rise to highly creative
music-poetry relations. Poetry festivals and other events that bring
together, for example, Hebrew poetry and World music or feature
poets and musicians from Africa and Asia (e.g. the Iranian composer
Hafez Nazeri who musicalizes the ancient Persian poetry written by the
thirteenth-century poet and mystic Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi)
give evidence of the astonishing creative energy sparked by music-
poetry collaborations worldwide.

7 Bibliography

7.1 Works Cited

Blackburn, Paul. “Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot.” 1964.
The Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn. Ed. Edith Jarolim. New
York: Persea, 1985. 316.
Bradley, Adam. Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop. New York:
BasicCivitas, 2009.
Bradley, Adam, and Andrew DuBois, eds. The Anthology of Rap. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.
Cooper, Wyn. “Words and Music: Three Stories.” The Poetics of
American Song Lyrics. Ed. Charlotte Pence. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2011. 134–142.
Ellison, Ralph. “Richard Wright’s Blues.” Living With Music: Ralph
Ellison’s Jazz Writings. Ed. Robert O’Meally. New York: Modern
Library, 2001. 101–119.
Feinstein, Sascha, and Yusef Komunyakaa, eds. The Jazz Poetry
Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Foreword.” The Anthology of Rap. Ed. Adam
Bradley and Andrew DuBois. New Haven: Yale University Press,
2010. xxii–xxvii.
Ginsberg, Allen. “Improvised Poetics.” Composed on the Tongue. Ed.
Donald Allen. Bolinas: Grey Fox Press, 1980. 18–62.
Ginsberg, Allen. “What Way I Write.” Deliberate Prose: Selected
Essays 1952–1995. Ed. Bill Morgan. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.
255–257.
Ginsberg, Allen. “Howl.” The Portable Beat Reader. Ed. Ann
Charters. New York: Penguin, 2003. 62–70.
Holmes, John Clellon. Go. 1952. London: Penguin, 2006.
Hughes, Langston. “The Backlash Blues.” The Crisis (June 1967): 251.
Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea: An Autobiography by Langston
Hughes. 1940. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.
Hughes, Langston. “The Backlash Blues.” The Collected Poems of
Langston Hughes. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Vintage,
1994a. 552.
Hughes, Langston. “The Weary Blues.” The Collected Poems of
Langston Hughes. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Vintage,
1994b. 50.
Jay-Z. Decoded. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2010.
Kerouac, Jack. “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” The Portable Beat
Reader. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Penguin, 1992. 57–58.
Lakoff, George. “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor.” The
Cognitive Linguistics Reader. Ed. Vyvyan Evans, Benjamin K.
Bergen, and Jörg Zinken. London: Equinox, 2007. 267–315.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Mitchell, Tony. “Introduction: Another Root – Hip-Hop outside the
USA.” Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop Outside the USA. Ed. Tony
Mitchell. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001. 1–38.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Raven.” 1845. Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and
Tales. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York: Library of America, 1984. 81–
86.
Porter, Bob. “The Blues in Jazz.” The Oxford Companion to Jazz.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 64–77.
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. Vol. II: 1941–1967, I
Dream a World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 22002.
“Rap.” Def. 8c. The Oxford English Dictionary.
www.oed.com/view/Entry/158127?
redirectedFrom=rap+music#eid27088536. (3 Oct. 2014).
Redling, Erik. “Kreativität, Improvisation und Spontaneität: Differenz
und Intermedialität von Bebop Jazz und Beat-Literatur aus
kulturökologischer Sicht.” Kulturökologie und Literatur: Beiträge
zu einem transdisziplinären Paradigma der Literaturwissenschaft.
Ed. Hubert Zapf. Heidelberg: Winter, 2008. 89–103.
Redling, Erik. Translating Jazz Into Poetry: From Mimesis to
Metaphor. Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming.
Reed, Lou. “Songs sind Theaterstücke.” Der Spiegel 6 (2000): 222.
Reed, Lou, and Lorenzo Mattotti. The Raven. Seattle: Fantagraphics,
2011.
Shuker, Roy. “Hip Hop.” Popular Music Culture: The Key Concepts.
London: Routledge, 32012a. 170–174.
Shuker, Roy. “Progressive Rock.” Popular Music Culture: The Key
Concepts. London: Routledge, 32012b. 266–268.
Spandler, Horst. “ruth weiss and the American Beat Movement of the
’50s and the ’60s.” Can’t Stop the Beat: The Life and Words of a
Beat Poet. By ruth weiss. Studio City: Divine Arts, 2011. ix– xxvi.
Tracy, Stephen C. Langston Hughes and the Blues. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1988.
Tracy, Stephen C. “Langston Hughes: Poetry, Blues, and Gospel –
Somewhere to Stand.” Langston Hughes: The Man, His Art, and His
Continuing Influence. Ed. C. James Trotman. New York: Garland,
1995. 51–61.
Warren, Harry, and Mack Gordon. “There Will Never Be Another You.”
The New Real Book. Ed. Chuck Sher. Petaluma: Sher Music, 1988.
355.
weiss, ruth. “Single Out: ruth weiss.” Interview. Breaking the Rule of
Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers. Ed. Nancy N.
Grace and Ronna C. Johnson. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2004. 55–82.
Woolfson, Eric, and Alan Parsons. “The Raven.” The Alan Parsons
Project. www.the-alan-parsons-project.com/tales-of-mystery-and-
imagination. (5 Oct. 2014).
Young, Kevin, ed. Blues Poems. Everyman’s Library. New York: Knopf,
2005.
Young, Kevin, ed. Jazz Poems. Everyman’s Library. New York: Knopf,
2006.

7.2 Sound Recordings

Alan Parsons Project. Tales of Mystery and Imagination – Edgar Allan
Poe. 1976. Mercury, 1987.
Conducting from the Grave. “Nevermore.” Revenants. Rykodisc,
2010.
Hughes, Langston. “The Weary Blues.” The Weary Blues with
Langston Hughes. MGM, 1958. Reissued as The Weary Blues with
Langston Hughes, Charles Mingus, and Leonard Feather. Polygram,
1991.
MC Lars. “Mr. Raven.” The Laptop EP. Truck Records, 2004.
Nox Arcana. Shadow of the Raven. Monolith Graphics, 2007.
Opera Magna. Poe. DFY Records, 2010.
Parker, Charlie. “Thrivin’ on a Riff.” Now’s the Time. Savoy, 1945.
Remastered. Savoy, 2006.
Parsons, Alan. “A Recurring Dream Within a Dream.” A Valid Path.
Eagle Rock, 2004.
Rollins, Sonny. “There Will Never Be Another You.” Rec. 20 Feb.
1963. The Essential Sonny Rollins: The RCA Years. RCA, 2005.
Simone, Nina. “Backlash Blues.” Sings the Blues. RCA Victor, 1967.
Smith, Bessie. “Backwater Blues.” 1927. The Essential Bessie Smith.
Sony, 1997.
Woolfson, Eric. “The Raven.” Edgar Allan Poe: A Musical. Limelight,
2009.

7.3 Further Reading

Bolden, Tony. Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry
and Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.
Feinstein, Sascha. Jazz Poetry from the 1920s to the Present.
Westport: Praeger, 1997.
Jones, Meta DuEwa. The Muse is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem
Renaissance to Spoken Word. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2011.
Pence, Charlotte, ed. The Poetics of American Song Lyrics. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2011.
Pielke, Robert J. Rock Music in American Culture: The Sounds of
Revolution. Jefferson: McFarland, 2011.
Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Music in Contemporary
American Culture. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.
Birgit Neumann

27 Intermedial Negotiations:
Postcolonial Literatures
Abstract: This essay explores the multifaceted role of intermedial
configurations in postcolonial literatures. The concept of
intermediality foregrounds the dynamic role of media in perpetuating
cultural knowledge and organizing power relations in colonial and
postcolonial times, inducing readers to question the overarching
political structures in which different medial practices become
possible. Touching upon notions of hierarchy, superiority and
legitimacy in the field of cultural representation, intermediality is
charged with political meaning, often taking up and taking on existing
medial representations and subjecting them to the foreignizing
dynamics of exchange. Examinations of intermediality in postcolonial
literatures will therefore necessarily go beyond formalist approaches to
take into consideration the politics of symbolic forms.
Key Terms: Hybridity, in-between-ness, translation, exchange,
cultural and aesthetic difference

1 Intermediality in Postcolonial Literatures –

Forging Connections and Showcasing
Difference

1.1 Intermediality and In-between-ness

The ever-expanding and heterogeneous field of intermediality is one of
the most promising and invigorating research areas within
postcolonial studies today. And yet, despite the prominence of
intermedial constellations in postcolonial literatures, to date there
have been only few attempts to systematically introduce the concept
into the field. This is all the more surprising since the concept opens
up numerous fruitful perspectives for the interpretation of postcolonial
literatures and the further conceptual development of postcolonial
studies. Most importantly, the concept of intermediality points to the
constitutive and dynamic role of media in construing forms of sociality
and perpetuating cultural knowledge, including concepts of
identification, alterity and power, in colonial and postcolonial times.
As such, it invites us to question the overarching political structures in
which different medial practices and self-representation become
possible.
Roughly speaking, intermediality can be defined as the interplay
between various media of communication that are conventionally
perceived as being distinct (cf. Wolf 2002, 39). Literary texts draw on
other media, both past and present, rooted in their own culture or in
others, and refer to them in a number of different ways: They imitate
their media-specific structures and modes of signification; they allude
to knowledge produced by specific media; they quote, paraphrase,
transform and parody their content. Moreover, literature may also
incorporate individual media (often reproductions of paintings, images
or photographs), confronting the printed word and the linearity of the
verbal text with the often disruptive presence of another medium.
Based on this broad definition, intermediality in literature refers to
both the verbal evocation of a distinct medium (be it through explicit
thematization of a specific medium or the structural imitation of
media-specific forms of world-making) and the direct integration of
another medium. As such, intermediality describes the range of
dynamic constellations in which different media run parallel, refer to
each other, collide, converge and interact (cf. Rippl 2005, 52), thus
opening up a space of semiotic and material in-between-ness.
Existing research on intermediality has extensively examined the
various possibilities of literature to evoke the formal structures and
contents of other media, and has thus taken a predominantly formalist
approach to intermediality. Given, however, that literary forms of
representation are almost always implicated in larger political
frameworks, social issues and ethical concerns, the exclusive interest
in intermedial forms as such can hardly do justice to the functional
complexity of intermediality and the politics of symbolic forms. Maybe
this holds particularly true for postcolonial literatures, which, roughly
speaking, are concerned with renegotiating imperial legacies and the
ensuing predominance of Eurocentric epistemologies. Examinations of
intermediality in postcolonial literatures will therefore necessarily go
beyond formalist approaches to take into consideration the ideology
and politics of symbolic forms, i.e. the intricate interplay between
intermediality on the one hand and larger cultural issues, such as the
supposed authority of Western signifying practices, on the other. Seen
from this perspective, intermedial configurations are not to be
regarded as aesthetic ends in themselves; rather, they are central to
what the French philosopher Jacques Rancière (2004, 13) called the
“distribution of the sensible”, understood as “the system of a priori
forms determining what presents itself to sense experience.”
Intermediality is charged with specific values, often taking up and
taken on existing medial representations and subjecting them to the
transformative dynamics of (literary) translation. Accordingly,
intermediality may intervene in the social fabric of existing medial
configurations, reworking them in a way that allows readers to
experience, see and imagine the world differently.
The interest of postcolonial studies in the politics of symbolic forms
requires an understanding of intermediality that can do justice to both
its aesthetics and its potential political implications. Defining
intermediality as a form of the in-between (cf. Paech 1998, 16), which
brings different media into interaction and cuts across seemingly fixed
boundaries, offers a good point of departure. For instead of relying on
seemingly self-contained systems of signification, intermediality
enforces links, connections and crossbreeds between media. As such,
intermediality can “literally be described as between the between”
(Herzogenrath 2012, 2), denoting a material and conceptual space
between media that does not belong to either side. Intermediality thus
not only refers to relations between media. It also describes the space
of in-between-ness that emerges through the always-present gap
between different media. In this interstitial space, exchange, transfer
and translation become possible, while material, social and functional
differences between media are made visible (cf. Paech 1998).
Intermediality in literature is therefore a central means of expanding
the boundaries of literary world-making and making available new
forms of signification, which may both complement and contest the
primacy of verbal representation.
Conceptually, the understanding of intermediality as a transgressive
practice exploring the realm of the in-between is highly relevant to the
field of postcolonial studies and introduces numerous pertinent
research perspectives. This is due to several factors. For one, much
postcolonial literature is deeply concerned with transgressing
established cultural boundaries and blurring binary oppositions (for
example, colonizer vs. colonized; identity vs. alterity; center vs.
periphery). Unsettling colonial epistemologies, which typically
embraced cultural homogeneity and notions of purity, postcolonial
literatures frequently mix and merge opposing principles and
practices. From this perspective, intermediality may bring to the fore
the heterogeneity and plurality of meaning-making and, in a wider
sense, reflect the impurity and – to use a central concept of
postcolonial studies – hybridity of all cultural formations. Working
towards medial and aesthetic hybridity and flaunting multiple
connections between seemingly separated entities, intermediality
poses a constant challenge to notions of homogeneity, unity and
sameness.
Moreover, the definition of intermediality as a practice exploring the
“between the between” (Herzogenrath 2012, 2) can be directly linked
to concepts like in-between-ness and ‘third space,’ which are central to
the field of postcolonial studies, inviting new perspectives on cultural
constellations. In his seminal book, The Location of Culture, Homi
Bhabha defines the “in-between” spaces as “terrain[s] for elaborating
strategies of selfhood – singular or communal – that initiate new signs
of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in
the act of defining the idea of society itself. […] It is in the emergence
of the interstices – the overlap and displacement of domains of
difference – that the intersubjectivity and collective experiences of
nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated.”
(Bhabha 1994, 1–2) Following this definition, it is in the spaces
between cultures, i.e. in a ‘third space’ that cuts across fixed
boundaries, in which meaning, ethics and politics are negotiated.
Rather than denoting the connections between two separated, self-
enclosed entities, the terms in-between-ness and ‘third space’ assume
dynamic transgression, interaction and exchange “to take place all
along” (Döring 2007, 30). They highlight the “productive instabilities,”
tensions and differences at work “within such entities” (Döring 2007,
30). In the ‘third space,’ “even the same signs can be appropriated,
translated” (Bhabha 1994, 37) and turned into topoi of cultural
difference.
The notion of in-between spaces suggests intriguing analogies to the
concept of intermediality, which creates transgressions and
transitions, yielding a third space in which different media interact,
clash and grapple with each other. Intermediality rarely establishes
harmonious relations between different media. Rather it gives rise to
productive tensions. These antagonisms illustrate that one medium
cannot simply be translated into another but is inevitably subjected to
processes of creative transformation (cf. Paech 1998, 15–16). For even
if literature attempts to imitate the formal structures and contents of
another medium, this process will always yield gaps and thus work as
an act of transfiguration, which affects all media involved. Imitation is
here turned into difference, into a form of alterity, which invites us to
consider the specificities, potentials and limits of specific media in the
multiple processes of world-making. By transferring one medium into
another, intermediality confronts the typically verbal forms of
signification with alternative modes of representation, reframing or
even foreignizing the repertoires and effects of language, writing and
text. Intermediality in literature therefore has a self-reflexive potential,
throwing into relief the specificities of textuality, including its semiotic
power and material characteristics (cf. Klarer 1999, 2; Rippl 2005, 62).
This argument gains particular urgency in the context of postcolonial
literatures since literacy and the printed book were central to
establishing imperial power. After all, the printed text, a key medium
of teaching and learning and endowed with enormous cultural
authority, played a major role in perpetuating imperial epistemologies
and marginalizing local knowledge, which often largely relied upon
oral modes.
The understanding of intermediality as a practice of in-between-ness
can be further expanded and transferred to transcultural relations. For
intermediality may not only forge connections, contact and
interchange between different media but also between diverse cultures.
Intermediality may bring media of different cultures into interaction,
making visible the similarities, but also differences and tensions
between specific media cultures. In turn, processes of cultural
exchange often stimulate far-reaching transformations, syntheses and
interferences within existing media cultures (cf. Simonis 2009, 12).
Considering that media frequently travel between cultures, i.e. are
translated from one culture into another, intermediality is a
particularly powerful strategy to reflect the potentials, limits and
effects of such cultural exchanges and transfers. What happens when
media are transferred from one culture into another? How are they
transformed in this process and how do they interact with medial
constellations of the target culture? Which (or whose) media do
actually cross the boundaries between different cultures, and how do
travelling media affect transcultural relations? These questions gain
special resonance in the context of global hierarchies, structuring both
the colonial and postcolonial world. After all, even if in our globalized
modernity media travel further and more swiftly than ever before,
their accessibility is often “restricted to those social actors who have
the economic means or the cultural capital to make use of them” (Welz
2009, 37).

1.2 Political and Ethical Repercussions

Seen from this perspective, intermediality has strong political and
ethical repercussions. As the verbal evocation or direct integration of a
different medium, intermediality in literature involves a struggle for
semiotic and cultural power, with individual media seeking to
showcase their capacities of meaning-making, sometimes even trying
to outdo other media (cf. Döring 2002, 151). This competitive
understanding of intermedial relations can be traced back to a
Renaissance debate about the hierarchy of the arts, which found its
most notable manifestation in Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone of Poetry
and Painting (the Italian paragone literally means ‘comparison’).
Here, he posits the superiority of the visual arts, which, according to da
Vinci, allow for more authentic and vivid representations. Touching
upon notions of hierarchy, superiority and legitimacy in the field of
cultural representation, the concept of the paragone is steeped in
politics. In his seminal study Iconology, W. J. T. Mitchell even goes so
far as to understand the paragone as “the war for the representation of
reality” (1986, 121). After all, media do not simply depict a pre-existing
version of reality but create and interpret the very reality they purport
to describe. Different media provide different versions of reality, which
bear on cultural epistemologies, the formation of subjectivities,
affective structures as well as social interactions. Mitchell argues that
the hierarchical relation of images and words – a relation that is
commonly referred to as ekphrasis ( 7 Postcolonial Ekphrasis in the
Contemporary Anglophone Indian Novel; 0 Introduction; 1
Ekphrasis: Theory) – is often staged as a struggle for cultural
domination, in which the textual “‘self’ is understood to be an active,
speaking, seeing subject,” while the other “is projected as a passive,
seen, and (usually) silent object” (Mitchell 1994, 157). In cultural
history, verbal-visual relations have time and again been harnessed to
negotiate gender differences: traditionally, women have been depicted
as mute objects of beauty in literature, whereas men have been
associated with verbal language and the power to represent. In more
recent research, Mitchell (2005) has somewhat revised his argument.
Attributing a certain degree of agency to the object of vision, he points
out that the spectator is also influenced by the object and can thus no
longer be conceived as the supreme subject and master.
The antagonistic understanding of the verbal-visual relations is
highly relevant to postcolonial literatures. As Mitchell (1994, 181)
remarks, the gender hierarchy is only one among a number of possible
explorations of difference performed by this type of intermediality. As
a matter of fact, within postcolonial contexts, verbal-visual relations
are oftentimes framed not only in terms of gender difference, but also
of intercultural difference and transcultural connectivity. Time and
again, verbal-visual relations are used to gauge differences between the
former colonizers and colonized or, in a broader sense, between
different ethnic groups. In this way, postcolonial literatures critically
engage with colonial imagery and the “politics of vision” (Emery 2007,
3). After all, as Tobias Döring (2002) and Mary Lou Emery (2007)
amongst others have shown, visuality is closely intertwined with the
manifestation of (colonial) power. Visual practices, including the
colonial gaze, were crucial to stigmatizing colonials as others, as
passive objects to be defined by the supposedly modern European
subject, possessing ratio and “the capacity for sight” (Emery 2007, 2).
Seen from this perspective, verbal-visual relations in postcolonial
literatures can indeed be understood as a “battle […] against semiotic
otherness” (Döring 2002, 159), i.e. as a strategy designed to counter
European visual practices and concomitant forms of cultural
stereotyping.
The notions of the paragone and ekphrasis refer first and foremost
to verbal-visual relations. And yet, it is clear that many arguments of
this debate can also productively be applied to intermedial relations in
postcolonial literatures. The fundamental issue concerns the relation
of mediality and power. The colonial power to represent and to define
hierarchical relations between different cultures involved a whole
range of medial forms and practices, which, next to texts and images,
included music, sculptures, performances and more. Principally, all of
these medial practices can be evoked in postcolonial literatures and
recoded into cultural terms as a way of challenging Eurocentric politics
of representation and validating alternative modes of signification.
Because the relation between literature and other media is frequently
staged as an antagonistic one, intermediality is particularly suited to
negotiating cultural struggles and conflicts, such as between different
forms of signification or conflicting concepts of sociality (cf. Döring
2002, 159). Intermediality therefore begs the question of how the
interaction between different media is represented: Are other media
simply evoked to showcase the superior signifying potentials of the
target medium? Are the contents of the evoked media subjected to
critical revisions and transformations so as to make room for
alternative codes and worldviews? Is intermediality used as a means of
foregrounding hitherto ignored links, connections and similarities
between different cultures?
Indeed, a number of postcolonial texts engage with “the
representational power of the dominant colonial code” (Döring 2002,
69) to counter the various manifestations of Western superiority and
to claim the authority of alternative medial practices. What emerges
from these postcolonial projects is “an aesthetic of trans-figuration”
(Emery 2007, 3) that claims power to represent and to re-imagine
dominant medial configurations, including the epistemologies, modes
of sociality and forms of subjectivity they give rise to. In this sense,
intermediality turns out to be a central postcolonial strategy to take up
established representations and, at the same time, question this
tradition by confronting it with alternative meanings (cf. Döring 2002,
142). David Dabydeen’s poetry collection Slave Song (1984), to give
just one example, may illustrate what is at stake here. The collection
confronts English eighteenth- and nineteenth-century engravings,
which largely depict black people from a Eurocentric perspective, with
multiple slave songs written in Guyanese Creole. These express the
suffering, pain and violence that black slaves, but also Indian laborers,
had to endure on Caribbean sugar plantations (cf. Döring 2002, 142).
The songs overcome the silence of the depicted black people, thus
reworking the colonial iconography in a way that provides room for
registering hitherto undocumented experiences. By bringing together
English and Creole medial practices, the collection creates a complex
“transcultural aesthetic” (Rajaratnam 2009, 48) that embraces
experiential multiplicity. At the same time, the transfer of Creole
songs, which emerged from the largely oral Caribbean (plantation)
cultures, into print foregrounds the transformative dynamics of
translation. The result of Dabydeen’s postcolonial intervention is a
critical form of cultural remembrance, which exploits the symbolic
capital or monumentality of earlier media to reflect critically on the
memories, epistemologies and norms they have given rise to.
Intermediality in postcolonial literatures does not, however,
necessarily relate to European medial practices and colonial
prefigurations. It would be wrong to reduce intermediality to its
possible subversive and revisionist functions. Intermediality in
postcolonial literatures can take a number of different forms and its
possible effects are indeed vast. Time and again, postcolonial
literatures evoke individual media and their specific manifestations to
examine their ideological framework and to validate alternative modes
of signification. A range of West Indian and West Indian British poets,
including Kamau E. Brathwaite, John LaRose, Anthony Salkey, Linton
Kwesi Johnson and John Agard, for instance, draw on calypso, jazz
and/or reggae, musical styles to foreground the importance of sound
as a mode of expression that challenges the primacy of Western media.
Playing on the alterity of sound, these musical forms revitalize a largely
ignored tradition of the black population of the Caribbean and register
a history of resistance (cf. Neumann 2015). Bernardine Evaristo’s
novel Blonde Roots (2008), to give another example, uses intermedial
references to slave songs to give expression to the fears and
frustrations, hopes and dreams of slaves. Here, the evocation of a
culturally distinct form of expression from the past forges a sense of
cultural identification and “helps reinforce communality in the
present” (Rigney 2008, 350). Furthermore, Mr Loverman (2013), a
recent novel by Bernardine Evaristo set in the Caribbean community of
London, tells a tale of illicit love, mobilizes intermedial references to
music to ‘sing back’ to the eponymous signature song of Jamaican
ragga and dancehall artist Shabba Ranks. As a matter of fact, the song
“Mr Loverman” is steeped in heterosexual norms and Shabba Ranks is
infamous for his homophobic attitudes. Evaristo’s novel subjects these
attitudes and the norms enshrined in the song to a witty revision,
pervasively changing the connotations of Mr Loverman: In her novel,
Mr Loverman figures as an ageing Caribbean immigrant, Barry, an
attractive dandy of 74, who is deeply in love, not with his wife, Carmel,
but with his gay lover, Morris.
Other postcolonial novels, such as Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of
Suburbia (1990) or Diran Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black (1997),
abound with intermedial references to contemporary pop music. In
these novels, pop music is presented as a central mode of expression
and identification of both white and black British youth cultures: It
expresses cultural values, world-views and styles of living. Against this
backdrop, intermediality serves the characterization of the
protagonists and the production of a meaningful context for the
fictional universe. The references to pop music underline the centrality
of media to processes of subject constitution and individual meaning-
making, highlighting the performative and open, rather than
essentialist, dimension of identity.

1.3 Intermediality as Cultural Commemorative

Practice
As the preceding remarks illustrate, intermedial references in
literature fulfill important mnemonic functions. “Literature,”
according to Renate Lachmann (2008, 301; cf. also Lachmann 1990),
“is culture’s memory.” Even though Lachmann mainly refers to the
intertextual aspects of literature, many of her arguments are also
pertinent to the conceptualization of intermediality in (postcolonial)
literatures. Intermediality is a central commemorative practice that
not only works to store the knowledge produced by specific media
cultures but, more importantly, that continually transforms, re-
interprets and re-members this knowledge according to present
epistemologies, norms and needs for identification. By evoking specific
media and thus inscribing itself into the “mnemonic space” (Lachmann
2008, 303) between media, literature “inevitably creates a transformed
mnemonic space” (Lachmann 2008, 303), in which new voices and
alternative experience can become manifest. Therefore, intermediality
does not simply confirm existing memories and inherited traditions
(frequently memories of a specific community constructed so as to
define a sense of identification), but transforms and displaces them. As
both a commemorative and transformative practice, intermediality is a
central strategy to keep past media and their respective knowledge
“up-to-date” (cf. Rigney 2008, 351), i.e. to rework them in a way that
can give expression to formerly marginalized subjectivities. Constantly
weaving connections between media, intermediality both produces and
retraces a dense web of knowledge, thus simultaneously revitalizing
and transforming cultural memories.
In the following, some traces of this intermedial network in
postcolonial literatures are reconstructed and interpreted. Whenever
literary texts are shaped by intermediality and their meanings reside,
at least to some extent, in references to other media, their
interpretation must presuppose a shared cultural tradition in which
such references become meaningful and hence interpretable. This asks
for an archaeological approach, which can trace the history of specific
media and locate them in their pertinent cultural, social and
technological contexts. Of course, such an approach poses a number of
methodological challenges that involves the identification of
intermedial references as well as the construction of their relevant
contexts. To make comparisons possible and keep distinctions sharp,
the following overview will confine itself to a distinct form of
intermediality, namely to references to music in postcolonial
literatures.

2 Poetics and Politics of Musical Intermediality

in Postcolonial Fiction: Some Examples
A range of postcolonial novels, poems and dramas use intermedial
references to specific musical styles to explore their respective cultural
validity and to position themselves within the cultural, social and
political frameworks associated with these styles. The preoccupation
with music and its culture-specific repercussions can be traced back to
early examples of postcolonial fiction, in particular of Caribbean
provenance, written in the 1950s and 1960s. Several Caribbean novels,
dramas and poems vividly engage with musical forms that are
considered distinctively Afro-Caribbean and, as such, promise to
revitalize a largely suppressed African legacy that has gone into the
making of Caribbean cultures. The concern with West African musical
traditions, which pervades the poetry of writers such as Louise
Bennett, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, John LaRose, Andrew Salkey,
James Berry and E. A. Markham, is frequently linked to the aim of
establishing a distinctively Caribbean poetics. This counter-aesthetics
seeks to move beyond imposed European poetic conventions and
validate local forms of expression and experiences.

2.1 Edward Kamau Brathwaite: The Arrivants

(1969)
In a number of critical essays, including “Sir Galahad and the Islands,”
“Roots,” “The New West Indian Novelists” and “Jazz and the West
Indian Novel” Barbadian poet and historian Brathwaite has tackled
these issues on a theoretical plane. He stresses the role of music and
the sonic, rhythmical dimensions of language in providing an
alternative to imposed British poetic traditions, which according to
him are inept at representing West Indian realities. “The hurricane,” as
Brathwaite (1984, 10) famously put it, “does not roar in pentameter,”
which is the dominant rhythm in English poetry. Brathwaite argues
that musical forms ( 26 The Musicalization of Poetry), such as blues,
jazz and calypso, typically structured by dactyls, have pervasively
shaped Caribbean speech cadences. According to him, these musical
forms are typical African cultural expressions, which, through
processes of displacement and translocation caused by the
transatlantic slave trade, have shaped Caribbean oral cultures. The
evocation of these musical forms, including jazz phrasing and
improvisation, is therefore particularly suited to bringing West African
legacies to the fore and to critically intervene in the established politics
of representation and identification (cf. Innes 2007, 107). In this anti-
colonialist framework, then, intermedial references to what Brathwaite
considers a distinctively West African musical tradition aim to forward
the liberation struggle by revising established hierarchies of European
and African modes of expression.
Brathwaite’s ‘new world’ epic, The Arrivants, published in 1969, is
his attempt to rework imposed colonial standards and to give voice to a
history of dislocation and survival of African peoples. Portraying the
experience of exile, journey, passage and return on a large scale, the
book-length poem draws on the evocation of music and Caribbean
speech patterns to imaginatively construct a rich sound culture that
can overcome the silence that has long afflicted black histories (cf.
Walder 1998, 132). Evoking the performative and formal features of
various black musical styles – jazz, blues, West African chant,
Rastafarian drums and calypso – the poem thrives on the alterity of
sound to make present a largely suppressed Afro-Caribbean heritage
and counter the primacy of hermeneutic meaning, which lies at the
heart of Western epistemologies. Throughout, sounds, drums and
music are celebrated as alternative, creatively liberating modes of
expression and central tropes of black consciousness. The poem
“Caliban,” part of the trilogy’s last bookIslands , evokes drumbeats,
reggae rhythms and ritual songs of the New World to powerfully
celebrate the presence of African traditions:
And
Ban
Ban
Caliban
like to play
pan
at the
Carnival;
prancing
up to the limbo
silence
down
down
down
so the god won’t drown
him
down
down
down
 to the island
town (Brathwaite 1969, 192)

Throughout, the poem foregrounds the sonic dimensions of black

orality and evokes music, voice and rhythmicality to challenge the
authority of English poetic models propagated by the colonial system.
Capitalizing on sound ( 25 Literary Acoustics) rather than semantics,
the fracturing of words into syllables as well as the mesmerizing
repetition of the word “down” echo the rhythms of drums and
Caribbean steel pans (cf. Torres-Saillant 1997, 103). These symbols of
black consciousness, creativity and resistance work against the
crippling effects of colonial education, so compellingly epitomized by
Shakespeare’s Caliban. By contrast, Brathwaite’s “Caliban,” playing
“pan / at the Carnival,” becomes a key, semantically condensed trope
for local and creolized modes of expression, which are aimed at
overcoming the cultural alienation caused by colonial education. The
steel pan, which was used as a means of communication among West
African slaves on Caribbean plantation cultures, acknowledges a
history of black resistance and agency, which is reaffirmed by the
reference to Carnival, which both celebrates Caribbean culture and
opens up a space in which subversion and masquerade become
possible.
In Brathwaite’s The Arrivants, then, references to music establish a
counter-discourse, which uses culture-specific modes of expression to
manipulate and change established power structures and to claim new
forms of identification. Located within a black tradition of oral and
performance poetry, the poem is written with an eye on performance
so that the music, rhythms and sonic elements of black orality, which
structure the poem, can be made audible for audiences. Disrupting the
dichotomy between writing and speech, voice and sound are used to
authenticate new speaking positions and to assert the presence of black
communities, in particular within diasporic contexts. Dave Gunning
(2009, 22) is right to note that “the music is presented as the inevitable
product of the bloody history of the Caribbean but also as the
mnemonic and archive that allows for the memory of history to persist
and inform a contemporary experience.” And indeed, in post-war
Britain the performance of poems such as Brathwaite’s The Arrivants
was central to validating the presence of Caribbean voices and to
forging a sense of community among West Indian diasporic groups (cf.
Innes 2007, 184).
And yet, the poem is far from simply celebrating the presence of an
African heritage and affirming a history of survival. Rather, the
deliberately fragmented typographic order re-members and renders
concrete the painful experience of cultural dispersion and
displacement that African slaves had to endure. Using words as visual
signifiers (cf. Walder 1998, 139) and the materiality of the page as a
site of creative intervention, the poem blends different
representational codes, i.e. the acoustic, graphic and verbal, to create a
creolized poetics. This intermedial poetics challenges homogenous and
totalizing epistemologies underlying colonial ideologies and suggests
that Caribbean cultures can only be understood in terms of their
multifarious travels and processes of exchange (cf. Boyce Davies 2013).

2.2 Jackie Kay: Trumpet (1998)

Intermedial references to West African musical traditions also feature
prominently in Trumpet (1998), the highly acclaimed debut novel by
black Scottish writer Jackie Kay. Yet Kay takes a somewhat different
approach to the role of music in the construction of communal and
individual identity. In her novel, jazz music ( 26 The Musicalization of
Poetry) is not represented as a specifically black type of music that
promises to revitalize a genuinely African tradition but figures as a
transcultural musical style, which brings together culturally diverse
traditions and signifies the openness, plurality and fluidity of
experience. Exploring the multifaceted riddles of identity, the novel
tells the story of the deceased black Scottish Joss Moody, a renowned
jazz trumpeter, who lived most of his life as a man, but is trapped in a
female body. It is only Millie, his wife, who shared this secret with him,
whereas their adopted son, Colman, as well as their friends, discover
Joss’s secret only after his death. Deeply shaken by the revelation of
his female anatomy, they struggle to make sense of it. The attempt to
interpret Joss’s identity posthumously and the almost desperate
struggle to find categories, labels, classifications and designations for
the life he and his wife led thus moves center-stage in this novel. Who,
after all, has the right to tell and represent Joss’s life story? Whose
norms and categories are involved here? How to make sense of the
discrepancy between Joss’s self-identification as a man and the
materiality of his female body?
Trumpet uses references to music and the ‘musicalization’ of the
narrative ( 24 Literature and Music: Theory; cf. also Wolf 1999;
Eckstein 2006) to tackle many of these questions. In a central chapter,
titled “Music,” the role of music in the dynamics of Joss’s subject
formation is explored. By contrast to most other chapters, this chapter
is not told from the perspective of a homodiegetic narrator, but from
that of a heterodiegetic one, which, by means of internal focalization,
grants insights into Joss’s mind:
When he gets down […] he loses his sex, his race, his memory. He strips himself bare,
takes everything off. […] He can taste himself transforming. Running changes. The body
changes shape. From girl to young woman to young man to old man to old woman. […]
There is music in his blood. […] He can’t stop himself changing. Running changes.
Changes running. He is changing all the time. […] It is liberating. To be a girl. To be a
man. […] All his self collapses – his idiosyncrasies, his personality, his ego, his sexuality,
even, finally, his memory. (Kay 1998, 131–135)

The performance of jazz music allows Joss to exceed the material

boundaries of his body and to inhabit several subject positions at once,
a multiplicity that profoundly questions essentialist notions of identity
and troubles the either-or logic of binary oppositions. The “dark sweet
heart of the music” (Kay 1998, 136) opens up a space of in-between-
ness, in which border transgressions become possible and
identification is always in the making and on the move: “So when he
takes off he is the whole century galloping to its close. The wide moors.
The big mouth. Scotland. Africa. Slavery. Freedom. He is a girl. A man.
Everything, nothing.” (Kay 1998, 136) In Kay’s novel, performance and
performativity turn out to be the key concepts for conceptualizing
gendered and ethnic identities: Echoing Judith Butler’s ideas on
identification, subject positions do not rely on a fixed and stable
essence, but must be actualized, rehearsed and renegotiated over and
over again – and always with a difference. In this way, the body, which,
in the context of colonial discourse has frequently been evoked to
naturalize ethnic differences and legitimate racist attitudes, no longer
signifies an inevitable, natural or unchanging materiality. Rather, the
body is understood as socially constructed, as an effect of performance,
and therefore as being open to various, conflicting interpretations.
Thus de-naturalizing the body, Trumpet invites readers to reconsider
epistemologies and ideologies that proclaim a natural correspondence
between corporeal characteristics and behavioral patterns.
In Trumpet, the choice of jazz music as an art form exemplifying the
performative openness of identification directly bears on concepts of
culture. For the genesis of jazz music itself epitomizes the protean in-
between-ness that Joss experiences while playing his trumpet. Kay’s
novel clearly goes beyond Brathwaite’s nativist approach to jazz music,
highlighting the heterogeneous musical styles and cultural traditions
that have gone into the making of this musical style instead. While
certainly being implicated in African cultures, jazz defies “borders and
boundaries of ‘blackness,’ ‘maleness,’ ‘femaleness,’ or ‘whiteness’”
(West 1993, 103; cf. Eckstein 2006, 55). In Trumpet, jazz is depicted as
a genuinely “transcultural New World art form” that brings together
“West African, European, and North American musical traditions”
(Stein 2007, 174). As such, it works against established topologies of
culture, pointing to strategies of relocation and displacement and
enacting the shifting contours of geography. At best, jazz can give rise
to a “Fantasy Africa”, as the title of Joss’s very first hit suggests, i.e. an
“imaginary landscape” (Kay 1998, 34), which has to be invented and
reinvented through symbolic and open processes of signification.
Rather than denoting a stable entity fully contained within a fixed
context, then, jazz is, to quote Homi Bhabha, located “in the realm of
the beyond” (1994, 1), forming part of a complex network of transfer,
translation and exchange.
The hybridity characteristic of jazz music is performatively
confirmed by the novel’s structure, namely by its transgressive
aesthetics created by the manifold intermedial references. After all, we
are not dealing with jazz music as such, but with representations of
jazz music in literature. The intermedial evocation and thematization
of music creates productive transformations and tensions, which affect
both media (i.e. music and literature), yielding a hybrid literary
aesthetics made up of mixed elements. The translation of music into
the realm of literature necessarily subjects jazz music to complex and
subtle processes of change and exchange: The acoustic nature of music
can only be evoked indirectly and imitated rudimentarily by the
linearity of printed words; the complex simultaneities and
overlappings of music, its “pluridimensionality” and spatio-
temporality “can never be fully attained in verbal art” (Wolf 1999, 20).
The literary text, too, its structural make-up and syntactic shape, is
affected by the evocation of jazz music. The biographical narrative is
made up of a multiplicity of different voices, perspectives and narrative
forms, creating a complex polyphony, which in many respects echoes
the structural specificities of jazz music (cf. Stein 2007, 174), such as
the call-and-response pattern, typically thriving on alternations
between a melody and an improvised counter-melody, and the ensuing
polyrhythm (i.e. the simultaneous use of diverse, conflicting rhythms).
The frequently short, breathless and staccato-like phrases, often
rendered in present tense and resonant of the spontaneity of oral
speech, add a sense of expressive improvisation to Kay’s narrative (cf.
Eckstein 2006, 57). Registering the various and conflicting attempts at
making sense of Joss’s life, all of these accounts offer a different, highly
subjective version of the past and foreground the sheer impossibility of
establishing a single truthful and final version. In fact, it is only
through the polyphonic multiplicity of perspectives, literally “a concert
of voices” (Stein 2007, 170), that readers gradually come to grasp the
multifaceted complexity of Joss’s identity. The multi-perspectival
narrative – just as Joss’s identity and jazz music – thwarts any attempt
to be fixed within stable patterns, requiring readers – and listeners –
who are willing to orchestrate different voices and to accept partial
truths, improvisations and disharmonies.
Jazz music in Kay’s Trumpet thus figures as a powerful model
illustrating the heterogeneity of cultural formations, which only
emerge through transcultural crossovers, exchanges, borrowings and
adaptations. The polyphonic, polyrhythmic and improvised structure
of jazz is turned into an alternative form of meaning-making, one that
opens a creative and critical dialogue between diverse voices (cf. Stein
2007, 170). At the same time, the translation of jazz music into verbal
narrative reminds readers of the transformations, instabilities and
differences that arise from acts of transcultural and intermedial
transfer, pointing to the disruptive processes which have given rise to
the emergence of jazz music. But, as Trumpet intriguingly illustrates,
these disruptions may also be productive because they can be used to
change dominant representational codes and to challenge seemingly
stable constructions, which lie at the heart of essentialist and totalizing
worldviews.
2.3 Salman Rushdie: The Ground beneath Her
Feet (1999)
Music also plays a pivotal role in Salman Rushdie’s sixth novel The
Ground beneath Her Feet, published in 1999. Broadly speaking, the
novel offers a postcolonial re-writing of the myth of Orpheus and
Eurydice, a re-writing in which rock music takes the place of Orpheus’s
mournful lyre songs. Mingling Homeric and Indian traditions and
permeated by an array of intertextual evocations, the novel features the
tragic, dramatic and traumatic love story of Ormus Cama, son of the
Parsi Anglophiles Lady Senta and Sir Darius Xerces Cama, and the
self-named Vina Apsara. Their epic romance, beginning in “impure old
Bombay” (Rushdie 1999, 95) in the 1950s and subsequently moving to
London and Manhattan, is intricately intertwined with an alternative,
and at times counterfactual, history of rock music, which challenges
the almost naturalized connection between rock and the West. Ormus,
who (much like Elvis Presley) is haunted by the painful memories of
his dead twin brother, eventually becomes a singer-composer of
extraordinary genius, and Vina Apsara, “the Indian lyre” (Rushdie
1999, 93), a famous singer and rock celebrity. Much like Madonna, she
is driven by a persistent desire to reinvent her identity. According to
Ormus and “Vina’s variant version of history” (Rushdie 1999, 96),
Ormus anticipated the music that Elvis, Bob Dylan and the Beatles
would become famous for by “one thousand and one nights” (Rushdie
1999, 96). In a central chapter of the novel, entitled “The Invention of
Music,” the narrator Rai (meaning prince, desire, or music) notes:
[T]he genius of Ormus Cama did not emerge in response to, or in imitation of, America;
[…] his early music, the music he heard in his head during the unsinging childhood years,
was not of the West, except in the sense that the West was in Bombay from the beginning
[…]. It was amazing proposition: that the music came to Ormus before it ever visited the
Sun Records studio or the Brill Building or the Cavern Club. That he was the one who
heard it first. […] So according to Ormus and Vina’s […] alternative reality, we Bombayites
can claim that it was in truth our music, born in Bombay like Ormus and me, not ‘goods
from foreign’ but made in India […]. (Rushdie 1999, 95–96)

Using intermedial references to rock music to counter one-sided,

hegemonic and seemingly unequivocal interpretations of (cultural)
history, The Ground beneath Her Feet both writes, or rather ‘sings,’
back to Western “cultural imperialism” (Rushdie 1999, 95) and
highlights the inherently impure and mixed ‘origins’ of rock music,
which cannot be tied to a single point of reference. After all, “The
Ground beneath Her Feet,” which is also the title of a song that Ormus
Cama composes after Vina’s death, hardly offers any stability, but
signifies “unsolidity” (Rushdie 1999, 54), unexpected “gaps” (Rushdie
1999, 54) and “layered uncertainty” (Rushdie 1999, 54). In Rushdie’s
highly self-reflexive novel, which combines representations of an
alternative history of music with reflections on the nature of
representation, rock music is a genuinely hybrid art form, which
effortlessly transgresses cultural boundaries and confounds
dichotomies between self and other, East and West, origins and
rootlessness. Rock music fuses, takes up and takes on multiple musical
traditions, and the band VTO, which Vina and Ormus found and which
alternately stands for “Vertical Take-Off,” “Vina To Ormus” and “We
Two” (Rushdie 1999, 8), epitomizes these protean metamorphoses.
Their song “At the Frontier of the Skin” presents a powerful physical
image of the ways in which rock music – and Rushdie’s dense
intertextual and intermedial novel – undermines the boundaries that
typically serve to demarcate sameness from otherness. After all, it is
the skin, a protective, and yet highly sensitive membrane that at once
forms a barrier between the individual body and the external
environment and that allows us to experience that environment
haptically.
In this novel, rock music thus signifies a borderline experience,
which emerges from contact situations and transcultural cross-overs.
As also suggested by VTO’s album “Quakershaker,” culture only comes
into being through passages, transfers, shifts and ruptures, which
fragment, change and foreignize established structures and traditions.
The multi-layered intertextual allusions (to mythical figures such as
Orpheus, Eurydice, Prometheus, Pygmalion, Helen, Proteus, Medea,
Persephone, Rama and Lakshmana as well as authors such as Rilke,
Tolkien, Joyce, Dickens, and other novels by Rushdie) and numerous
intermedial references to music (from Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan to
John Lennon and David Bowie, from The Who and T. Rex to Madonna
and U2), which pervade the narrative, intriguingly reflect this cultural
plurality, establishing an alternative order beyond the politics of
coherent and unified categorization. Instead of producing a “clearly
bordered work of art” that, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, became “crucial in defining the nation as an ‘imagined
community’” (Brennan 1990, 48), Rushdie produces a deliberately
hybrid and fragmented narrative. This postcolonial narrative
constantly throws readers back on their own efforts of meaning-
making, inducing them to explore the principles that underlie the
making and interpretation of (art) history.
* * * * *
The transformative power of the arts, i.e. their propensity to travel and
thereby to stimulate cultural change, is compellingly illustrated by the
fact that the lyrics to the song “The Ground beneath Her Feet” were
adapted and recorded by the Irish rock band U2 (featuring Rushdie in
the accompanying video). The plurimedial constellation of literary text
and music shows that individual artifacts form part of a multifaceted
medial network and the social circulation of meaning: Meaning is
therefore “never fixed once and for all, but is something that happens
in the way […] cultural products are appropriated (over and over again,
always with a difference).” (Rigney 2008, 348) It is only these
processes of intermedial and intercultural translation, at once acts of
stabilization and transformation, that ensure the lasting cultural
significance of individual artifacts. The agency of translation, exchange
and travel profoundly challenges the tendency to assess individual
artifacts in ‘splendid isolation’ and to place them in fixed topographies.
Postcolonial intermediality, which affects the medial practices of both
the so-called Western and ex-colonized world, is therefore a powerful
means of revealing the contact zones, exchanges and passages between
what were once considered separated and homogenous entities.

3 Bibliography

3.1 Works Cited

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York and London:
Routledge, 1994.
Boyce Davies, Carole. Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight
Zones. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013.
Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy.
 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. A History of the Voice: The Development
of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. London and
Port of Spain: New Beacon, 1984.
Brennan, Timothy. “The National Longing for Form.” Nation and
Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha. London and New York: Routledge
1990. 44–70.
Döring, Tobias. Caribbean-English Passages: Intertextuality in a
Postcolonial Tradition. London: Routledge, 2002.
Döring, Tobias. Postcolonial Literatures in English. Stuttgart: Klett,
2007.
Eckstein, Lars. “Performing Jazz, Defying Essence: Music as a
Metaphor of Being in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet.” ZAA 54.1 (2006): 51–
63.
Emery, Mary Lou. Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Gunning, Dave. “John Agard.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol.
347: Twenty-First-Century ‘Black’ British Writers. Ed. R. Victoria
Arana. Detroit: Gale, 2009. 20–28.
Herzogenrath, Bernd. “Travels in Intermedia[lity]: An Introduction.”
Travels in Intermedia[lity]: ReBlurring the Boundaries. Ed. Bernd
Herzogenrath. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2012. 1–14.
Innes, C. L. The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures
in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Kay, Jackie. “Let It Be Told.” Into the Nineties: Post-Colonial
Women’s Writing. Ed. Anna Rutherford, Lars Jensen, and Shirley
Chew. Armidale: Dangaroo Press, 1994. 530–544.
Klarer, Mario. “Introduction.” Word & Image 15.1 (1999): 1–4.
Lachmann, Renate. Gedächtnis und Literatur: Intertextualität in der
russischen Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990.
Lachmann, Renate. “Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of
Literature.” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and
Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning.
 Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2008. 301–310.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual
Representations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of
Images. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Neumann, Birgit. “Liberationist Political Poetics.” Cambridge
Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010). Ed.
Deirdre Osborne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015
forthcoming.
Paech, Joachim. “Intermedialität: Mediales Differenzial und
transformative Figurationen.” Intermedialität: Theorie und Praxis
eines interdisziplinären Forschungsgebiets. Ed. Jörg Helbig. Berlin:
Erich Schmidt, 1998. 14–30.
Rajaratnam, Renuka. “Contemporary British Poetry and the
Transcultural Imagination.” Moving Worlds 9.2 (2009): 47–58.
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. 2000. Trans. Gabriel
Rockhill. London and New York: Continuum, 2004.
Rigney, Ann. “The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts between
Monumentality and Morphing.” Cultural Memory Studies: An
International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and
Ansgar Nünning. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2008. 345–356.
Rippl, Gabriele. Beschreibungs-Kunst: Zur intermedialen Poetik
angloamerikanischer Ikontexte (1880–2000). Munich: Wilhelm Fink,
2005.
Rushdie, Salman. The Ground beneath Her Feet. London: Random
House, 1999.
Simonis, Annette. “Einleitung: Intermedialität und Kulturaustausch.”
Intermedialität und Kulturaustausch: Beobachtungen im
Spannungsfeld zwischen Künsten und Medien. Ed. Annette Simonis.
Bielefeld: transcript, 2009. 9–18.
Stein, Mark. “Jackie Kay, Trumpet: Life Border Writing.” A History of
Postcolonial Literature in 12 ½ Books. Ed. Tobias Döring. Trier:
 wvt, 2007. 169–180.
Torres-Saillant, Silvio. Caribbean Poetics. Toward an Aesthetic of
West Indian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997
Walder, Dennis. Post-Colonial Literatures in English: History,
Language, Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
Welz, Gisela. “Multiple Modernities: The Transnationalization of
Cultures.” Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions,
Realities. Ed. Frank Schulze-Engler and Sissy Helff. Amsterdam and
New York: Rodopi, 2009. 37–58.
West, Cornell. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.
Williams, Patrick. “Significant Corporeality: Bodies and Identities in
Jackie Kay’s Fiction.” Write Black, Write British: From Post
Colonial to Black British Literature. Ed. Kadija Sesay. Hertford:
Hansib, 2005. 40–55.
Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory
and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi,
1999.
Wolf, Werner. “Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, bildender
Kunst und Musik: Ein Beitrag zu einer intermedialen
Erzähltheorie.” Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial,
interdisziplinär. Ed. Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning. Trier: wvt,
2002. 23–104.

3.2 Further Reading

Eckstein, Lars, and Christoph Reinfandt, eds. The Cultural Validity of
Music in Contemporary Fiction. Special Issue of ZAA 54.1 (2006).
Elkins, James. The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. San
Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1996.
Emery, Mary Lou. “Refiguring the Postcolonial Imagination: Tropes of
Visuality in Writing by Rhys, Kincaid, and Cliff.” Tulsa Studies in
Women’s Literature 16.2 (1997): 259–280.
Mendes, Ana Cristina. Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture:
Celebrating Impurity, Disrupting Borders. New York: Routledge,
2012.
Claudia Georgi

28 Contemporary British Theatre

and Intermediality
Abstract: Theatre is a multi- or plurimedial medium capable of
incorporating any other medium whatsoever. This exceptional
intermedial potential of theatre becomes apparent when we consider
the historical and more recent development of theatrical
intermediality, and specifically its relation to technological media. The
present chapter illustrates how Irina Rajewsky’s and Werner Wolf’s
categories of (inter)-medial transposition, intermedial references and
media combination apply to the theatrical medium by analysing two
case studies: Forkbeard Fantasy’s combination of theatre and film in
The Fall of the House of Usherettes (1996; 2005; still ongoing) and
Gob Squad’s use of live video relays in Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve
Never Had It So Good) (2007; still ongoing). Both productions prove
that theatre displays all types of intermediality which may even occur
simultaneously in order to enhance each other’s impact. Furthermore,
the case studies display a difference in quality between the general
multi- or plurimediality of theatre and additional media combinations
such as the incorporation of film and video. Finally, the productions
demonstrate how theatre avails itself of other media in order to stage
its own mediality and liveness by contrast.
Key Terms: (Inter)medial transposition, intermedial references,
media combination, multi- or plurimediality, film, video

1 The Intermedial Potential of Theatre and Its

Historical Development
Theatre, as an inherently multi- or plurimedial medium, combines
language, movement or dance, architectural and pictorial stage
designs, music and other media in a way that makes them appear not
as individual media but as integral components of the composite
theatrical medium. Accordingly, medial differences fade and the
spectators are hardly aware of how exactly individual media contribute
to the overall performance. They intuitively judge the performance as a
homogeneous piece of theatre rather than a multimedia event.
More importantly, theatre is also capable of incorporating any
additional media that do not (yet) form constituent parts of its general
multi- or plurimediality. When presented on stage, these additional
media are perceived as more unconventional and therefore salient
elements of a performance. In the introduction to their edited volume
Intermediality in Theatre and Performance (2006) Freda Chapple
and Chiel Kattenbelt comment on the exceptional intermedial
potential of theatre when describing it as a “hypermedium that
incorporates all arts and media and is the stage of intermediality”
(Chapple and Kattenbelt 2006, 20). Drama as a literary and generally
monomedial medium, by contrast, cannot materially include other
media but may only evoke them while remaining confined to the page
and to the written word.
Petra Maria Meyer also addresses the intermedial potential of
theatre and highlights its unique ‘mobility of signs’ [“Mobilität der
Zeichen”] that allows it to include any other media and their
corresponding sign systems (e.g. Meyer 2001, 77, 118). While it is true
that theatre can incorporate any other media, it should be clear that
the sign systems of these media are transformed into theatrical signs in
this process of theatrical media combination. Yet, this semiotic
transformation does not affect the materiality or mediality of the
integrated media. Both remain intact when being brought on the stage
(cf. Klaver 2000, 93–94). Theatrical media combination, in other
words, does not level the involved media in the way its multi- or
plurimediality does. It may instead expose medial differences and
therefore encourages metamedial reflection among the spectators (cf.
Meyer 2001, 62–63, 118). In a slight modification of Meyer’s term, the
capacity of theatre to stage other media without subjecting them to its
own mediality could be described as its ‘medial mobility’, a
characteristic theatre shares with other multi- or plurimedial media
such as opera (cf. Georgi 2014, 46–47).
That no medium is exempted from theatre’s propensity for including
and appropriating other media is illustrated by the long list of media
that have appeared on stage shortly after their invention within the
past two centuries. The examples range from media such as
photography, radio, film or video to the internet and mobile
technologies. While theatre already made use of technology in its early
forms of stage machinery in antiquity (cf. Lehmann 2001, 413; Fischer-
Lichte 2010, 200), more recent inventions of analogue and digital
media have taken theatrical intermediality to an entirely new level.
First experiments with projections of photography and film as part
of stage designs occurred in productions by international pioneers
such as Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940), Sergei Eisenstein (1898–
1948), Erwin Piscator (1893–1966) and Josef Svoboda (1920–2002)
(cf. Giesekam 2007, 27–71). By the last decades of the twentieth
century, video, television and eventually computer technology had
become the preferred media in intermedial theatre productions. In the
Anglophone world, these media have been used extensively by artists
and companies such as John Jesurun, Squat, The Wooster Group,
George Coates Performance Works and The Builders Association in
America, by the director and founder of Ex Machina company Robert
Lepage in Canada, as well as by the British company Complicite and
theatre director Katie Mitchell, to name but a few prominent examples
(cf. Dixon 2007, 1).
The latest experiments with intermedial and multimedia theatre
have further expanded their focus to include new forms of mobile
technology and pervasive computing which increasingly figure in
contemporary theatre productions. As part of their durational
performance Fortnight (2011; still ongoing), for instance, the
Manchester-based company Proto-type Theater communicates with
the participants via electronic and postal mail, Twitter and text
messages sent over a period of two weeks (cf. Proto-type Theater
2013). Blast Theory, a British company based in Brighton, produces
work that fuses theatre, internet and pervasive games. It employs
online streaming for its performance Kidnap (1998), experiments with
virtual reality in Desert Rain (1999), explores mixed reality via 3G
mobile phones in I Like Frank (2004) and further pushes the
boundaries of theatre and performance in the mobile phone game Day
of the Figurines (2006) (cf. Blast Theory 2014). Live streaming via the
internet is more extensively explored by the British company Station
House Opera in Live from Paradise (2004–2005), The Other Is You
(2006), Play on Earth (2006) and What’s Wrong with the World?
(2008), productions that employ live video links to connect remote
performers and performance venues in real-time (cf. Station House
Opera). Companies such as Second Front, the Avatar Repertory
Theater or the Metaverse Shakespeare Company finally relocate their
work entirely into cyberspace with productions that are screened in
virtual worlds and on online platforms.
As this selection of examples illustrates, there are no limits to
theatre’s potential to integrate other media. Despite their different
choices of media, many of the above-mentioned productions share a
focus on audience participation, interaction and immersion that
challenges established notions of the spectators’ role by turning them
into co-performers, participants or ‘players’. At the same time, many of
these productions separate performers and participants in time and
space, in virtual and actual reality by relying on remote interaction. In
this way, they question received conceptions of theatre as a medium
defined by the spatio-temporal co-presence of performers and
spectators and illustrate how theatre may take advantage of other
media in order to reflect on its own mediality and conventions.
In view of the plethora of new media that have taken over the stages
in contemporary theatre practice, it is not surprising that scholars
occasionally criticise how technological media encroach upon theatre.
The excessive use of these media, so they argue, may eventually
marginalise and usurp theatre and live performance. Most prominent
among such claims is Philip Auslander’s observation that
mediatisation has infiltrated live performance to an extent that live
and mediatised performance can no longer be properly distinguished
from each other (cf. Auslander 1999, 31–32). According to his
argument, the influence mediatisation exercises over liveness cannot
only be seen in the actual use of technological media in live
performances, but it is also expressed in the aesthetic and formal
impact mediatisation has on live performance in terms of a “media-
derived epistemology” (Auslander 1999, 33). Rather than proposing an
ontological opposition between live and mediatised performances,
Aus-lander believes their distinction to be only historically,
ideologically or economically relevant (cf. Auslander 1997, 54;
Auslander 1999, 51, 54, 159). Overall, however, he does not necessarily
consider increased mediatisation as a negative phenomenon.
 As the extensive, yet by far incomplete, list of productions that use
new technological and specifically digital media suggests, theatre
companies and individual artists are not overly critical of the impact of
mediatisation on theatre and mostly welcome new technologies. As a
matter of fact, theatre has always been receptive to other media
without giving up its own mediality and it may therefore be expected to
continue so in the future. Possibly, theatre even needs to open up to
new media in order to compete with them and redefine its own
position in a struggle for medial supremacy. This is suggested at least
by contemporary intermedial theatre that frequently avails itself of
these media in order to investigate its own specific nature by contrast.
In this sense, it can be said to stage and re-evaluate its distinctive
liveness by comparison with mediatisation. The discussion of
Forkbeard Fantasy’s The Fall of the House of Usherettes (1996; 2005;
still ongoing) as well as Gob Squad’s production Gob Squad’s Kitchen
(You’ve Never Had It So Good) (2007; still ongoing) will illustrate this
self-reflexive strategy in more detail.

2 Types of Intermediality in Theatre

While intermedial theatre productions can be distinguished according
to the respective media they employ or allude to, they can also be
categorised according to the kind of relation that exists between the
theatrical medium and the other media involved. Irina Rajewsky’s and
Werner Wolf’s comprehensive typologies of intermedial relations
prove especially useful for the latter approach. Although their
terminology is not specifically geared to theatrical intermediality, but
has been developed for intermedial phenomena in general, it can also
be applied to the theatrical medium and offers a useful tool for
analysing differences as well as similarities among various forms of
theatrical intermediality.
Intermediality is a “heteromedial” (Wolf 2005, 252) or “cross-
medial” phenomenon (Wolf 1999, 46) that involves at least two distinct
media in one way or another. Following Rajewsky and Wolf, the
relation among these media can be subdivided into the categories of
(inter)medial transposition, intermedial references and media
combination or multi- and plurimediality. Wolf further proposes
transmediality as an additional intermedial category.
Intermedial transposition, or medial transposition as Rajewsky
terms it (2005, 51), refers to the transformation of content or formal
aspects of a source medium into another medium. Only the latter
medium and its sign system(s) are materially present in the resulting
work of art so that (inter)medial transposition creates monomedial
phenomena (cf. Wolf 2008, 29; Wolf 2005, 253–254; Wolf 2002, 171;
Rajewsky 2005, 51; Rajewsky 2004, 37; Rajewsky 2002, 16). Their
intermedial nature can only be identified if the recipients are able to
trace the origin and are aware of the influence of the source medium.
In the context of theatre, (inter)medial transpositions can be observed
in any adaptations from theatre to other media or vice versa. The most
common examples are film adaptations of theatre plays as well as stage
adaptations of films. Whereas film adaptations of plays or the mere
filming of live performances for subsequent broadcasts were originally
much more common than the reverse transformation, stage
adaptations of films have by now become equally established (cf.
Maintz 2002, 13, 25–31).
Intermedial references form a further type of intermedial relations.
They once more result in monomedial phenomena because only a
single medium is present with its sign system(s) while another medium
or other media are alluded to or imitated (cf. Rajewsky 2002, 56–57;
Wolf 2002, 174). Both Rajewsky and Wolf further distinguish between
system references to a distinct medium or medial subsystem and
individual references to a specific, actual or fictional, work of art.
System and individual references may take the form of explicit
references that directly mention another medium or work of art or
implicit references that only indirectly imitate or evoke it (cf. Rajewsky
2005, 52–53; Rajewsky 2004, 38–39; Rajewsky 2002, 16–17; Wolf
2008, 30–31; Wolf 2005, 254–255; Wolf 2002, 174–175). Especially
when intermedial references are implicit, it may be difficult for the
recipients to identify the intermedial nature of a work of art. If one
applies these terms to theatre, individual references can be observed
when a play implicitly alludes to or explicitly mentions or quotes from
a specific non-theatrical work of art. System references are instead
given when a theatre production either explicitly mentions other media
in general such as painting, photography, television etc. or implicitly
evokes their aesthetics, techniques or formal features. The latter effect
can be achieved by stressing the importance of colours, using static
images or tableaux vivants, presenting a fragmented plot that suggests
televisual channel- hopping, or any other strategies that are
reminiscent of other media.
A third subcategory of intermediality comprises phenomena that
Rajewsky refers to as media combination (2005, 51), whereas Wolf
uses the terms multimediality orplurimediality (2005, 254; cf. also
Rajewsky 2002, 15). This type of intermediality defines the more or
less intense fusion of at least two distinct media. Since each of these
media is materially present and its sign system(s) become manifest,
media combination differs from (inter)medial transposition and
intermedial references in being a heteromedial rather than
monomedial phenomenon. Nonetheless, one medium may be used
more extensively than the other(s), but ideally none of the involved
media is perceived as dominant or subordinate (cf. Rajewsky 2004, 37;
Rajewsky 2002, 15). The intensity of the relation between the involved
media ranges from loose combinations to tight conflations. Close
fusions of media may even become so established that they are
eventually considered as composite media, as is the case with opera or
theatre (cf. Wolf 2002, 173; Rajewsky 2005, 52; Rajewsky 2004, 37–
38).
Since the transition from mere combination to complete fusion of
media is often gradual or only minimal, it may sometimes be difficult
to make precise distinctions based on the intensity of media
combinations. Such a differentiation between loose combinations and
tight fusions, however, is crucial for inherently multi- or plurimedial
media such as theatre, opera, film etc. These media are composed of
various other media whose seamless fusion has become so established
and taken for granted that the individual components are no longer
separable and are not consciously perceived as distinct media by the
recipients. Yet, such multi- or plurimedial media may additionally
incorporate further media that do not blend in so easily and are
therefore identified as alien elements. Whereas language or movement,
for instance, are generally considered as constituent elements of
theatre, the use of film or video in theatre appears as a more unusual
combination of media. We therefore have to distinguish between
multi- or plurimediality as an already established and conventional
fusion or conflation of media as opposed to media combination, a
looser juxtaposition of distinct media being used side by side.
Following this distinction, theatre is inherently multi- or plurimedial
but it does not necessarily provide instances of media combination
unless it deliberately chooses to incorporate media that are not
considered integral parts of its multi- or plurimediality (cf. Georgi
2014, 38–39). Still, this distinction leaves a grey area where it may not
be altogether clear at which moment a particular media combination
may become habitual and turn into multi- or plurimediality.
To complement the common types of intermediality, Wolf suggests
transmediality as a further subcategory of intermediality. It covers
elements related to form or content that are separately observable in
distinct media while their origin cannot be traced to a specific medium
and is not essential for understanding the artistic result (cf. Wolf 2008,
28–29; Wolf 2005, 253; Wolf 2002, 170). This may, for instance, apply
to certain themes or motifs such as the fight between good and evil, the
quest for knowledge etc. which are as common to theatre as they are to
other media. Though Wolf’s definition of transmediality is indebted to
Rajewsky, she considers it as a phenomenon distinct from
intermediality because transmediality is located beyond rather than
between or within media (cf. Rajewsky 2005, 46; Rajewsky 2004, 31;
Rajewsky 2002, 12–13). The same could, however, also be argued with
regard to (inter)medial transposition, so that Wolf’s approach of
including both phenomena within the concept of intermediality is
more consistent. Since transmediality is “non-specific to individual
media” (Wolf 2008, 28; Wolf 2005, 253), it will not be further
considered in the following analysis of how these universal categories
of intermediality may be applied to theatre in particular.
Despite the theoretical accuracy of Wolf’s and Rajewsky’s
terminological distinctions, practice shows that their categories often
overlap and coexist (cf. Rajewsky 2005, 53; Rajewsky 2004, 39;
Rajewsky 2002, 17). Moreover, their typologies do not account for
connections between media that are merely based on an artist’s areas
of creativity, as is the case with writers who are also painters,
composers etc. Such relations among media are especially widespread
and hence relevant to theatre where dramatists, performers, directors
etc. often also work as scriptwriters, actors and directors in film or
television and thus establish close ties among these media. Their
transmedial engagement and the experiences gained in these different
fields also frequently find expression in formal aspects of their work.

3 Case Study I: Forkbeard Fantasy’s The Fall of

the House of Usherettes
Forkbeard Fantasy’s production The Fall of the House of Usherettes
paradigmatically elucidates how the different types of intermediality
may take shape in practice and how they intersect and interrelate in
theatre performances. The production was first performed in February
1996, was revived in 2005 and has toured internationally (cf. Giesekam
2007, 180). In its use of film and animated cartoons and the smooth
transitions of characters between stage and screens it can be
considered as representative of Forkbeard Fantasy’s intermedial
approach to theatre.
The company was founded in 1974 and ranks among the pioneers in
intermedial theatre in Britain (cf. Farmer 2011). As in most of
Forkbeard Fantasy’s productions, the five male and female parts in The
Fall of the House of Usherettes are impersonated by Chris and Tim
Britton, the founding members of the company, as well as Ed Jobling,
who joined the company as performer, sound technician and stage
manager in 1987 (cf. Forkbeard Fantasy). Designer Penny Saunders
completes the number of permanent members who also frequently
collaborate with filmmaker and editor Robin Thorburn (cf. Farmer
2011; Forkbeard Fantasy).
Forkbeard Fantasy first embarked on their intermedial experiments
with their use of an animated film in The Clone Show (1979–1980) and
have inventively combined live performance and film ever since. Even
today, they are among the few companies that still adhere to the use of
film while most other theatre and performance companies by now
work with video projections and emerging technologies (cf. Giesekam
2007, 176). In Forkbeard Fantasy’s more recent productions such as
Invisible Bonfires (2007–2008) and The Colour of Nonsense (2010–
2011) their use of film is combined with 3D-sequences, and numerous
digital projectors are placed on stage (cf. Forkbeard Fantasy). Among
many other projects such as interactive exhibitions, outdoor
projections, experimental films etc., Forkbeard Fantasy have also
taken to producing online games and apps to increase their
involvement with new technologies (cf. Forkbeard Fantasy).
Forkbeard Fantasy’s productions often not only materially
incorporate film but also explicitly comment on the medium of film
and on filmmaking in order to throw the medium into relief on the
thematic level. This applies above all to Frankenstein (2001–2002), a
production that deals with the creation of a film adaptation of Mary
Shelley’s novel. Similar to the cutting and editing processes in
filmmaking, the performers’ bodies are repeatedly cut into live and
mediatised halves or split across screens while the monster’s mate is
assembled out of severed body parts projected onto two blinds (cf.
Giesekam 2007, 194–196). A further thematic exploration of
filmmaking is offered in Shooting Shakespeare (2004), a production
about creating a silent film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The
Tempest. Since Forkbeard Fantasy’s performers frequently draw
attention to the onstage projectors they themselves operate during the
performances, film does not serve as a mere backdrop but forms a
prominent aspect of the action.
The most distinctive quality of Forkbeard Fantasy’s productions is
the way they merge live and mediatised action whenever their
characters seem to walk into and out of screens or burst through
projection surfaces straight onto the stage. Forkbeard Fantasy have
termed this strategy “Crossing the Celluloid Divide” (Forkbeard
Fantasy) and have also prominently employed it in the interaction with
16mm film and animated cartoons in The Fall of the House of
Usherettes. The title of the production inevitably calls to mind Edgar
Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). Except
for the title and the gothic atmosphere, however, there are hardly any
parallels between both works. The evaluation of adaptations on the
basis of their ‘fidelity’ to an ‘original’ source text has frequently been
criticised in adaptation studies in recent years in order to liberate
adaptations from the restrictive and normative influence of their
precursor texts (cf. Leitch 2007, 21, 127; Albrecht-Crane and Cutchins
2010, 11–12). Yet, even without demanding close correspondence
between hypo- and hypertexts, it is fair to say that Forkbeard Fantasy’s
gothic parody is too loosely based on Poe’s short story to be considered
as an adaptation in a strict sense and hence is better thought of as a
case of explicit and individual intermedial reference.
 A brief summary of the plot illustrates how far Forkbeard Fantasy’s
version departs from Poe’s short story. In The Fall of the House of
Usherettes protagonist Bernard von Earlobe discovers the Empire
Picture Palace, also known as the House of Usherettes, a dilapidated
cinema haunted by the usherettes Nancy, Deirdre and Lucy as well as
their brother Roderick. As the spectators learn from an animated
cartoon, the siblings’ father Edmund Lilyhair de Usherette invented
‘liquid film’, a fantastic type of film that is sprayed onto the screen and
dissolves immediately afterwards (cf. The Fall of the House of
Usherettes 00:16:10). The original ‘master bottles’ of his films, which
in a self-reflexive coup de théâtre include the one for “The Fall of the
House of Usherettes” (01:00:47), are preserved in a crypt. It is
suggested that the entire production witnessed by the audience is a
liquid film screened by the usherettes (cf. 01:00:47; 01:23:12) who are
themselves forever caught in a filmed state together with their brother
Roderick. The idea that even the spectators’ presumed reality may only
be a film is also hinted at. Since Roderick is weary of this existence, he
tries to flee with von Earlobe’s assistance and contrives a plan to
escape into a “really positive and truly uplifting movie with lots of
romantic interest and a truly heroic finale” (01:01:07). This statement,
however, indicates that their escape is only a trading of their current
filmed existence for another film. Eventually, their attempts at
retrieving the master bottles lead to the collapse of the House of
Usherettes.
While this production cannot be classified as an (inter)medial
transposition, its relation to Poe’s short story can be described as an
explicit and individual intermedial reference. Implicit individual
references to the literary medium are provided by the three sisters’
recurring chorus that parodies William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and
recalls his three witches:
When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning or in rain? When the Hurlyburly’s
done, when the bottle’s [sic] lost and won. Fair is foul and foul is fair, let’s hoover [sic]
through the fogged and filmy air. (00:04:10; 00:22:44; 00:55:00)

As opposed to these individual references to Poe’s short story and

Shakespeare’s drama, von Earlobe’s remarkable first person past tense
commentary on the action is more reminiscent of prose texts in general
and hence serves as a continuous implicit system reference to narrative
fiction.
 Whereas these references allude to literary genres, the production
also abounds with intermedial references to film. Some of these are
explicit and individual intermedial references that directly mention
actual as well as fictional films, film characters and directors. Nancy’s
film quiz, for instance, mentions Jean Epstein and Luis Buñuel’s 1928
film adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher (cf. 00:11:13),
whereas von Earlobe’s nightmares include The Bounty, 20.000
Leagues Under the Sea and Ole Man River among other films (cf.
00:50:26). A further example is provided by Roderick’s physicians:
Doctor Who, Dr. No, Dr. Caligary, Dr. Mabuse, Dr. Strangelove and Dr.
Dolittle (cf. 01:08:53).
Commentaries on ‘liquid film’ such as the animated film about its
invention (cf. 00:15:45), by contrast, form explicit system references to
film as a medium in general. This also applies to von Earlobe’s meta-
commentary on the actual production process of the opening film
sequence that shows his arrival at the Empire Picture Palace:
I lurched from frame to frame as on a half-developed emulsion of some film. I felt as
though I was superimposed upon a model landscape as each cut increased my sense of
mounting tension and heightened the effect of mystery until I came against its bleak and
glassy frontage. (00:06:15)

Less obvious but more ingenious than these explicit individual and
system references are implicit individual references to famous films
and experiments with film and photography. The animated film
sequence showing personified Time on his galloping horse, for
instance, alludes to Eadweard Muybridge’s early experiments with
sequences of photographs such as “Animals in Motion” (1887) (cf.
Britton 2005). The scene in which a close-up of Roderick’s head is
projected onto an inflated weather balloon to make it seem as if he was
being pumped up by Lucy calls to mind George Méliès’ silent film The
Man with the Rubber Head (1902) (cf. Britton 2005). As a more
contemporary point of reference, the appearance of a boy cycling on a
tricycle along the filmed corridor of the House of Usherettes alludes to
Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining (1980). Moreover, the production
makes frequent implicit references to individual films via its use of
soundtracks.
Finally, the live characters’ imitation of filmic techniques and their
use of film vocabulary provide implicit system references. This is the
case when von Earlobe’s movements seem rewound or as if in slow-
motion (cf. 01:24:16) or when Lucy perceives “the credits […] amassing
in huge storm clouds upon the horizon” (01:12:32). Photography, too,
is evoked via implicit system references. These are based on
terminology relating to photographic processing such as the mention
of a “developing tank” (e.g. 00:42:42) and a “drying room” (e.g.
01:11:00) as well as von Earlobe’s puns on being “well enough
developed” (00:48:33) or getting more “exposure” (00:48:37).
The most striking and obvious type of intermediality in Forkbeard
Fantasy’s production, however, is the media combination of theatre
and film. Film, in other words, is not only imitated or evoked by means
of intermedial references, but it is actually used on stage. Its material
presence is underscored by the visibility of the projectors, and
attention is also drawn to the main screen when it is rotated on the
revolving stage to simulate a “tracking shot” (01:01:55). What further
highlights the materiality of film is the use of unconventional
projection surfaces such as a large cloth (cf. 00:03:06), an opened
umbrella (cf. 00:12:10) or the inflated weather balloon (cf. 01:18:15).
Repeatedly, live and mediatised characters collide with the surface of
the screen (e.g. 00:29:47; 01:05:22; 01:08:17) or erupt out of the
projection surfaces (e.g. 00:07:05; 01:22:14), thus further underlining
their materiality. Though the transitions between stage and screen
imply that theatre and film have permeable boundaries and are not
strictly separate, such foregrounding of the projections also stresses
the distinct mediality of film and theatre. As a consequence, film does
not completely fuse with the general multi- or plurimediality of theatre
but remains visible as a deliberate and unconventional media
combination. Using Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s perceptual
distinction between immediacy as a subconscious “looking through”
and hypermediacy as a conscious “looking at” media (Bolter and
Grusin 1999, 41), the status of film in The Fall of the House of
Usherettes can be described as shifting between immediate
imperceptibility and hypermediate visibility or foregrounding. Though
film does not completely merge with the live action, its pervasive
presence by means of intermedial references and media combination
renders it an equitable element of Forkbeard Fantasy’s production that
is in no way subordinate to the theatrical medium. As a consequence,
the production stresses the compatibility and complementary nature of
both media.
4 Case Study II: Gob Squad’s Gob Squad’s
Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good)
The British-German performance collective Gob Squad was founded by
Creative Arts graduates of Nottingham Trent University and Applied
Theatre graduates of Giessen University in 1994 (cf. Gob Squad and
Freiburg 2010, 10; Gob Squad). As opposed to Forkbeard Fantasy, they
primarily use live or pre-recorded videos in their productions, an
approach that is also followed in Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never
Had It So Good). This production, here abbreviated as Gob Squad’s
Kitchen, premièred at the Volksbühne im Prater in Berlin on 30 March
2007, was first performed in England at Nottingham Playhouse on 29
May 2007 and is still part of Gob Squad’s repertoire (cf. Gob Squad). It
is best described as a re-enactment, or rather an attempt at re-enacting
selected ‘Factory films’ by American artist, photographer and
experimental film-maker Andy Warhol (1928–1987). Warhol’s film
Kitchen (1965) figures most prominently in Gob Squad’s production
alongside Sleep (1963) and Screen Tests (1964– 1966). During their re-
enactment, Gob Squad’s performers are hidden behind a large screen
divided into three sections so that they can only be seen in three live
video relays projected onto the screen. While their remake of Kitchen
is presented in the central section, Sleep takes place on the left side
and the Screen Tests on the right. Additionally, other Warhol films and
series like Haircut (1963), Kiss (1963), Blow Job (1964) and Eat (1964)
are briefly alluded to.
In a manner typical of Gob Squad’s productions, Gob Squad’s
Kitchen uses improvisation and a changing cast that appears in varying
constellations from one performance to the other (cf. Gob Squad and
Freiburg 2010, 57). The parts are thus continuously redistributed
among Gob Squad’s core members Johanna Freiburg, Sean Patten,
Sharon Smith, Berit Stumpf, Sarah Thom, Bastian Trost and Simon
Will as well as associated performers (cf. Gob Squad). Moreover,
members of the audience are requested to take on certain roles, a
strategy already employed in previous Gob Squad productions. What is
also characteristic of Gob Squad’s approach is the way the performers
introduce themselves using their real names, which makes them
appear to shift between the status of characters and performers,
between impersonation and self-dramatisation, between acting a
character and being themselves, thus blurring these distinctions in an
attempt at “present[ing] real life with real people doing real things”
(Tecklenburg and Carter 2012, 9). They are thus more adequately
described as personae rather than characters. This impression also
corresponds to the low-key performance style and seemingly unclear
status of the performers in Andy Warhol’s Kitchen (1965). Warhol’s
actors are presented in mundane yet contrived situations without a
proper storyline and, when trying to enact a part, occasionally forget
their lines (cf. Smith 1986, 164) and revert to being themselves. Gob
Squad’s pretence of not following a predetermined script is thus
reminiscent of Warhol’s apparently unscripted but actually rehearsed
Kitchen (cf. Smith 1986, 164).
With regard to its intermedial quality, Gob Squad’s Kitchen first of
all figures as an example of (inter)medial transposition though it only
loosely follows Warhol’s Kitchen and the selected other films while
adapting them into an intermedial performance. Gob Squad’s
performers do not aim at a faithful reproduction and emulation of
Warhol’s films but, more generally, attempt to evoke the spirit and
atmosphere of the 1960s as represented by Warhol. They draw on
commonplace aspects they believe will confirm the spectators’
stereotypical ideas about Warhol’s time (cf. Gob Squad and Freiburg
2010, 44) and rely on a more general cultural memory of the 1960s in
order to recreate “the essence of [the] time” (Gob Squad’s Kitchen
00:02:24; cf. 01:31:24). Gob Squad’s performers therefore did not
actually watch Warhol’s Kitchen until the rehearsals for their
production were almost completed (cf. Gob Squad and Freiburg 2010,
45). That Gob Squad’s idiosyncratic approach intends to absorb
Warhol’s oeuvre into their own work is already reflected in the self-
assertive title of their production.
The question of fidelity to Warhol’s originals is repeatedly addressed
by the personae’s meta-commentaries. Already in the first scene Simon
(Will) asserts that the setting is a “real kitchen” (Gob Squad’s Kitchen
00:03:54) and debates with Sharon (Smith) whether the table-cloth is
“quite sixties” or rather “quite fifties” (00:04:10). Acknowledging their
difficulties with a detailed and faithful recreation of Warhol’s films, the
personae subvert notions of authenticity and instead stress the
differences between the originals and their own version. Most clearly,
the personae’s doubts concerning their Warhol remake come to the
fore whenever they interrupt, explain, reject and repeat individual
scenes because they do not know how best to enact their parts (e.g.
00:09:23; 00:10:53; 00:17:05; 00:24:59). A striking example of this is
offered when Sean (Patten) accuses Sharon (Smith) of having ruined
the re-enactment of Warhol’s Screen Tests. Momentarily slipping out
of character himself, he criticises her performance and complains:
“Sharon, what on earth do you think you’re doing? […] You just really,
really just messed it up” (00:30:07). In the end, the notion of fidelity to
an original is replaced by a more general impression of authenticity
that emerges when the performers break character, play with their
real-life identities and are eventually substituted by selected members
of the audience. Yet, although Gob Squad’s presumed lack of acting
corresponds to Warhol’s approach, it also distances Gob Squad’s
seemingly inept performers from Warhol’s originals.
Gob Squad’s Kitchen is not the only Gob Squad production that
displays a liberal and subversive approach to adaptation. Their
production King Kong Club (2005–2007), for instance, is a parody of
the original film produced in 1933 and its many remakes. The story is
clumsily re-enacted (or rather overacted) by the spectators themselves
who are clad in absurd ape-costumes and are videotaped by the
performers figuring as directors. Eventually, the resulting amateur film
with its inappropriate yet resourceful special effects is shown to them
(cf. Gob Squad). Live Long and Prosper (2009) relocates classic
Hollywood death scenes to unsuitable settings in the city of Berlin and
juxtaposes them with the originals in order to stress the discrepancies
between them (cf. Gob Squad). In Prater-Saga 3: In This
Neighbourhood, the Devil Is a Goldmine (2004–2010) amateur actors
are supposed to perform the third part of German dramatist and
director René Pollesch’s Prater-Saga (2004–2005) to be recorded on
video. Yet, the production is more concerned with casting passers-by
from the street as amateur actors than with their eventual video-
transmitted performance.
Gob Squad’s Kitchen only briefly and indirectly hints at additional
Warhol films and series such as Haircut, Kiss, Blow Job and Eat.
When Sharon (Smith) is given a new haircut (cf. Gob Squad’s Kitchen
00:58:48) and Sarah (Thom) kisses a spectator (cf. 01:19:22), these
allusions are no comprehensive adaptations of the respective films but
form implicit and individual intermedial references that may go
unnoticed by spectators who are not familiar with Warhol’s complete
oeuvre. Whereas the video cameras remain hidden behind the screen
in Gob Squad’s Kitchen, Gob Squad’s performers operate their cameras
overtly in many of their other productions and therefore draw
attention to the process of recording. Frequently, their productions
thematically explore additional media like television or the internet by
means of implicit or explicit intermedial system references. Many
productions, for instance, playfully evoke filmic and televisual
subgenres or formats such as reality television in Room Service (Help
Me Make It through the Night) (2003–2010) or casting shows in
Prater-Saga 3: In This Neighbourhood, the Devil Is a Goldmine
(2004–2010) (cf. Gob Squad and Freiburg 2010, 151). This often goes
along with a critique of stardom and the manipulative potential of the
media, as in the red-carpet parody of gala events Who Are You
Wearing? (2004–2009), the mock talent show Neukölln sucht den
Superstar (2003) or the re-enactment of “the least watched video on
YouTube” in Western Society (2013; still ongoing) (cf. Gob Squad).
These productions thus constitute further examples of implicit or
explicit intermedial system references.
More importantly and unmistakeably, Gob Squad’s Kitchen – like
many other Gob Squad productions that merge theatre and live or pre-
recorded video – also clearly figures as an example of media
combination. Initially, the live video relays form the dominant
medium in this media combination because the action and interaction
exclusively occur on screen. Yet, stage and auditorium increasingly
participate in this interaction so that the live video relays bit by bit
forfeit their preeminent role. At the outset, the three live video relays
seem clearly separate from each other on the three parts of the screen
although they are simultaneously presented. Suddenly, the performers
on one part of the screen display an awareness of what happens in the
other live video relays, and this interaction across the videos gradually
increases. Sean (Patten), for instance, undermines the visual
separation of the individual live video relays when reprimanding
Sharon (Smith) on the adjacent section of the screen: “Sharon, don’t
pretend you can’t hear me. I’m just through a wall made of fabric next
to you” (00:12:19). Eventually, the three remakes completely fuse
when the performers move from one remake to another and the
different strands of action finally coalesce in the central Kitchen
setting. In addition to these exchanges among the live video relays,
interaction also occurs between screen, stage and auditorium. This
development is initiated by Simon (Will) who eventually appears on
stage when he is weary of performing on screen. Though being called
back by the performers remaining on screen, Simon does not return
and instead selects a member of the audience to replace him on screen
(cf. 00:51:50). One by one, the other performers also take a seat in the
auditorium in order to be substituted by spectators who take on their
roles in the live video relays. The selected amateur actors are equipped
with headphones through which they receive instructions on how to
perform the performers’ parts, which in turn were mere re-enactments
of Warhol’s characters. The resulting mixture of various layers of
acting and performing and the direct interaction among live and
mediatised performers and spectators in real-time create a hybrid
production that fuses video and live performance in a way that no
longer allows for a clear separation of the individual media. Yet, the
blurring of live and mediatised action is not intense enough to render
it impossible for the spectators to distinguish between these two levels.
Gob Squad also adhere to the use of live video relays as a strategy for
including spectators as active participants in many other productions.
They often even extend audience participation to the general public
when the performers leave the performance venues and invite passers-
by in the streets to take on individual parts. The most striking
examples are the casting of passers-by as actors in Prater-Saga 3: In
This Neighbourhood, the Devil Is a Goldmine or the search for a
representative of ‘The People’ in Revolution Now! (2010; still
ongoing). Since the indoor spectators witness the participation of the
public by means of real-time video transmissions from the streets, Gob
Squad’s approach can be aptly described as “celebrat[ing] live
performance as a space for the negotiation of encounter via
mediation” (Tecklenburg and Carter 2010, 9). The company thus
illustrates how theatre may successfully avail itself of other media in
order to enhance its own possibilities, establish interaction and extend
its reach to the world beyond the stage.

5 Conclusion
Forkbeard Fantasy’s The Fall of the House of Usherettes and Gob
Squad’s production Gob Squad’s Kitchen are only two among
numerous possible examples of how theatre and other media
interrelate. They exemplify how theories of intermediality and
specifically Irina Rajewsky’s and Werner Wolf’s terminology can be
applied to performative contexts. As they illustrate, theatre may
feature all types of intermediality: (inter)medial transpositions
transform works of art from other media into theatre performances or
vice versa; intermedial references allude to or evoke other media or
individual works other than theatre performances; and media
combinations meld theatre and other media.
At the same time, the productions also demonstrate how distinct
types of intermediality may coexist, overlap and enhance each other’s
effect in order to create the impression that the selected media
thoroughly pervade the theatrical performances on various levels
rather than forming limited points of reference. The worlds presented
by theatre, film and video in The Fall of the House of Usherettes and
Gob Squad’s Kitchen thus do not seem to be self-contained. Instead,
interaction and transitions occur between stage and screens or among
distinct screens. In this way, the productions suggest theatre’s
compatibility and affinity with film and video.
Nonetheless, this pervasive evocation and actual material presence
of film and video within the performances does not entirely fuse them
with the hybrid medium of theatre. A difference in quality remains
between these types of intermediality and the general multi- or
plurimediality of theatre. That the spectators of the selected
productions are conscious of the intermedial strategies and do not
perceive film and video as forming part of the inherent multi- or
plurimediality of theatre is partly due to the use of metamedial
commentaries and reflections that overtly address the role and effect of
the involved media. Furthermore, these media are also rendered
salient by the hypermediate use of screens and projection surfaces
whose materiality is repeatedly stressed and marked out as different
from theatre.
Such alternations between seamless fusion and juxtaposition,
immediacy and hypermediacy of the involved media are frequently
employed in intermedial theatre in order to underscore the similarities
between theatre and other media as well as the medial specifics of
theatre. Theatre thus resorts to intermediality and metamedial
strategies to discuss its relation to other media, to highlight its own
mediality and, when confronted with technological media, to stage its
own liveness by contrast with mediatisation. In this sense, theatre
never completely quits the scene to yield to other media, but asserts its
own mediality and its exceptional potential to incorporate any other
media.

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Literatur: Beiträge zu einer Medientheorie der
Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Roger Lüdeke and Erika Greber.
Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004. 27–77.
Rajewsky, Irina O. “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation:
A Literary Perspective on Intermediality.” Intermédialités 6 (2005):
43–64.
Smith, Patrick S. Andy Warhol’s Art and Films. Ann Arbor: UMI
Research, 1986.
Station House Opera. Station House Opera: Projects.
www.stationhouseopera.com/projects. (9 July 2014).
Tecklenburg, Nina, and Benjamin Carter. “Reality Enchanted,
Contact Mediated: A Story of Gob Squad.” TDR: The Drama Review
56.2 (2012)/T 214: 8–33.
Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory
and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.
Wolf, Werner. “Intermedialität: Ein weites Feld und eine
Herausforderung für die Literaturwissenschaft.”
Literaturwissenschaft: Intermedial – Interdisziplinär. Ed. Herbert
Foltinek and Christoph Leitgeb. Vienna: Verlag der
Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2002. 163–192.
Wolf, Werner. “Intermediality.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative
Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan.
London: Routledge, 2005. 252–256.
Wolf, Werner. “The Relevance of Mediality and Intermediality to
Academic Studies of English Literature.” Mediality/Intermediality.
Ed. Martin Heusser, Andreas Fischer, and Andreas H. Jucker.
Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2008. 15–43.

6.2 Further Reading

Bay-Cheng, Sarah, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender, and Robin
Nelson, eds. Mapping Intermediality in Performance. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2010.
Carlson, Marvin. “Video and Stage Space: Some European
Perspectives.” Modern Drama 46.4 (2003): 614–628.
Chapple, Freda, and Chiel Kattenbelt, eds. Intermediality in Theatre
and Performance. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.
Giannachi, Gabriella. Virtual Theatres: An Introduction. London and
New York: Routledge, 2004.
Kaye, Nick. Multimedia: Video, Installation, Performance. London
and New York: Routledge, 2007.
Knopf, Robert, ed. Theater and Film: A Comparative Anthology. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
Christina Ljungberg

29 Intermediality and Performance

Art
Abstract: Intermedial interaction among various media or sign
systems has always existed in most cultures, but since performance art
is a relatively new phenomenon, this chapter focuses on the
relationship between intermediality and performance art. With the
increasingly frequent use of sophisticated digital technologies in
multimedia performance, the question regarding what happens when
several media interact in performance art has become a pressing one.
What is the relationship between intermediality, performance and
performativity in multimedia art forms? How does the sense of
openness and of unravelling of the source or pre-text translate into the
intermedial adaptation that a performance involves? This chapter
discusses issues of semiotics, performativity and self-reference in
relation to intermediality. For its application of these theoretical
concerns, it will use Laurie Anderson, the American performance
artist, whose large and complex multimedia productions have not only
revolutionised the art form, but also offer interesting insights into the
adaptation of the intersection of narrative, visual, musical and gestural
source texts mediated by new technologies and the performing arts. In
particular, Anderson’s “O Superman” from her groundbreaking
performance United States (1980) will allow us to discuss the close
relationship between intermediality and performance art.
Key Terms: Intermediality, performance art, performativity, self-
reference, self-reflexivity, multimedia, Laurie Anderson

1 Intermediality and Performance Art

Intermediality has become intrinsic to performance art in which
diverse media and art forms intermingle or even stage hybrid genres
such as the media and digital arts by drawing attention to a particular
medium’s specificity. A fairly new phenomenon compared to the other
arts, performance art is today as omnipresent and complex as any
other art form. It started out as an experimental artistic event in the
form of cabaret performances by the European avant-garde in the early
twentieth century, when the Futurist manifestos by Marinetti and
Boccioni or the Dada exhibitions took place by and for artists in a
limited artistic community (cf. Carlson 2006). In the early 1960s,
however, it emerged as a popular live art form used to bundle the
various forms of live events that were taking place across diverse
disciplines such as literature, poetry, theatre ( 28 Contemporary
British Theatre and Intermediality), music, dance, architecture and
painting, often combining various media such as film, video,
photography, and slide projection, making it inherently intermedial.

1.1 Defining an Art Practice

A performance, as conceptualised in performance studies, can range
from the most highly elaborated artistic activity to minimalist events
such as a sporting contest or a veteran’s parade to an informal
gathering. In performance art, the key medium is the artist’s body and
the work of art is what the performance produces through the live
actions s/he performs. However, it mostly involves some kind of
staging and, as earlier mentioned, interaction with various media such
as film, video, photography, slide projection, digital arts or digital
technologies in some form, which accounts for its intermedial
character. Due to this, a precise definition of performance art has
proved difficult to provide. The OED defines it as an “art form that
combines visual art with dramatic performance”, Macmillan
Dictionary presents it as “a type of art in which an artist gives a
performance using different art forms such as acting, dance, and
painting” and Merriam Webster calls it “a type of art that is created in
front of or presented to an audience by the artist”. MoMA, the New
York Museum of Modern Art, uses Roselee Goldberg’s description of
performance art as “‘live’ presentations by artists” (Goldberg 2004).
What these various definitions have in common, however, is that they
designate the genre as a combination of different art forms presented
live in front of an audience. Performance art shares these
characteristics with theatre, musical performances and opera.
 In addition, there are local differences in the use of the term. In
Great Britain, the expression “live art” is used together for both
performance art and “time-based art”. In Australia, by contrast,
“performance” indicates work in the theatre tradition and
“performance art” denotes performances by artists with “bona fide art-
school diplomas” (Goldberg 2004, 12). Hence, performance art is an
“essentially contested concept” (Gallie 1964, qtd. in Strine, Long, and
Hopkins 1990, 183, and Carlson 2006, 2), “a complex and constantly
shifting field in its own right” (Carlson 2006, 2), made even more
complex because of its entanglement with ideas of performance from
other areas and with contemporary intellectual, cultural and social
currents. Here we find, for example, the quest for contemporary
subjectivity and identity, the eternal question of the relationship
between art and power, as well as issues of gender, race, and ethnicity,
just to mention some of its most prominent characteristics (cf. Carlson
2006, 6).
Early Beginnings – Conceptual Art: From the time of its inception,
performance art has been closely if also ambiguously related to
conceptual art. While the term was coined by Edward Kienholz
(Merriam Webster), the concept has been traced back to Marcel
Duchamps’ 1913 definition of the artist as “one who selects material or
experience for aesthetic consideration rather than forming something
from the traditional raw materials of art” (cf. Carlson 2006, 111).
Furthermore, the notion that art should examine its own nature
developed in the 1960s. Creating a new work from something already
existing rather than using raw materials, so-called “ready-mades” of
ordinary objects or real life activities called attention not only to the
creative process itself but also to the materials used and often staged,
as in e.g., Jasper Johns’ collages or David Hockney’s early photo
montages. Other examples are the intermedia or even multimedia
aspects in the mixed media abstract art by Judy Pfaff, or the works by
Christo who extended concept art to include natural and human
environments, wrapping objects such as coastlines, rivers or trees for
his political or social statements. Over time, the interest in perception
and in the creative process itself began to include everyday activities
that also involved the body as a ‘made’ or constructed part of the
environment. Among these are, e.g., Kaprow’s happenings, the anti-
elitist large-scale photoworks by Gilbert & George, and Joseph Beuys’
multifaceted and multimedia art which included happening and
performance art, sculptures, installations, graphic art as well as art
theory and art pedagogy.
Body Art: In performance art, the artist’s body, bodily processes and
spatial environments as well as bodily interactions with various media
became the focus of attention. Among early examples of this are, e.g.,
Yves Klein’s “body paintings” in France in the 1960s. Three women
covered each other’s bodies with paint, which then served as ‘stamps’
for a colour print on large-size paper. Simultaneously, Klein, dressed
as a conductor, directed musicians in his single note Monotone
Symphony. Gilbert & George’s “living statues” in Britain document
further sources. In Germany, performances such as Joseph Beuys’
How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965) ironically commented
on the difficulty of aesthetic communication with his head coated in
honey, covered in gold leaves.
In the U.S.A., the trend first caught on in the 1970s in New York and
California where body art became the most common term for this kind
of performance art (cf. Carlson 2006, 111). Bruce Naumann, allegedly
inspired by Duchamp, pioneered body art, making videotapes of body
parts or manipulating them, later involving participants performing to
closely controlled prescriptive gestures or actions. As has been pointed
out by several critics (cf. Anderson 2004; Carlson 2006; Goldberg
2004; Jackson 2004), almost all art forms of action and activity during
the 1970s were explored by performance artists as artistic
provocations, happenings, art workshops, or real-time activities such
as walking, sleeping, eating or drinking, emphasising the open-
endedness of an art form that seemed to defy definition.
Performance Art: This live art form was termed ‘performance art’ as
its American practitioners were looking for a way to refer to and
describe the many live events taking place at that time. As Laurie
Carlos, one of its practitioners, expresses it, “[p] erformance art was
the one place where there were so few definitions” (qtd. in Goldberg
2004, 9). Since then, performance art has broadened to comprise a
wide-ranging spectrum of practices including social activities that
range from sporting contests or even parades to spontaneous
gatherings of young people to stage street parties (cf. Goldberg 2000;
Carlsson 2006; McAuley 2008).
 In recent art and media theory, interest has increasingly focused on
the intermedial relationships that have become typical of performance
art. Despite arguments to the contrary that performance art was more
“body oriented” and that “more complex, technologically innovative”
performance art is more typical of the 1990s (Spackman 2000, 5),
‘body artists’ already made use of such technologically innovative and
sophisticated work in the 1960s and 1970s (Carlson 2006, 133). As
digital technologies became increasingly more easily available,
multimedia techniques became more essential to experimental groups
(Wooster Group, Builder’s Project), avant-garde theatre (Robert
Wilson, Robert Lepage) and mainstream theatre or stadium
productions, such as rock operas (The Who’s Tommy, Frank Zappa’s
Joe’s Garage), among many others.
New Media: The interaction between performance art and
cybertechnology has opened new fields of innovative investigation for
artists as it makes possible the exploration of the body in cyberspace
(cf. Ascott 1999; Santaella 2003; Ljungberg 2006; Nöth 2006). Those
working in digital media in particular have been insistently
interrogating the consequences and the potential of such intermeshing
processes. Artists have readily seized the opportunity to both thematise
and realise what these new techno-social cyber environments mean
and what positions and perspectives they create, not least by
attempting to blur the boundaries between subject and object by
mapping their bodies into cyberspace as an expansive and dynamic
field.
This shifts the attention from the individual body to complex human
technology interfaces within collective infrastructures. The resulting
interactivity indicates “a new understanding of environments of
relations / responsibility and a relational aesthetics based on
interhuman exchange or physical interaction as well as a new
technological kinesthetics” (Birringer 2006, 300). Scrutinising body
interiors, Mona Hatoum’s Corps étranger (1994) challenges body
boundaries by turning her body’s inside into an outside, making the
spectator both subject and object, both penetrator and engulfed. The
Australian performance artist Stelarc, claiming that the body is
‘obsolete’ (cf. Stelarc 2008) as well as redesigning it to be plugged into
the Internet, was one of the first to engage with these technological
kinesthetics and thus opening a productive dialogue between
corporeality and cybernetics (cf. Ljungberg 2006).

1.2 “Border Talks” – Semiotic Interaction

The increasingly sophisticated and innovative use of digital
technologies in multimedia performance raises the question as to what
actually happens when several media interact in performance art.
According to the results of intermediality research, it involves the issue
of which intermedial strategies are used to negotiate the “border talks”
(Rajewsky 2010) taking place between the various media. According to
Rajewsky, intermediality can thus be perceived as the study of:
(1) medial transformation such as film adaptations of literary texts,
novelizations, etc;
(2) media combination such as opera, film, theatre, illuminated
manuscripts, computer or Sound Art installations, comics, or
multimedia, mixed media, and intermedia;
(3) intermedial references such as a literary text referring to a specific
film, film genre or film as medium, or in a film to painting, a
painting to photography, or ekphrasis (cf. Rajewsky 2010, 55).
But what is a ‘medium’ and how do we account for the media
specificity involved in multimedia performance when several media
are involved? In a technical or material sense, a ‘medium’ can be
described as the channel enabling communication between a sender
and a receiver. In its broader semiotic sense, the sign itself functions as
a medium (Peirce 1998, 477). A sign is anything that stands for
(represents) something, called its object, to generate another sign as its
interpretant. According to this definition, the sign is itself a mediator
or medium, acting as a translator between its object and its so-called
interpretant, which is the result or the effect of its interpretation (cf.
Colapietro 1993). It initiates a process which makes it interact
relationally or functionally with its object. This also pertains to a
performance, since signs have neither to be material objects nor a class
of objects: They exist in the mind of their interpreters, in other words,
they have a cognitive effect on their interpreters (cf. Nöth 1990, 42).
What is also crucial in this respect is that the media involved in
multimedia performance art belong to different sign systems – music,
gesture, film/video, and verbal language. Semiotics, the general study
of signs and sign systems, offers a useful framework for analysis here.
It broadens the scope from a more narrow focus to a wider range of
how a particular sign system converges with many other types and
modalities of signs. Sign systems foreground different sign aspects, the
iconic, the indexical and the symbolic, which concern the relation
between a sign and its object. Icons are signs that resemble the object
they represent. However, they can also be iconic because of the
qualities that they possess themselves intrinsically. This allows them to
create a world of their own, like music, which does not need much
reference to the actual life-world but comes to us in the form of a mere
quality. The same goes for digital media, which consist of numerically
translated information without any direct relationship with the life-
world, creating a virtual world of its own.
Indices are signs that are causally linked or factually related to their
object, for example, by pointing (“There!”) or in a cause-effect relation
as smoke to fire and photographic images. In the case of photography
and film, the factual linkage is due to their mode of production since
they record light reflected by their objects and background.
Photographic recording is either done on film or converted to
electronic signals in the sensor, which makes them predominantly
indexical – despite their strong iconic traits since they look like their
objects. Symbols are typically conventional or habitudinal as well as
socially ‘legislated’ signs. This is where we find painting to be
predominantly symbolic, insofar as it adheres to the styles and cultural
(and ideological) conventions dominant in the period in which it is
executed or used. Thus there are no ‘pure’ sign forms, there are no
‘purely’ visual, verbal or aural media or, in W. J. T. Mitchell’s words,
“all media are mixed media” (Mitchell 2005, 258; Ljungberg 2010,
84).
It is when various sign systems interact that we encounter the
phenomenon of intermediality. Intermediality concerns the
negotiations of the various media borders in the process of media
transformations. Such instances of intermediality are radically
performative, as we are confronted with hybrid forms that generate
something new and unique. Since they focus attention both on their
own mode of production and on their own semiotic specificity, they are
also strongly self-reflexive, and their self-reflexivity is heightened by
the increasing digitalisation of interacting media. Hence, they
constitute a highly effective communication strategy: they give
viewers/ listeners access to different levels of meaning (cf. Ljungberg
2010, 88).

1.3 The Performative Elements in

Intermediality and Performance Art
Negotiations between hybrid media forms involve performativity in the
sense that, within our cultural life, performative utterances and acts
bring something new into being. This intermediality already
demonstrates how a seemingly simple transgression is inherently
performative, since it creates something new and unprecedented at the
same time as one medium is reflected in another. Thus, performative
acts are acts that are neither true nor false since the reality to which
they refer is only created by the statements being uttered. For instance,
when a writer – or a performer – presents a fictional narrative as real,
this is a reality only created by its very presentation (cf. Loxley 2007).
The effect becomes intensified in a performance which is an event that
does not exist on its own, but only in the creative activity of the
performer and as experienced by the viewers/listeners (cf. Fischer-
Lichte 2004, 13). This releases a transformative potential based on a
shared cultural understanding as well as a cultural – and appropriate –
context (cf. Bal 2002, 176), which enables it to constitute a reality.
Other contributing factors are the rituals and practices linked with
attending a performance (noting the time of performance, going to the
location and entering the building, buying and showing the ticket,
occupying one’s seat, cf. Schechner 2006, 189).
In intermedial art forms such as multimedia, these relationships
become radicalised. The various media are not just layered one on top
of the other, or juxtaposed but interact and transform each other, often
“remediating” one another (Bolter and Grusin 2002). This process
does not take away any of a medium’s particular characteristics, its
‘specificity’ as it were. Moreover, it enables media mixtures and
innovations as well as the transformations of old media by means of
new media. It creates new varieties and new diversities: “If all media
are mixed media, they are not all mixed in the same way, with the same
proportions of elements” (Mitchell 2005, 260). That may explain why
the performative effect of intermediality has become increasingly
dominant in performance art. The incorporation of digital processing
in a performance not only changes experiential aspects of it effectively,
but it also transforms contexts and forms (Yap 2009, 161). This process
also affects the reception of a performance. Digital technologies with
live bodies on stage create an “effect performed in-between mediality,
supplying multiple perspectives, and foregrounding the making of
meaning rather than obediently transmitting meaning” (Boenisch
2006, 103). The complexity of the performance and the individual gaps
produced by the spectators’ subjectivities create a broad spectrum of
experience, which points to the inherently indeterminate character of
performance.

1.4 Self-referentiality
Intermediality in performance art is, therefore, both a technological
and a performative phenomenon. Intermedial relationships in
performance art also display high degrees of self-referentiality or self-
reflexivity. Iconic self-reference is typical of the aesthetic sign, since
one of its characteristics is that it calls attention to diverse aspects of
itself, above all its sensuous qualities and formal structures, its actual
materiality and its rhetorical strategies. Self-referentiality can thus be
understood in terms of iconicity (at least in part), insofar as all iconic
signs are self-referential. This could appear paradoxical since a sign
should really stand for or represent something else. In Peircean
semiotics, however, the sign’s referent can be another sign, and self-
reference can be a chain of signs referring to other signs (cf. Nöth
2007, 19).
Self-reference therefore contributes to the radicalisation of the
performative aspects of contemporary performance art because it
“reinforce[s] the materiality or expressive qualities of the aesthetic
utterance, emphasize[s] the situation as a staging and world-making
event taking place in the presence of the here and now, and
intensif[ies] the aesthetic experience as an embodied experience”
(Kattenbelt 2010, 33). A performance always reflects on itself, its
meaning and its aesthetic situation. This is part of the aesthetic
experience as well as being an intrinsic component in both artistic
production and reception. When an artwork reflects on its meaning, or
on what it represents or how it does it, it is semantically self-reflexive,
i.e., reflecting on “the reality, fictionality, or probability
(verisimilitude) of what a work of art shows or tells about” (Nöth 2014,
447). When it concerns “the aesthetic involvement of the author, the
narrator, the actor, the reader, or the spectator” it is pragmatically
self-reflexive (Nöth 2014, 447). An intermedial or multimedial
performance is paradigmatically self-reflexive insofar as the switching
between or among various media forces its viewers or, rather,
participating audience, to make comparisons. It also exposes the
particularities of the various semiotic systems that each medium
embodies. Such performances also frequently involve intertextuality in
the form of repetitions of and references to the performing artist’s
earlier performances or to other works in the same genre. Examples
are, e.g., texts alluding to other texts, music recalling other pieces of
music, visuals reminding viewers of other visuals; such quotations are
self-referential, especially when digitised or originating from software
(cf. Nöth 2002; Nöth and Bishara 2007, 3; Ljungberg 2007, 294).

2 Intermediality in Laurie Anderson’s

Multimedia Performance Art
Laurie Anderson’s innovative and radical multimedia performance art
is an illuminating example of the genre’s intermedial transformations.
As one of today’s premier performance artists, she has cast herself in
roles as varied as visual artist, composer, poet, photographer,
filmmaker, electronics whiz, vocalist and instrumentalist. Her large
and complex multimedia productions have not only revolutionised the
art form but her intelligent and innovative performances also testify to
her interdisciplinary knowledge and creative capacity in the fields of
literature, film, art and music. Anderson’s performances pluck
components from various genres of cultural performance such as
theatre, ritual, dance, music, popular entertainment and sport, which
she mingles with autobiographical references, everyday life events and
media culture. She has also pioneered the use of multimedia in
performance, not least with her self-invented electronic gadgets: the
Talking Stick, her self-playing violin and her custom-built vocoder,
among other things. With all of these aspects and innovations, her
ability to transgress the cleft between high and low culture, between
avant-garde and mainstream culture, becomes even more pronounced.
All this was probably the reason for the success of Anderson’s
performance United States in 1980, which catapulted performance art
into cultural consciousness, introducing a degree of sophistication and
style it had so far been lacking. Her groundbreaking performance was
a “portrait of the country”, as she has said in an interview (Prasad
1990). A good seven hours long, it combined stories, songs, films, slide
projection as well as an extraordinary percussion solo performed on
Anderson’s wired skull, which turned her body into a musical
instrument. Over the next few years, Anderson added thousands of
slides, short film clips and projections devices, collected further
material and developed new gadgets such as her fake hologram
projecting a room hovering in mid-air (Goldberg 2000, 57). The work
was performed in its entirety four times, in New York, San Francisco,
London and Zurich, each performance lasting roughly eight hours.
Later, the performance was recorded and adapted to fit the consumer
TV screen’s small scale for her first music video. Here, she used close-
up shots and exaggerated silhouettes of her shadow-puppet hands,
which illuminated her glowing face by means of a small pillow speaker
inside her mouth. A pre-recorded violin solo emanated from it, which
she modulated with her lips, while her skull was all wired for the
famous percussion solo performed on it.
In addition, the signature song, “O Superman”, added a year after
the initial performance (1981), opened up the music world for
Anderson and led to collaborations with Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno.
It is also one of the “strangest records to make number 2 on the UK
[Singles] Charts” (cf. BBC) in 1981. Whereas the song’s title was
inspired by Jules Massenet’s opera Le Cid, its lyrics confronted crucial
contemporary issues. Anderson had heard the American tenor Charles
Holland singing the aria “O Souverain” from the opera, which made a
deep impression on her both musically and thematically. Rewriting
Massenet’s piece – which is a prayer for a knight on the eve of a
hopeless battle – into her own, more ominous, late twentieth-century
version, her use of electronics suggests the extent to which technology
obstructs rather than facilitates the communication of emotions. It
begins as a phone conversation between the speaker and a mysterious
voice, which first leaves a message claiming to be the narrator’s mother
but, upon receiving no response, reveals itself as someone who the
narrator “doesn’t know” but “who knows” the narrator. The narrator
finally responds, asking: “Who is this really?” The song’s ironic twist,
alluding to the naïve belief of American self-reliance, becomes
particularly obvious in its last part: “’Cause when love is gone, there’s
always justice / And when justice is gone, there’s always force / And
when force is gone, there’s always Mom – Hi Mom!” (Anderson 2007,
n. pag.). Addressing the “pillars of the American dream” (Goldberg
2000, 90) – Superman, Mom and Dad, justice and the army – in a
world of technological alienation, God – the ‘souverain’ in Massenet’s
aria – has been replaced by a cartoon character ( 22 Comics and
Graphic Novels) from outer space and communication takes place via
answering machines, with legal as well as armed violence coming to
the fore when the machines break down.
The sophisticated interplay among the visual, the vocal and the
gestural in Anderson’s performance is highlighted by the complex
interaction generated by various digital media. Her impressive artistic
arsenal comprises shadow play, microphone, sound editor, animation,
projection, video as well as Anderson’s own bodily and vocal
performance. The text is half spoken, half sung through a vocoder, one
of her own electronic inventions, by means of which she can distort
and ‘technologise’ her voice against a musical background formed by
two harmonising chords repeating the syllable “Ha”, with occasional
bird tweets throughout and with a saxophone track at the end. In
addition, there is a video projection of Anderson in a white coat, white
sunglasses and white gloves, signing the same text in ASL, American
Sign Language.
What is particularly striking is the way Anderson deals with the
pre-‘texts’ or source texts derived from the various media with which
she dialogues throughout her performances. This necessarily involves
some kind of adaptation and translation of its pre-‘texts’ or source
texts, as in every new staging of a play, or any other work of art. Such
processes also always require interpretation, which makes them at the
same time similar and dissimilar, but never identical, to their pre-
texts. Each performance takes place at a specific historical and cultural
moment. It is also produced according to media-specific rules
(language, screen play, film or new medium format). Hence, it depends
on a wide array of cultural practices, which will necessarily be
influenced by a contemporary context as well as conditions of
production and reception. This is even more so in multimedia art,
which concerns the transformation and juxtaposition of several media
in order to create the work of art. How can we account for these pre-
texts? How important is an analysis of these processes for the
understanding of Anderson’s multimedia performance which thus
concerns adapting a highly complex intersection of narrative, visual,
musical and gestural ‘pre-texts’ mediated by new technologies and
performance art? Such an undertaking would seem to call for a
theorising of the performative effect of the intermedial and intertextual
processes involved.
Anderson’s performance illustrates the difficulty of distinguishing
among the various modalities of intermediality in order to make a
more specific definition of this relationship since, as in this case, as a
live performance, it can “only partly be described as a fixed set of
media relations” (Elleström 2010, 29). Using a broad definition of
intermediality as a flexible genre “that can be applied, in a broad sense,
to any phenomenon involving more than one medium” (Wolf 1999,
36) does not seem particularly useful in this context. That it is a “media
combination” (Rajewsky 2010, 41) is quite clear. What is important
here is the performative effect that this intermedial combination
achieves, as well as its self-referentiality.
What we have here is an interesting array of intermedial
transformations. Anderson’s pre-‘text’, that is, Massenet’s opera, first
performed at the Paris Opéra in 1885, is based on Corneille’s
tragicomedy Le Cid (1637) about love and honour in eleventh-century
Spain at the time of increasing Moor colonisation. Interestingly,
Corneille’s play was as new an art form in 1637 as that of Anderson’s
United States performance in the 1980s since Corneille’s play is
regarded as the first classical French tragedy (Encyclopedia
Brittanica). Corneille was inspired by, or even partly adapted his piece
from, the play Las Mocedades del Cid (The Youth of Cid, 1612–1615)
by the Spanish playwright Guillén de Castro, who was one of the first
to revive the Cid narrative and myth. Castro’s play is, in turn, based on
the oldest monument of Spanish literature, the thirteenth-century long
narrative poem, El Cid, el Campeador, a so-called Castilian cantar de
gesta originating from the myth of the legendary hero who led the
reconquista of the territories captured by the Moors. The poem itself is
another divergence from its sources, the uncertain oral narratives of
the youthful exploits of the legendary hero El Cid that gave rise to the
foundational narrative. In other words, the intermedial
transformations run from a legend to a poem to a play to another play
to an opera to a live multimedia performance which was then recorded
on video and more recently reissued digitally.
The importance of the source text for the intermedial transformation
of “O Souverain” into “O Superman (for Massenet)” may not be
entirely obvious. Nevertheless, Anderson’s explicit reference to and
own comment on her song’s genesis direct the audience to look for the
source text and search for resemblances. For, as she goes on to point
out,
“O Souverain” was written as a prayer for a knight on the eve of a hopeless battle. Its
iconic themes made me think of Napoleon at Waterloo as he looks out over the desolate
battlefield strewn with bodies of men and horses. “O Souverain” was a prayer about
empire, ambition, and loss. (Anderson 2007, 17)

In addition, Anderson first performed this piece just after the so-called
“Iran hostage affair”, a bungled undercover mission to rescue
American hostages in Tehran. It resulted in American helicopters
crashing in the desert, destroying Americans’ and the world’s trust in
Jimmy Carter, the Democratic president at the time, who would later
be replaced by the Republican Ronald Reagan. Thus, it had severe
political consequences since, as Anderson reminds us, the U.S.A. “is
still fighting the same war of economic and military aggression”
(Anderson 2007, 17). Anderson performed the song again after the
attacks on the World Trade Towers on September 11, singing it in the
New York City Town Hall in September 2001. Suddenly, the text was
no longer about the past but about the present, utterly sinister
situation in the face of the loss of lives and terrorist threats. Things
have changed: Massenet’s protagonist Rodrigo finds solace in the
“souverain’s”, that is, in God’s, hands, singing “ta seule image est dans
mon âme / que je remets entre tes mains” (Massenet 1976 [1885]). In
Anderson’s version, these hands can no longer be trusted, nor is there
any hope left for divine assistance. Instead of giving relief, there is a
hand projecting the shadow of a gun onto the circular projection
behind her as she sings “This is the hand, the hand that takes / This is
the hand, the hand that takes […]”. Then she goes on:
Here come the planes
They’re American planes. Made in America
Smoking or non-smoking?
And the voice said: “Neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night shall stay these couriers
From the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” Anderson (2007, n. pag.)

This quotation is an inscription on the James Farley Post Office in NYC

taken from Herodotus’ Histories (8.98), which makes a reference to
the courier service in the ancient Persian Empire, and thus implicitly
reminds us of the transience of empires. At the same time, it
emphasises the role of language in human communication, in its
spoken, written or gestural, as in the ASL projection against a globe
backdrop, as well as in the cultural importance of ancient documents:
Even though the empire disappeared thousands of years ago, verbal
communication has remained essential.
The intermedial transformations of Anderson’s performance of “O
Superman” are also interesting from a self-reflexive viewpoint. When
she performed the work live, Anderson made clever use of the theatre
spaces, appearing as “a small figure with signature spiked hair”
(Goldberg 2000, 86), alone on a huge stage with a brilliantly white
globe as a backdrop. The smallness of her body suggested human
fragility in the face of alienating technology, self-reflexively drawing
attention to semantics, “evoking reflections on its meaning, on how or
what it represents” (Nöth 2014, 447). By highlighting the influence of
technology in daily practices such as trying to communicate without
response in an increasingly technological environment, Anderson’s
performance created a world ruled by machines. At the same time, the
scenario can be read as a critique of American life as being too
dependent on technology, a society in which verbal language needs
more and more translation. In this world, even communication
between family members is mediated by technology. Simultaneously,
her performance is pragmatically self-reflexive (cf. Nöth 2014, 447)
since it concerns the involvement of both the performer and, not least
of all, the audience who, with their own experience and imagination,
actively participate and fill in gaps, thus creating their own version of
Anderson’s performance.
 This is why Anderson finally consented to producing a video
recording of her performance and then digitally reissuing it. Pointing
to her own dilemma, Anderson comments on her own performance
art:
Live art is especially ephemeral. Once performed, it tends to become myth and a few
photos and tapes. […] I myself used to be very proud that I didn’t document my work. I
felt that, since much of it was about time and memory, that was the way it should be
recorded – in the memories of the viewers – with all the inevitable distortions,
associations and elaborations. (Anderson 2004, 6)

However, realising the extent to which her audiences distorted their

memories of her performance by, for instance, ‘remembering’ false
details and elements that were never part of it, she started to record
her performances in order not to have them disappear or be wrongly
remembered. Besides the question of how this affects the art form,
what is also of interest here is the question of what is involved in such
intersemiotic makeovers – from live performances made up of various
intermedia pre-‘texts’ into a digitally produced video – and which both
adapts and translates the process of performance into other media and
other art forms. What happens to the dynamic interaction between
performer and audience, which is partly due to the very ephemerality
of performance, when it is filmed or registered?
In the case of “O Superman”, the digital version testifies to what
intermedial transformation does to performance art. Instead of using a
theatre’s large stage, the video works with close-ups, side shots,
exaggerated silhouettes and fade-aways, which are more suitable for
the television screen. If the live performance was a (multi) media
combination, this video is an adaptation of the original performance. It
is still highly performative, as it calls attention to the aesthetic
utterance achieved through the various art forms and media involved.
It is, however, also self-reflexive, not only because it so clearly reflects
on itself and its aesthetic situation but also because the digitisation of
the performance and the various media involved is the result of
software. Her performance art can thus be seen as a highly interesting
example of the close link between intermediality and performance art.
This interconnectedness not only leads to new and hybrid art forms, it
also succeeds in retaining the performative and self-reflexive character
of Anderson’s works in their recorded media versions.
3 Bibliography

3.1 Works Cited

Anderson, Laurie. Big Science. 1982. DVD and paginated booklet.
Warner Bros., 2007.
Anderson, Laurie. Home of the Brave. Warner Bros., 1986.
Anderson, Laurie. “Foreword.” Performance: Live Art Since the 60s
by Roselee Goldberg. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004. 6–7.
Ascott, Roy, ed. Reframing Consciousness. Exeter: Intellect, 1999.
Auslander, Philip, ed. Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and
Cultural Studies. New York and London: Routledge, 2003.
Bal, Mieke. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide.
London: Routledge, 2002.
BBC. “Laurie Anderson, ‘O Superman’ – the Song.”
www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/plain/A874758. (15 Mar. 2014).
Birringer, Johannes. “Interacting: Performance and Transmediality.”
Monologues: Theatre, Performance, Subjectivity. Ed. Claire
Wallace. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006. 297–325.
Boenisch, Peter. “Aesthetic Act to Aisthetic Act: Theatre, Media,
Intermedial Performance.” Intermediality in Theatre and
Performance. Ed. Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt. Amsterdam
and New York: Rodopi, 2006. 103–116.
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard A. Grusin. Remediation:
Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.
Carlson, Marvin. Performance: A Critical Introduction. New York:
Routledge, 22006.
Colapietro, Vincentars. Dictionary of Semiotics. New York: Paragon
House, 1993.
Elleström, Lars. “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding
Intermedial Relations.” Media Borders, Multimodality and
Intermediality. Ed. Lars Elleström. London: Palgrave Macmillan,
 2010. 21–50.
Encyclopedia Britannica. “Corneille, Le Cid.”
www.global.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/117664/Le-Cid/. (28
July 2014).
Goldberg, Roselee. Laurie Anderson. New York: Harry N. Abrams,
2000.
Goldberg, Roselee. Performance: Live Art Since the 60s. Foreword by
Laurie Anderson. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004.
Herodotus. Histories. Translated and edited by Alfred Dennis Godley.
London: Heinemann, 1921.
archive.org/stream/herodotuswitheng04herouoft/herodotuswitheng04herouoft
(8 Dec. 2014).
Jackson, Shannon. Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy
from Philosophy to Performativity. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004.
Kattenbelt, Chiel. “Intermediality in Performance and as a Mode of
Performativity.” Mapping Intermediality in Performance. Ed. Sarah
Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender and Robin Nelson.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. 29–37.
Ljungberg, Christina. “The Artist and Her Bodily Self: Self-Reference
in Digital Art/Media.” Self-Reference in the Media. Ed. Winfried
Nöth and Nina Bishara. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2007. 291–
302.
Ljungberg, Christina. “Performative Strategies in Intermedial Art.”
Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality. Ed. Lars
Elleström. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 81–96.
Ljungberg, Christina. Creative Dynamics. Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2012.
Loxley, James. Performativity. London: Routledge, 2007.
Macmillan Dictionary. “Performance Art.”
www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/performance-
art/. (24 July 2014).
McAuley, Gayle, ed. Unstable Ground: Performance and the Politics
of Place. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.
Massenet, Jules. Le Cid. Opera. 1885. Performance Carnegie Hall,
with Placido Domingo and Grace Bumbry. New York, 1976.
Merriam Webster. “Performance Art.” www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/performance%20art/. (24 July 2014).
Mitchell, W. J. T. “There Are No Visual Media.” Journal of Visual
Culture 4.2 (2005): 257–266.
Nänny, Max. “Ikonicitet.” Intermedialitet. Ed. Hans Lund. Lund:
Studentlitteratur, 2002. 131–138.
Nöth, Winfried. Handbook of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990.
Nöth, Winfried. “Semiotic Machines.” Cybernetics and Human
Knowing 9.1 (2002): 5–21.
Nöth, Winfried. “Self-Reference in the Media: The Semiotic
Framework.” Self-Reference in the Media. Ed. Winfried Nöth and
Nina Bishara. Berlin and New York: Mouton De Gruyter, 2007. 3–30.
Nöth, Winfried. “Self-Reflexivity in Electronic Art.” Johns Hopkins
Guide to Digital Media. Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson and
Benjamin J. Robertson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2014. 445–449.
Nöth, Winfried, and Lucia Santaella. “Literature and the Other Arts:
The Point of View of Semiotics.” The Role of Comparative
Literature in the Sharing of Knowledge and in the Preservation of
Cultural Diversity. Ed. Lisa Block de Behar. Oxford: Eolss, 2009.
www.eolss.net/sample-chapters/c04/e6-87-02-04.pdf. (10 Oct.
2014).
Peirce, Charles Sanders. Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical
Writings 2. Ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1998.
Prasad, Anyl. “Innerviews: Interview with Laurie Anderson.”
www.innerviews.org/inner/anderson.html/. (10 July 2014).
Rajewsky, Irina O. Intermedialität. Tübingen: UTB/Francke, 2002.
Rajewsky, Irina O. “Border Talks: The Problematic Status of Media
Borders in the Current Debate about Intermediality.” Media
Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality. Ed. Lars Elleström.
 London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 51–68.
OED. “Performance Art.” Oxford Dictionaries.
www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/performance-art/.
(8 Aug. 2014).
Santaella, Lucia. Culturas e artes do post-human: Da culturas das
midias a cibercultura. São Paulo: Paulus, 2003.
Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. London: Routledge, 2006.
Stelarc. www.stelarg.org. (10 Nov. 2008).
Spackman, Helen. “Minding the Matter of Representation: Staging the
Body (Politic).” The Body in Performance. Ed. Patrick Campbell.
Singapore: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000. 5–22.
Strine, Mary S., Beverly Whitaker Long, and Mary Frances Hopkins.
“Research in Interpretation and Performance Studies: Trends,
Issues, Priorities.” Speech Communication (1990): 181–193.
Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory
and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.
Yap, Tyng Shiuh. “Intermedial Performance: Digital Connectivity.”
The Real and the Virtual. Ed. Daniel Rhia and Anna Maj. Whitney:
InterDisplinary Press, 2009. www.interdisciplinarypress.net/. (12
July 2014).

3.2 Further Reading

Auslander, Philip, ed. Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and
Cultural Studies. New York and London: Routledge, 2003.
Bay-Cheng, Sarah, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender, and Robin
Nelson, eds. Mapping Intermediality in Performance. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2010.
Carlson, Marvin. Performance: A Critical Introduction. New York:
Routledge, 22006.
Diamond, Elin, ed. Performance and Cultural Politics. New York and
London: Routledge, 1996.
Jackson, Shannon. Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy
from Philosophy to Performativity. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004.
Jones, Amelia, and Andrew Stephenson, eds. Performing the Body,
Performing the Text. London: Routledge, 1999.
Parker, Andrew, and Eve Kosowsky Sedgwick. Performativity and
Performance. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Maria Marcsek-Fuchs

30 Literature and Dance:

Intermedial Encounters
Abstract: This article examines the manifold ways in which dance can
add to the signification of literary texts as both kinetic medium and
cultural practice. Werner Wolf’s broad definitions of medium and
intermediality, as introduced in this volume, are taken as a starting
point as well as research perspective. The study of transmedial features
and intermedial transpositions via dance adaptations of
Shakespearean plays demonstrates the symbiotic interplay of
similarity and difference as well as medial self-referentiality when the
contrastive media of verbal text and dance are brought into contact.
Explicit intermedial reference to the waltz, as in Byron’s “Apostrophic
Hymn” to the ‘scandalous dance’, is shown to propel political satire;
and the plurimediality of dance is illustrated as a multiplier of the
hypermediality of theatre. The essay contrasts nineteenth-century
popular drama with elitist theatre of the Fin de Siècle: Overabundance
stands against absence in Moncrieff’s Tom and Jerry and Oscar
Wilde’s Salome.
Key Terms: Intermediality, literature and dance, plurimediality,
transmediality

1 Introduction
Literature and dance seem to be medial antagonists. One
communicates through verbal language and is in many cases
monomedial; the other signifies via kinetic forms and is, through its
connection to music, fundamentally multimedial. A poem signifies
through letters on a page, a ballet through the dancer’s movement to
musical accompaniment. Yet, not only are there exceptions to these
medial generalisations, but both media share features and at the same
time complement each other, which makes an intermedial dialogue
particularly attractive. It is this coexistence of medial difference and
similarity that has attracted writers over the centuries to incorporate
dance as a signifying partner into verbal creation. Be it the reference to
scandalous waltzing in a poem, the incorporation of a festive ball scene
into a play, or the intermedial transposition of a novel into ballet; all in
one way or another refer to both, kinetic and cultural, qualities of
dance culture.
This essay will illustrate the many ways in which literature and
dance can engage in intermedial encounters, and through this
demonstrate how kinetic and cultural allusions enrich literary
signification. Since there is such a wide variety of ways in which text
and movement can enter into an intermedial dialogue and in which the
crossing of medial boundaries can add to literary creation, Werner
Wolf’s typology of intermediality, as discussed in this volume ( 24
Literature and Music: Theory), will serve as the foundation for
theoretical and analytical argumentation. Forms of extra-
compositional and intra-compositional intermediality will be both
contrasted and correlated. Unlike other studies that search for formal
or metaphoric uses of dance in novels (cf. Wilson 2009), this essay will
concentrate on the theoretical discussion of intermedial text-dance
encounters in plays and poems. Some of the concepts and examples
briefly exemplified here are discussed in much more detail in Dance
and British Literature: An Intermedial Encounter (Marcsek-Fuchs
2015a).

2 Intermedial Text-Dance Encounters:

Definitions and Concepts
Before we can discuss intermedial encounters of literature and dance,
it is necessary to define dance as a medium. However, which notion of
‘medium’ works best to describe artistic movement? For the discussion
of ‘literalised dance’ – a term used here to mean all ways of including
dance into literary creation – it is helpful to start with a wide notion of
‘medium’. Werner Wolf in his study on the Musicalization of Fiction
suggests a
moderately broad sense [of medium meaning a] conventionally distinct means of
communication, specified not only by particular channels (or one channel) of
communication but also by the use of one or more semiotic systems serving for the
 transmission of cultural ‘messages’. This definition encompasses the traditional arts but
also new forms of communication that have not or not yet advanced to the status of an
‘art’ […]. (Wolf 1999, 35–36)

In this sense, dance and literature can be viewed as separate media

that can enter into an intermedial dialogue, where medial boundaries
can be crossed and where transmedial features can be shared. The
‘semiotic systems used’ in dance are manifold. Copeland and Cohen’s
broad definition of dance is telling: They describe it as “any patterned,
rhythmic movement in space and time” (1983, 1). The dancer and
his/her body, the dancer’s movements but also spatial and rhythmical
patterns as well as the musical accompaniment add to the signifying
process. Yet, the signifying elements are not easily separable. Yeats’
poem “Among School Children” (1928) presents the conglomerating
nature of dance in a simple question: “How can we know the dancer
from the dance?” (Yeats 1997, l. 64). Sender, message, and channel, in
Jakobsonian terms, are fused to one in the dancing body. Yet, also
floor patterns, speed and force of movement as well as the number and
positioning of dancers in a specific space all have potential to signify.
Furthermore, dance is ephemeral. It is over by the time one can pick
up a pen to set the movements down on paper. And, most importantly,
signification in dance is ambiguous. Meaning, in Derridean terms, is
deferred. What Derrida describes for language is still more true for
dance and its literalised versions: Meaning is produced through
“différance and dissemination, through a complex play of signifying
traces” (Derrida 1984, 125). Signifying happens through the act of
reception. The viewers, and more so the readers of texts that include
dance as a signifying element, participate in the production of
meaning. This is similar to the reading of texts, but it is the level of
denotation that in most cases is missing. The viewer of dance makes
sense of movements through an act of association and connotation.
Dances are, in Roland Barthes’ terms, “writerly texts”, which make the
viewer/reader “producers of [those] text[s]” (1975, 4).
To illustrate the reader’s ‘choreographic role’ in the act of reception,
Colum McCann’s novel Dancer may serve as an example: As a
historical metafiction on Rudolf Nurejew’s life, it includes a dance
recital at a hospital in World War II. The narrator describes the
following scene:
In the spaces between the beds the children performed. They twirled and reeled and went
under bridges of arms for a Tartar folk dance. They sank to their knees and then they rose
 and shouted and clapped their hands and sank to their knees once more. A tiny girl
crossed her arms and kicked. Another child with red hair got embarrassed when his laces
came undone. They wore big smiles and their eyes shone. It could have been their
birthdays, they were so beautiful. (McCann 2003, 22)

The reader is left with a technical term, some fragmental

choreography, allusions to repetitive movement, and references to
both the context and the narrator’s impressions of the event. The
actual dance, which in this case is additionally fictional, cannot be
represented in its entirety and has to be imagined by the reader.
Depending on the amount of knowledge about a “Tartar folk dance”
and on how much s/he is part of the respective ‘interpretative
community’ (cf. Fish 1980), the reader will fill the kinetic and cultural
‘gaps’ (cf. Iser 1976) linked to the dance description and render the
movement described in the prose text in his/her imagination.
A second example illustrates what I would like to call the ‘moving
text’. In Morris Barnett’s Mrs G. of the Golden Pippin (1830), Mr
Chasseè, a would-be star of the Paris Opera, not only dresses like a
ballet dancer, he converses in ballet terminology and moves on and off
stage via balletic steps. He courts Mrs G., the rich and widowed owner
of a tavern, with some kinetic metaphors:
Adorable Mrs. G.! I have flown upon the wing of Zephyrus, to throw myself in an
entrechat, at your pedal extremities! If you would but consent to become my partner, in a
Pas de Deux, our lives would be one grande ronde of pleasure! (Barnett 2003 [1830], 11)

To “throw” oneself at the feet of the lady with an “entrechat” means

leaping high while rapidly interchanging one’s feet in the air; a skilful
balletic combination, which the text couples with an exaggerated
landing on the ground. The kinetic conceits that follow add to the
humour of the scene. Anyone familiar with ballet terminology will see
fragments of movement in his/her imagination and create an
imaginary ‘moving text’. Yet, it is not only the movement quality that
enriches this textual passage. It is the cultural associations linked to
the respective dance fashions that are presented in a literary nutshell.
This leads to another definition of ‘medium’ by Werner Wolf. He
describes it as a ‘dispositive of communication’ [translation mine],
which serves as a “frame of reference” for both sender and receiver
(2002, 165). In addition to structuralist and legal interpretations of the
term, ‘dispositive’ or ‘dispositif’ can lead to a Foucauldian reading and
thus to such notions as ‘discourse’, ‘power’ and ‘cultural
constructedness’. Dance in general, and literalised dance in particular,
are part of a culture. They help to construct cultural identity and are
regulated by cultural conventions, but they also have the potential to
subvert these. The waltz is a good case in point. It has its origins in the
Austrian ‘Landler’, has crossed national and social borders until it
reached London in 1812, to then be rejected as a public scandal. It was
the dance that for the first time after the eighteenth century minuet
allowed secluded movement for couples and that thus enabled
unchaperoned courting “in dual rotation” (Katz 1983, 525). It was soon
taken up by writers as a metaphor for lasciviousness. However, it did
not take long until the waltz became a commonly accepted cultural
practice, much supported by the musical oeuvre of Strauss, both father
and son. So when the waltz is taken up as a motif in literature,
reference occurs not only to the movement patterns but also to a
bundle of cultural associations. Thus, combinations of kinetic and
cultural features add to a work’s signifying process. It is in the hands of
the informed recipient to unfold what is enclosed in an ‘intermedial
nutshell’.
The cultural associations that a reader can form differ according to
dance genres, which in themselves can be markers of class, national
identity and cultural history. There are several ways to divide dance
into genres (cf. Kraus 1969; Hanna 1979; Cohen et al. 1998). Adrienne
Kaeppler differentiates between “dances of participation” and “dances
of presentation”, as well as between ethnic, social and theatre dances
(1978, 46). Certain practices are connected to certain nationalities,
such as the tango to Argentina. Others, like the aforementioned waltz,
display an early version of globalisation. While the eighteenth-century
minuet represents aristocratic culture, country dances, which were just
as well practiced at court, stand for vulgar peasant entertainment (it is
this crossing of social boundaries that William Hogarth hints at in
Plate 2 of his Analysis of Beauty and which finds frequent metaphoric
use in literature). Classical ballet stresses patriarchal structures and
social elitism while modern dance stands for theatrical revolution and
gender emancipation.
This rich field of kinetic and cultural allusions makes the medial
otherness of dance attractive for literary creation. Stéphane Mallarmé,
in his essay on “Ballets” (1886), stresses the signifying potential of
artistic movement, while at the same time linking it to writing; all this
without undermining medial differences:
[T]he ballerina is not a girl dancing; […] she is not a girl, but rather a metaphor which
symbolizes some elemental aspect of earthly form: sword, cup, flower, etc., and she does
not dance but rather with miraculous lunges and abbreviations, writing with her body, she
suggests things which the written work could express only in several paragraphs of
dialogue or descriptive prose. Her poem is written without the writer’s tools. (Mallarmé
1983, 112)

The medial differences between dance and poetry on the one hand and
their similarities on the other have brought about a long list of works
that include dance into their processes of signification among a great
variety of forms. In order to show various ways of intermedial
encounters, I will discuss a set of examples along the lines of Werner
Wolf’s typology ( 24 Literature and Music: Theory). The common
definition of intermediality as the crossing of medial boundaries will
be the starting point. For this, it is important to work with a narrow
understanding of ‘text’ as verbal communication only, and at the same
time a wide notion of ‘intermediality’, including extra-compositional
intermediality into the argumentation, as defined by Wolf (2005, 253),
who distinguishes between extra- and intra-compositional
intermediality ( 24 Literature and Music: Theory). The former he
subdivides into transmediality and intermedial transposition, the latter
into plurimediality and intermedial references. As the argumentation
continues, I will use these categories as analytical tools in order to
highlight the variety of ways in which text and dance can form both a
contrastive and symbiotic relationship in literary creation. Bernd
Scheffer speaks of a dual authorship in intermedial production by
subdividing his understanding of intermediality into a perspective of
production and reception (2004, 115). The recipient plays a great part
in the process of signification of literalised dance. Therefore, the aspect
of reception needs to be strongly considered when speaking of the
movement quality of a literary text.

3 Extracompositional Intermediality and Text-

Dance Encounters

3.1 Transmedial Features Connecting Literature

 and Dance
Features that are non-specific to certain media and whose medial
origins are not easily traceable are called transmedial (Wolf 2008, 28).
Transmedial features to be found in different media are, for instance,
narrativity, the use of specific motifs or formal characteristics such as
dialogic structures. A discussion of transmedial features connecting
literature and dance shows clearly that the contemporaneity of
similarities and differences enriches the interplay of media.
Both literature and dance have the ability to tell a story. Yet, already
a glimpse at the various literary genres from poetry to drama shows
that each mode of writing alters the way narration takes place. Stories
can also be told through movement alone. Ballets such as The
Nutcracker or Swan Lake, also labelled as ballets d’action or dramatic
ballets, propel the action through both dance variations and gestural
pantomime. As the genre label reveals, there are connections to both
dramatic writing and musical composition. Such features as dialogue,
characterisation and plot structure are relevant in both ballet and
drama. Dancers can respond to each other in movement sequences,
such as is often the case in the balletic balcony scenes of Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet. Pantomimes and tableaux are theatrical elements in
both plays and dances, such as the dumb show of the play within the
play in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Nutcracker’s gestural display of
his victory over the mouse king. Yet, Shakespeare’s balcony scene
shows the simultaneity of transmediality and self-reflexive media-
specificity at work: In the text, Juliet contemplates names and Romeo’s
identity as a Montague (II.1.80–90). She expresses her concern that he
might be caught by her kinsmen (II.1.105–108), and gets into an
argument about the faithfulness of vows (II.1.150–159). On the level of
denotation, there is much exchange of factual, cognitive information
via logical discussion. On the level of connotation, however, many of
the statements express powerful and oscillating emotions between
passionate love and rational reasoning. Balletic adaptations, be it in
classical or modern dance, express the strong emotional bond between
the lovers in correspondence to and with the help of the musical
accompaniment. One example is Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet score (Opus
64), whose musical balcony scene works through instrumentation and
variation of themes to imitate the dialogic nature of the play’s scene.
Similarly to the musical composition, dance works through kinetic
themes and the variations thereof. The dancers converse via
choreographic patterns, very much like the compositional technique of
question and answer in music. Kinetic conversation is coupled with
acrobatic partner work.
Two media are fused in this example via their transmedial features.
The choreographic balcony scene is linked to both dramatic and
musical composition at the same time. This example also shows that
transmediality, intermedial reference to formal features, plurimediality
and the act of intermedial transposition are inseparable, much like the
fusion of the dancing body with the movement itself: The
Shakespearean dialogue is transposed into dance, dialogic structures of
the text are imitated by both musical and choreographic composition,
and the choreography is inspired by, responds to and forms a
symbiotic relationship with Prokofiev’s score, thus fusing both media
into a plurimedial blend.

3.2 Intermedial Transposition as an Analytical

Category
One solution to this mingling and blending of intermedial categories is
to view Wolf’s typology not only as a tool for mapping territories or as
a means to categorise a vast field of examples, but to use each of the
categories as a starting point for investigation, as an analytical method
and research perspective. The choice of perspective helps to focus on a
particular feature of an intermedial encounter – particularly with
plurimedial phenomena – as well as reveal characteristics outside the
bounds of an intermedial type that would possibly remain
unacknowledged otherwise.
One example is the comparison of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
with balletic versions of it via ‘intermedial transposition’, a category
that Wolf subsumes under ‘extra-compositional intermediality’ (Wolf
2008, 28). “[I]ntermedial transposition”, as Wolf notes, is marked by
“a transfer between two media”; it is observable in “cases in which
discernibly similar contents or formal aspects appear in works of
different media and where at the same time a clear heteromedial origin
can be attributed to them” (Wolf 2008, 29). According to Irina
Rajewsky, the focus of “media change”, as she terms it, lies in the
process of production (2002, 16).
Dance adaptations of literary works are highly popular in theatre
culture. Just as with the main example of intermedial transposition,
the filmisation of novels, ballet versions of canonical works secure box
office success for one of the most endangered theatre genres. If a
theatre advertises Romeo and Juliet as a ballet on its programme, the
ticket sales are thrice secured: once through the reference to
Shakespeare’s masterpiece, once through Prokofiev’s renowned score
and yet again through a long choreographic tradition, which goes back
to Vincenzo Galeotti’s choreography in 1811 (Edgecombe 2006, 70).
The long line of choreographers attempting a Romeo and Juliet ballet
includes Leonid Lavrovsky, John Cranko and Kenneth MacMillan.
Thus, an intermedial transposition will not only refer back to
Shakespeare’s play, but also to the musical score at hand and to the
choreographic tradition and style (for a detailed discussion of Romeo
and Juliet remakings cf. Marcsek-Fuchs 2015b). The dance styles used
as kinetic language for the specific versions range from ballet to
contemporary dance. The literary texts transposed into dance are
derived from various genres, including prose, poetry and drama.
The transposition of a work of literature into dance is necessarily a
double transposition: once from verbal text to movement and once
from literary genre to the medial structuring of dance. It makes a
difference whether a play like Romeo and Juliet, a prose text like Lewis
Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, or a poem like Lord Byron’s The
Corsair is transferred. While the dramatic text is already written for
performance and while some of the theatre conventions are shared in
ballet creation, the adaptation of a poem requires dramatisation for the
stage, be it for acting or dancing. Changes made to the plot are often
due to medial characteristics of dance creation and/or ballet history.
Five different ballet versions of The Corsair appeared between 1826
and 1856, during the craze that marked the time after the verse tale’s
publication in 1814. Yet, already from the first librettos, like that of
Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges, The Corsair was changed from a
(tragic) verse tale told in heroic couplets, dealing more with
introspection of a Byronic hero than with a mere pirate tale, to “Le
Corsaire”, a balletic love story with a happy ending. The plot, the
distribution of characters, and even the settings were changed to make
the libretto fit the medial peculiarities of ballet: the oscillation between
the advancement of the action and the display of balletic virtuosity via
so called variations. As Judith Mackrell points out in her introductory
article on the “Cult of the Cutlass”, ballet conventions of 1826 called for
a change in character presentation:
From the beginning, it seems that the poem could not be danced straight – not only was
the action too complicated, so too was the internal torment of its hero, as he spurns the
love of beautiful sex slave Gulnara and ends up mourning the death of his loyal but largely
absent wife Medora. By the time Mazilier choreographed his own production, he was
working on a libretto that had turned tragedy into love story, and focused on Conrad’s
transformation from savage loner to ardent suitor of Medora. (Mackrell 2007, n. pag.)

Yet what seems to be an act of simplification for the needs of kinetic

representation can be seen as what I would like to call ‘intermedial
interpretation’. What is meant by this is an act of interpretation that is
due to two interwoven processes: 1) The choreographer, like a director
for a stage production, interprets the pretext and creates his own
reading(s) via dramaturgical decisions. 2) As in the example above,
these decisions stand in close connection to the media involved, which,
aside from choreography, also include stage and costume design as
well as the musical composition. In this sense, the balletic versions
often self-referentially allude to their own mediality and at the same
time re-read the pretexts in question, thus adding readings to a wide
web of existing interpretations across media.
Two examples that illustrate the interplay of medial self-
referentiality and textual (re-) interpretation (cf. Marcsek-Fuchs,
2015b) are John Neumeier’s and José Limón’s Shakespeare
adaptations: 1) John Neumeier in his 1971 ballet Romeo und Julia has
the heroine enter barefooted, covered only by a towel. She expresses
her youthfulness, which in Shakespeare’s text is revealed via the
Nurse’s long excursus on Juliet’s age (I.3.12–50), through both her
exuberant movements and her lack of skill in dance decorum, the latter
being stressed by absence of costume and point shoes. Juliet’s
appearance at the ball and her first meeting with Romeo (I.5) are
expressed through her dancing on point shoes for the first time. Her
coming of age is foregrounded by the choreographic means of dancing
on point, which represents both weightlessness and strict confinement
to rules. Neumeier’s choreography stresses Juliet’s development
through the contrasting of modern dance and balletic refinement.
Through this, he adds a Juliet to a chain of balletic as well as theatrical
representations who from the beginning is unwilling to conform
completely to the decorum of her times.
2) An even more telling example that illustrates how reduction and
media-specific signification work as means of intermedial
interpretation is José Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane (1949). His modern
dance version of Shakespeare’s Othello reduces the long list of
characters to only four, renamed as ‘The Moor’, ‘The Moor’s Wife’, ‘His
Friend’, and ‘His Friend’s Wife’. This piece of merely twenty-three
minutes encloses Iago’s intrigue to provoke Othello’s raging jealousy
into the confines of a Renaissance dance, as the title already indicates.
Anna Kisselgoff describes the act of reduction as well as the
interchange of dramatic choreography and court dancing as follows:
It was Limón’s genius to realize that Shakespeare’s “Othello,” a play as messy in its
emotions as any, could be distilled with pungent simplicity. He chose a dance form – the
pavane – as a poetic conceit, to symbolize his human drama. When the pavane’s formal
patterns break sharply apart onstage, we sense the disastrous crisis among the characters.
And when we see the four main characters dancing in their symmetrical and formal
patterns, we know that the societal facade merely conceals the swirling passions
underneath. (Kisselgoff 1986, n. pag.)

Although the choreography is subtitled as “A Variation on the Theme

of Othello”, the dramaturgical reduction, the renaming of the
characters, the concentration on intrigue and jealousy as well as the
reference to music through the subtitle all lend themselves as a means
to reinterpret Shakespeare’s play. Limón contrasts a highly sexualised
reading of Iago with the rigidness of the courtly pavane. In order to
utilise the dance as a “poetic conceit”, as Kisselgoff does, the
connotations of the dance need to reverberate to an informed
audience.
The kinetic movement quality and the cultural allusions connected
to the pavane serve together as means to represent courtly elegance,
formal confinement and submission to patterns. The dance has its
origins in sixteenth century Italy and is “a slow processional type of
dance for the most part employing a continuous repetition of basic step
patterns […] in simple quadruple meter (4/2 or 4/4)” (Randel 2003,
639). Through the use of this dance as the matrix for Limón’s Othello
adaptation, the work makes references to period, class and gender
relations. The dance label immediately contextualises the piece in
Renaissance culture, alludes to aristocratic elitism and hints at a
relationship of couples that is strictly ruled by social decorum. The
couples only have bodily contact through the holding of hands, a
feature that Limón uses in variations. This interplay of kinetic and
cultural allusions as means of signification plays an even greater role
with what Wolf terms “intermedial reference” (2008, 29).

4 Intracompositional Intermediality, Cultural

Allusion and Literalised Dance

4.1 Intermedial Reference to Dance as Means

of (Political) Satire
“Intermedial Reference” and “plurimediality” are the two variants that
Wolf subsumes under “intracompositional intermediality” (2005, 253).
“As opposed to plurimediality, intermedial reference does not give the
impression of a medial hybridity of the signifiers, nor of a
heterogeneity of the semiotic systems used, but rather of a medial and
semiotic homogeneity and thus qualifies as ‘covert’ intracompositional
intermediality” (Wolf 2008, 30). “[T]he other medium enters as a
conceptual rather than a physical presence, and the base medium
retains the character of a homomedial semiotic complex” (Wolf 2005,
254). This can happen either through implicit imitation of formal
characteristics or explicit mentioning. For further explanations and
differentiations see Wolf’s article in this handbook ( 24 Literature and
Music: Theory). An example of implicit (formal) intermedial reference
is Edith Sitwell’s poem “Fox Trot”, which imitates the step patterns of
the dance via the configuration of the words on the page. In the
following, I would like to demonstrate the interplay of kinetic and
cultural associations by way of explicit intermedial referencing.
As demonstrated earlier in this paper, the mere mention of Mr
Chasseè in Barnett’s Mrs G of the Golden Pippin, with his speaking
name, his wished-for membership at the Paris Opera house and his use
of balletic movements as metaphors for courting, evokes medial and
cultural associations which enrich the process of characterisation in
the play. These associations can be characterised as a mixture of
kinetic and contextual information, all bundled in technical dance
terminology like “chassée”, “entrechat” or “grand ronde”. The
movement qualities related in these steps are coupled with the
conventions and peculiarities of the ballet world: its prima ballerinas,
leaping princes, stardom and the stereotypes connected to artists
excluded from this elitist abode. Roland Barthes’ discussion on
authorship and texts works well to describe the interplay of diverse
contexts in literalised dance. Barthes characterises a text as “a multi-
dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them
original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from
the innumerable centres of culture” (Barthes 2001, 1468). In this
sense, we could refer to Barnett’s Mrs G. as a “tissue of [medial]
quotations” through intermedial referencing via explicit thematisation
of balletic conventions. Furthermore, these references also serve
dramatic purposes, namely as means of characterisation and of
increasing the play’s playful humour.
An example that employs intermedial referencing for biting political
satire is Lord Byron’s poem “The Waltz: An Apostrophic Hymn”
(1813). Soon after the waltz, an innovation imported from Austria
through Germany and France, had been introduced at Almack’s by
Mme de Lieven in 1812, it received harsh criticism and was rejected as
a public scandal. The Times called it “indecent” and projected “that it
[would] never again be tolerated in any moral English society” (qtd. in
George 1967, 172). But, like with many of these predictions, the
contrary happened. It became the craze of the time and, as with many
crazes, was soon ridiculed. Byron’s poem is preceded by a preface
describing the kinetic quality of this scandalous import in a very vivid
way. Not only do we get an impression of how the dance was valued,
we also witness Byron’s art in describing such a transient and
multimedial art. Horace Hornem, the fictive speaker of the poem,
writes a letter to his publisher, in which he describes the following
scene: “Mrs. Hornem with her arms half round the loins of a huge
hussar-looking gentleman […] turning round, and round, to a d––d
see-saw up-and-down sort of tune, […] like two cock-chafers spitted on
the same bodkin” (Byron, “The Waltz”, Preface). One can sense this
kinetic simile implying eroticism and the loss of virtue most vividly in
James Gillray’s La Walse, his adaptation of a French caricature by an
anonymous artist (fig. 1).

Fig. 1: James Gillray, Le Bon Genre: La Walse, 1810.

Copyright Trustees of the British Museum.

The reference to the waltz worked so brilliantly for satire because of its
formation and movement quality. The closeness of the bodies, the dual
rotation and the simultaneous dancing of all couples (again unlike its
predecessor, the minuet) allowed unchaperoned seclusion and induced
dizziness. Byron even foretells unwanted pregnancies, accusing the
dance’s lasciviousness as reason for unwilling temptation:
Imperial Waltz! imported from the Rhine
(Famed for the growth of pedigrees and wine),
Long be thine import from all duty free,
And Hock itself be less esteemed than thee;
In some few qualities alike––for Hock
Improves our cellar––thou our living stock.
The head to Hock belongs––thy subtler art
Intoxicates alone the heedless heart:
Through the full veins thy gentler poison swims,
And wakes to Wantonness the willing limbs. (Byron, “The Waltz” ll. 29-38)

Yet, it is the international origin which is at fault. The scandalous

practice is an import from Germany, like cheap wine and the
Hanoverians. In the following lines, the attack on Germany becomes
stronger. What seems like praise soon becomes harsh criticism of the
Germans and the French through the reference to the Rhine
Confederation:
Oh, Germany! how much to thee we owe,
As heaven-born Pitt can testify below,
Ere cursed Confederation made thee France’s,
And only left us thy d––d debts and dances! (Byron, “The Waltz” ll. 39-42)

Wittily foregrounded through an elliptical alliteration with ambiguous

grammatical relations, the waltz is portrayed as important heritage and
at the same time as equally fatal with the economic losses that followed
Napoleon’s success at the battle of Austerlitz in 1806. The speaker
intermingles contemplations on dance culture and politics as he goes
on to ridicule the remains left by the Confederation. Despite economic
losses, England can still rejoice about the Hanoverian king(s).
Of subsidies and Hanover bereft,
We bless thee still––for George the Third is left!
Of kings the best––and last, not least in worth,
For graciously begetting George the Fourth.
To Germany, and Highnesses serene,
Who owe us millions––don’t we owe the Queen?
To Germany, what owe we not besides?
So oft bestowing Brunswickers and brides;
Who paid for vulgar, with her royal blood,
Drawn from the stem of each Teutonic stud:
Who sent us––so be pardoned all her faults––
A dozen dukes, some kings, a Queen––and Waltz. (Byron, “The Waltz” ll. 43-54)

Yet, by 1813 George III is no great profit, as he was declared insane in

1810 and followed by his son George, Prince of Wales as his Prince
Regent. The reference to the waltz closes the satirical statement.

4.2 Plurimediality, Drama and Dance Scandals

It is not surprising that a dance with such connotative potential such as
the waltz was also included into plays. Here it is the dialogic nature of
plurimediality in theatre that enriches the intermedial encounter of
text and dance. According to Werner Wolf, “[p]lurimediality occurs, in
short, whenever two or more media are overtly present in a given
semiotic entity at least in one instance” (2005, 254). The media are
present on the level of signifiers, in their own media-specific form.
Plurimedial combinations or even blends occur very often in
“illegitimate drama”, which after the Licensing Act of 1737 forced many
authors to include songs and dance into their plays if they wanted to
escape censorship and see their works performed on stages other than
Drury Lane and Covent Garden (cf. Donohue 2004, 23). Not only do
the dances in these plays counteract with the verbal passages through
“silent rhetoric”, as Thoinot Arbeau labelled the art form in his
Orchésography (1589); the kinetic visualisation of the movement
quality was often coupled with intermedial references to the dances in
question. Moncrieff’s Tom and Jerry (1821/1826) tests the aspect of
combining as many medial features into a plurimedial spectacle of
song, dance and intermedial reference as possible. Jerry, one of the
protagonists, uses the dance metaphor to propose to Sue.
Jerry. Sweet girl! may I be permitted to hope that the partnership of this evening may
lead to one for life?
Sue. Ah! Sir, a dance affords you gallant gentlemen worlds of latitude for flattery and
deceit. Jerry. Nay, I am sincere, by heaven!
Sue. Come, Sir, they are about to waltz, and if you wouldn’t have my head as giddy as you
seem to think my heart is, you will conduct me to a seat. (Moncrieff n. d. [1821/1826], 31)

Yet, after Sue remarks on the indecency of the dance, from which it
would be more proper to refrain, a choreographic and musical firework
of waltzing begins. The stage directions call for an embracing pattern:
“Waltzing commences; the principal dancing lady brings Trifle or
Green forward, waltzing to an adaptation of Rossini’s ‘Di tanti
palpiti.’” The following finale incorporates a trio of different waltz
tunes, “The Hungarian Waltz”, “Lieber Augustine”, and “Copenhagen
Waltz”, all of which, as the stage directions promise, “harmonize
together” (Moncrieff n. d. [1821/1826], 32). Trifle and Green add to the
‘harmony’ of the Airs, sung by the ladies to their suitors, with a song
commenting on the waltz:
Never talk to me of waltzing it,

Giddily, O! Giddily, O!
’Tis a dance has many faults in it,
Giddily, O! Giddily, O!
First it strains our stays, in a thousand ways,
Whiskers much amaze, till your collar strays,
 And you make a thousand halts in it,
Giddily, Giddily, O! (Moncrieff n. d. [1821/1826], 31)
The night at Almacks and thus this plurimedial conglomerate of
waltzing closes with a moving “Grand Tableau”: “During this, the
Company waltz at back; and the Characters sing and waltz in front till
Curtain falls on Grand Tableau.––End of Act I” (Moncrieff n. d.
[1821/1826], 32). Instead of finishing the vivid scene with the contrast
of a frozen image, the tension drawn up through the plurimedial blend
of music, dancing and song brings the close of the first act to a climax.

4.3 Presence through Absence: Dance as an

Intermedial Gap in Oscar Wilde’s Salome
(1891)
A play that includes dance as a central plot-driving motif, alludes to
movement as a symbolist symbol through frequent intermedial
references, yet leaves the actual dance as a textual gap is Oscar Wilde’s
Salome.
(1) Dance as Text in Oscar Wilde’s Salome: Dance appears in Oscar
Wilde’s Salome in two forms: as a frequently repeated word, which
propels the action, and as a stage direction, which initiates the
embedded dance within the play. The dance of the seven veils lies at
the centre of the conflict. ‘The Young Syrian’ Narraboth admires
Salome and, being rejected, commits suicide. Salome craves the body
of Iokanaan, who in turn refuses her. Herod Antipas, the Tetrarch,
longs for his step-daughter Salome’s lustful movements and desires
her to dance. The princess initially refuses but as a means to fulfil her
desires and to possess the prophet, gives what the Tetrarch demands:
she “dances the dance of the seven veils” (Wilde 1989, 323). As her
reward she claims Iokanaan’s head. Despite Herod’s desperate offers
to render her all his treasures, she remains relentless and thus receives
the bleeding head on a silver plate. In total darkness Salome’s voice is
heard: “‘I have kissed thy mouth, Iokanaan, I have kissed thy mouth.’
[A ray of moonlight falls on Salome and illumines her]” (Wilde 1989,
329). Herod turns around, sees her, and shouts: “Kill that woman!”
(Wilde 1989, 329) With this powerful exclamation and the crushing of
Salome by the soldiers, the play ends. And like the ending, the dance
incorporates visual, kinetic and acoustic elements in a union that
allows both unity and diversity of effect. Her ‘dance of lust’ gives
Salome the power to demand the un-demandable: the beheading of
Iokanaan.
(2) Word Dance: The central dance is not the first mention of dance-
like movement in Salome. Dancing is hinted at right at the beginning
of the play:
The Young Syrian. How beautiful is the Princess Salome tonight!
The Page of Herodias. Look at the Moon. How strange the moon seems! She is like a
woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for
dead things.
The Young Syrian. She has a strange look. She is like a little princess who wears a yellow
veil, and whose feet are of silver. She is like a princess who has little white doves for feet.
One might fancy she was dancing.
The Page of Herodias. She is like a woman who is dead. She moves very slowly. (Wilde
1989, 301)

While the page of Herodias insistently alludes to the moon, Narraboth,

the ‘Young Syrian’, fixes his attention to the princess. If we assume that
the Syrian is not in the second utterance referring to the moon, with
which Salome is linked throughout the play, but to Salome alone, and
if we read the passage from the point of view of dance, we might detect
an early reference to the later performance even here. The choice of
words, such as “veil”, “doves” and “feet”, in combination with his
pondering “One might fancy she was dancing” foreshadows the dance
of the seven veils. Later in the scene she is referred to as holding a fan
and as moving her hands “like a narcissus trembling in the wind”
(Wilde 1989, 304). All could have been part of Salome’s choreography
with the seven veils, but these early references are very fragmental and
are one part of a metaphoric cluster that has no clear referents. Similar
to the stage direction later in the play, the references to movement are
vague. The recipient has many ways of interpreting the image(s). What
is meant by the word “dance”? Could this use of the word be described
as a case of symbolist writing in the sense of French Symbolism?
Symbolism is a poetic movement of the latter third of the nineteenth
century, which characterises works of such poets as Mallarmé,
Verlaine, Rimbaud and Laforgue. In 1886, Jean Moréas published his
“Manifeste du Symbolisme”, which brought the movement to public
attention. Even though it cannot be regarded as a homogeneous
school, French and Anglo-American literary critics use the term for the
time from 1880 to 1920 and make out a non-mimetic and non-realistic
use of imagery (cf. Fritz 1994, 413). The aim is not exact description,
but evocation, allusion and suggestion. This combination of
indetermination and synaesthesia also matches the characterisation of
modern dance, the dance form which was en vogue during the Fin de
Siècle: Being more indeterminate than classical ballet, it aimed at the
evocation of emotions rather than realistic depiction. But dance as
such, like synaesthesia, merges different sense perceptions into a
unified whole. Symbolism soon found its way to the stage. Dance as a
concept of combining sense perceptions, of alluding to both body and
soul, fits well with the ideas of Symbolism, synaesthesia and total
theatre (as inherited from Richard Wagner).
The next variant of intermedial reference to dance in Salome has a
very different quality. Aside from the metaphoric use of dance, Wilde’s
play also incorporates this word in the context of stichomythic
dialogue. In the following passage, the word ‘dance’ is repeated so
often that it does not so much evoke emotions by the sole mentioning
of it or by the embedding of it into a complex image; rather, the
frequent repetition of the word ‘dance’ in heated dialogue lessens the
associative power of the word alone but strengthens the context into
which it is embedded.
Herod. Dance for me, Salome.
Herodias. I will not have her dance.
Salome. I have no desire to dance, Tetrarch.
Herod. Salome, daughter of Herodias, dance for me.
Herodias. Peace. Let her alone.
Herod. I command thee to dance, Salome.
Salome. I will not dance, Tetrarch.
Herodias [Laughing.] You see how she obeys you.
Herod. What is it to me whether she dance or not? (Wilde 1989, 319)

Herod’s insistence, Salome’s refusal and Herodias’ comments are

intensified via the stichomythic and overly repetitive structure. This
repetitive, almost ritualistic mode reappears again and again until
Herod renders his oath to Salome: “Salome, Salome dance for me. I
pray thee dance for me. […] Dance for me, Salome, I beseech thee. If
thou dancest for me thou mayest ask of me what thou wilt, and I will
give it thee” (Wilde 1989, 320).
 Wilde’s major innovation compared to the biblical source, but also to
Flaubert’s work, was his interpretation of the heroine. She was no
longer the innocent child, who merely obeyed her mother Herodias by
asking for Iokanaan’s head. Wilde gave her a personality, a voice and
most importantly of all, her own motive. She, as an independent
individual, desires Iokanaan. Since she cannot have him alive, she does
anything to fulfil her desire. So the dance of the seven veils is her
means to achieve her goal.
(3) Text as Dance: Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils: The most
physical representation of dance in Wilde’s Salome would then be the
prescribed, but not described, dance of the seven veils. Whereas the
examples of dance as text mentioned so far were all embedded in the
primary text of the tragedy, this dance is only present as a stage
direction and thus as secondary text. It is remarkable that by the time
we reach the climax of the play, the most important component of the
conflict is reduced to a short stage direction: “[Salome dances the
dance of the seven veils]” (Wilde 1989, 323). The information about
the dance is so veiled that it is completely up to the director as well as
the performer and the reader to create this crucial part of the play. The
recipient has but few clues to influence his (mental) construction of the
dance: one being the intertextual quality of Wilde’s play, with its
mainly literary and painterly pretexts.
(4) Intertextual/Intermedial Sources: Wilde had a wide variety of
texts that served as a source for his version of Salome. The gospels of
Mark and Matthew had no description of the dance. Flaubert’s
Herodias (1877) on the other hand, does the exact opposite. While still
portraying a child that seems to follow orders and thus enacts a passive
protagonist (here called Herodias), her dance is depicted in much
detail. Here are some examples:
With her eyes half-closed, she swivelled her waist, thrust her belly backwards and
forwards in rhythmic waves and made her breasts quiver; […] The dance continued, now
depicting the lover’s yearning for satisfaction. She danced like the priestesses of the
Indies, […]. Without bending her knees, she spread her legs apart and inclined her body
so low that her chin touched the floor. […] She threw herself on her hands with her heels
in the air and in this pose she crossed from one side of the platform to the other like an
enormous beetle. (Flaubert 2005, 100–101)

Even if the seductive nature of the dance is quite evident, Flaubert

presents her movements as rather acrobatic. Mallarmé’s Hérodiade, a
poetic fragment, and Moreau’s painting Salomé contrived
contradictory images of the princess: the first a virgin, the second a
tattooed naked goddess. To make matters even more interesting,
Wilde’s role model for his aestheticist art was Huysmans’ À rebours
which describes Mallarmé’s dramatic poem and Moreau’s depictions of
Salome in its narrative. This source is then both intertextual and
intermedial at the same time.
(5) The Dance of the Seven Veils: If we now turn to the medium of
dance, which is plurimedial in itself, and examine the tradition of the
dance of the seven veils, we will find contradictory pieces of
information. Wilde seems to have invented this type of dance himself.
Tony Bentley summarises the problem as follows: “In all the references
throughout history to Salome and John the Baptist […] until 1893
there is no mention of Salomé’s dance being called the Dance of the
Seven Veils. Until Oscar Wilde” (Bentley 2002, 31). Even if the myth of
Ishtar tells us about the mythological figure going down to the
underworld to be reunited with her lover and about her successive
shedding of garments at each of the seven gates, there is no mention of
a dance in this context.
Considerations about the veil and its ambiguous connotations reveal
some additional ideas on the mysterious gap in Wilde’s play. A veil is
made of thin material, at the same time revealing and concealing some
hidden treasure, particularly female sexuality. Its presence in two
contradictory contexts, in the sacred and the secular, reflects this thin
material’s cultural ambiguity. It is linked to extremes, to the celibacy of
nuns as well as to “sexual secrecy” of the woman, as she was envisioned
in Fin de Siècle culture (Showalter 1991, 145). Thus, the veiled woman
not only promises pleasure but also danger, effecting a “male gaze”
that is simultaneously “self-empowering” and “self-endangering”
(Showalter 1991, 146). Roland Barthes in his essay “Striptease” points
to the loss of sexual attraction in the revealing course of undressing:
Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked. We may therefore
say that we are dealing in a sense with a spectacle based on fear, or rather on the pretence
of fear, as if eroticism here went no further than a sort of delicious terror, whose ritual
signs have only to be announced to evoke at once the idea of sex and its conjuration.
(Barthes 1993, 84)

Thus, in this sense, Salome’s shedding of veils is not what causes the
threat, it is the mere idea that she is covered in seven veils that projects
deadly pleasure. If interpreted with Wilde’s aestheticism in mind,
Salome’s dance (although nowhere indicated as professional artistry)
can only represent highest art and beauty in order to fulfil the decadent
ideal.
Depending on the interpretation of Salome as a femme fatale or as a
virgin, as “the mystic, the sister of Salammbô, or a Sainte Thérèse”
(Wilde qtd. in Ellmann 1987, 355; cf. also Meier 2002, 117), the dance
of the seven veils means different things. Gomez Carillo
has [Wilde] swinging between two seemingly opposite views of [the dance]: in one Salomé
is the seductress, entirely naked except for cascades of exotic jewels; in the other a
‘blazingly innocent’ Salomé wears veils ‘woven by angels’. These are the contradictions in
the character herself […] and a reflection of Wilde’s ruling principle: ‘A Truth in art is that
whose contradictory is also true’. (Worth 1983, 65–66)

Amy Koritz takes Wilde’s aestheticist reading of Salome further by

calling our attention to the transcending nature of the dance and thus
of Salome herself: the transcending of the “dichotomy between the
physical and the spiritual” (Koritz 1995, 76). Wilde himself describes
the dance as being “more metaphysical than physical” (qtd. in Ellmann
1987, 355). Koritz interprets further: “[A]lthough his readers cannot
see Salomé as anything except body, Wilde could imagine her equally
as soul” (1995, 81). Salome’s only sin, in Koritz’ interpretation, is that
she aspired to the male realm of spirit by trying to unify body and soul.
Salome represents a blurring of binaries and a bending of gender
relations. Her kiss of Iokanaan’s head is a symbol of her taking
possession of exactly this male domain. Koritz links this reading to an
interpretation of the dance in her following summary: “[I]f the severed
head of Iokanaan is the image of Salomé’s failure to unify body and
soul, her dance is the image of her success” (Koritz 1995, 82).
Following this reading, Salome could be seen less as unveiling her body
than her soul.
As the symbolist way of writing proposes, there is little precise
description but much allusion in Wilde’s drama. He has wrapped
Salome’s dance in so many veils that the more we try to uncover, the
more veiled it seems. Salome’s dance of the seven veils effects an act of
dissemination: in both the literal and the metaphorical sense, each
unveiling reveals even more connotations and mysteries. If we remain
with the text as a closet drama, one could suspect that Wilde never
intended a complete unveiling of this mysterious riddle but the effect
of conjuring a wide set of contradictory images and allusions, which in
turn evoke powerful emotions. However, the play was intended for
performance, if by no one else than Sarah Bernhardt. And as directors
and choreographers continued filling the gap of the ‘seven veils’, more
and more so called “Salome Routines emerged” (Tydeman and Price
1996, 136), which meant that the dance was extrapolated from the play
and turned into a dance routine of its own by artists such as Loie
Fuller, Ruth St. Denis or Maud Allen (for an in-depth description see
Tydeman and Price 1996; cf. also Marcsek-Fuchs 2015a).

5 Literature and Dance: Intermedial

Encounters Continued – A Conclusion
The examples discussed in this paper show how the recipients of
literalised dance fill kinetic and cultural gaps left in what could be seen
as a ‘third space’ between the verbal and kinetic medium through their
association. Be it in intermedial transposition, explicit referencing or
in the plurimedial coexistence of text and movement, the inclusion of
dance into the processes of signification adds to the (inter-)medial
polyvalence of literary creation. Meaning is transported in a
plurimedial ‘nutshell’ through the interplay of kinetic and cultural
allusions. The variants and thus the effects of text-dance encounters
range from metaphoric connotation to medial dialogue. A look into
later examples seems to reveal a growing medial equality between text
and dance.
In contrast to Oscar Wilde, who used dance as a symbol in the vein
of the Symbolist tradition and as an intermedial gap in his Salome
(1891), W. B. Yeats incorporates the art as a substantial medial
function into his Plays for Dancers (1921). Dance and verbal text come
into an intermedial dialogue, and this in the most literal sense. In his
At the Hawk’s Well (1916), a central character, the Guardian of the
Well, communicates through modern dance only, reflecting the coming
modernism in literary, art and dance practices at the same time (cf.
Marcsek-Fuchs 2015a).
As literary and dance history proceed, the ways of intermedial
encounters become increasingly versatile, interwoven and technical;
for example in some plays by Samuel Beckett and choreographies by
William Forsythe. Forsythe’s Sider (2011) can be called an intermedial
‘dialogue’ with Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The dancers’ movements are
created in response to lines from the filmic Hamlet-adaptation by Tony
Richardson (1969), which the dancers hear through earphones and to
which they respond. Verbal text, dance and lighting interact in this
postmodern work, which functions as intermedial transposition in the
most technical and physical sense. It should be highly enlightening to
witness how text and dance become entangled in an increasingly
hybridised hypermedial literary world and how intermedial research
facilitates new readings of an ongoing variety of intermedial
encounters between literature and dance.

6 Bibliography

6.1 Works Cited

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Marcsek-Fuchs, Maria. Dance and British Literature: An Intermedial
Encounter. Theory – Typology – Case Studies. Leiden: Brill/Rodopi,
2015a.
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Bielefeld: transcript, 2015b. 131–152.
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Scheffer, Bernd. “Zur Intermedialität des Bewusstseins.”
Intermedium Literatur: Beiträge zu einer Medientheorie der
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Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004. 103–122.
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. 1595. Ed. Jill L. Levenson.
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Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de
Siècle. London: Bloomsbury, 1991.
Tydeman, William, and Steven Price. Wilde: Salome. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Wilde, Oscar. Salome. 1891. Ed. Isobel Murray. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989.
Wilson, Cheryl A. Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century
Britain: Jane Austen to the New Woman. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009.
Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory
and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.
Wolf, Werner. “Intermedialität: Ein weites Feld und eine
Herausforderung für die Literaturwissenschaft.”
Literaturwissenschaft: Intermedial –Interdisziplinär. Ed. Herbert
Foltinek and Christoph Leitgeb. Vienna: Verlag der
Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2002. 163–192.
Wolf, Werner. “Intermediality.” The Routledge Encyclopedia of
Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-
Laure Ryan. London: Routledge, 2005. 252–256.
Wolf, Werner. “The Relevance of ‘Mediality’ and ‘Intermediality’ to
Academic Studies of English Literature.”Mediality/Intermediality.
Ed. Martin Heusser, Andreas Fischer, and Andreas H. Juncker.
Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2008. 15–43.
Worth, Katherine. Oscar Wilde. London: Macmillan, 1983.
Yeats, William Butler. “Among School Children.” 1928. The Major
Works: Including Poems, Plays, and Critical Prose. Ed. Edward
Larrissy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

6.2 Further Reading

Brandstetter, Gabriele. “Tanz.” Handbuch Fin de Siècle. Ed. Sabine
Haupt and Stefan Bodo Würffel. Stuttgart: Körner, 2008. 583–600.
Brissenden, Alan. Shakespeare and the Dance. London: Macmillan,
1981.
Dahms, Sibylle, and Claudia Jeschke, eds. Tanz. Stuttgart: Metzler,
2001.
Ellis, Sylvia C. The Plays of W. B. Yeats: Yeats and the Dancer.
Reprinted with alterations. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.
Fleischer, Mary. Embodied Texts: Symbolist Playwright-Dancer
 Collaborations. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007.
Mester, Terri A. Movement and Modernism: Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence,
Williams, and Early Twentieth-Century Dance. Fayetteville:
University of Arkansas Press, 1997.
Pfandl-Buchegger, Ingrid, and Gudrun Rottensteiner. “Intermedia
Studies and Dance: A First Step Towards an Interart
Dialogue.”Intermedialita: Slovo – Obraz – Zvuk. Ed. Jan Schneider
and Lenka Krausová. Olomouc: Univ. Palackého, 2008. 163-175.
Session, William A. “Milton and the Dance.” Milton’s Legacy in the
Arts. Ed. Albert C. Labriola and Edward Sichi, Jr. University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988. 181–203.
Thompson, Allison. Dancing through Time: Western Social Dance in
Literature, 1400–1918. Selections. Jefferson: McFarland, 1998.
Britta Neitzel

31 Performing Games:
Intermediality and Videogames
Abstract: This article examines the intermedial relations between
videogames and other performative art- and media-forms. The
relations are established by the ludic as a tertium comparationis,
which shows itself less in material characteristics or in commonly used
sign systems but in performance practices. Similar to narration that
relates through narrative various media, the ludic is considered to
relate various ludic media. To demonstrate this, the article considers
single player and group performances in videogames and relates them
to performances in sports, in dance, and in the theatre. Joint topics are
the mediatisation of these performances and the role of the body that
is connected with the question of “liveness”.
Key Terms: Performance, avatar, Let’s Plays, Massive Multiplayer
Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), liveness

1 Introduction
Finding the right place for an article on videogames in a handbook on
intermediality is not an easy undertaking. Cinema has already been
termed an integrative medium with relations to nearly all previous
media (Paech 1993, 3), and this is even more applicable to videogames.
Videogames are not thinkable anymore outside of relation to literary
themes, to (simple) structures of narration (interactive storytelling) or
transformations of classical narrative patterns, to themes, visual
patterns (“virtual camera”) or methods of the production of films,
references to painting, or musical dramaturgy. These topics have been
examined in game studies. Thus, there are studies on the narrativity of
videogames ( 23 Narratives across Media and the Outlines of a
Media-conscious Narratology), their audiovisual composition (e.g.
Järvinen 2002), their relations to film or literature (e.g. King and
Krzywinska 2002), and their participatory characteristics (e.g.
Raessens 2005). These different approaches illustrate that videogames
are highly differentiated media that cannot be treated as one
homogenous object. As different as videogames are with respect to
these modes of production or presentation, there are two qualities that
all of them share. One is their “dependency on the computer as a
material support” (Ryan 2006, 181) and the other one is the fact that
videogames are not solely watched, read or listened to. They are
played. Videogames are performative objects. As performative objects,
they relate to other performative objects or performative art forms.
Videogames have references to non-digital games, to sports and, last
but not least, to performance and theatre. The latter relations pertain
to practices of showing something, to performance, to acting – to
playing in a broad sense. Without playing, videogames are
unthinkable: There is no game without play. Hence, this article will
focus on the intermediality of the performative aspects of videogames.

2 Intermediality
Having limited the field of inquiry so far, there are still some
theoretical considerations to be taken up. They encompass the concept
of intermediality used here, as well as the concepts of performativity
and performance. Without being able to describe the discussion of the
concept (or rather, concepts) of intermediality entirely ( 0
Introduction), I will limit myself to some introductory and cursory
remarks. In intermediality studies, it is common ground that precisely
separated media do not exist (cf. e.g. Elleström 2010; Müller 2007;
Schröter 2007). Against such a background in which monomedia or
media monads refer to each other and create an internal dimension,
the question of how intermediality should be conceptualised arises
anew. The answers to this question depend on the scholarly tradition
and/or the intention of the respondents. Elleström (2010), for
example, starts from the very beginning with a definition of media.
This approach, which he describes as bottom-up, introduces four
modalities that belong to every medium. These are the material
modality – the material a medium works with, like the human body or
sound waves for example; the sensorial modality, concerned with the
human senses that are addressed – seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting,
smelling; the spatiotemporal modality – different uses of time and
space; and the semiotic modality – the type of signs a medium uses
(symbolic, iconic, indexical). According to Elleström, all media can be
compared using these modalities. Furthermore, he discriminates basic
media from qualified media: “What I propose to call basic media, are
defined by the four modalities whereas qualified media are defined by
the four modalities and the two qualifying aspects. All qualified media
are based on one or more basic media.” (Elleström 2010, 35) Basic
media are, for example, “auditory texts” (e.g. spoken words),
“organized non-verbal sound” (e.g. music), “visual text” (e.g. written
words) or non-organised non-verbal sound (e.g. noise). This is
unfortunately the level at which this model becomes normative: Who
decides what a basic medium is and how to differentiate them? Is a
birdcall, for example, an organised or a non-organised sound?
Qualified media are media that are qualified as specific media, by the
operational qualifying aspect, which encompasses “the aesthetic and
communicative characteristics” (Elleström 2010, 25) of media and/or
the contextual qualifying aspect, which encompasses “the origin,
delimitation and use of media in specific historical, cultural and social
circumstances” (Elleström 2010, 24). Elleström considers such
qualifying aspects to be interactive and to be conventional.
Even if his model contains some problems, it makes perfectly clear
that the term ‘medium’ is often used for different things. For example,
a text and a book are both considered to be media. In Elleström’s terms
the text would be a basic medium while the book would be a qualified
medium that is based on the basic medium text.
In considering some problematic fields of more recent intermediality
studies, Irina Rajewsky identifies two fundamentally different interests
with respect to intermediality. On the one hand, these were studies
concerned with general questions of mediality or media analysis, and
on the other hand, there are approaches that aim at a concrete analysis
of medial works or performances (cf. Rajewsky 2007, 47–48). While
the former locate their tradition in media studies, the latter find their
tradition in the arts. In this chapter, I will concentrate on questions of
mediality or media analysis when comparing videogames, the theatre
and performances, by discussing the roles of the avatar and of the
spectator in videogames. But I will refer to specific games as examples
of intermedial relations that, in most cases, hold true for other games.
 Rajewsky (2007) refers to Bolter and Grusin (2000) when she finds
that in media studies intermediality is regarded as a basic requirement
for understanding media. This may be clarified with Schröter (2007),
who notices – with a reference to Saussure – that the position from
which one medium is regarded must take into account the network of
surrounding media which defines what is considered a medium. Or to
refer to Elleström again: The qualifying aspects decide what is
considered to be a certain medium, and these aspects are dependent
on all media. Rajewsky basically shares the assumption of a general
intermediality. But in citing Bolter and Grusin, she remarks that if “all
mediation is remediation” (Rajewsky 2007, 50) the concept would
encompass the whole of mediality and would oversee differences in the
techniques of intermedial references (cf. Rajewsky 2007, 51).
Therefore, Rajewsky proposes three subcategories:
a) media transformation (Medienwechsel), in which a media product
(e.g. a novel) is transformed into another medium (e.g. a film);
b) intermedial references, in which one distinct medium refers to
another;
c) media combination (Medienkombination), in which (formerly)
distinct media are combined in one medium. Or, as Georgi puts it,
media combination is “the combination of at least two
conventionally distinct media, which are materially present with
their respective sign systems and thus form constitutive parts of the
resulting work of art” (Georgi 2014, 30).
These subcategories are of differing importance with respect to
videogames and especially as regards my focus in this article. The first
category – media transformation – refers to the intermediality of
specific works or performances and does not deliver very fruitful
outcomes in an inquiry into the intermediality of videogames in
general, since today, in popular media, it is difficult or sometimes even
impossible to decide what came first. Often, movies and videogames
are synchronously produced. This was the case with James Cameron’s
Avatar (both, the film and the videogame, were released in December
2009) or Peter Jackson’s King Kong (Nov. and Dec. 2005), to name
only two. Other products, for example the Star Wars movies –
animated and live action –, the Star Wars television series,
videogames, comics, novels, action figures, puzzles, board games,
Lego-series, conventions, YouTube videos, T-shirts, mugs and
bedclothes, form a whole universe. Some of the relations between these
products may be captured by the term ‘transmedia storytelling’ (cf.
Jenkins 2011), but usually they are termed ‘transmedia worlds’ (cf.
Wolf 2013).
Intermedial references (the second subcategory) form the network of
transmedia worlds. These worlds are held together and enlarged by
constant references across media boundaries. Of course, such
references occur outside of transmedia worlds, too. Rajewsky, for
example, addresses the musicalisation of literature. In relation to the
subject of this article, such transfers could be called ludification (in the
sense of playfulness, as e.g. Joost Raessens uses the term, cf. Raessens
2006). An example for the ludification of a film, that is the transfer of
ludic elements into a film, is the film Run Lola Run. This film adopts a
typical element of games, namely, that a player has several lives, and
uses it for its narration. The film narrates its plot three times with
slight variations: The main character, Lola, tries to raise a lot of money
for her lover; twice she dies trying, the third time she succeeds. To
make this gamelike narration possible, further elements of games have
to be adopted. First of all, there are rules that provide for the
unchanged external conditions for the player (in the film: Lola) in
every match of a game, and by this enable the possibility of repetition
typical of games. By these three elements – three lives, unchanged
conditions (rules) and repetition – the film establishes the reference to
games. Tykwer additionally establishes a strong reference to
videogames in that Lola does not walk but runs – characters in
videogames usually run. Meanwhile, it is current practice for films to
use this narrative pattern (a multiform story according to Murray
1998, 30).
In the face of the last example, i.e. the adoption of certain elements
that belong to games and connote ‘gameness’, the question arises if
Schröter’s (1998, 2007) category of transmedial reference has to be
put alongside intermedial references, or if it could be considered to be
a subcategory of Rajewsky’s intermedial references, which in itself
remains relatively non-specific. Schröter considers transmedial
reference as a relation of media via a third element, a tertium
comparationis, and uses narration as an example. As a tertium
comparationis, narration can be used to compare media that narrate,
or as an organising structure that is realised in various media. In this
article, I will adopt this thought and consider the ludic as a tertium
comparationis as well. The ludic can be realised by certain
components like rules and repetitions, like roles, masks and avatars,
like play and performance. Playing a role or wearing a mask, for
example, cannot be considered behaviours that belong to a certain
medium; they are characteristics of the ludic that are realised in
certain situations, contexts or media – always with a certain
materiality and significance that is dependent on the respective
situation, context and medium.
Examples from the third subcategory, media combination, also seem
to be interesting for the analysis of the intermediality of videogames
because they are complex media in the same sense that film and
theatre are complex media, multimedia or hypermedia. Videogames as
qualified media comprise music, moving (animated) images, written
and spoken language, text, sound, and gestures; they operate with
filmic means (‘virtual camera’, editing), narration and of course ludic
elements. This subcategory will be used to describe the intermedial
relations between specific videogames and other medial works.

3 Basic Attributes of Performances and the

Theatre
Richard Schechner basically describes performances as “showing
doing” (Schechner 2013, 28), which means that activities are exhibited
in one way or another. This basic description implies that
performances have at least two parties: one that encompasses the
actors or exhibitors who show their deeds, and another that
encompasses the spectators who watch the show. Schechner
distinguishes eight kinds of performance. Performance may take place
in: 1) everyday life, such as cooking, socializing, and “just living”; 2) the
arts; 3) sports and other popular entertainments; 4) business; 5)
technology; 6) sex; 7) ritual – sacred or secular; 8) play (Schechner
2013, 31).
In business, sports, and sex, ‘to perform’ is to do something up to a standard – to succeed,
to excel. In the arts, ‘to perform’ is to put on a show, a play, a dance, a concert. In everyday
life, ‘to perform’ is to show off, to go to extremes, to underline an action for those who are
 watching. In the twenty-first century, people as never before live by means of
performance. (Schechner 2013, 28)

Apart from his strange (and probably gendered) conception of sex,

these characteristics of performance can all be found in videogames.
Performances and theatre have similarities and overlaps. Theatre is
surely a kind of performance, but has a special form. Classical theatre
takes place in a venue that is especially designed for performances and
separates the actors from the audience: While the performance of the
actors takes place on a stage, the audience is located in the auditorium.
Furthermore, performances in the theatre are usually based upon a
written play and the actors play a well-defined role. Actors in non-
theatrical performances may play a role as well, though probably,
especially in every-day performances, it may not be as well-defined a
role as in the theatre. Actors in the theatre usually wear costumes, in
non-theatrical performances they only sometimes wear costumes. In
the theatre as well as in performances, sometimes masks come into use
– for example in the ancient Greek theatre and some ritualised
performances.
Playhouses, costumes, roles and masks are ‘discretionary clauses’.
To qualify performances and theatre as distinct media, to make them
qualified media in Elleström’s words, other attributes are used.
‘Showing doing’ – the exhibition of actions for an audience – is a
necessary, but not a sufficient, condition. The showing must
additionally be done live. Performers, the performance and the
audience have to be co-present. They have to be at the same place at
the same time. From the beginning of theatre studies on bodily co-
presence, liveness was the qualifying attribute for both theatre and
performance (cf. Otto 2013, 51–67). An advocate of this view is Erika
Fischer-Lichte, who states:
Max Herrmann demonstrated that the specific mediality of performance consists of the
bodily co-presence of actors and spectators. Performance, then, requires two groups of
people, one acting and the other observing, to gather at the same time and place for a
given period of shared livetime. Their encounter – interactive and confrontational –
produces the event of the performance. (Fischer-Lichte 2008, 38)

Conjoined with the attribute of liveness are notions of uniqueness,

unpredictability, and ephemerality, the last of which is strongly
connected with presence and disappearance (for a discussion of these
attributes cf. Georgi 2014, 110–160).
 Thus, paradoxically, what makes theatre and performances qualified
media is the absence of mediatisation. But, as Philipp Auslander
(1999) has shown and Ulf Otto (2013) has later reinforced, the
enunciation of an absence of mediatisation only makes sense in the
face of mediatisation. “[H]istorically”, Auslander (1999, 51) states, “the
live is actually an effect of mediatization, not the other way around. […]
Prior to the advent of those technologies (e.g., sound recording and
motion pictures), there was no such thing as ‘live’ performance, for
that category has meaning only to an opposing possibility”. Or, using
Derrida’s (1967) deconstructive thought: For the first to become the
first, it is indispensable that there is a second. Without the media,
everything would be ‘live’ so that ‘live’ would not be a distinguishing
characteristic. Liveness itself is only thinkable in a network of
intermediality.

4 Actors and Spectators in Videogames

This section examines the relations between theatre, performance and
videogames, as well as the questions whether and how actors and
spectators, liveness, and ‘showing doing’ are to be found in
videogames. For a videogame it is evident that actors – people who
play – are necessary, but it is less evident that there are spectators, too.
In the early 1990s, Brenda Laurel already used the metaphor of the
theatre in her book Computers as Theatre to explain human-computer
interaction. She starts with the thesis that the “interesting potential [of
a computer] lay not in its ability to perform calculations but in its
capacity to represent action in which humans could participate”
(Laurel 1993, 1). Laurel considers the actions of a user as “an
indispensable ingredient of the representation, since it is only through
a person’s actions that all dimensions of the representation can be
manifest” (Laurel 1993, 2). According to [this, …] she conceptualises
the interface of a computer as the context for action in which the user
and the computer are agents. Interfaces both enable and represent
actions. They become the arena for the performance of some task in
which both humans and computers have a role. Thus, interface design
should concern itself with “representing whole actions with multiple
agents” (Laurel 1993, 7).
 According to Laurel, theatrical design and interface design are aimed
at creating representations of worlds. Just like theatrical scene
designers, interface designers create representations of objects and
environments that provide a context for action. Laurel refuses the
notion of an interface as something between a user and a computer.
she prefers to consider the interface as a stage on which the actions of
different actors take place. To give an example: This stage, provided by
the computer, may be a soccer field, on which two digital soccer teams
play against each other. The actions of the players, both those who are
generated and controlled by the computer (non-player characters or
NPCs) and the players that are generated by the computer but
controlled by a user, take place on the soccer field or stage. In Laurel’s
terms: The spectators, who are definitely part of the situation in the
theatre but excluded from the happenings on the stage, disappear and
become actors. Unfortunately, she does not explain how a spectator
can become an actor, how this transformation can become possible.
“[T]he representation is all there is” (Laurel 1993, 17) is her only
statement.
Game studies work on the explanation for this transformation. In
videogames, such transformation is conducted insofar as the player of
a game is ‘duplicated’. A player of a videogame plays the game by
moving a cursor, a crosshairs, a hand, an avatar, or any other symbol
generated by the programme. Krämer (2000) calls this symbol the
semiotic or databody of a player, which is necessary for interacting
with the digital environment. While the player corporeally remains
outside the digital game world (in Laurel’s terms, the stage), her
semiotic body replaces her in this world (or on the stage, respectively).
Since the semiotic body is generated according to the rules and the
fiction of the game, it perfectly fits on the stage. The player
manipulates this body, and with its help the game world, and watches
the outcome of her manipulations. In that way s/he is her own
spectator, so that playing a videogame can be considered a kind of self-
observation (cf. Neitzel 2005, 230).
Game studies literature discusses the relationship between a player
and her semiotic body, especially in the form of an avatar, in various
ways. Some scholars consider the avatar to be a representation of the
player, others argue that the player is the avatar or becomes her avatar
in the course of the game, and still others claim that the avatar is
conceptualised as a fictional figure. Alison McMahan describes avatars
as “textual or graphic representations of users that include a character
designed to fit into the fictional environment in question, complete
with a set of personality traits, skills, and health status” (McMahan
2003, 74, emphasis mine). Thus, the avatar has a double functionality:
For one, it is a representation of the player, but it is also a fictional
figure of the game-world. Contrary to McMahan, Fullop (in Frasca
2001) describes the avatar as a play-instance with which the player
merges. This means there exists an identity, or at least a short-circuit,
in the relation between avatar and player. Fullop additionally states
that the avatar is nothing but a cursor. As Klevjer (2006) highlights,
this “cursor-theory” (I suggest calling it “tool-theory”) emphasises the
instrumental function of the avatar, that serves as a tool for the player,
enabling her to act in the fictional game world (cf. also Neitzel 2004).
Although this is surely the case, an avatar is more than a cursor. While
a cursor is nothing more than the display of the position for the next
input, an avatar is at least a bundle of capacities and capabilities (cf.
Newman 2002; Neitzel 2004). It can jump, run, shoot, sometimes
speak or cast spells, etc. But it still remains the very position from
where the player can act in the fictional game world. It marks the
‘point-of-action’, as I have called it (cf. Neitzel 2000, 2004, 2007).
Apart from its instrumental functions, an avatar is also part of the
fiction. Its appearance, its name, and probably its backstory belong to
the fictional world of the game. As part of the game world and
especially as hero in a game’s underlying narrative, the avatar gives
sense to the particular actions it carries out. Max Weber (1980, 1)
distinguishes behaviour from action in respect to their senses. Action
is meaningful when it is aimed at something else, when it connects an
initial condition with a target. In Luhmann’s (1971, 26) terms, sense is
always a construction of a reasonable social or psychic system. Thus,
while the avatar as a fictional figure can give sense to the diegetic game
actions, a cursor cannot, because it can hardly be considered a psychic
system.
It is exactly this integration in the fictional world that renders the
notion of avatars as representations of users problematic. A figure that
belongs to a fictional environment cannot represent a player who does
not belong to that environment. This is the problem that Laurel (1993,
16–17) refers to when she states that just putting an audience on a
theatre stage would cause confusion. But there is of course a relation
between the player and the avatar. A player is dependent on the avatar
to carry out actions in the fiction. In some games, the player can even
determine some attributes of the avatar. Yet, to call this a
representation of the player would stretch the term too far. In
multiplayer games, an avatar can be called a representative of a player
in the sense that it stands in for the player and other players encounter
her by meeting the avatar. Klevjer calls it a “vicarious body” that “gives
the player a subject-position within a simulated environment” (Klevjer
2006, 10).
To summarise, many discourses and aspects of a game meet in the
figure of the avatar: the instrumental (it is a tool that enables actions in
the game’s diegesis); the fictional (it is part of the game’s diegesis); and
the social (it is the representative of a player). As a tool, the avatar
positions the player in the fictional world. As a fictional figure, the
avatar enables the player to play (with) a role. As a representative of
the player, it is comparable to a mask. For upcoming studies of
intermediality, it would be reasonable to further examine and compare
the functions of roles in the theatre and in videogames, as well as the
functions of masks, avatars and user-profiles in social media.

5 Performances in Videogames

5.1 Single and Group Performances in Games

Whichever form the avatar may have, the player can always watch it
from outside. The avatar is a tool and a character in one, so that a kind
of self-observation can take place. The player becomes her own
spectator. This is the basic alignment of videogames. It can be
described with the help of Plessner’s (1975 [1928]) differentiation
between having a body and being a body. A player has a body in the
form of her avatar, but is a body in front of the computer monitor.
Because of and with the help of this alignment a player can rehearse
her game. The audiovisual displays of the computer give her feedback
about the quality of her actions. Like dancers or actors who can
rehearse in front of a mirror, a videogame player can rehearse with the
help of the screen and the speakers. Krämer (1995, 229) has indicated
the similarities of mirror images and virtual images. According to
Krämer, a mirror creates a second place for the object in front of the
mirror and thereby enables a person to see herself with the eyes of
others, as “virtuality […] rests on illusory positionings that enable a
spectator to receive sensations that are impossible to receive from the
place in which her physical body is factually located” (Krämer 1995,
229, translation mine). These actions in videogames can be described
as restored behaviour (cf. Schechner 2013, 29), as action that people
train or rehearse for, which are not being executed for the first time.
On the one hand, the rehearsal can serve a player’s own
performance, which will improve and could possibly get quantified and
displayed as a highscore. On the other hand, it can be a preparation for
joint playing. In addition to the audiovisual feedback, most
videogames further support the rehearsal of or for a performance.
Many games have introductory or training levels in which players learn
the basic movements necessary for playing the game. A tangible
example of the invitation to train is the training dummies that are
placed in the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing
Game) World of Warcraft (WoW) in the military quarters of the
capital cities of the game’s factions. Integrated in the game’s narration
of the eternal fight between the Alliance and the Horde, training with
the dummies in the capitals again articulates the double function of the
avatar. The player simultaneously trains for her own performance in
the game while the fictional figure trains for her fight against the
opposing faction.
The trained movements can be presented by the player in single
combats (either against NPCs or against the avatars of other players)
or in-group performances. An example for a single combat is the so-
called duel to which a player can challenge another (even of her own
faction). Players can duel nearly everywhere in the game world, but
duels are often carried out in front of the gates of the capitals (the
cities themselves are ‘safe’ zones). Here, at the gates, many players’
characters pass by, can be challenged or watch the duels. Sometimes
the gates of Stormwind or Orgrimmar resemble a circus, with one duel
after the other, characters watching or joining. Again, the duels
themselves can be regarded as training for the player vs. player (PvP)
battles in which groups of players from the opposing factions fight
each other. These battles demand skills that cannot be trained for with
the dummies, but demand experience from fights with other players.
Apart from the PvP battles, the abilities of a player are also
presented in group combats against computer-generated enemies
(Player vs. Environment – PvE) – in dungeons or raids. Here, five or
more players play together to beat exceptionally strong enemies.
Untrained players or untrained groups usually lose these fights in the
first attempts. A dungeon will not be completed victoriously until the
group has acquired the ability to act in concert and is acquainted with
the enemies and their abilities as well as the spatial circumstances. In
the words of David Seamon (1980), the battles in these dungeons can
be called “place ballets”. These are actions that can be carried out in a
routinised and – so to speak – preconscious fashion due to frequent
rehearsal at a certain place. The sequences of actions are standardised
to achieve the best possible outcome under time pressure. Like a
theatre performance that has been practised repeatedly, they differ
only in nuances from former performances; the sequences in the
dungeons only differ minimally when carried out by practised groups.

5.2 Transmissions of Live Performances:

Guides, E-Sports and Let’s Plays
Like theatre or everyday performances, these live performances in
videogames can be recorded – often with tools already implemented in
the game – and displayed again. Recorded performances of PvE
dungeons for example are sometimes used as dungeon guides to help
unexperienced players gather information about a certain dungeon.
The guides use different symbolic codes (in Elleström’s terms, basic
media). Some appear in the form of written text (e.g. www.icy-
veins.com/wow/raid-guides), others in the form of a video recording of
a dungeon performance with spoken commentary (e.g.
hordeguides.de). The first form can be considered a textual instruction
on how to act. Thus, they belong to the family of repair instructions or
cooking recipes in books (or meanwhile, on the internet). The latter
form is comparable with video instructions for a certain dance. The
guides are published on YouTube or on the websites of the guilds that
have performed in the dungeon. Aside from their function as guides,
the videos also exhibit the mastery of the group that has performed in
the dungeon. On YouTube, one finds diverse videos of bossfights or
final battles that do not raise the www.icy-veins.com/wow/raid-
guides), others in the form of a video recording of a dungeon
performance with spoken commentary (e.g. hordeguides.de). The first
form can be considered a textual instruction on how to act. Thus, they
belong to the family of repair instructions or cooking recipes in books
(or meanwhile, on the internet). The latter form is comparable with
video instructions for a certain dance. The guides are published on
YouTube or on the websites of the guilds that have performed in the
dungeon. Aside from their function as guides, the videos also exhibit
the mastery of the group that has performed in the dungeon. On
YouTube, one finds diverse videos of bossfights or final battles that do
not raise the claim to be guides. These videos, usually with music
added, only show the achievement of the guilds or teams. Guilds which
are able to master a dungeon or a raid first, or very early on, often
enjoy a great reputation among the members of the community.
Especially ambitious and skilled players are organised into so-called
e-sports leagues, or they play at e-sports tournaments. Organised like
other sports events, players compete against others in different classes
and different sports (that is, games). The World Cyber Games (WCG),
which took place annually from 2000 until 2013, was the largest such
tournament in recent years. The WCG aimed at being the Olympic
Games of e-sports, with between 170 and 800 players from 40
countries upwards participating in the finals (“World Cyber Games”).
Yet there are also a lot of smaller events. The developer and publisher
Blizzard for example organises the yearly Blizzcon. During the
convention, several tournaments in different games take place. They
can be watched on location at the Blizzcon and interested audiences
can also buy a virtual ticket to follow the discussions and the matches
of the convention via livestream on the internet. The presentation of
the matches (not only of the Blizzcon tournaments) resembles the
broadcast of a football match. Usually, two commentators, sitting
behind a desk on which two monitors are placed, start the
transmission with the verbal analysis of the teams and their expected
tactics. After this introduction, the match begins. The audience sees
the visual display of the match with information on the progress of the
two teams (the teams only see their own progress) and hear the
commentary on the actions. When the matches begin, the verbal
comments depart from a television broadcast and start to resemble a
radio broadcast. The commentators talk at enormous speed with
excitement in their voices.
As with the videogame industry in general, e-sports have become a
huge business, with sponsoring from the soft- and hardware industry,
internet channels for live streaming (e.g. www.twitch.tv) and
professional organisers and players. Thus, they do not significantly
differ from other professional sports. Also in respect to the live
transmissions, there are resemblances to other live events: Spectators
can attend in a sports arena and/or view the audiovisual live
transmission.
Another form of the presentation of videogame performances are the
so-called let’s plays. Since approximately 2010, players record their
game performances, add a commentary and display them on YouTube.
In the ensuing time, this has become a famous genre of internet videos
(on October 10th 2014, the search term “let’s play” provided over 24
million entries on Google). In let’s plays, the spectators see the game
screen, hear the commentary, and in most cases they see another small
window that shows the player in a close up commenting on her
gameplay. In this alignment, the player is not only her own spectator,
as in the basic alignment of videogames, but also her own
commentator.
The aim of this form of exhibition is not to provide a guide for other
players or to show an especially good performance, but to put the
game-experience on display. This becomes apparent by the many let’s
plays that display the first match of a game. The commentary of these
let’s plays often poses questions an unexperienced player might ask.
Also, emotions – joy after a successful move, fear in a certain situation
– as they may come up in playing a game are (most of the time
hyperbolically) shown in let’s plays (cf. KingAnonymous187). Let’s
plays reveal and highlight elements of a game that usually only pass by.
They are a highly self-referential genre that aims at exhibiting the
performative nature of videogames. But they highlight and comment
on not only the performance of players, but also the performance of the
computer and computer-generated characters. Some creators of let’s
plays have themselves created a large fan base and become internet
stars.
With the concentration on the performance in and of videogames,
let’s plays differ from machinima, “the making of animated movies in
real time through the use of computer game technology” (Lowood
2005, 10). These videos, created with the game engines, transform the
game into a narration, a comic situation, a lyrical impression, and
many other forms. One of the oldest, most successful and entertaining
is the Red vs. Blue series based on the Halo games, which has, in the
meantime, also become available on Blu-ray Disk. While machinima
can be considered to be videos about possible happenings in a game’s
diegesis, let’s plays are videos about possible ways of playing the game.

5.3 Performances in Public Spaces

There are two sorts of performances that – related to videogames –
take place in public spaces: for one in the public space of MMORPGs
(here I will again draw on the example WoW), for the other in public
spaces in the city. As a first example for public performances in WoW,
the duels in front of the city gates have already been mentioned. The
capital cities of WoW are home to various shops, quest givers for daily
quests, transport infrastructure, banks and – most importantly – the
auction houses. Thus, many players visit the cities regularly. They are
places in the game’s world where players stay if they do not have
quests to complete or dungeons to master, but wait for an invitation to
a dungeon or just hang around and socialise. In the early evenings,
when many players are online, the cities are frequented or –
sometimes – crowded. The cities are places for, as Schechner calls it,
performances in everyday life. Here, where many others are around,
players or guilds can ‘show off’: Some players may be kissing each
other – ‘kissing’ is done by clicking on another character and type
“/kiss”, the other players then can read “x blows a kiss to y” in the chat
window –, some tell jokes (“/joke”) or dance (“/dance”) or they strut
around with arms flicking imitating the clucking of a chicken
(“/chicken”). Guilds may show off by gathering in front of a bank,
everyone sitting on an impressive mount. In these performances the
role-playing as well as the social aspects of the game come to the fore.
In the form of their avatars, and masked by their avatars, players can
overact, play a certain role or just behave unusually more easily than
without an avatar.
Apart from these everyday performances, WoW has a long tradition
of in-game protests. The oldest one is supposedly the gnome’s walk. In
2005, only a few months after the game went online, players of the
warrior class created level-one gnomes and walked into Ironforge, one
of the capital cities of WoW, to protest against changes in the design of
their class that had affected the gameplay. In WoW the players are able
to undress their game characters; thus, there were not only hundreds
of gnomes walking into Ironforge, but they were all (nearly) naked (cf.
Foton 2005; Andrews 2014). The protest march had a double aesthetic
quality. Not only did the players choose the gnomes as means of
protest, they also decided to undress, and because of this masquerade
the demonstration became an art form.
But WoW players do not only protest for the quality of the game. As
a digital environment that is frequently visited by more than 10 million
people from all over the world, WoW has also been used for political
demonstrations from outside the world of warcraft. In 2009, the PETA
organisation called on WoW’s Northrend to demonstrate against seal
slaughter in Canada (cf. Huling 2009; Can 2009). Not without wit, this
demonstration was supposed to take place in the area where an in-
game organisation called D.E.H.T.A (Druids for the Ethical and
Humane Treatment of Animals) fights the big game hunter and author
of The Green Hills of Stranglethorn, Hemet Nesingwary, and his
friends.
These performances – the everyday performances, the in-game
protests for better gameplay, and the political demonstrations – can be
considered to have a live character. They take place and can be
attended in WoW on a certain server at a certain in-game location at a
certain point in time. People who are not there at that time with their
semiotic bodies can only get notice of the events through ‘the media’:
YouTube videos, blogs, newspapers, news on television, or (text)books.
For example, there is no video of the PETA demonstration accessible
on the internet (albeit there are many videos that positively, negatively
or satirically refer to the demonstration), so that no one except a
participant or a spectator of the live event knows if this demonstration
actually took place.
Georgi states that liveness is dependent on “[physical] co-presence
and being alive though threatened by death and disappearance” (2012,
104). She further acts on the assumption that videogames simulate co-
presence and only “create the illusion of being an active participant in
an alternative reality” (Georgi 2014, 167). I do not want to neglect the
differences between theatre and performances in videogames, but
Georgi’s assumptions create a gap that is far too big and overlooks the
ability of play, including that in videogames, to establish presence.
As a material modality, physical co-presence belongs to theatre and
performance, it is not a qualifying aspect for videogames. Yet in
tournaments, playing together on a console, PC or mobile device, in a
LAN or a location-based game, the players of videogames are
physically co-present. And even in these situations of gameplay there is
a difference as regards both theatre and live performance: It is a co-
presence among players and not a co-presence among actors and
audience that is instantiated. But do the other games simulate co-
presence and only create an illusion of participation? The two
assumptions belong together. Videogames do not simulate physical co-
presence. Every player sitting at her desk is well aware that it is not her
physical body in the game’s diegesis, even if the physical body is
involved in and defined by playing the game (cf. Krämer 2002, 59).
Bodies in the diegesis of a videogame are signs for physical bodies that
have their own in-game physicality and are by no means threatened by
death (on the contrary, they are immortal). As many let’s plays show,
players have an awareness that the in-game bodies are just digital
signs. But this does not mean that multiplayer videogames do not
create a co-presence. Players of these games actualise a virtual reality
by their performances and only in the moment of their performances;
they do not participate in an alternative reality. Virtual realities are
defined as possibilities that can be actualised by the activities of users
(cf. Münker 1997, 2000). A game (every game, not just a videogame)
provides these possibilities that are transformed into actualities during
play. Presence (Gegenwärtigkeit), connected with unpredictability, is a
qualifying aspect of play (cf. Scheuerl 1999 [1954], 47). In conjunction
with its repeatability, it even aims at an expansion of presence (cf.
Neitzel 2000, 44–45). Even without bodily involvement videogames
take place live.
In what remains, I will consider performances in videogames that do
not take place in virtual but in material locations and take the so-called
location based games as example. The oldest videogame (or one of the
oldest videogames) that was played in the streets has been named Pac
Manhattan. In 2004, a group of players transformed the arcade
gamePacMan into a physical version. Some players were dressed as
ghosts and one as PacMac, and they used the streets of Manhattan as a
playground, while others acted as ‘controllers’, connected with the
players in the streets via mobile phones (cf. Pacmanhattan). The basic
alignment of videogames – the integration of actor and spectator in the
person of the player – is unravelled in this game. A player in the streets
merely acts in the fictional game world (that overlays the material
city), but s/he needs the controller’s gaze from outside to provide an
overview necessary for orientation in the game world.
Today, location based games are played with smartphones that are
equipped with a GPS function to locate the position of the player or the
phone. I will concentrate on the example of Ingress here. The game
was created by the Google subsidiary Niantic Labs and uses a
modification of the Google map as one of its two playgrounds. While
the usual signs for landmarks on a map are erased – the Ingress map
has a black background with only the streets, official footpaths, rivers
and lakes visible – this map displays ‘portals’ through which ‘exotic
matter’ streams onto earth. The task for the players is to conquer the
portals for their own faction (the enlightened or the resistance) in
order to either promote the influence of the ‘exotic matter’ or to
obstruct it. Captured portals are colour-coded (green for the
enlightened, blue for the resistance) and can be linked with other
portals of the same colour. If a player links three portals with each
other, s/he establishes a field and captures ‘mind units’.
By the acts of the players, the formerly black map is covered with
green and blue portals and fields during the course of the game. In
addition to this visual and digital side of the game, there is a material
one. The digital portals on the map are linked to objects in the physical
world (artworks in public spaces, special places, pubs, etc.). To be able
to capture a portal or create a link, players have to approach these
objects bodily with the GPS, confirming their position. In so doing,
they save the world in the game’s diegesis. For creating links and fields
in Ingress players walk around a block several times, they go back and
forth, they stand in front of a church or another noticeable building for
quite some time pressing on their smartphones. This is not a ‘normal’
behaviour but an in-game performance in public. Or, as a player has
put it: “Walking around looking weird with my device, with a cool
reason to do so” (Lui 2013). Passers-by do not have to be astonished,
but they could be. This might even be more likely when a group of
people, all equipped with smartphones, behaves like this. Apart from
gatherings of local Ingress players, this is the case in the events
organised by Niantic, which can only be won if players play and walk
together.
The game Ingress does not stand alone. It is accompanied by a
background story told in a video on the ingress.com website, the
weekly Ingress Report that spins this story further, introduces new
game features, and reports on players’ (agents’) activities. The report is
displayed on YouTube and sent to players by email. Additionally,
players get emails when a portal they own is attacked, and three e-
books on the game are available. Ingress is a cross-media product.
Yet Ingress is just one example for location based games, which in
turn include just one of many forms of performances in videogames
that exist. To conclude, what all of them have in common is the
coupling of presence and unpredictability, a coupling that informs the
notion of performance in videogames. This coupling is of importance
irrespective of the number of players or the particular localities (in
virtual or physical space) involved – and it demonstrates the
importance of the ludic as a connector not only of different agents in
this process, but also, ultimately, different media.

6 Bibliography

6.1 Works Cited

Andrews, Scott. “WoW Archivist: Class Protests and the Million
Gnome March.” 8 Oct. 2014. wow. joystiq.com/2014/10/08/wow-
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2014).
Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture.
London and New York: Routledge, 1999.
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding
New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.
Can. “World of Warcraft”: Peta protestiert in Online Spielen gegen
Robben-Schlächter. 11 Apr. 2009.
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Derrida, Jacques. De la grammatologie. Paris: Editions du minuit,
1967.
Elleström, Lars. “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding
Intermedial Relations.” Media Borders, Multimodality and
Intermediality. Ed. Lars Elleström, Jorgen Bruhn, and Siglind
Bruhn. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010. 11–48.
Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A
New Aesthetics. London and New York: Routledge, 2008.
Foton. The Gnome Tea Party. 28 Jan. 2005.
afkgamer.com/archives/2005/01/28/the-gnome-tea-party/. (14.
Oct. 2014).
Frasca, Gonzalo. “Ludologists Love Stories, too: Notes from a Debate
that Never Took Place.” Level Up: Digital Research Conference.
Ed. Marinka Copier and Joost Raessens. Utrecht: Utrecht University
Press, 2003. 92–99.
Georgi, Claudia. Liveness and Mediatisation: The Use of Film and
Video in Contemporary British Theatre and Performance.
Dissertation submitted to the University of Göttingen. Göttingen,
2012.
Georgi, Claudia. Liveness on Stage: Intermedial Challenges in
Contemporary British Theatre and Performance. Berlin and
Boston: De Gruyter, 2014.
Huling, Ryan. Help Battle Seal Slaughterers in World of Warcraft. 6
 Apr. 2009. www.peta.org/blog/help-battle-seal-slaughterers-world-
warcraft/. (14. Oct. 2014).
Järvinen, Aki. “Gran Stylissimo: The Audiovisual Elements and Styles
in Computer and Video Games.” Computer Games and Digital
Cultures Conference Proceedings. Ed. Frans Mäyrä. Tampere:
Tampere University Press, 2002. 113–128. www.digra.org/wp-
content/uploads/digital-library/05164.35393.pdf. (3 Feb. 2015).
Jenkins, Henry. Transmedia 202: Further Reflections. Confessions of
an Aca-Fan. Weblog. 11 Aug. 2011.
henryjenkins.org/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html/.
(26 Oct. 2014).
King, Geoff, and Tanya Krzywinska, eds. Screenplay:
Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces. London and New York: Wallflower
Press, 2002.
Klevjer, Rune. What is the Avatar? Fiction and Embodiment in Avatar-
based Singleplayer Computer Games. Bergen: University of Bergen,
2006. folk.uib.no/…/RuneKlevjer_What%20is%20
the%20Avatar_finalprint.pdf/. (10 Oct. 2014).
Krämer, Sybille. “Spielerische Interaktion. Überlegungen zu unserem
Umgang mit Instrumenten.” Schöne neue Welten? Auf dem Weg zu
einer neuen Spielkultur. Ed. Florian Rötzer. Munich: Boer, 1995.
225–236.
Krämer, Sybille. “‘Performativität’ und ‘Verkörperung’: Über zwei
Leitlinien für eine Reflexion der Medien.” Neue Vorträge zur
Medienkultur. Ed. Claus Pias. Weimar: VDG, 2000. 185–197.
Krämer, Sybille. “Verschwindet der Körper? Ein Kommentar zu
virtuellen Räumen.” Raum – Wissen – Macht. Ed. Rudolf Maresch
and Niels Werber. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002.
Laurel, Brenda. Computers as Theatre. Reading: Addison Wesley,
1993.
Lowood, Henry. “Real-Time Performance: Machinima and Game
Studies.” The International Digital Media & Arts Association
Journal 2.1 (2005): 10–17.
Luhmann, Niklas. “Sinn als Grundbegriff der Soziologie.” Theorie der
 Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie – Was leistet die
Systemforschung? Ed. Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann.
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971. 25–100.
Lui. The Demographics of Ingress. Simulacrum. Technology,
Economics, and Anthropology. 23 Jan. 2013.
simulacrum.cc/2013/01/23/the-demographics-of-ingress/. (14
Oct. 2014).
McMahan, Alison. “Immersion, Engagement, and Presence: A Method
for Analyzing 3-D Video Games.” The Video Game Theory Reader.
Ed. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron. New York: Routledge,
2003. 67–86.
Müller, Jürgen E. “Intermedialität und Medienhistoriographie.”
Intermedialität Analog/Digital: Theorien, Methoden, Analysen.
Ed. Joachim Paech and Jens Schröter. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007.
31–46.
Münker, Stefan. “Was heißt eigentlich: ‘virtuelle Realität’? Ein
philosophischer Kommentar zum neuesten Versuch der
Verdoppelung der Welt.” Mythos Internet. Ed. Stefan Münker and
Alexander Roesler. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997. 108–127.
Münker, Stefan. “Vermittelte Stimmen, elektrische Welten:
Anmerkungen zu einer Frühgeschichte des Virtuellen.”
Telefonbuch. Ed. Stefan Münker and Alexander Rösler. Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000. 185–198.
Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in
Cyberspace. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.
Neitzel, Britta. Gespielte Geschichten: Struktur- und
prozessanalytische Untersuchungen der Narrativität von
Videospielen. Weimar: University of Weimar, 2000. www.db-
thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-
2063/Dissertation.html/. (10 Oct. 2014).
Neitzel, Britta. “Wer bin ich? Zur Avatar-Spieler Bindung.” “See? I’m
real…” Multidisziplinäre Zugänge zum Computerspiel am Beispiel
von “Silent Hill.” Ed. Britta Neitzel, Rolf F. Nohr, and Matthias
Bopp. Münster: Lit, 2004. 193–212.
Neitzel, Britta. “Narrativity in Computer Games.” Handbook of
 Computer Game Studies. Ed. Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein.
Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2005. 227–245.
Neitzel, Britta. “Point of View und Point of Action – eine Perspektive
auf die Perspektive in Computerspielen.” Computer/Spiel/Räume:
Materialien zur Einführung in die Computer Game Studies. Ed.
Klaus Bartels and Jan Noël Thon. Hamburg: Institut für Medien und
Kommunikation Universität Hamburg, 2007. 8–28.
Newman, James. “The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame: Some
Thoughts on Player-character Relationships in Videogames.” Game
Studies 2.1 (2002). www.gamestudies.org/0102/newman/. (10 Oct.
2014).
Otto, Ulf. Internetauftritte: Eine Theatergeschichte der neuen
Medien. Bielefeld: transcript, 2013.
Pacmanhattan. pacmanhattan.com/about.php. 2004. (26 Oct. 2014).
Paech, Joachim, ed. Film, Fernsehen, Video und die Künste.
Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993.
Plessner, Hellmuth. Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch:
Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie. 1928. Berlin and
New York: De Gruyter, 1975.
Raessens, Joost. “Computer Games as Participatory Media Culture.”
Handbook of Computer Game Studies. Ed. Joost Raessens and
Jeffrey Goldstein. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2005. 373–
388.
Raessens, Joost. “Playful Identities, or the Ludification of Culture.”
Games and Culture 1.1 (2006): 52–57.
Rajewsky, Irina. “Intermedialität und remediation: Überlegungen zu
einigen Problemfeldern der jüngeren Intermedialitätsforschung.”
Intermedialität Analog/Digital: Theorien, Methoden, Analysen.
Ed. Joachim Paech and Jens Schröter. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007.
47–60.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2006.
Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. London
and New York: Routledge, 2013.
Scheuerl, Hans. Das Spiel. 1954. Weinheim and Basel: Beltz, 1990.
Schröter, Jens. “Intermedialität: Facetten und Probleme eines
aktuellen medienwissenschaftlichen Begriffs.” montage/av 7.2
(1998): 129–154.
Schröter, Jens. “Das ur-intermediale Netzwerk und die (Neu-
)Erfindung des Mediums im (digitalen) Modernismus: Ein Versuch.”
Intermedialität Analog/Digital: Theorien, Methoden, Analysen.
Ed. Joachim Paech and Jens Schröter. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007.
579–601.
Seamon, David. “Body Ballets, Time-space Routines and Place
Ballets.” The Human Experience of Space and Place. Ed. Anne
Buttimer and David Seamon. London: Croom Helm, 1980. 146–165.
Weber, Max. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. 1921/1922. Ed. Johannes
Winckelmann. Tübingen: Mohr, 51980.
“World Cyber Games.” Wikipedia.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Cyber_Games/. (14 Oct. 2014).
Wolf, Mark J. P. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History
of Subcreation. New York: Routledge, 2013.

6.2 Further Reading

Ackermann, Judith. “Masken und Maskierungsstrategien – Identität
und Identifikation im Netz.” Social Media: Theorie und Praxis
digitaler Sozialität. Ed. Caja Thimm and Marios Anastasiadis.
Frankfurt and New York: Peter Lang, 2011. 59–84.
Bay-Cheng, Sarah, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender, and Robin
Nelson, eds. Mapping Intermediality in Performance. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2010.
Chapple, Freda, and Chiel Kattenbelt. Intermediality in Theatre and
Performance. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006.
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New
York: Doubleday, 1959.
Nitsche, Michael. “Performance.” The Routledge Companion to Video
 Game Studies. Ed. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron. London and
New York: Routledge, 2014. 388–395.
Widrich, Mechthild. “Geschichtete Präsenz und zeitgenössische
Performance: Marina Abramovićs The Artist is Present.”
Authentizität und Wiederholung: Künstlerische und kulturelle
Manifestation eines Paradoxes. Ed. Uta Daur. Bielefeld: transcript,
2013. 147–166.

6.3 Games, Films, Internet Videos

Avatar. Dir. James Cameron. Narr. James Cameron. Twentieth
Century Fox. 2009.
Halo Series. Developer: Bungie, Ensemble Studios, 343 Industries,
Microsoft. Publisher: Microsoft. 2001–2013.
Ingress. Developer: Niantic Labs. Publisher: Google. 2013–.
Ingress Report. 25 Sept. 2014. www.youtube.com/watch?
v=NPIWrOvHogg/. (15 Feb. 2015).
KingAnonymous187: Gronkh erschreckt sich beim Cry of Fear spielen –
BEST OF. 29 Jan. 2013. www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzXXl_01yoY/.
(14 Oct. 2014).
King Kong. Dir. Peter Jackson. Narr. Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens,
Peter Jackson. Universal Pictures. 2005.
PacMan. Developer: Namco. Publisher: Namco, Midway. 1980.
Pacmanhattan. Pacmanhattan Team. pacmanhattan.com. 2004. (15
Feb. 2015).
Red vs. Blue. Dir. Burnie Burns, Matt Hullum, Gavin Free, Miles Luna.
Narr. Burnie Burns, Matt Hullum, Miles Luna, Monty Oum, Eddy
Rivas. Rooster Teeth. 2003–.
Run Lola Run. Dir. Tom Tykwer. Narr. Tom Tykwer. X-Filme. 1998.
[German original Lola rennt].
____
Part III Intermedial Methodology and
Intersectionalities
Wolfgang Hallet

32 A Methodology of Intermediality
in Literary Studies
Abstract: This contribution to the handbook seeks to systematize and
explain the various categories that are available for an intermedial
analysis of a given literary text and, in terms of a methodology, provide
appropriate questions for intermedial investigations. In particular,
these encompass the recognition and identification of different types of
intermedial relations between a given literary text and other media and
the systemic levels at which intermedial relations can be observed and
described. With regard to literary analysis and interpretation, two
major parts of this contribution are concerned with the possible
functions of intermedial reference, both within the literary text itself
(close reading) and in the wider context in which a literary text is
situated or to which it refers as a cultural or historical context (wide
reading).
Key Terms: Multimodality, intra- and extratextual functions of
intermediality, genre-specific intermediality, semiotic modes,
metafiction

1 Challenges of a Methodology of Intermediality

This handbook of intermediality is proof of the vast variety and broad
scope of interrelations between literary texts and other medial forms of
all kinds, and of the countless number of ways in which media can be
represented in literary texts. Furthermore, in connection with the
representation of other media, ‘literature’ is in itself a very general
term that encompasses a large variety of texts and genres that can be
expected to incorporate other media in very specific ways. Also,
‘literature’ is unspecific in terms of content and form, a distinction that
has to be made whenever the effect of another medium in or on a
literary text has to be described. Last but not least, the range of media
that can be referenced or represented in a literary text may range from
a TV set and a film camera to a newspaper article or a pop song and its
composer, to name but a very few instances of intermediality.
Methodologically, a first basic distinction that needs to be made
concerns the sensual and empirical (unmediated) presence of at least
one other medium as an integral part of a work of literature or art on
the one hand (‘overt intermediality’ in Wolf’s terminology, cf. Wolf
1999, 37–44, ‘multimodality’ in social semiotic approaches; 34 Non-
verbal Semiotic Modes and Media in the Multimodal Novel), and the
transformation of another medium into a literary verbal text on the
other (‘covert intermediality’ in Wolf’s terminology). The most obvious
examples of what in Wolf’s terminology is defined as overt
intermediality would be the opera or the film as a combination of
language, music, sound etc. As a rule, such conventionalized forms of
the co-presence of different media in one work of art constitute literary
or aesthetic genres of their own with a very specific and
conventionalized interrelation between the different media and have
therefore also been termed ‘plurimediality’ (as in the case of the
theater play; cf. Pfister 2001, 24–29), or the ‘multimodality’ of film (cf.
Bateman and Schmidt 2012, 75–98) or of novels (‘the multimodal
novel,’ cf. Hallet 2014).
Generally speaking it can be contended that the study of plurimedial
and multimodal literary works requires and actually has generated
genre-specific conceptualizations and methodologies to the extent that
new disciplines like theater, film or game studies have emerged which
specialize in the study of these generic types of medial co-presence.
Even if, in terms of the discipline, plurimedial or multimodal works of
literature are investigated in literary studies, the languages and modes
of signification may be so specific that, as in the case of the comic strip
or the graphic novel, it may be difficult to grasp them merely within
the framework of intermediality. The comic strip, for instance,
challenges such culturally established and conventionalized medial
boundaries as that between the word and the image (cf. Rippl 2005,
31–35), since comics and graphic novels have developed a
multisemiotic language of their own which encompasses, e.g., sound
words or the very important device of the gutter, both of which are
neither word nor image. In the case of the gutter it is even an empty,
non-representational space between the panels which is nevertheless
significant and meaningful ( 22 Comics and Graphic Novels).
 For all of these reasons, it is obvious that a single methodology of
intermedial analysis can probably not do justice to all of these forms of
medial interrelations. This is why the methodological proposals in this
article are limited to the representation, thematization or imitation in
or by literary works that are word-based and in which the written and
printed word is the medial form of representation (i.e. ‘covert
intermediality’ in Wolf’s terminology). Even then, because of the
contingency and openness of the field, the attempt to draft a
methodology of intermedial relations faces a number of challenges at
different levels, the reflection upon which is itself part of any
methodological approach.
Another basic and important distinction that has to be made
concerns the way and the extent to which intermedial references are
transparent to or concealed from the reader. In the first case, the
reference to a single artifact or medium will be visible at the surface of
the text by naming, mentioning, thematizing or referencing a non-
literary piece of art or another medium explicitly. By contrast, an
implicit reference to another medium or art form leaves it more or less
to the reader to recognize or detect the medium of reference since its
interconnectedness to other media is not thematized or addressed
directly in the text. Therefore, this indirect kind of intermediality
requires a certain amount of expertise or research in the field of medial
reference (cf. Wolf 1999, 71–92). For instance, a reader who is not
familiar with jazz music will understand that Toni Morrison’s novel
Jazz thematizes this musical art form by merely understanding its title,
but it will be difficult for them to identify features of the narrative
discourse of this novel as an imitation of aesthetic and stylistic features
of this kind of music. Thus, a reader unfamiliar with jazz is bound to
miss an important aspect of this ‘musicalization of fiction’ (Wolf 1999).
With this distinction between explicit (direct) and implicit (indirect)
intermediality in mind, a more systematic methodology of the analysis
of intermedial relations revolves around the following more detailed
questions:
– Genre-specific intermediality: One of the central questions is in
what way the representation of or reference to other media is
specific to the literary genre or type of text in which it occurs. For
instance, in a narrative text, e.g. in a short story or in a novel, a
 piece of music can be mentioned by one of the characters or by the
narrator and will, in that sense, be a more or less important part of
the storyworld. It may contribute to equipping a character with
certain features or experiences or illustrate and contextualize the
world in which the story is set. In a poem, a certain kind of music
may provide the pattern or set the tone or pace and thus add a
musical dimension to the language and sound that the poem
expresses and conveys. In a theater play, the audience may witness
a scene in which one of the characters sits down at a piano and
plays a very elegiac passage from a famous suite. As against that
sensual experience of music on the stage, it can only be represented
in verbal form in the play-script. Whereas on the stage music
constitutes a rather independent aesthetic form of expression that
is directly communicated to and experienced by the audience, a
novel or a poem can only evoke music in imaginary form in the act
of reading.
From such generic specifications of intermediality it becomes
obvious that the functions and effects of intermediality depend, at
least to a good extent, on the very specific ways in which a literary
genre shapes and gives life to the world (or a slice thereof) that it
creates, represents and communicates. In any case, an intermedial
analysis will have to focus on the way in which the occurrence of
another medium is connected with the genre-specific constituents
and dimensions of the literary text, e.g. the characters and the story
of a piece of narrative fiction, the voice and rhythm of a poem, the
characters or the dramatic development of a scene in a play (cf.
section 3).
– Types of representation of media in a literary text: As
demonstrated in this handbook, the ways in which other media
occur or are represented in literary texts are so manifold that it is
difficult to systematize them. For some types of representation like
‘illumination’ or ‘ekphrasis,’ reliable theoretical concepts have been
developed. Others remain rather open and unsystematized. For
instance, ‘visualization’ indicates that visual images and practices
play an important role in a given literary text, but the term does not
denote the specific way in which visual images occur or are
referenced, nor does it specify the type of visual image which the
term ‘visualization’ addresses. After all, a picture on the wall can,
 e.g., be mentioned in passing as part of the setting; it can be
described in neat detail in an ekphrastic manner; it can be a central
plot-driving object; it can even be representative of a whole
aesthetics and be essential for a critique of cultural practices and
values. In any case, an intermedial methodology will have to
systematize and categorize the most important forms of
representation that media can take on in literary texts, and a
systematic analysis of a given literary text has to describe them in
neat detail.
– The imitation of media by a literary text: One of the important
distinctions that needs to be made concerns the type of
representation or reference, since a medium can either be
represented or mentioned or thematized explicitly in the literary
text, or the text as a whole can represent or imitate in verbal form
the specific structure or the aesthetics of another art form and its
specific way of arranging and structuring signs aesthetically (cf.
Wolf’s distinction between ‘telling’ and ‘showing,’ 1999, 44–46;
Rajewsky 2002, 78–117). For the novel and other forms of prose
fiction this implies that the effects of intermedial relations on both
story and discourse have to be identified and analyzed. If the level
of discourse is affected, the literary work as a whole is ‘musicalized’
or ‘visualized.’ In that case the literary text mimics the macro-
structure of the referenced medium and adopts its compositional
principles or aesthetic structure. The literary text then transforms
the art form of, e.g., a symphony into an overall (verbal) literary
form, or the narrative discourse may imitate or display the
polyphony and call-and-response principle of the jazz genre, as in
Morrison’s novel on the rise of the African American community
and culture in the first decades of the twentieth century. In cases
like these, the other medium is “perceptibly re-presented ‘in’ fiction
in the mode of imitation.” (Wolf 1999, 71) Although the effect on
the discourse level is the main focus, the literary text may and, as a
matter of fact, often will also thematize the referenced medium,
incorporate it in the story and thus address it explicitly.
– Types of media represented or referenced: As established concepts
like ‘ekphrasis’ or ‘illustration’ show, there is a long tradition of
intertwining text and visual images in literary history (cf. Rippl
2005). However, the regular arrival of new visual and other media
in the course of the last two centuries and of digital media in the
present has naturally led to a multiplication of the kinds of media
to which literary texts can be related. Therefore, one of the major
concerns of intermedial analysis is the identification of the types of
media that the literary text addresses (cf. Wolf 1999, 37–38). Since
all of these media must be regarded as sign systems that are based
on specific symbolic languages, the affordance of these other
semiotic modes of expression, representation and communication
(like, e.g., the cartographic map or the film) must in itself be
investigated in order to determine what their specific cultural or
communicative value is and why they arouse interest in the sphere
of literature. Intermedial analysis therefore entails a comparative
approach through which the effect of these other semiotic modes
on or their ‘translation’ into a literary text can be apprehended (cf.
the example of music and literature in Wolf 1999, 14–33). It is
obvious that, as a consequence, a certain degree of
multidisciplinary expertise in the ‘language’ of the non-literary
medium, e.g. in musical or art history, is an indispensible pre-
condition of every intermedial approach.
As the large variety of chapters in this handbook suggests, there is a
whole chronology of ever new media that attracted the interest of
literary authors and their works, among them, above all, the
popular media of the photograph, radio, film (cf. Brosch 2011) and
TV. In contemporary literature it is the digital media, electronic
communication and the Internet that attract increasing attention in
novels and other literary works (cf. Nünning and Rupp 2011; Hallet
2011a; Hallet 2011b; Basseler et al. 2013). Therefore, the broad
range of media that can occur in literary texts also opens up a whole
field of interrelated disciplines, from art history to film studies and
information technology studies, to mention just a few. This regular
response of literature to the cultural rise of new media also points
to one of the cultural functions (or, in Zapf’s terms, the ecology, cf.
Zapf 2002, 2005) of literature as a medium of cultural reflection
and a critique of media of communication and representation, the
role of media in people’s lives, social and communicative practices
connected with them and the various ways in which media shape
the world.
Since in most cases a literary text does not allude or refer to just
 one medium, but to a large variety and different sorts of media, the
type of medium that a literary text addresses, incorporates or
imitates is also relevant with regard to the more general and
overarching characterization of types of intermedial relations by
which a literary text is dominated. Concepts like ‘musicalization’
(cf. Wolf 1999; also the chapters on music in Part II) or
‘visualization’ therefore refer to the predominance of a certain
medium in a literary text or of its aesthetic form. However, such an
overall characterization of a literary work does not imply that other
media are not represented or referenced in a given literary text (cf.
Wolf 1999, 38).
The following sections will elaborate on the foci of intermedial analysis
as outlined above in more detail, delineating strategies of analyzing the
roles and functions of intermedial references in literary texts by
distinguishing different levels or objects of investigation for heuristic
reasons. Paul Auster’s novel Moon Palace (1989) and Toni Morrison’s
Jazz (1993) will serve as sample texts to illustrate assumptions and
proposals where appropriate. A comprehensive intermedial analysis
that does justice to the aesthetic complexity and coherence of a literary
text will, of course, have to synthesize these different foci of analysis
and integrate them in a holistic interpretation. The following section
describes different levels of intermedial reference; sections 3 and 4
attempt to systematize intratextual and extratextual effects and
functions of intermediality.

2 Systemic Levels of Intermediality

As has been proposed and described in intermediality theories, one of
the fundamental distinctions concerns the systemic level at which
other media are addressed in the literary text. In accordance with Wolf
(1999, 46–50) and Rajewsky (2002, 59–77) and drawing upon theories
of intertextuality (cf. Broich and Pfister 1985; Plett 1991), for
methodological purposes it is useful to distinguish between the single
artifact, the genre and a semiotic system as three basic categories of
representation, reference or thematization:
– The literary text is related to and, in many cases, explicitly
 addresses a single (real or fictitious) artifact, medial product or
work of art (the single ‘text’ in terms of intertextuality; cf. Rajewsky
2002, 149–157). In Paul Auster’s novel Moon Palace, for instance,
one of the key passages in the novel is a meticulous description of
the autodiegetic narrator’s meditative study of one of the numerous
Moonlight paintings by the American painter Ralph Blakelock in
the Brooklyn Museum, rendered in an ekphrastic manner (Auster
1989, 137–139; Part I: Text and Image, section on Ekphrasis).
Other kinds of ‘text’ or artifacts that can be referenced and often
immediately identified are, e.g., pieces of music, photographs,
sculptures, TV and feature films or websites. However, it is evident
(cf. Rajewsky 2002, 149– 155) that a literary text’s relatedness to a
single medial artifact always also implies a reference to the
respective semiotic system since intermedial reference always
raises (and often explicitly addresses) questions of medial, semiotic
and aesthetic similarity and difference. Using film as an example
(cf. Rajewsky 2002, 151–155), its thematization or imitation in the
verbal literary text necessarily evokes the contrast between visual
and verbal representation or between the monosemiotic verbal
system of the literary text and the multisemiotic composition of the
film. Quite often, as in Moon Palace, the prominence of another
single medial artifact in a literary text points to its intratextual
importance in terms of implications that it has for the plot or story,
for a character’s development or for an aesthetic theme that the
literary text unfolds. In Moon Palace, the narrator’s visit to the
museum, his aesthetic experience and his reflections on the
painting play a key role in the epistemology and the aesthetics that
the novel offers (cf. Hallet 2008, 112–120). Furthermore, the novel
imitates the aesthetic structure of the painting: As in Blakelock’s
image, where a full white moon is placed “in the middle of the
canvas – the precise mathematical centre” (Auster 1989, 137), the
Brooklyn Museum episode and the ekphrasis of the painting take
‘the precise mathematical centre’ of the novel (cf. Ickstadt 1998,
198).
– In many cases it is not the single ‘text’ (in the broad semiotic sense)
that is involved in the literary text, but a whole medial or aesthetic
genre. Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz is a case in point: The novel does
not only address the musical genre in its title, but it can as a whole
 be regarded as an intermedial ‘translation’ of the art of jazz music
into a literary narrative. The title of the novel recalls jazz as an
important art form that “is reckoned throughout the world as one
of America’s most significant cultural contributions, and it
originated with African American artists.” (Kubitschek 1998, 141)
Responding to white cultural histories of the ‘Jazz Age,’ the novel
tries to emphasize the African American roots of this new music
which “both makes the City what it is and owes its creation to the
City.” (Kubitschek 1998, 157) From the first lines of the novel, when
Lenox Avenue with all its famous music halls, ballrooms and dance
halls is mentioned, the Harlem jazz scene provides the
topographical setting of the novel and serves as the medium of the
characters’ and various narrators’ reflections on the city and their
attitudes.
However, jazz is more than “simply a musical background” (cf.
Morrison 2004, xix) and a theme. Morrison translates the musical
technique of this art into a compositional structure and a narrative
technique: The very first paragraph of the novel sets the tune and
introduces the thematic leitmotif; subsequently, the following parts
are all stories of their own, narrative fragments or brief interludes
that all respond to, elaborate or vary it (cf. Lewis 2000, 271–277).
Through the “perpetual elaboration of this original melody” (Brown
2003, 182), the novel unfolds the introductory thematic core and
thus imitates a complex jazz piece. All subsequent stories rendered
by different narrative voices can be regarded as improvising solos,
but they also interact with each other and the central motif and
constitute a continuous polylogue (cf. Lewis 2000). By
transforming the dialogic musical ‘call and response’ pattern in
which “a leader issues a call, group members respond, and the
leader then issues a new call modified or directed by the responses”
(Kubitschek 1998, 184), the reader experiences the most salient
aesthetic feature of jazz music in semiotically translated form and
becomes part of its audience. In Jazz, the ‘musicalization of fiction’
(cf. Wolf 1999) brings this musical art form to life and rewrites its
history from an African American point of view.
– A literary text may also refer to, thematize or comment upon a
whole aesthetic or medial semiotic system, i.e. a whole class of
artefacts based on the same kind of signifiers. According to S. J.
 Schmidt (2003, 2008), the term ‘media’ used in this sense
encompasses these semiotic signs as instruments of
communication, the specific technology employed by a medium, its
social-systemic institutionalization, including production
conditions and distribution strategies, and the medial designs that
are available in a system (cf. also Neumann and Zierold 2010;
Rajewsky 2002, 69–149). In the case of film, ‘Hollywood’ in a
literary text would be such a systemic intermedial reference, since it
evokes a certain kind of film (a genre), whole classes of agents
(producers, directors, actors etc.) and institutions like studios, film
companies and cinemas and, of course, the medial and
technological design and production of moving images. In Moon
Palace, the rise of the film industry and its institutions is
represented by one of the ‘new’ cinema halls, a theater that “was
one of those gaudy dream palaces built during the Great
Depression.” (Auster 1989, 52)
On the systemic-aesthetic level, by referring to The Hudson River School as a mainstream
painting movement or to the famous TV broadcast of the first man on the moon, Moon
Palace also thematizes and reflects upon the role of popular visual mass media, the way
they affect people’s ways of seeing and looking at the world and how they may constitute a
whole way of life. The wide scope of these considerations of visuality and sight in the novel
establishes intermediality as a metacultural dimension of the novel since it also situates all
of the other media and semiotic systems in American culture, both diachronically and
synchronically. Therefore, the novel as a whole can be read as a representation of and a
reflection upon the systemic character of intermedial relations and the role of various
media in a given cultural context.

These systematic distinctions are mainly made for methodological and

analytical reasons since they facilitate the recognition and
identification of the contribution of the respective other medium and
intermedial difference to the meaning of the literary text in question.
As against such a systematic approach, it is evident that the three
levels described above are always inextricably intertwined since a
single medial artefact always also evokes the features of the whole
semiotic system in the reader, and vice versa: Generic or systemic
similarities and differences can hardly be imagined without evoking
single instances, i.e. a (prototypical) particular film, photograph or
piece of music in the reader that illustrates the genre or the system
(e.g. a typical ‘Hollywood movie’).
In Moon Palace, the juxtaposition of the single artefact (the
Moonlight painting and its non-conformist painter Ralph Blakelock)
and a whole school of mainstream artists, the Hudson River School,
foregrounds these different levels of intermedial relations and
abstraction and transforms them into an important element of the
novel’s plot and cultural-aesthetic reflection. In the same vein, one of
the three protagonists, the narrator’s grandfather, is thus positioned in
this historical field of the art of painting (cf. Hallet 2008, 111–130)
while simultaneously, more or less personified in the young narrator,
cultural practices of looking and the semiotic art of seeing are
thematized and reflected upon (cf. Hallet 2008, 130–136).

3 Intratextual Functions of Intermediality

Intermedial references and representations affect many levels and
dimensions of the meaning of a literary text and its constitution by the
reader. However, methodologically and in terms of a systematic
analysis of intermedial phenomena and their effects, it is advisable to
distinguish between two basic functions of intermediality. The first
one, classified as the intratextual function, refers to the way
intermediality co-constitutes the text itself and its meaning by
determining its basic constituents, like a character or action. The
second type refers to extratextual functions and effects such as, e.g.,
meta-aesthetic or cultural reflections or critique. In order to identify
and assess the effects of intermediality in and on the literary text itself
it is advisable to study the constituents or elements of a given literary
work. For instance, for the drama the analysis of intermedial effects
may concern the characters of the play (e.g. their occupation with
another art), the way another medium contributes to its plot and
action (e.g. the visit to an art museum), a specific space and place that
is constituted and characterized (e.g. a music hall) or the thematization
and negotiation of another medium (e.g. a painting or a piece of music)
in dialogic discourse.
In the following, these intratextual effects will be briefly illustrated
by examining some of the basic constituents of narrative genres:
– Plot and action: As has already been indicated, in Moon Palace
some of the most important elements of the plot and much of its
action are directly connected to works of art and other media. From
 the beginning, these other media feature prominently in the novel.
The visit to the Brooklyn Museum is a key episode in the novel, and
the tales of the narrator’s grandfather about his past as a painter
trigger the narrator’s adventurous journey to the American west in
an attempt to discover his grandfather’s cave paintings. In a sense,
exploring other media and the art of painting in particular, with its
history, traditions and whole schools of art, can be regarded as the
main plot with repercussions on major parts of the action and the
story.
– Character and character development: Moon Palace as a whole
can be regarded as a story of initiation in which Marco Stanley
Fogg, the young narrator, is introduced to the art of looking, seeing
and visual representation. Intermediality is thus experienced by
both the autodiegetic protagonist and the reader as a
transformative force that equips them with knowledge and abilities
that they were formerly lacking and with new ways of looking at
and understanding the world. Even the neon signs of a Chinese
restaurant named ‘Moon Palace’ can be regarded as one such
different medial text and system in which all of the autodiegetic
narrator’s experiences and reflections culminate. Thus,
intermediality turns out to be an important strategy, both for Fogg
and for the narrative as a whole, that is able to constitute and
intersubjectively negotiate reality, relativizing and stabilizing the
arbitrariness of all signification. Even the ‘Moon Palace’ neon sign
can be regarded as a distinct medium, bearing the features of a
higher order sign, the meaning of which unfolds as the main
character’s development and the novel as a whole progress.
– Character constellation: Due to the features of a story of initiation
that the novel also bears, in Moon Palace the autodiegetic
narrator’s development and transformation is catalyzed by and
directly connected with his encounter and friendship with an old
man who, due to his autobiographical experience and expertise,
takes on the role of a master and teacher, thus establishing a
complementary expert-novice or mentor-disciple relationship
which finally materializes in the (supposed) revelation of a
genealogical, familial relation between Effing, the grandfather, and
Fogg, his grandson. Other important character constellations in the
novel are also defined through other arts or works of art: Uncle
 Victor, who takes on the role of a foster father after the death of
Fogg’s mother, is a clarinettist in a mediocre “small combo that
made the usual rounds of weddings, confirmations, and graduation
parties.” (Auster 1989, 5) As a matter of fact, Uncle Victor, Fogg’s
temporary caretaker, is mainly characterized as a culmination point
of various medial practices since he “could not go to the ballpark
without considering some minor character in Shakespeare, and
then, when he finally got home, could not sit down with his book
for more than twenty minutes without feeling the urge to play the
clarinet.” (Auster 1989, 5–6)
– Themes: The implicit or explicit reference to other media in a given
work of literature always establishes or at least co-constitutes the
thematic issues that it addresses. These may be of minor
importance for a novel as a whole, for instance in the case of a
painting which serves as a decorative element in a room. But even
then this raises questions of the particular meaning of that one
painting and its style in the context of the novel or its relevance for
the characters and their way of life. In other cases, the reference to
another medium is of a programmatic kind and therefore central to
the meaning of a novel: In Morrison’s novel jazz music serves to
reconstruct and recall the emergence and rise of the African
American community and culture in the city of New York at the
beginning of the twentieth century. In Moon Palace, intermediality
is the primary overall strategy that establishes individual and
cultural signifying practices, the semiotic constitution of meaning
and visual culture as main themes of the novel (cf. Hallet 2008,
111–145).
– Narrative discourse: It is obvious that references to other media
affect the narrative discourse and the composition of a narrative in
many ways. As inMoon Palace , the structural effects may range
from ekphrastic descriptions and episodic storytelling to
consciousness narration and meta-semiotic or meta-medial
reflections. In Toni Morrison’s Jazz, the composition and narrative
structure of the novel as a whole can be regarded as ‘musical’ since
it imitates the aesthetic features of jazz music by employing, e.g.,
the principles of the interplay of solos and polyphony or of the call-
and-response technique.
– Metafiction: Although metafictional elements of novelistic
discourse are, strictly speaking, never exclusively intratextual, they
can have a considerable impact on both a narrative’s story and the
discourse. At the story level, metafictional comments may establish
a self-reflexive dimension, e.g. at the level of characters, their
mental dispositions, their cognitive engagement or their
consciousness. At the level of discourse, metafictional comments
establish a self-referential dimension in which the narrator and/or
the narrative examine, question or critique the narration itself, for
instance in terms of the possibility to represent the non-fictional
experiential world, of the reliability of story-telling or of the acts of
verbal signification in which it engages.
The rather structuralist analytical approach suggested above can, of
course, only be transformed into the fruitful whole of an interpretation
if the findings at the different levels and for the various constituents
are ultimately integrated with each other and synthesized in the
formulation of a holistic description and exploration of the meaning of
the novel as a whole. In particular, such a holistic interpretation will, of
course, have to integrate all of the findings on its intermedial relations
with the large amount of other aspects that need to be analyzed and
interpreted.

4 Extratextual Functions of Intermediality

As demonstrated above in the case of metafiction, a strict division of
intratextual and extratextual functions and effects of intermediality is
not really possible, and it is only methodologically justified in terms of
an analytical procedure. However, in accordance with functional
approaches to literature (cf. Fluck 1997; Zapf 2002, 2005; cf. also the
respective subchapters and case studies in Wolf 1999), investigations
into intermediality must, per definition, always account for the type of
relation that is established between the given work and the respective
medial phenomena outside the literary text and the various functions
that can be assigned to them. As Werner Wolf has shown, these
extratextual functions all belong to the meta-level of aesthetic, medial
and cultural reflection or self-reflection (Wolf 1999, 48–50). Once
again, all of these levels are normally intrinsically interwoven, but for
the purpose of a systematic analysis it is useful to distinguish between
the following functions:
– Meta-fictional functions: Meta-fictional reflections in literature are
mainly of a self-reflexive kind and encompass reflections or
comments on “the discursive, medial or fictional status” (Wolf
1999, 48) of a text and on how the verbal literary text arranges
signs and creates meaning through its specific aesthetic style. For
instance, one of the major concerns inMoon Palace is the narrator’s
ability to ‘translate’ the material and visible world into verbal
language since this is why he has been appointed by Effing, the
blind old man who turns out to be his grandfather. The narrator’s
ability to mediate the visible world to Effing culminates in the
death scene in which the narrator renders a meticulous description
of the death room. Using “the same methods I had developed
during our walks” (Auster 1989, 219), Fogg opens up the world to
his blind grandfather by translating his perceptions into words: “By
putting these things into words for him, I gave Effing the chance to
experience them again, as if merely to take one’s place in the world
of things was a good beyond all others.” (Auster 1989, 219) In that
respect, the novel stages the world-constituting and signifying
power of the word on which it itself relies, and thus evokes the
reader’s reflections on the medial and mediating quality of the
verbal language in comparison to other, particularly visual media
that the novel addresses.
– Meta-aesthetic and meta-medial functions: Meta-aesthetic and
meta-medial (self-) reflections refer to the specific features,
qualities or affordances of the medium that is referenced or
explicitly addressed, often in comparison to or across other media.
In particular, such reflections and comments may refer to the way a
particular sign system is able to engage in acts of signification or
the ability to create works of art to which a more general capacity
and effect is attributed: In Moon Palace, for instance, a crucial
epistemological role in culture and in individual lives is assigned to
visual and literary art by Effing: “The true purpose of art was not to
create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of
understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s
place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas
might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to
 engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things.”
(Auster 1989, 170)
– Meta-cultural functions: Often the two functions addressed above
go hand in hand with a more general reflection and critique of
general cultural developments, processes and practices. Thus, by
focussing on visual art and artifacts, Moon Palace foregrounds the
pivotal role that visual images have played and still play in the
creation of American myths and the establishment of cultural
values. Visual images, the novel contends, helped to transform
native land into American territories and conquer ‘the West,’ and
thus contributed to the formation of collective images of the West
and the frontier.
Furthermore, the novel also (re-)assesses the role of modern visual
media like cinema and TV. In particular, it thematizes the way
visual media prefigure individual and cultural perceptions: Images
of the desert and the canyons, of the moon and outer space, of the
wilderness and the city. Books and films quoted and referenced in
the novel, e.g., Around the World in Eighty Days, have helped to
establish the cultural notion of the frontier and of the further
conquest of other territories.
Toni Morrison’s novel can be regarded as a similarly advanced form
of cultural critique since her intermedial reference to jazz questions
the established histories of the so-called Jazz Age as well as
American mainstream encyclopaedic historiography. Borrowing
from the patterns of the musical tradition of jazz by employing a
fragmented and polyphonic narrative technique and by exploring
the musical culture of the time from within the period through the
eyes and ears of the novel’s characters, the composition of the novel
is connected with the general claim that fiction is the more
adequate, more reliable way of writing history because it can give a
voice to the marginalized or eclipsed experiences of African
Americans in the metropolises of the first decades of the twentieth
century and can thus re-constitute their specific contribution to art
and culture.
Of course, a systematic intermedial analysis of a given literary text and
the respective issues of intermediality that need to be addressed
depend on specific aesthetic, structural and thematic features.
Therefore, for any meticulous scrutiny of the explicit or implicit
intermedial relations of a literary text, the kind of questions and
examinations proposed in this methodological contribution can be
regarded as minimum requirements and starting points. Above all,
findings resulting from an intermedial analysis will have to be
counterchecked by and integrated with all the other results of literary
analysis. This needs to be emphasized since the intermedial quality of a
given text is always just one among various other features and aspects
that an interpretation of a given work must account for. The relevance
and position of intermediality can only be assessed in relation to all the
other factors that contribute to the meaning of a text and in light of a
holistic, more comprehensive approach to literature.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Auster, Paul. Moon Palace. London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1989.
Basseler, Michael, Ansgar Nünning, and Christine Schwanecke, eds.
The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change in Contemporary
Fiction: Theoretical Frameworks, Genres and Model
Interpretations. Trier: wvt, 2013.
Bateman, John A., and Karl-Heinrich Schmidt. Multimodal Film
Analysis: How Films Mean. London and New York: Routledge, 2012.
Broich, Ulrich, and Manfred Pfister, eds. Intertextualität: Formen,
Funktionen, anglistische Fallstudien. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1985.
Brosch, Renate, ed. Moving Images – Mobile Viewers: 20th Century
Visuality. Berlin: LIT, 2011.
Brown, Caroline. “ Jazz (1992).” The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia. Ed.
Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu. Westport and London: Greenwood Press,
2003. 181–191.
Fluck, Winfried. Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Funktionsgeschichte des
amerikanischen Romans, 1700–1900. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1997.
Hallet, Wolfgang. “Jazz: Toni Morrison’s Novel and the Use of
Cultural Studies in the Literary Classroom.” Cultural Studies in the
EFL Classroom. Ed. Werner Delanoy and Laurenz Volkmann.
Heidelberg: Winter, 2006. 269–291.
Hallet, Wolfgang. Paul Auster: Moon Palace. Stuttgart: Klett, 2008.
Hallet, Wolfgang. “Medialisierung von Genres am Beispiel des Blogs
und des multimodalen Romans: Von der Schrift-Kunst zum
multimodalen Design.” Medialisierung des Erzählens im
englischsprachigen Roman der Gegenwart: Theoretischer
Bezugsrahmen, Genres und Modellinterpretationen. Ed. Ansgar
Nünning and Jan Rupp. Trier: wvt, 2011a. 85–116.
Hallet, Wolfgang. “Visual Images of Space, Movement and Mobility in
the Multimodal Novel.” Moving Images – Mobile Viewers: 20th
Century Visuality. Ed. Renate Brosch. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011b.
227–248.
Hallet, Wolfgang. “The Rise of the Multimodal Novel: Generic Change
and Its Narratological Implications.” Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-
Noël Thon. Storyworlds across Media: Towards a Media-Conscious
Narratology. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. 151–
172.
Ickstadt, Heinz. Der amerikanische Roman im 20. Jahrhundert:
Transformation des Mimetischen. Darmstadt: WBG, 1998.
Kubitschek, Missy Dehn. Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion.
Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1998.
Lewis, Barbara W. “The Function of Jazz in Toni Morrison’s Jazz.”
Toni Morrison’s Fiction: Contemporary Criticism. Ed. David L.
Middleton. New York and London: Garland, 2000. 271–281.
Morrison, Toni. Jazz. 1992. London and Basingstoke: Picador, 1993.
Morrison, Toni. “Foreword.” Jazz. New York: Vintage International,
2004. xv–xix.
Neumann, Birgit and Martin Zierold. “Media as Ways of Worldmaking:
Media-specific Structures and Intermedial Dynamics.” Cultural
Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives. Ed. Vera Nünning,
Ansgar Nünning, and Birgit Neumann. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010.
 103–118.
Nünning, Ansgar and Jan Rupp, eds. Medialisierung des Erzählens im
englischsprachigen Roman der Gegenwart: Theoretischer
Bezugsrahmen, Genres und Modellinterpretationen. Trier: wvt,
2011. 85–116.
Pfister, Manfred. Das Drama. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2001.
Plett, Heinrich F., ed. Intertextuality. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1991.
Rajewsky, Irina O. Intermedialität. Tübingen and Basel: Francke,
2002.
Rippl, Gabriele. Beschreibungs-Kunst: Zur intermedialen Poetik
angloamerikanischer Ikontexte (1880–2000). Munich: Wilhelm Fink,
2005.
Schmidt, Siegfried J. “Medienkulturwissenschaft.” Konzepte der
Kulturwissenschaften: Theoretische Grundlagen, Ansätze,
Perspektiven. Ed. Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning. Stuttgart and
Weimar: Metzler, 2003. 351–369.
Schmidt, Siegfried J. “Der Medienkompaktbegriff.” Was ist ein
Medium? Ed. Stefan Münker and Alexander Roesler. Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 2008. 144–157.
Schwanecke, Christine. Intermedial Storytelling: Thematisation,
Imitation and Incorporation of Photography in English and
American Fiction at the Turn of the 21st Century. Trier: wvt, 2012.
Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory
and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi,
1999.
Zapf, Hubert. Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie: Zur kulturellen
Funktion imaginativer Texte an Beispielen des amerikanischen
Romans. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002.

5.2 Further Reading

Erll, Astrid. Prämediation – Remediation: Repräsentationen des
indischen Aufstands in imperialen und postkolonialen
 Medienkulturen (von 1857 bis zur Gegenwart). Trier: wvt, 2007.
Hallet, Wolfgang. “Intertextualität als methodisches Konzept einer
kulturwissenschaftlichen Literaturwissenschaft.” Kulturelles
Wissen und Intertextualität: Theoriekonzeptionen und Fallstudien
zu Kontextualisierung von Literatur. Ed. Marion Gymnich, Birgit
Neumann and Ansgar Nünning. Trier: wvt, 2006. 53–70.
Hallet, Wolfgang. “Methoden kulturwissenschaftlicher Ansätze: Close
Reading und Wide Reading.” Methoden der literatur- und
kulturwissenschaftlichen Textanalyse: Ansätze – Grundlagen –
Modellanalysen. Ed. Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning. Stuttgart
and Weimar: Metzler, 2010. 293–315.
Crispin Thurlow

33 Multimodality, Materiality and

Everyday Textualities: The
Sensuous Stuff of Status
Abstract: Four seemingly banal objects – a pepper pot, a napkin, a
pack of tissues and a pair of pyjamas – will function as the
complicating actions for the narrative presented here. On the surface,
this will be a story about the production of luxury in contemporary
consumer culture. At root, however, it is a social semiotics of super-
elite mobilities, an ideal domain for exploring the materiality of
language and the inherently multimodal nature of everyday textual
practices. This chapter is also offered as an interdisciplinary reflection
on possible connections between academic domains. Just as many
linguists are seeking to push beyond the binarising boundaries of
language and ‘the semiotic rest’, the pursuits of literary studies and
discourse studies may be more easily aligned than one might imagine.
We may prioritise different sites, different texts, different object(ive)s,
but our core interests may not be all that far removed when it comes to
understanding the interplay of semiotic resources.
Key Terms: Multimodality, social semiotics, visual-material
resources, luxury, elitist discourse

1 Introducing Multimodality (and Social

Semiotics)
In discourse studies, recognition of the inherently and unavoidably
mediated nature of all communicative action precludes us from an
otherwise isolationist semiotics, one that separates out or privileges a
single mode of communication (cf. Norris and Jones 2005). For
linguists, this has typically been language, which we have tended to
extract from its naturally occurring contexts of use for theoretical
deliberation, or kept apart from nonverbal behaviour and physical
setting for the sake of analysis. To talk of ‘mediated communication’ is,
however, about as sensible as speaking of oxygenated breathing. In
reality, there is no communication without mediation. Language never
takes place, never makes sense, outside of its situated, embodied,
multi-sensory uses – whether gushing from the pages of a book,
reverberating in the ears of speakers, or glistening on city billboards.
For scholarly convenience or rigour, we often bunker down around
disciplinary investigations of, say, words, images, sounds or spaces.
These academic exercises detach and abstract meaning-making
practices from their patently multimodal realities. Besides, the
isolating of, say, language from its richer context – like the
disembedding of books from their embodied moments of reading –
becomes increasingly difficult nowadays when so many texts are
materially and semiotically varied.
Take, for example, the webpage reproduced on the next page; it is
from the Luxury Travel Fair in London. What we have here is a
quintessential ‘text of our times’, one that demonstrates how it is
practically and experientially impossible to disentangle the array of
semiotic resources at work in many contemporary texts: words,
images, typefaces (style, design and size), colour and shading, layout,
icons (i.e. for various social media), and a range of directional and
frame markings (i.e. the repurposed parentheses, the blocked titles like
“OFFICIAL FAIR VIDEO”). The text is a composite or an ensemble. A
gestalt. The different semiotic resources and meaning-making
practices are all doing different kinds of communicative work, while
also working together to generate an affective reaction and an effective
response. Which does not mean that we have to like it, get it or agree
with it. The webpage is also a hypertextual and multi-media text,
offering various opportunities to engage and manipulate the content
further: clicking through to other pages, selecting different reading
paths, watching a video, tweeting, or requesting more information.
Complex texts like these are designed deliberately to be multimodal –
for example, visual, verbal, gestural, tactile, musical – and to be ‘read’
in more open-ended ways.24 Texts are certainly not simply passive
representations of the world (they never were); they also demand our
attention and interact with us by asking us to do things (see “follow us
on Twitter”) and inviting us into relationships (real or imagined,
instant or delayed) with the authors of the text and with the people
depicted in the text (see the smiling celebrity in “meet the experts”).
And these communicative actions are accomplished with words,
images, colours, typefaces, layout, and so on.
It would be wrong, of course, to suggest that multimodality is
somehow a modern phenomenon or a distinctively new-media one.
Even in quite straightforward ways, cave paintings, illuminated
manuscripts and Victorian postcards were clearly multimodal
accomplishments. Indeed, the rise in multimodal studies (or
multimodal analysis) is understood to be a product of so called visual,
spatial and material turns across the social sciences and humanities,
which themselves may – at least in part – be explained by larger
intellectual paradigm shifts towards complexity and interactivity, and
towards disorder and the messy stuff of everyday life (cf. Jewitt 2013).
Multimodal analysis is undoubtedly an interdisciplinary pursuit:
closely allied with work being done in media and cultural studies, as
well as in pragmatics, sociolinguistics and discourse studies; it is also
necessarily informed by the work of geographers, anthropologists and
sociologists. Like many of these disciplinary traditions, multimodal
analysis attends to the cultural and political contexts of communicative
action. Importantly, multimodal analyses look beyond the discursive
‘content’ of images and other texts to examine the choice of mode itself
which is laden with communicative, epistemological and ideological
significance. Each communicative mode expresses meaning in its own
distinctive way.
Fig. 1: The Luxury Travel Fair website, screenshot reprinted with permission.

In fact, a key principle of multimodality is that different modes are

modes in their own right. Colour, sound, space, touch are as
communicatively rich and ‘grammatically’ sophisticated as speech or
writing. Their apparent simplicity or insufficiency is usually a product
of our own restricted understanding and limited descriptive powers.
Colour communicates in ways that words often cannot. Our words
typically fail us when it comes to making sense of the ten million
colours our brains can technically perceive (cf. Judd and Wyszecki
1975). There are only so many things we can do with our words, only so
many ways we can make sense of other communicative modes. This is
because colour, sound, space and touch afford opportunities which
words do not (cf. Kress and van Leeuwen 1996). What is more, these
other modes are capable of expressing representational meanings,
relational meanings and compositional meanings. Colour can, for
example, depict our worldviews (e.g. ‘pink is for girls’), generate
interpersonal feelings (e.g. bereavement or celebration), and structure/
cohere texts (e.g. for emphasis or connection – see the purple words
above). None of this is to say that language is without tremendous
influence and semiotic weight; it remains one of our most dominant,
institutionally established, scientifically studied meaning-making
systems, and is especially useful for expressing abstract notions or
distantiated experiences.
Addressing the challenges of multimodal communication – as both a
theory of communicative action and as a method for its analysis – has
been central to the work of social semioticians (cf. Aiello 2006 for a
neat introduction). It is beyond the confines of this chapter to
reproduce a more detailed account of the intellectual origins of social
semiotics and to do justice to the array of academic traditions that feed
contemporary research practice (cf. Jewitt 2013 and other publications
listed in the further-reading section of this chapter). Nonetheless,
before turning to my ‘luxurious’ demonstration, I want to offer several
important groundings in social semiotics, the first of which (medium,
mode and meaning) is presented as a snapshot on the next page.
Together, these groundings offer practical directions for organising a
social semiotic analysis.
 medium
media are the material resources used in the production of semiotic
products and events, including both the tools and the materials used. /
if a semiotic resource is organised as a medium, it has only a ‘lexis’ …

mode
modes are semiotic resources which allow the simultaneous realisation
of discourses and types of (inter)action. / if a semiotic resource is
organised as a mode, it has both a grammar and a ‘lexis’ …

meaning
meaning … results from human engagement with the world, and the
resources we use in articulating and interpreting meaning comprise
both semiotics modes and semiotic media25
Communicative Meta-Functions
A key feature of semiotic modes is their capacity to fully and self-
sufficiently serve the three core (or ‘meta’) functions of all
communicative action (cf. Halliday 1978; Kress and van Leeuwen
1996), which are:
– Ideational or representational function: the capacity to depict or
express certain discourses, stories or claims about the world at
large;
– Interpersonal or interactional function: the capacity to generate
emotional and relational connections between the reader, the
author, and the people/characters depicted in a text;
– Textual or compositional function: the capacity to organise and
cohere texts, to guide readers by prioritising or highlighting
different types of information.
Usefully, this three-part theoretical framework points to some
directions for analysing multimodal discourse. Accordingly, we can
consider not only the representational meanings (aka ‘content’)
conveyed by, for example, a particular choice of colour, typeface or
sound, but we can also identify how different semiotic resources
engage readers/viewers emotionally and relationally (e.g. challenging,
amusing or persuading them), and the way semiotic resources help
texts to hang together and work as ensembles.
Methodological Objectives
In practical terms, social semiotics is committed to the following
objectives, outlined by a/the leading scholar in the field (van Leeuwen
2005, 3):
– Inventories: collecting, documenting and cataloguing semiotic
resources;
– Settings: investigating how these resources are used and talked
about in specific historical, cultural and institutional contexts;
– Applications: developing new resources and/or new uses of
existing resources.
In my own work, these activities have directed me to three analytic
steps for making fuller sense of any particular discursive practice: (1)
description, which may entail loosely quantitative procedures to
account for the semiotic repertoires deployed in a text; (2)
interpretation, which considers how meaning potentials are
conventionalised and culturally significant; and (3) critique, which
seeks to connect singular often ordinary texts or communicative
actions to larger/wider social-political processes (cf. Thurlow and
Aiello 2007 for a more detailed account of this approach).
Critical Perspectives
Uniting social semiotics, critical discourse studies and cultural studies
is a shared commitment to understanding “what kinds of identities,
actions, and circumstances are concealed, abstracted, or foregrounded
in a text” (Machin 2013, 352). These inevitably have ideological
implications. Similarly, the recontextualisation of words, genres and
notions from one text or practice to another means that some
meanings are lost and some are gained; all are inevitably reframed.
These, too, are matters of ideology. With this in mind, and following
Machin (2013), social semioticians typically attend to the following
processes:
– Deletion: what is excluded from a representation and how do
certain modes conceal (or reveal) information better than others?
– Addition: what alternative meanings do different modes add to a
text, privileging some meanings over others?
– Substitution: how do different modes effectively replace or
dominate other modes in a text? How do certain modes call
attention to themselves as the expense of others?
– Evaluation: how do different modes express the goals, values or
priorities of the authors/creators of the text, or of the people
represented in the texts?
Social semiotics, like most multimodal approaches, is committed, as
both a critical ideal and a methodological principle, to understanding
how meaning making takes place all over the place. And not only in the
hands and mouths of society’s ratified speakers and text producers, but
also those of everyday communicators. Indeed, most people’s
communicative practices are invariably agentful and creative; they are
definitely always purposeful (although not always transparent) and
relevant to the situation at hand. This is why social semioticians
eschew meanings (e.g. ‘red means anger’) in favour of meaning
potentials (i.e. red may mean anger, passion, good fortune, danger, but
seldom means cold). Within these culturally relative and historically
variable conventions, there is plenty of room for polysemy and
innovation. Like professional communicators (e.g. designers,
advertisers, architects, artists), lay communicators can (and do) select,
combine and rework modes and semiotic resources in even their most
ordinary interactions and text-makings. Having said which, our
communication choices and opportunities are never completely free or
equal; all communicative action is shaped by cultural norms, values
and wider political-economies. For this reason, social semioticians
frequently locate their analyses of communicative actions in relation to
social processes of inequality, privilege, access and institutional control
(Machin 2013). This brings us nicely to the case-study example of
social semiotics in action.

2 A Social Semiotics of Luxury (and Elitist

Discourse)
Against this brief overview of multimodality/social semiotics, I want to
turn to four objects: a pepper pot, a napkin, a pack of tissues, and a
pair of pyjamas.26 This stuff presents itself as a neat social semiotic
conundrum. How are we to make sense of these objects as
communicative actions, as ways of representing the world (or saying
something about it), as ways of interacting with users, and as broader
meta-communicative or textual accomplishments? All four of these
objects found their way into my life – and onto my desk – as part of a
collaborative research programme on elitist discourse in the context of
‘high-end’ or so called luxury travel (e.g. Thurlow and Jaworski 2006,
2010, 2012, 2014, forthcoming). Artefacts like the ones here help me to
understand how status, prestige and distinction are produced through
a constellation of communicative actions (i.e. different genres, styles
and discourses) and always as a combination of semiotic modes and
resources. This is an inherently interdisciplinary, multimodal project
drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, discourse analyses of
advertising and other print materials, as well as the interpretation of a
host of visual, material and spatial practices. It is this which brings us
also to seemingly banal, pointless objects like the pepper pot, napkin,
tissues and pyjamas. In contrast, perhaps, to the usual literary pursuits
of intermediality scholars, these are the kinds of everyday texts and
practices that often occupy social semioticians and multimodality
scholars.
To be clear, the analysis which follows is not presented as a
definitive or necessarily typical example of social semiotics; the field is
vast and varied, and inevitably shaped by different traditions and
scholarly styles. The combination of biography, ethnography and
performance is certainly my own preference – including the deliberate
selection of a first-person, auto-ethnographic voice in the tradition of
Queer scholarship (cf. Adams and Jones 2011). Nonetheless, what this
potted analysis has in common with most social semiotic analyses is
the following: (a) the description and inventorying of other modes and
their particular affordances; (b) an attention to the interplay between
semiotic resources; (c) a critical framing around questions of political
economy and ideology. Importantly, my analysis here also orients
explicitly to the allied enterprises of semiotic landscapes research (cf.
Jaworski and Thurlow 2010) and language materiality (cf. Shalini and
Cavanaugh 2012), both of which are pushing discourse studies scholars
to think in more comprehensively multimodal ways. One of the most
significant moves that social semiotics makes, as part of its
commitment to multimodality, is to lift analyses off the page, shifting
attention from abstracted, disembedded print texts/images to the
situated, emplaced, embodied actions of these texts/images (their
production and consumption). In other words, turning from a two-
dimensional to a three-dimensional perspective. Indeed, within
discourse studies, the conventional notion of text is often expanded (if
not exploded) beyond the word-dominant genres of writing or speech.
Thus, ‘textuality’ combines and plays with the representational
affordances of language as well as the multisensory possibilities of
texture (sic), affect and other non-representational (cf. Thrift 2007) or,
at least, more-than-representational experiences.
In this regard, and as an intermediate step towards the four objects
introduced above, I want to connect the Luxury Travel Fair website as
an ideal, contemporary 2-D text to an actual, 3-D site: the Burj al Arab
hotel in Dubai which styles itself “the world’s most luxurious hotel”.27
This hotel is also a perfect metonymic example of the world promoted
by the Luxury Travel Fair. In particular, I want to demonstrate how
the rhetorics of the website actually ‘take place’ and are made manifest
in practice. To properly understand the orders of discourse (i.e. a
“network of social practices”, Fairclough 2003, 24) by which super-
elite mobility is organised and realised, one is forced to engage a far
more extensive, elaborate semiotic field. Here, for example, is how the
language of the Luxury Travel Fair is taken up (not a simply causal or
sequential relation) in the depiction of a single ‘room’ on the Burj al
Arab’s own website:
DELUXE TWO-BEDROOM SUITE
Welcome to the decadent 335 square metre two bedroom Deluxe Suite. Perfect for family
and friends, this heavenly suite spans two impeccable levels and features magnificent
views of the Arabian Gulf throughout. This space includes two lounges, two exquisite
bedrooms overlooking the sea, a private dining room, two master bathrooms, a private
bar and a butler’s kitchen.

This is the kind of hyperbolic linguistic flourish we quickly recognise as

typical of advertising discourse: ‘deluxe’, ‘decadent’, ‘heavenly’,
‘impeccable’ and ‘magnificent’ but it is also a lexicon of excess,
superiority and other-worldliness especially typical of luxury
advertising (cf. Thurlow and Jaworski 2006, 2010). The
semioticisation – the verbal rendition – of space deserves special
attention. Luxury and elite status are predicated on a relentless
performance of space (this is, after all, not a room but a ‘suite’) –
having lots of it and having exclusive, ‘private’ unhindered access to it.
And the staging of spaciousness depends on a range of multimodal
techniques and semiotic resources, starting with the rhetorical
specificity of quantification (‘335 square metres’) and scale (‘levels’ and
‘views’). Importantly, however, these rhetorics are fulfilled in tangible,
embodied and material ways. Indeed, space itself – not only the talk of
space – is another semiotic resource for the performance of elite status
and distinction. Take a look at the montage (fig. 2) drawn from our
own fieldwork (cf. Thurlow and Jaworski 2012 for more background
about this research). This is the ‘deluxe two-bedroom suite’ where the
production of space is patently spectacular, excessive and fully
multimodal: chandeliers, classical columns, floor-to-ceiling windows,
canopied beds, and so on. Also notice the sweeping, ornate (i.e.
attention-seeking) staircase, the domed ceiling mural of a starry sky,
the romantic wraparound landscape painting in the (one-of-two)
bathrooms, and the bed oriented to the windows and the endless,
empty skies beyond. Indeed, the ultimate visual-material performance
of super-elite space is its vacuousness: ostensibly staged for occupancy
(four bar stools, multiple living rooms, grand dining tables), but
purposefully designed to be underutilised (like the elevator – not
shown). As we have remarked before, the excessive, expansive spaces
of luxury have spaces to spare (Thurlow and Jaworski 2012). Space is
an indispensable semiotic resource in the performance and
performative realisation of super-elite status, as powerful – perhaps
more so – than any words or images. It is a resource I have myself
deliberately toyed with on p. 623. And these discursive practices
circulate far beyond the literal spaces of luxury travel. Space, as both
rhetoric/sales pitch and as structural/material reality, has become one
of the defining stratifiers of our time: “Today more than ever”, says
Henri Lefebvre, “class struggle is inscribed in space” (1991 [1974], 55),
although he might not have foreseen the extent or minute detail to
which this is playing out today. On this note, I turn now to the pyjamas
as the first of my four objects, each framed as a multimodal vignette.
Fig. 2: Making sense of space.
Copyright C. Thurlow and A. Jaworski.
Fig. 3: Pyjamas.
Copyright C. Thurlow.

Vignette 1: Pyjamas
Not alone in furnishing first-class customers with pyjamas, the now-
defunct ‘all-business-class’ airline eos had a pair like these, tied
together with a ribbon, ready for each passenger (aka ‘guest’). Medium,
large or extra-large? With its slightly obscure classical allusion, the
name eos appears as a machine-stitched ‘embroidered’ monogram,
resonating with a similarly old-fashioned, regal status marker. The
pyjamas, a surprisingly established tactic for performing ‘first-class’,
are neat examples of synthetic personalisation whereby mass (however
elite and relatively few) consumers are seemingly treated ‘personally’
as unique individuals worthy of special attention and intimate care (cf.
Fairclough 1995). Needless to say, the decadent frisson and intimate
promise of these pyjamas did not materialise in their embodied
execution. Like everyone else, I assume, I contorted myself inelegantly
and, had the door flung open, compromisingly in the body-hugging
space of the on-board toilet. Such was my naïve determination to fulfil
the promise of being styled elite, I persevered and then emerged into
the softly lit cabin. In my pyjamas! I slept no better, the plane arrived
no earlier, but the rub of soft, semi-synthetic cloth against my skin
reassured me of my cosy, privileged passage.
Fig. 4: Pepper Pot.
Copyright C. Thurlow.

Vignette 2: Pepper Pot

The excess of the pyjamas is played out in smaller ways, too. Here we
have another performance of plenty predicated on waste rather than
sustainability. Indeed, I have yet to read a study which assesses the
environmental impact of luxury. This little pepper pot was lifted from
an elaborately staged ‘business-class’ dinner tray (also, I hasten to add,
a fieldwork site like the eos trip). In some ways, this trinket is the
quintessential multimodal luxury text: the white ceramic itself, the
golden calligraphy of the Emirates logo, the delicately painted (more
likely printed) flourishes around the pot, and the inherent disposability
and, thus, extravagance of it all. It is not the practical utility of these
objects which counts, of course, but rather their expressive function,
their narration into the overall staging of luxury and status (cf.
Thurlow and Jaworski 2006). Nor am I alone in drawing off a symbolic
resonance from these banal objects. “Salt and pepper shakers always
add a touch of class to a meal.” So says one reviewer for Australian
Business Traveller.28 People do notice, people do care. The semiotic
games work. And, in this commentary, we find evidence also for the
ways semiotic practices are constantly recontextualised (i.e. lifted up
and circulated elsewhere) and resemioticised, with material resources
transformed (back) into linguistic ones together with new/different
meaning potentials.

Fig. 5: Napkin.
Copyright C. Thurlow.

Vignette 3: Napkin
Much of what takes place across the luxury landscapes of super-elite
travel is trivial and fleeting. What marks things as luxurious or elite is,
needless to say, its packaging – literal and figurative. In other words,
inexpensive tat is made magical through a kind of multimodal
alchemy. One of my most recent, non-fieldwork acquisitions comes
from an unexpected upgrade to business-class where I was served
lunch along with this prime example of the primacy of design over
substance. Contrasted with the paper napkins in economy class, this
little one claims its prestige through its clothness, its linen-ness – a
visual-material resource for marking distinction, authenticity, quality
and tradition. Styling itself (and, thereby the service and airline) as
fancy, this object works its magic on me too: For just a moment, I am
persuaded of its authenticity and allow myself to be hailed as fancy too.
And then, on closer inspection (such is the self-justifying curiosity and
self-satisfying cynicism of the scholar), I notice that it is not linen at
all: The drawn-thread work is actually a series of printed grey dots. The
whole thing is an artful simulation of linen and, thus, a perfect
example of the aestheticisation (Featherstone 1991) of natural
materials. A semiotic, multimodal ruse.

Fig. 6: Tissues.
Copyright C. Thurlow.

Vignette 4: Tissues
And now, a far less subtle instance of aestheticisation at work, one
which adds another twist to the multimodal alchemy. Super-elite
landscapes are awash with words appealing to prestige, superiority,
exclusivity and distinction. The Luxury Travel Fair, for example,
promotes its elitist vision of luxury by means of “bespoke”, “boutique”,
“tailor-made”, “hand-picked”, “definitive”, “finest”, “unique”, “first-
class”, “concierge”, “discerning”, “exclusive” and “style”. All that, on
just the homepage; a quintessential discursive production, rendering
putatively material, physical experiences semiotic and exotic. But
words are not merely or simply symbolic; they are also materialising
agents. Indeed, word-things like ‘elite’ and ‘privilege’ circulate far
beyond confines of super-elite status/spaces – floating signifiers
which, when tied down and emplaced, performatively declare
someone, something or somewhere superior, distinctive and/or
exclusive (cf. Thurlow and Jaworski forthcoming), like the packet of
tissues here. (I also have examples of plumbing companies, nail salons,
packets of coffee and jars of pickles.) In this case, elitist meaning
potentials are expressed not only in the word, but through the
‘calligraphic’ italicisation of the word, and through the appearance of
elevated or embossed lettering (i.e. the shaded edges). What we
witness, therefore, are semiotic actions taking place in mobile spaces
(e.g. on aero-planes), but also semiotic tokens themselves on the move:
genres, discourses, styles, single words. In the process, elite status is
normalised across more far-reaching terrains and for ever-wider
demographics.
No social semiotic analysis is complete without its critical-with-a-
capital-C denouement. In this regard, I want to end by offering to three
loosely sketched observations or interpretations, which I draw from
some of our existing statements about the luxury landscapes of super-
elite mobility (specifically, cf. Thurlow and Jaworski 2014,
forthcoming). What I hope to have illustrated is how the rhetorics of
elite status – like the discourses of luxury – are nowadays ubiquitous
and expressed in the most fastidious ways. They are also fully
multimodal and, I believe, strategically so. All of which speaks of a
wider political economy and a deeper cultural politics. It is precisely in
their ordinariness, smallness and banality – as much as their ubiquity
– that the four random objects above accrue their real ideological
force.
What has been presented here is on-the-ground, empirical evidence
of a discursive formation (in the Foucauldian sense) at work across
multiple sites, institutions, genres, modes and resources. My four
objects are throw-away manifestations of a much bigger story about
the reordering of contemporary class structures. These are the kinds of
micro-level (nano-level?) enactments of a post-class ideology which
normalises and rationalises elite status (e.g. through the wide-spread
use of the word ‘elite’) and which propagates a sense of privilege as
somehow domesticated and democratised. All these back-dropped
visions (a kind of luxury wall-paper) and banal materialisations
normalise the very notion of luxury itself. We must all of us be
constantly taught to recognise luxury – to know what it looks like – but
we must also be taught to desire it in the first place. And just as the
rhetorics of luxury slide easily across spaces, the sensuous stuff of
status gets quickly under our skin. Regardless of our power or wealth.
Along these lines, and in keeping with the spirit of social semiotics, I
must declare something of my own positionality. In a response paper
for an edited collection on elite mobility, Andrew Sayer (2014) offers a
pretty emphatic, hard-hitting critique of scholars working in the field
of elite studies who simply appear to celebrate rather than properly
critique the privileged worlds of which they write. One way, I believe,
to retain a critical edge is to remain self-critical, never losing sight of
my own complicity in it all – to recognise that power and privilege are
never neatly bounded, out-there phenomena. In doing my own
research on super-elite mobilities, I have always known that what
really interested me was trying to understand my complicit (and often
quite explicit) role. It was, after all, me who collected the objects of my
analysis here; it was me who got to be inside a 335-square-metre ‘suite’
at the Burj al Arab (fieldwork or not), and me who secured an upgrade
off the back of my own frequent flying. We are all of us targets for
aspirational luxury marketing and we are all of us positioned by elitist
discourses. They are hard to resist; they are certainly impossible to
avoid.
Luxury landscapes are awash with stuff – aural, visual, spatial,
material and otherwise. Indeed, a very fine line – if any – is to be
drawn between the visual and the verbal, the symbolic and the iconic,
the material and the immaterial, the functional and the aesthetic. And
the designers and architects of super-elite luxury landscapes are not
just aestheticians – technical wizards at making banal stuff appear
exceptional, making crap look fabulous; they are also synaestheticians,
appealing constantly, strategically and expertly to what Gunther Kress
(1997) sees as our innate potential for shifting between and reading
across different semiotic modes. To hear colours, to see sounds and to
taste words. Experiencing, for example, language as stuff or material
objects as pictures – and generating new/different social meanings out
of these transmodal combinations. Herein lies the deep appeal and
ideological effectiveness of super-elite/luxury discourse: They
constantly toggle between and apparently collapse modalities which we
scholars otherwise dogmatically insist on keeping apart. As such, it
becomes impossible sometimes to know where things begin and end.

3 Bibliography
3.1 Works Cited
Adams, Tony E., and Stacy Holman Jones. “Telling Stories:
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Aiello, Giorgia. “Theoretical Advances in Critical Visual Analysis:
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of Visual Literacy 26.2 (2006): 89–102.
Fairclough, Norman. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social
Research. London: Routledge, 2003.
Featherstone, Michael. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism.
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Halliday, Michael A. K. Language as Social Semiotic: The Social
Interpretation of Language and Meaning. Baltimore: University
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Jaworski, Adam, and Crispin Thurlow. “Introducing Semiotic
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Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow. London: Continuum, 2010. 1–
40.
Jewitt, Carey, ed. The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis.
London: Routledge, 22013.
Judd, Deane B., and Günter Wyszecki. Color in Business, Science and
Industry. New York: Wiley-Interscience, 31975.
Kress, Gunther. Before Writing: Rethinking Paths to Literacy.
London: Routledge, 1997.
Kress, Gunther. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to
Contemporary Communication. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The
Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge, 1996.
Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Multimodal Discourse: The
Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. London:
Arnold, 2001.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. 1974. Oxford: Basil
 Blackwell, 1991.
Machin, David. “What Is Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies?”
Critical Discourse Studies 10.4 (2013): 347–355.
Norris, Sigrid, and Rodney Jones, eds. Discourse in Action:
Introducing Mediated Discourse Analysis. New York: Taylor &
Francis, 2005.
Sayer, Andrew. “Postscript: Elite Mobilities and Critique.” Elite
Mobilities. Ed. Thomas Birtchnell and Javier Caletrío. London:
Routledge, 2013. 251–262.
Shankar, Shalini, and Jillian Cavanaugh. “Language and Materiality in
Global Capitalism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012): 355–
369.
Thrift, Nigel. Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect.
London: Routledge, 2007.
Thurlow, Crispin, and Adam Jaworski. “The Alchemy of the Upwardly
Mobile: Symbolic Capital and the Stylization of Elites in Frequent-
flyer Programmes.” Discourse & Society 17.1 (2006): 131–167.
Thurlow, Crispin, and Adam Jaworski. “Silence Is Golden:
Linguascaping, Anti-communication and Social Exclusion in Luxury
Tourism Representations.” Semiotic Landscapes: Image, Text,
Space. Ed. Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow. London:
Continuum, 2010. 187–218.
Thurlow, Crispin, and Adam Jaworski. “Elite Mobilities: The Semiotic
Landscapes of Luxury and Privilege.” Social Semiotics 22.5 (2012):
487–516.
Thurlow, Crispin, and Adam Jaworski. “Visible-Invisible: The Social
Semiotics of Labour in Luxury Tourism.” Elite Mobilities. Ed.
Thomas Birtchnell and Javier Caletrío. London: Routledge, 2014.
176–193.
Thurlow, Crispin, and Adam Jaworksi. “Word-things and Space-
sounds: The Synaesthetic Rhetorics of Luxury.” Cultural Politics,
forthcoming.
Thurlow, Crispin, and Giorgia Aiello. “National Pride, Global Capital:
A Social Semiotic Analysis of Transnational Visual Branding in the
 Airline Industry.” Visual Communication 6.3 (2007): 305–344.
Van Leeuwen, Theo. Introducing Social Semiotics. London:
Routledge, 2005.

3.2 Further Reading

Jaworski, Adam, and Crispin Thurlow, eds. Semiotic Landscapes:
Language, Image, Space. London: Continuum, 2010.
Machin, David. Introduction to Multimodal Analysis. London:
Bloomsbury, 2007.
Scollon, Ron, and Suzie W. Scollon. Discourses in Place: Language in
the Material World. London: Routledge, 2003.
Social Semiotics (journal since 1991, published by Routledge). Visual
Communication (journal since 2002, published by Sage).
Wolfgang Hallet

34 Non-verbal Semiotic Modes and

Media in the Multimodal Novel
Abstract: Since the 1990s a new kind of novel has emerged in
considerable number, which integrates a wide range of non-linguistic
symbolic forms and non-narrative modes into the narrative discourse.
These forms encompass visual images of all sorts, but also diagrams or
maps and reproductions or imitations of non-narrative texts and
genres. Whereas intermediality theories regard and describe such
other forms of symbolization as ‘media,’ multimodality theories
(originating mainly from social semiotics) conceptualize them as
semiotic modes that serve (more or less conventionalized) signifying
and communicative purposes. The present contribution introduces the
concept of multimodality and demonstrates how it can be applied to
understand and describe the sub-genre of the multimodal novel.
Key Terms: Multimodality, multimodal novel, semiotic mode,
multimodal narrative discourse, multiliterate reading, transmodal
meaning

1 Features of the Multimodal Novel

From its early beginning, the genre of the novel has been associated
with the written word in printed form in the medium of the
paperbound book. Thus, although in the nineteenth century quite a
few novels were published with additional (non-diegetic) illustrations
to popularize the genre ( 20 The Nineteenth-century Illustrated
Novel), reading has always been a primarily linear, page-turning act of
decoding alphabetic signs, of word-based imagination and of making
meaning of letters, words and sentences. However, since the end of the
twentieth century there is a growing number of novels that integrate
other, non-linguistic symbolic forms and modes of representation into
the narrative discourse ( 7 Postcolonial Ekphrasis in the
Contemporary Anglophone Indian Novel; 10 Nesting – Braiding –
Weaving; 21 Intermedial Encounters in the Contemporary North
American Novel). These forms include visual images of all sorts, often
photographs, but also diagrams, cartographic maps, screenshots,
drawings or cartoons and comics. Apart from visual images,
reproductions or imitations of other kinds of texts and non-narrative
genres can be integrated, like, e.g., handwritten letters, e-mails or
other ephemera, but also formulaic languages like algorithms or
mathematical calculations. There is, of course, no limited set of modes
or media that can occur in the multimodal novel; the collage of written
text, images, reproductions of documents and a large range of visual
and distinct other textual elements (e.g. footnotes) make it difficult to
identify a text as a novel in the traditional sense at all and to regard the
novel as ‘a text.’ Still, the systematic and recurrent integration of non-
verbal and non-narrative elements in novelistic narration makes it
necessary to expand the notion of ‘the novel’ and ‘the literary text’
beyond word-based forms of representation and meaning-making. On
the one hand, the kind of novel described above obviously constitutes a
sub-genre, categorized as ‘the multimodal novel.’ On the other hand,
the integration of non-linguistic signs and even whole ‘texts’ calls for a
re-conceptualization of ‘diegesis’ in literary studies in general and of
novelistic narration and the theory of the novel in particular (cf. Hallet
2009, 149–152; Hallet 2014, 168–169).
It is important to note that in the kind of novel that is labelled as
‘multimodal,’ these non-linguistic elements are not extra-textual,
additional illustrations (like, e.g., illustrated editions of novels) or
complementary editorial elements, and that they are substantially
different from paratexts. Rather, there are two defining features that
make a novel ‘multimodal.’ Narratologically speaking, these other,
non-linguistic or non-narrative elements
– are distinct visual or textual entities that form an integral part of
the narrative discourse; they are at the narrator’s disposal and
displayed as the narrative unfolds. Often, the verbal narrative refers
to them or addresses them more or less explicitly;
– are an intrinsic part of the fictional world at different diegetic
levels. They are artifacts that are produced, used and located in the
fictional world of the novel and are thus related to the characters’
actions and perceptions or to the narrator’s ways of thinking,
 communicating and making sense of the world.
In other words: Unlike in the traditional (‘monomodal’) novel, the
fictional world is not represented and constituted in verbal form only.
The integration of different types of symbolization and semiotic forms
leads to a multisemiotic, more comprehensive, at times also more
authentic representation of the fictional world that tries to imitate or
resembles the multifarious ways in which the non-fictional reality is
perceived by the reader and in which knowledge and experiences are
represented and communicated in the reader’s lifeworld. Therefore, it
is appropriate to categorize this type of multisemiotic narrative as a
literary subgenre and designate it as the multimodal novel (cf. Hallet
2009a, 2011a, 2011b; Gibbons 2010a, 99; Gibbons 2010b, 287;
Nørgaard 2010b).
Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family (1982; Hallet 2015),
Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000; Gehring 2009; Gibbons
2012, 46–85), W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2002; cf. sections 2 and 3 in
Denham and McCulloh 2006; Hallet 2011a, 2014), Mark Haddon’s The
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003; cf. Hallet 2014)
or Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005;
cf. Hoth 2006; Glorig 2007; Hallet 2009, 2014; Nørgaard 2010a;
Gibbons 2012, 127–166) are among the most renowned and popular
multimodal novels. However, Young Adult Novels and fictional
autobiographies in diary form in particular appear to be the globally
most successful type of multimodal novel. Sherman Alexie’s The
Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Jeff Kinney’s Diary
of a Wimpy Kid engage in obviously highly recognizable and popular
communicative and notational practices and styles of self-narration,
imitating the handwritten diary, scrapbook practices, occasional
lifeworld-related graphics (such as, for instance, teacher or peer
caricatures) and integrating more ambitious forms of hand-drawn
portraits or comics.
Fig. 1: Multimodal sample page from The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet.
Larsen 2009, 3.

A brief description and analysis of a prototypical page from Reif

Larsen’s novel The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet (2009) may serve to
demonstrate how a multimodal novel is composed and narrates (fig. 1).
The main body of the page consists of verbal narrative discourse in the
traditional style, presenting the autodiegetic narrator and his family;
the first sentence also introduces the situation (the phone call) that
triggers the young narrator’s adventurous journey to the East. The
second paragraph further specifies the narrator’s character and
simultaneously serves as a backdrop to the visual elements on the page
since the narrator describes his habit of mapping everything he
experiences: “maps of people doing things” in blue, “zoological,
geological and topographical maps” in green and anatomic sketches of
insects in red notebooks. The verbal text shares the main body of the
page with a topographical map of the narrator’s home region in
Montana in which his hometown Divide and his parents’ Coppertop
Ranch is located. Later in the novel, U.S. America’s east-west divide is
thematized as an existential experience and a determining factor in the
colonisation of the American West (cf. Hallet 2014, 158–159).
A detailed plan of the narrator’s bedroom with the color-coded
bookshelves authenticates his claim that his life is organized around
his mapping practices and the art of drawing maps and scientific
sketches. This room plan is placed in the margin, which the narrator
continuously uses for remarks, additional notes, reflections and
excerpts from his notebooks, as in the example in fig. 1, where more
details about the young topographer’s equipment that he stores in his
room are disclosed. Sometimes the margin is also an important space
to present graphic or topographical details, genealogical or personal
information about other characters or about the narrator’s (Spivet’s)
mapping practices. The sketch of a sparrow skeleton at the bottom of
the margin alludes to and explains the background to the narrator’s
second name, ‘Sparrow,’ and is a demonstration of the narrator’s skill
in the art of scientific drawing. Often, as in the line between the
topographical map and the map of the bedroom at the top of the page,
a particular item in the main text is assigned to a marginal detail
through a dotted line; in other cases, particularly in the middle part of
the novel containing the journey, the margin is used as a navigation
device that provides the reader with geographical information about
the narrator’s east-west itinerary and the locations and places he visits
or passes.
The sample page from Larsen’s novel demonstrates to what extent
the way the storyworld is represented and constituted differs from the
monomodal novel; but it also becomes evident at first sight that what
is commonly regarded as ‘narrative discourse’ takes on a completely
different shape. It is not only delinearized, but important details
concerning the setting, the characters or their actions and even the
narrator’s thoughts, reflections and knowledge are now, through the
layout, relegated to specific places on the page and presented in
various symbolic forms, urging the reader to decode other ‘languages’
and transforming reading into a hypertextual activity. This is why the
shift from monomodal to multimodal storytelling in the novel affects
both story and discourse, the representation of the storyworld and the
(delinearized) presentation of information on the page, the creation of
a narrative and the act of reading (cf. sections 3 and 4 for details).

2 Multimodality as a Theoretical Framework

The concept of multimodality originates from various theory strands
and different disciplines, the three most important of which are
discourse analysis in linguistics, multimedia technology for man-
machine interaction (Ventola, Charles, and Kaltenbacher 2004;
Scollon and LeVine 2004) and the functional grammar approach in
social semiotics (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001; van Leeuwen 2005;
Hallet 2008; Gibbons 2010, 8–25; Kress 2010; Bucher 2011, 132–135).
Two major developments have led to the establishment of
multimodality as a theoretical framework in the humanities. On the
one hand, multimodality theories try to account for the shortcomings
of monomodal disciplinary approaches in which, as in the philologies,
“language was (seen as) the central and only full means for
representation and communication” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001, 45;
cf. also Bucher 2011, 123-125) or, in case other modes are studied
(music, photography, painting), “representation was treated as
monomodal: discrete, bound, autonomous, with its own practices,
traditions, professions, habits.” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001, 45).
However, even theories and disciplines specialized in the study of one
particular type of artifact like, e.g., paintings, could hardly ignore the
involvement of other ways and forms of meaning-making. This is why
in his picture theory, W. J. T. Mitchell contended that the
image / text problem is not just something constructed ‘between’ the arts, the media, or
different forms of representation, but an unavoidable issue within the individual arts and
media. In short, all arts are ‘composite’ arts (both text and image); all media are mixed
media, combining different codes, discursive conventions, channels, sensory and cognitive
 modes. (Mitchell 1995, 94–95)

The social-semiotic theory of multimodality has taken up this notion of

the intrinsic combination of ‘different codes’ and ‘modes’ involved in a
single act of signification and communication.
On the other hand, the emergence of new multimedia technologies,
and the electronic hypertext in particular, has led to the insight that
theories of symbolic representation and communication need to
account for the combination of different media and symbolic forms in
displays and environments in which ‘meaning’ can no longer be
explained as resulting solely from the natural human language alone.
In electronic multimedial environments, the contribution of other
codes and symbolic languages such as, e.g., sound and music, maps
and diagrams, photographs and moving images (as in videos, for
example), needs to be considered, too: “Multimodal production is now
a ubiquitous fact of representation and communication. That forces us
urgently to develop precise tools requisite for the description and
analysis of texts and semiotic entities of contemporary
communication.” (Kress 2010, 102) Therefore, any theory of cultural
semiosis and communication must explain and describe how meaning
is made across (and simultaneously through) a variety of different
semiotic systems, medial and generic modes, and how a combination
of all of these modes and media is able to produce one whole,
integrated meaning. This applies to both, single successful and
efficient (multimodal) acts of communication, as, e.g. in a newspaper
article that combines verbal text, a diagram and a photograph, and to
the broader production of cultural meaning in discourses which “may
be realised in different ways. The ‘ethnic conflict’ discourse of war, for
instance, may be realised as (part of) a dinner-table conversation, a
television documentary, a newspaper feature, an airport thriller, and
so on.” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001, 5)
In social semiotics, the concept of multimodality is closely tied to a
functional definition of the semiotic mode. It is regarded as “a socially
shaped and culturally given resource for making meaning in
representation and communication” (Kress 2010, 53), which is “used
in recognisably stable ways as a means of articulating discourse” (Kress
and van Leeuwen 2001, 25). Although the status of some of these
resources (like, e.g., color or typography) remains rather unclear (cf.
Bucher 2011, 131; Nørgaard 2010b), the vast majority of modes,
particularly in the context of hermeneutic approaches, can be seen as
textual or medial (generic) entities. By contrast, media are defined as
merely physical and material resources “used in the production of
semiotic products and events, including both the tools and the
materials used (e.g. the musical instrument and the air; the chisel and
the block of wood)” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001, 22), as is the case
for an oil painting on canvas, a black and white paper-print
photograph, a printed newspaper article, a video blog in the electronic
environment of the Internet and so forth. Thus, a semiotic mode is
always tied to a specific material or medial carrier, but media in
themselves do not produce meaning. This is a substantial conceptual
difference between intermediality theories and multimodality theories
( 0 Introduction). Whereas in the former the verbal text and a visual
image are regarded and described as different, interrelated media,
text-image relations in the multimodal novel (as in multimodal texts in
general) are not conceptualized as intermedial relations, but as an
interplay of two distinct semiotic modes (textual entities) in the same
‘medium,’ i.e. the printed book, which jointly contribute to the
production of one whole meaning in a single act of communication (cf.
Bucher 2011, 125). In multimodality theories, therefore, the emphasis
is on the meaning that the single mode (textual entity) produces, and
on the combination of various modes that result in one (transmodal)
meaning of a multimodal text. An analysis of the multimodal novel has
to account for the contribution of these single semiotic modes to the
constitution and characterization of signifying, communicative and
socio-cultural practices in the fictional world as well as to the kind of
meaning it produces there, and the role of a specific mode in the text-
reader interaction (cf. sections 3 and 4).
The distinctness of the single mode is a pre-condition of the
constitution of a multimodal text, but it also implies that its
communicative efficiency, its epistemological potential and its capacity
to produce meaning in a way that is specific to a particular mode plays
an important role (‘affordance’). According to M. A. K. Halliday (2004,
29–31) a mode needs to comply with three metafunctional principles
of communication: the ideational (or referential or representational)
function, i.e. the ability to communicate content, knowledge and
experiences; the interpersonal function, i.e. the capacity to establish
social interaction between interlocutors; and the textual function,
which concerns the coherence of a communicative entity as a distinct
textual (or medial) unity.
The distinctness of single semiotic modes and their contribution to a
larger, more comprehensive meaning in a given multimodal text or
communicative unity (among them the multimodal novel) leads to
three levels of analysis, interpretation and description:
– firstly, the specific meaning of the single semiotic mode like a
photograph, a map, a handwritten letter or other elements. Since
they can be treated and occur as independent texts (in the wide,
semiotic sense) they produce a meaning of their own. For instance,
a topographical map or a photograph represent specific features or
aspects of a particular slice of the world and thus produce meaning
relatively independent of the context in which they are deployed. A
map of Montana represents an identifiable part of the United
States, whether it occurs in the multimodal novel or in some other
discursive and cultural context;
– secondly, the interrelatedness of the single mode with other modes
and the specific kind of relation that can be identified (cf. Bucher
2011, 128–132; Chan 2011). Such intermodal relations always
depend on the given communicative or discursive context (i.e. on
the way they are presented in the multimodal novel) and can be
described as, for instance, redundant (image and verbal text
providing the same information), hierarchical (e.g., the verbal text
framing an image), elaborating (additional information provided by
the image) or juxtapositional (the image contrasting with the text in
some way). A literary analysis of the multimodal novel will have to
provide a detailed description of the respective role and relatedness
of a single mode to other modes in the novel;
– thirdly, the transmodal (synthesized, holistic) meaning, in which
the interplay of the multiple modes in the novel results. This overall
(hypertextual) meaning of the novel is more than an addition of the
individual meanings of the single modes and also of the specific
kinds of intermodal relations that can be observed in a given novel.
The manifold and intricate kinds of interplay of semiotic modes
and their individual meaning (comparable to, e.g., the film) lead to
a higher level of meaning that neither resides in these modes
 themselves nor in their relations, but in a level of meaning that is
constituted through the interplay itself.
Because of all of these observations, the multimodal novel can, on the
one hand, be regarded as just one instance of multimodality,
participating in a general cultural practice of signifying and making
meaning and as cultural and communicative normality. On the other
hand, because of its specificity as a literary text, it can be expected to
not only mirror such social and cultural practices in fictional form, but
also to reflect and comment upon them critically and in a self-reflexive
manner. The narratological implications are multifarious, since the
multimodality of novelistic narration affects the way readers imagine
the storyworld and its various constituents, while also altering the
reader’s pathways of making sense of signs. These are now not only
arranged in a hypertextual manner, as opposed to the linearity of signs
in the conventional, word-based novel, but they also belong to different
sign systems which the reader must be able to decode.

3 The Multimodal Constitution of the

Storyworld
The sample page from Larsen’s novel in fig. 1 demonstrates that the
information and data the reader is offered in multimodal novels to
construct and imagine the storyworld are substantially different from
those in the traditional novel. A brief examination of Mark Haddon’s
novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time serves to
demonstrate how all of the main constituents of a fictional narrative
are affected. Apart from traditional verbal discourse, this novel
presents the reader with a broad range of other symbolic forms and
semiotic modes, among them street-plans of the narrator’s
neighborhood, diagrams and curves, drawings of all kinds of objects,
even of cow patterns or seat patterns, but also lists of all sorts, time-
tables, mathematical formulae, calculations and algorithms,
handwritten letters and many more. All of these modes affect basic
constituents of the narrative.
(1) Actions and the Story: As the title indicates, the narrator regards
the death of a dog in his immediate neighborhood as a murder mystery
case which he sets out to solve and narrate. Therefore he employs and
presents various modes that are suited for his detective work,
systematizing the data and his observations. Since they thus serve as
problem-solving tools they enhance Christopher’s investigations and
thus propel the action. For instance, Christopher produces a map of his
neighborhood to plan his investigation or to clarify the positions of
possible witnesses. One of his favorite problem-solving strategies is
algorithmic reasoning, formally developed (Haddon 2004, 78–82) and
represented as a “Chain of Reasoning” (Haddon 2004, 53–54), to come
to conclusions about the main suspect. Furthermore, key experiences
in Christopher’s life are (re-)presented in the mode of the handwritten
letter (typographically set off as such): Letters from his mother are
central objects in the story (Haddon 2004, 118–144) since they not
only reveal that, in contrast to what his father had always claimed, his
mother is still alive, they also testify to his mother’s will to keep in
touch with him after leaving his father; furthermore, these letters also
trigger his father’s confession that he killed the dog (Haddon 2004,
150). Finally, these letters also lead to Christopher’s decision to travel
to London in order to live with his mother (Haddon 2004, 161–163).
Once again, this journey is not only related in words, but also
represented through a large number of visual elements, maps in
particular, but also other modes like traffic or Underground railway
signs, electronic timetables and so forth. Therefore it can be contended
that in this multimodal novel (as in many others) non-verbal semiotic
forms represent actions, key-stages of and central objects in the story,
whereas in the traditional novel actions and the story are exclusively
rendered in verbal form.
(2) Character: Apart from representing key elements and stages of
the murder mystery case and of the subsequent family story, the non-
verbal semiotic modes are of paramount importance for the narrator’s
and protagonist’s ways of making sense of the world. Since Christopher
shows deviant forms of world apprehension and signs of autism,
resorting to non-linguistic ways of understanding, thinking,
communicating and expressing himself is this character’s cognitive and
communicative key strategy. For instance, a set of smileys helps him to
typify people’s emotions, which are otherwise difficult or almost
impossible for him to decode (Haddon 2004, 2–3). Since problem
solving is a constant challenge in his everyday life, he has developed
cognitive excellence in reasoning, logical, mathematical and
algorithmic thinking. All of these cognitive activities are conducted in
formal languages, which he also presents in the course of and as an
intrinsic part of the narrative discourse. This is why a key-decision in
his life – whether to stay with his father or with his mother in the
future – is presented in the form of an algorithm (Haddon 2004, 162–
163). This way, readers have direct access to the narrator’s mind and
the specific epistemological tools Christopher applies to solve all the
puzzles and mysteries in his life; readers are able to observe ‘how the
mind works’ (another of Christopher’s major areas of interest; cf.
Haddon 2004, 146). Thus the semiotic modes in this novel represent
the narrator’s (often solipsistic) cognition and one of this character’s
important (or even pre-dominant) features. Since he frequently also
reflects upon his own cognitive abilities and thinking strategies, they
also form a dominant dimension in his personality and identity
development – one of the reasons why this novel can also be regarded
as a Bildungsroman.
(3) Social and Communicative Practices: Whereas in the traditional
novel readers access the fictional world via linguistic signs only, the
multimodal novel makes it possible to study all sorts of semiotic and
communicative practices and artifacts employed or produced in the
textual world in a direct, unmediated way. Thus readers are able to
observe and recognize a multitude of semiotic and social practices in
the storyworld and relate them to those in their own lifeworld. For
instance, the multimodal youth novel in particular imitates, mirrors or
popularizes youth cultural practices like keeping diaries, creating
scrapbooks or designing comics. However, the integration of non-
verbal semiotic forms in the novel not only serves to represent social,
cultural and communicative practices like mapping, visualizing
statistical data or designing buildings and objects in the storyworld
(cf., e.g., the seat patterns or the plan of Christopher’s mother’s flat in
Haddon 2004, 227, 235). The multimodal novel also displays and
highlights the semantic, cognitive or epistemological surplus and the
specific affordances of semiotic modes in a given (fictional)
sociocultural and societal environment. This way it also subjects the
semiotic modes presented in the course of the novel to metacognitive
and metasemiotic observation and critique (cf. section 5), particularly
if the communicative or epistemological affordance of a specific mode
is explicitly addressed by a character or the narrator, like, e.g., the
smileys or stellar constellations in The Curious Incident (Haddon
2004, 2–3, 156–157).
(4) Space and Setting: As in Larsen’s novel, self-made maps feature
prominently in Haddon’s novel because they play a key-role in the
young narrator’s life. Due to his special cognitive disposition (namely,
Asperger Syndrome), he needs to anticipate and systematize spatial
perceptions and to plan his itineraries carefully. Therefore, he has
developed the habit of mapping his environment and the places he
visits. As a result, the spatial dimension of this novel is, in many cases,
presented in the semiotic form of maps and plans. Thus, readers are
equipped with often very detailed architectural, geographical and even
astronomic information about railway stations, the narrator’s
hometown Swindon and London, a zoo, and even the Milky Way and
stellar constellations of the universe. Thus, in this multimodal novel as
in others, in order to “orient themselves on the map of the fictional
world” and to “picture in imagination the changing landscape along
the routes followed by the characters” (Ryan 2001, 123), readers can
make use of a whole range of semiotic modes, including verbal
description, to construct mental models of the places and spaces (cf.
Hallet 2008b, 2009b, 2011a, 2014). Regarding the spatial dimension,
multimodality is definitely a feature that brings the novel closer to the
reader’s experiences since, in the lifeworld, space is always ‘real-and-
imagined,’ constructed in symbolic form (cf. Hallet 2009b, 2011a),
including conventionalized semiotic modes like maps of all kind,
graphic routes or electronic navigation devices.
As is the case for the reader’s imagination of the fictional spaces and
places, it can be generalized that the multimodal novel offers the
reader a broader range of modes than the traditional novel as a basis
for their construction of the storyworld. Since all textual worlds are of
a more or less holistic nature (cf. Hallet 2008b), comprising a
“connected set of objects and individuals; habitable environment;
reasonably intelligible totality for external observers, field of activity
for its members” (Ryan 2001, 91), readers intuitively draw upon their
real world experiences in which the use of different types of signs and
sensory channels and of different symbolic languages is a semiotic and
communicative rule. The multimodal novel, at least to a certain degree,
imitates the multiplicity of modes that are involved in everyday
cognitive processes and enhances the experiential dimension of the
reader’s construction of the fictional world (cf. fig. 2; cf. Hallet 2008b,
2014).

Fig. 2: The multimodal constitution of the fictional world.

Hallet 2014, 167.

4 Multimodal Narrative Discourse

A look at any multimodal page of a novel instantly demonstrates that
its narrative discourse no longer unfolds in a linear manner and that
this kind of novel can no longer be regarded as a coherent text in the
traditional sense. Rather, the novel’s narrative discourse is now
organized as a hypertextual ensemble of different types of symbolic
representations and textual elements that the reader must interrelate
(cf. Hallet 2009a, 150–151; Hallet 2011b), and text-reader interaction
no longer relies on linguistic signs only or on a linear act of reading.
Although longer passages of the novel are still word-based narration, a
typical double page in Larsen’s T. S. Spivet novel (2009, 174–175)
consists of a variety of modes, i.e. bounded elements that can be read
as coherent texts of their own. Apart from verbal text in the main body
of these two pages, the most conspicuous element is a family tree
designed by the narrator as a “Genealogy Placemat that I had made for
Father on the occasion of his forty-eighth birthday” (Larsen 2009,
175). This object is part of an ongoing subplot that traces the narrator’s
family history and scientific tradition, and is inserted in the main text
like a quote. The two margins are filled by a note on the physical
experiences of being slapped in the face and a school bus hitting a
squirrel; a hand-drawn sketch of a school bus “from Notebook G29”
(Larsen 2009, 174); and a short history of the placemat gift rendered in
another marginal note (175) which is linked to the depiction of the
Genealogy Placemat in the main body by a dotted line. In other
instances, the multimodal page of a novel may only be moderately
hypertextual, e.g. by inserting a typographically represented e-mail. By
contrast, in Danielewski’s House of Leaves, pages of the novel do not
present coherent verbal text at all nor do they resemble traditional
book pages any longer; rather, in the most advanced form of the
multimodal novel, pages look like poetic collages, labyrinths or jigsaw
puzzles, the pieces of which the reader has to study and interconnect to
make meaning (cf. Gehring 2009; Gibbons 2010b; Gibbons 2012, 46–
85).
A more recent and most advanced type of multimodal novel even
expands narration and the act of reading beyond the medium of the
printed book (i.e. ‘medium’ in terms of the physical and material
quality of the carrier of a mode) and refers the reader to the Internet in
order to involve them in electronic interactive formats like websites or
blogs. Nota bene, these Internet formats are not non-diegetic
additional components (like, e.g., an interview with the author or some
kind of background information); instead, they are existents in the
fictional world and part of the diegesis so that, for instance, the reader
is enabled to communicate with characters from the novel or with the
narrator, or to look at artifacts and documents from the fictional
world. In such novels, like Jeffery Deaver’s Road Side Crosses or
Jennifer Cowan’s Earthgirl, narration and reading transgress the
medial boundary of the printed book and become truly transmedial.
Therefore, ‘reading’ multimodal novels not only requires multiple
literacies, i.e. the reader’s ability to decipher a large variety of codes
and symbolic languages, but it also transforms the act of ‘reading’ into
a hypertextual activity and the reader into a ‘user’: The transmodal
construction of coherent narrative discourse and meaning now
depends on the reader’s reading paths and decision-making. The
reader is constantly challenged to proceed from one semiotic element
on the page to the other, to identify or define the kind of interrelation
between these different elements (cf. section 2) and to assign meaning
to the single semiotic element as well as to the combination of all of
these modes on a page and in the book as a whole.
5 Meta-semiotic Critique and Epistemological
Scepticism
The experiential dimension of multimodality in a novel implies that
the reader, while decoding the signs, always, at least to a certain
extent, engages in meta-semiotic, meta-communicative or
epistemological reflection, even if the novel does not thematize the
modes and languages it deploys. It comes as no surprise, though, that
most multimodal novels display a deep interest in the discussion and
critical reflection of the affordances of semiotic modes and their
cultural role and impact. In the young adult novel The Absolutely True
Diary of a Part-Time Indian, the young narrator declares that he
draws pictures “all the time”: “I draw because words are too
unpredictable. I draw because words are too limited.” (Alexie 2004, 5)
Likewise, young Spivet, at the beginning of Larsen’s novel, is deeply
convinced of the universal epistemological potential of maps. And in
Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, the protagonist of the same name is obsessed
with the idea of a photographic cultural history of European
architecture.
However, a lot of these novels also develop a considerable semiotic
and epistemological skepticism. While, in Larsen’s novel, Spivet is
completely obsessed with mapping practices, he is, at the same time,
aware of their short-comings. He accuses George Washington of
producing and “imagining all sorts of false geographies” (Larsen 2009,
33) and generalizes his observations into an epistemological and
political critique of cartography as a cultural practice in a historical
perspective: “[T]hese early cartographers of the Corps of
Topographical Engineers […] were conquerors in the most basic sense
of the word, for over the course of the nineteenth century, they slowly
transferred the vast unknown continent piece by piece into the great
machine of the known, of the mapped, of the witnessed – out of the
mythological realm of empirical science.” (Larsen 2009, 16)
In the same vein, the protagonist of Sebald’s novel not only gives up
his photographic project (handing over his huge collection of
photographs to the anonymous narrator), but his confidence in
languages and signs in general is completely lost when his writing
project fails too: “[T]he exposition of an idea by means of a certain
stylistic facility […] now seemed to me nothing but an entirely arbitrary
or deluded enterprise. I could see no connections any more, the
sentences resolved themselves into a series of separate words, the
words into random sets of letters, the letters into disjointed signs.”
(Sebald 2002, 175–176) This way, multimodal novels are often also
meta-semiotic and meta-cultural narratives that reflect upon the
semiotic and communicative practices in which they engage.
Multimodality in the novel is therefore not only a way of
representation and storytelling, but also of epistemological and meta-
semiotic reflection and critique.

6 Bibliography

6.1 Works Cited

Alexie, Sherman. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
New York: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2007.
Bucher, Hans-Jürgen. “Multimodales Verstehen oder Rezeption als
Interaktion: Theoretische und empirische Grundlagen einer
systematischen Analyse der Multimodalität.” Bildlinguistik:
Theorie – Methoden – Fallbeispiele. Ed. Hajo Diekmannshenke,
Michael Klemm, and Hartmut Stöckl. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2011.
123–156.
Chan, Eveline. “Integrating Visual and Verbal Meaning in Multimodal
Text Comprehension: Towards a Model of Intermodal Relations.”
Semiotic Margins. Meaning in Multimodalities. Ed. Shoshana
Dreyfus, Susan Hood, and Maree Stenglin. London: Continuum,
2011. 144–167.
Cowan, Jennifer. Earthgirl. Toronto: Groundwood, 2009.
Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. A Novel. New York: Pantheon,
2000.
Deaver, Jeffery. Roadside Crosses. London: Hodder & Stoughton,
2009.
Denham, Scott, and Mark McCullough, eds. W. G. Sebald: History,
 Memory, Trauma. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2006.
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. London:
Penguin, 2005.
Gehring, Melina. “Das Labyrinth als Chronotopos. Raumtheoretische
Überlegungen zu Mark Z. Danielewskis House of Leaves.”Raum und
Bewegung in der Literatur: Die Literaturwissenschaften und der
Spatial Turn. Ed. Wolfgang Hallet and Birgit Neumann. Bielefeld:
transcript, 2009.
Gibbons, Alison. “‘I Contain Multitudes’: Narrative Multimodality and
the Book that Bleeds.” New Perspectives on Narrative and
Multimodality. Ed. Ruth Page. London and New York: Routledge,
2010a. 99–114.
Gibbons, Alison. “The Narrative Worlds and Multimodal Figures of
House of Leaves: ‘– find your own words; I have no more.’”
Intermediality and Storytelling. Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan and Marina
Grishakova. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010b. 285–311.
Gibbons, Alison. Multimodality, Cognition and Experimental
Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2012.
Glorig, Lorenz. “Narrative Konstruktion, Bild und Photographie in
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.”
Komparatistik Online 2 (2007): n. pag. freenet-homepage.de/
Komparatistik-online/page11937d5bdf2.html/. (15 Mar. 2012).
Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
London: Vintage, 2004.
Hallet, Wolfgang. “Multimodalität.” Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und
Kulturtheorie. Ed. Ansgar Nünning. Stuttgart: Metzler, 52008a. 546–
547.
Hallet, Wolfgang. “The Multimodality of Cultural Experience and
Mental Model Constructions of Textual Worlds.” Ed. Jürgen
Schlaeger. The Literary Mind. Tübingen: Narr, 2008b. 233–250.
Hallet, Wolfgang. “The Multimodal Novel. The Integration of Modes
and Media in Novelistic Narration.” Narratology in the Age of
Interdisciplinary Narrative Research. Ed. Sandra Heinen and Roy
Sommer. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2009a. 129–153.
Hallet, Wolfgang. “Fictions of Space: Zeitgenössische Romane als
fiktionale Modelle semiotischer Raumkonstitution.” Raum und
Bewegung in der Literatur: Die Literaturwissenschaften und der
Spatial Turn. Ed. Wolfgang Hallet and Birgit Neumann. Bielefeld:
transcript, 2009b. 81–113.
Hallet, Wolfgang. “Visual Images of Space, Movement and Mobility in
the Multimodal Novel.” Moving Images – Mobile Viewers. 20th
Century Visuality. Ed. Renate Brosch. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011a.
227–248.
Hallet, Wolfgang. “Medialisierung von Genres am Beispiel des Blogs
und des multimodalen Romans: Von der Schrift-Kunst zum
multimodalen Design.” Medialisierung des Erzählens im
englischsprachigen Roman der Gegenwart: Theoretischer
Bezugsrahmen, Genres und Modellinterpretationen. Ed. Ansgar
Nünning and Jan Rupp. Trier: wvt, 2011b. 85–116.
Hallet, Wolfgang. “The Rise of the Multimodal Novel: Generic Change
and Its Narratological Implications.” Storyworlds across Media.
Towards a Media-Conscious Narratology. Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan and
Jan-Noël Thon. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. 151–
172.
Halliday, Michael K. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London:
Holder Education, 32004.
Hoth, Stephanie. “From Individual Experience to Historical Event and
Back Again: ‘9/11’ in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud &
Incredibly Close.” Kulturelles Wissen und Intertextualität.
Theoriekonzeptionen und Fallstudien zur Kontextualisierung von
Literatur. Ed. Marion Gymnich, Birgit Neumann, and Ansgar
Nünning. Trier: wvt, 2006. 283–300.
Kinney, Jeff. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: A Novel in Cartoons. New York:
Amulett Books, 2007.
Kress, Gunther. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to
Contemporary Communication. London and New York: Routledge,
2010.
Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen, eds. Multimodal Discourse:
The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. London:
 Arnold, 2001.
Larsen, Reif. The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet. London: Harvill
Sacker, 2009.
LeVine, Philip, and Ron Scollon, eds. Discourse and Technology:
Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Washington: Georgetown University
Press, 2004.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual
Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Nørgaard, Nina. “Multimodality and the Literary Text: Making Sense
of Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” New
Perspectives on Narrative and Multimodality. Ed. Ruth Page.
London and New York: Routledge, 2010a. 115–126.
Nørgaard, Nina. “Modality: Commitment, Truth Value and Reality
Claims Across Modes in Multimodal Novels.” Journal for Literary
Theory 4.1 (2010b): 63–80.
Norris, Sigrid. “Multimodal Discourse Analysis: A Conceptual
Framework.” Discourse and Technology: Multimodal Discourse
Analysis. Ed. Philip LeVine and Ron Scollon. Washington:
Georgetown University Press, 2004. 101–115.
Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family. 1982. London: Vintage,
1993.
Page, Ruth, ed. New Perspectives on Narrative and Multimodality.
London and New York: Routledge, 2010.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality. Immersion and
Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore and
London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Cognitive Maps and the Construction of
Narrative Space.” Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences.
Ed. David Herman. Stanford: CSLI, 2003. 214–242.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Fiction, Cognition and Non-Verbal Media.”
Intermediality and Storytelling. Ed. Marie-Laure and Marina
Grishakova. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010. 8–26.
Ryan, Marie-Laure, and Marina Grishakova, eds. Intermediality and
Storytelling. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010.
Sebald, W. G. Austerlitz. London: Penguin, 2002. [German original
2001].
Scollon, Ron, and Philip LeVine. “Multimodal Discourse Analysis as
the Confluence of Discourse and Technology.” Discourse and
Technology: Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Ed. Philip LeVine and
Ron Scollon. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2004. 1–6.
Van Leeuwen, Theo. Introducing Social Semiotics. London and New
York: Routledge, 2005.
Ventola, Eija, Cassily Charles, and Martin Kaltenbacher, eds.
Perspectives on Multimodality. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John
Benjamins, 2004.

6.2 Further Reading

Baldry, Anthony, and Paul J. Thibault. Multimodal Transcription and
Text Analysis: A Multimedia Toolkit and Coursebook with
Associated On-line Course. London: Equinox, 2006.
Bateman, John. Multimodality and Genre: A Foundation for the
Systematic Analysis of Multimodal Documents. Houndmills and
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Herman, David, and Ruth Page. “Coda/Prelude: Eighteen Questions
for the Study of Narrative and Multimodality.” New Perspectives on
Narrative and Multimodality. Ed. Ruth Page. London and New York:
Routledge, 2010. 217–220.
Endnotes
Chapter 6
1 See Gunzenhäuser for the connection between American culture and
especially the development of digital media. She names “technological
development,” “the American market,” and the “history of the digital
media in the context of US-American culture” as crucial for what she
calls – following Arjun Appadurai – “mediascape,” which is medially
coined, and is formed by a complex network of images, narrative
structures, and cultural discourses and relies on electronic media of
information (Gunzenhäuser 2010, 303–305).
2 Cf. Jütte’s chapter “Cyberspace and the Future of the Senses” on how
sense perception might change in the digital age. This pertains to the
experience of and within virtual worlds that to some extent require the
separation of body and mind in acts of simulated experiences that are
enabled by various forms of soft- and hardware (cf. Jütte 2005, 324–
335). According to Wilden, the very process of perception is to be
regarded as a form of digitization in that a flow of information is
fragmented into bits of information that can be processed. This
intriguing argument however neglects the complexity of the embodied,
synaesthetic, conscious and unconscious human experience. Wilden’s
argument shows a certain fascination with computational metaphors for
the mechanism of the human brain (cf. Wilden 1980, 25).
3 Cf. Kjeldsen on Quintilian’s “three-step, visually based rhetorical model
of communication” that crucially involves the evocation of “visions”
(Kjeldsen 2003, 135) and Butzer on the relationship between
imagination and the rhetorical techniques of amplificatio and evidentia
(2008, 85–92).
4 Cf. Rollinson and Geckle (1998, 90) and Roberts (1899, 1–23) on the
discussion of the question of authorship.
5 According to Longinus, the five sources of “the sublime in literature”
are “the command of full-blooded ideas,” and “the inspiration of
vehement emotion” as “congenital” sources. The other three sources
concern the textual constitution, namely the “proper construction of
figures,” “nobility of phrase” and “the general effect of dignity and
elevation” (141). Longinus speaks of the importance of choice and
combination resulting in the text as “an organic whole” (155) or “perfect
organism” (237). He thus combines stylistic and affective dimension.

6 Simone Winko makes out six defining characteristics. Digital literature

is interactive, the duplicity of the text or digital image (text on the
screen and HTML-text, which is hidden, invisible), multimedial, non-
linear, certain paratextual elements that mark it as, on the one hand, a
form of literature (with certain aesthetic implications – a criterion that
can be called rather neglected), and on the other, aspects of formal and
content-related nature that mark it as literature (Winko 2005, 138–140).
For an alternative model of characterization see Suter (2005, 202–213).
Chapter 7
7 According to Pinney, darshan’s corpothetics of commercially produced
god pictures is the opposite of the Western, neo-Kantian imperatives of
disinterested aesthetics (the fine art practice of the colonial Indian art
schools) and hence a “countertheory of Western visuality” (Pinney
2002, 356); however, this neat differentiation between a universalist
Western neo-Kantian aesthetics on the one hand and Indian local
darshan-related practices on the other has been criticized as problematic
by scholars such as Ajay J. Sinha (2007, 206).
8 India’s national election of spring 2014 made Narenda Modi India’s new
prime minister. Modi used to be Gujarat’s president when the brutal
pogroms of Muslim citizens took place in 2002, and which cost over
1000 Muslims their lives and drew hundreds of thousands into ghettos.
Some voices have claimed that Modi, high-ranking BJP (Bharatiya
Janata Party) politician and Hindu-nationalist, had mongered hate which
ignited the communal violence in Gujarat in 2002 and should hence be
made responsible for the torturing and killing of so many Muslims.
Chapter 11
9 For clarity’s sake, throughout this chapter I will use the notion of genre,
leaving aside discussions on the similarities and differences between
genre, medium, format, cultural form, etc. (cf. Baetens 2013a, 2014).
Chapter 20
10 For a brief discussion of the problematic implications of the term
‘representation’ in intermediality studies and in relation to iconotext and
ekphrasis, cf. Wagner 2013a.
11 On the consequences for characterisation, plot, and setting of serialised
fiction, cf. Patten 1999b, 2006.
12 On the publishing history of Oliver Twist, and especially on Dickens’
preface in the 1841 edition and subsequent changes, cf. the introduction
and note on the text in the Oxford edition of the novel which I have used
as my principal text in this article (Dickens 1999).
13 For a study of Hogarth’s importance for Dickens, cf. Stone 1994, 35–55.
Hogarth’s treatment of Jews in his graphic works has been discussed by
Ronald Paulson (1993, 167–173). There is a tendency among
biographers and critics, once they have made an author or artist the
subject of their major research, to excuse the foibles and weaknesses of
their heroes. Thus Paulson is at pains to exculpate Hogarth, denying
racist implications in Hogarth’s renderings of Jews (Paulson 1993, 170–
172) while Stone argues that Dickens was probably unconscious of, or
gave little thought to, Fagin’s anti-Semitic ramifications.
14 Cf. Cohen’s interesting visual juxtaposition of the pedlar in Hogarth’s
engraving of 1757 and Cruikshank’s etching entitled “Oliver’s
Reception by Fagin and the Boys”, from Bentley’s Miscellany (Cohen
1980, 22, fig. 4).
15 For an in-depth study of an earlier version of this highly intertextual
print, including the Jew and the Muslim outside the window, cf.
Krysmanski 1996, 539–552. Krysmanski also provides an enormous
wealth of critical literature concerning the representations of Jews in
contemporary and previous art and the literature of the time.
16 For a detailed study of the economic and political situations of Jews in
the context of legal prohibitions concerning professions, cf. Foxman
2010. Cf. also Jerry Z. Muller’s Capitalism and the Jews (2010), a
persuasive if provocative study of how Jewish culture and historical
accident prepared Jews for commercial success and why that success
has earned them so much hatred and criticism.
17 For a discussion of the “Jew Bill” and Hogarth’s ambiguous reaction to
it in plate 2 of his Four Prints of an Election (1755–1758), cf. Paulson
1993, 167–173.
18 It is perhaps telling that “Jew” was an insult used by politicians in
 Georgian England to attack opponents; cf. Paulson 1993, 477;
Endelman 1999 [1979], 21.
19 Ever since the publication of the pioneering works of Foucault (1973
[1966]) and Derrida (1987 [1978]) we are now generally agreed that
images always contain a semantic ‘excess’ that escapes verbal
description; for more recent discussions of the issue and the
impossibility of ‘translating’ pictures into words, cf. especially Mitchell
1994; Wagner 1995, 2013c.
20 On Cruikshank’s obsession with Fagin, which reminds one of Dickens’
similar obsession in his later years with the murder of Nancy, cf.
especially Cohen 1980, 23. Cf. also Cohen’s striking visual
juxtaposition in a reproduction of Cruikshank’s self-portrait and Fagin’s
posture in the cell (1980, 23).
Chapter 21
21 For a detailed analysis of literary visuality as phenomenologically
refocused form of intermedial narration cf. Hartmann 2015 forthcoming.
22 The term Renaissance implies in both terms ‘American Renaissance’
and ‘Canadian Renaissance’ the reconnection to preceding traditions.
However, in both cases one would rather have to presume the
emergence of something genuinely new.
Chapter 25
23 I would like to thank Sascha Bru, Tom Vandevelde, and Tom Willaert,
the organizers of the “Listening to Literature, 1899–1950” conference
that took place at KU Leuven in March 2014. There, I have received
much useful feedback on an early version of this paper. Thanks also go
to Daniel Allemann for his diligent proofreading and formatting of the
text.
Chapter 33
24 A working definition of mode is offered by Gunther Kress (2010, 79) as
a “socially and culturally shaped resource for making meaning. Image,
writing, layout, speech, moving images are examples of different
modes.”
25 These definitions for “medium”, “mode” and “meaning” are drawn from
Kress and van Leeuwen (2001, 21, 22, 68).
26 My four artefacts come, respectively, from Argentina (the tissues), the
now-defunct British airline eos (pyjamas), and the business-class
services of the UAE’s Emirates airline (pepper pot) and the Spanish
airline Iberia (napkin).
27 The Burj al Arab’s most-luxurious-hotel-in-the-world claim is
prominently displayed on its website at www.jumeirah.com/en/hotels-
resorts/dubai/burj-al-arab/ (30 Mar. 2015).
28 This and one other randomly selected instance of commentary are to be
found online here: www.ausbt.com.au/garuda-indonesia-business-class-
fully-flat-bed-superb-service and www.ausbt.com.au/garuda-indonesia-
business-class-fully-flat-bed-superb-service and http://www.navjot-
singh.com/airline-pr/emirates-airline-bangkok-to-dubai-business-class-
on-the-boeing-777-300 (30 Mar. 2015).
Index of Subjects
Achilles’ shield 1, 2, 3, 4
acoustics, literary 1, 2, 3, 4–5
adaptation 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 8–9, 10, 11, 12–13, 14
– balletic 1
– comic book 1
– dance 1–2
– film 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18
aesthetics 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15–16, 17, 18,
19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25
– cinematic 1
– film 1, 2, 3–4
– intermedial 1, 2, 3
– New Deal 1
– of violence 1–2
– photographic 1, 2
– picturesque 1, 2–3
– transcultural 1
– visual 1, 2
Africa 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
African-American 1, 2, 3
allegory 1
– political 1
– moral 1
alterity 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
America 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
– American culture 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Anglo-Saxon 1, 2
anti-Semitism 1, 2–3
Antiquity 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
appropriation 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6
– cultural 1, 2
arch-intermediality 1, 2, 3
architecture 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
art
– abstract 1–2, 3
– body 1
– conceptual 1–2
– digital 1
– installation 1
– live 1, 2, 3, 4
– modern 1, 2, 3
– multimedia performance 1, 2–3
– performance 1, 2, 3–4
– postmodern 1, 2
– Renaissance 1, 2, 3
– verbal 1, 2, 3, 4
– visual 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15
– sister arts 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6
art history 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
artist 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
– body 1, 2
– visual 1, 2, 3, 4
– woman 1–2
Asia 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
audience 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7–8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18,
19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28
aurality 1
Australia 1
Austria 1, 2, 3
authenticity 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
– authentic 1, 2–3, 4, 5
– authentication 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
author 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
– authorship 1, 2, 3
autobiography 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
– life writing 1
avant-garde 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
avatar 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6
ballet 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10–11, 12, 13
baroque 1, 2
– neo-baroque 1
Bayeux Tapestry 1
Beat Generation 1, 2, 3–4
Bildungsroman 1, 2, 3
biography 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
blog 1, 2, 3, 4
body 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19,
20, 21
– ekphrastic 1
– female 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– semiotic 1
Britain 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
– Great Britain 1, 2, 3
Cambodia 1, 2
camera 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
– virtual 1, 2
canon 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8–9, 10
– American movie 1, 2
– ekphrastic 1, 2, 3, 4
– literary 1–2, 3
– Sherlock Holmes 1, 2, 3
capital, cultural 1, 2, 3, 4
Caribbean 1, 2, 3, 4–5
caricature 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
cartoon 1, 2, 3, 4
– jive 1
– single-panel 1
century
– eighteenth 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
– fifteenth 1
– fifth 1, 2
– first 1
– fourteenth 1, 2
– fourth 1
– nineteenth 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8–9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17–18,
19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26
– sixteenth 1, 2
– seventeenth 1, 2, 3
– sixth 1
– third 1, 2
– twelfth 1
– twentieth 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8–9, 10, 11, 12, 13–14, 15, 16, 17, 18,
19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30
– twenty-first 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
choreography 1, 2–3
cinema 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10–11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19,
20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25
– avant-garde 1
– silent 1
– Volta 1
code, graphic 1, 2
cognition 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– 4e 1–2
– dual coding theory of 1
– cognitive 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15–16, 17, 18,
19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28
collage 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
colonialism 1, 2, 3, 4
– colonialization 1
– colonized 1, 2, 3, 4
– colonizer 1, 2
comics 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7–8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14–15, 16–17, 18, 19,
20, 21, 22, 23
– superhero 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– comic book 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6–7, 8, 9
– comic strips 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
– webcomics 1, 2
composition 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16
– musical 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6
computer 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14–15, 16
– computerization 1, 2, 3
Congo 1–2
copyright 1, 2
corpothetics 1, 2
cosmopolitanism 1–2, 3, 4
criticism
– art 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6
– film 1
– literary 1, 2, 3, 4
Cubist 1
culture 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19
– celebrity 1
– contemporary 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
– convergence 1
– dance 1, 2
– digital 1, 2, 3
– early modern 1
– high 1, 2, 3
– literary 1, 2, 3
– mash-up 1
– mass 1, 2
– media 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8
– medieval 1, 2
– modern 1, 2
– national 1
– postmodern 1, 2
– popular 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
– print 1
– rap 1
– visual 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7–8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14–15, 16–17, 18, 19,
20
– Western 1, 2, 3, 4
cybernetics 1
– cyberspace 1, 2, 3
– cybertechnology 1
Czechoslovakia 1
dance 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7–8, 9, 10, 11, 12
– literalised 1, 2, 3, 4–5
– modern 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– text as 1
– word 1–2
darshan 1, 2, 3
deconstruction 1, 2, 3, 4
defamiliarization 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
– defamiliarized framings 1–2, 3–4
– enstrangement / ostranenie 1, 2
Depression, Great 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 7
description 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6–7, 8–9, 10, 11, 12, 13–14, 15–16, 17,
18–19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24–25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32
– ekphrastic 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14–15, 16, 17, 18,
19, 20, 21
– landscape 1, 2
– literary 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– pictorialist 1
– poetic 1, 2
– descriptive 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10–11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16
design 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 9
– costume 1
– decorative 1
– interface 1
– layout 1
– panel 1
– photographic 1
– stage 1
– theatrical 1, 2
– visual 1
dialogue 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17,
18–19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27
– intermedial 1, 2, 3, 4
– dialogic 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7–8, 9, 10
diary 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6
diegesis 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
– of games 1, 2, 3, 4
– hypodiegetic 1
difference
– aesthetic 1, 2
– cultural 1, 2, 3
– gender 1
digitalization 1, 2–3, 4
– digital age 1, 2–3, 4, 5–6, 7
– digital revolution 1
discourse 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
– aesthetic 1, 2
– elitist 1, 2–3
– fictional 1, 2
– literary 1, 2, 3, 4
– learned 1, 2, 3
– multimodal 1
– narrative 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7–8
– paragone 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6–7
– television 1, 2
– verbal 1, 2
– visual 1, 2
Disney 1
documentary 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
– documentary book 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
– documentary mode 1–2
drama 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18–19,
20
– early modern 1
– nineteenth-century popular 1
dramatis personae 1, 2
drawing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
e-book 1, 2
e-reader 1
e-sports 1–2
early modern 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
economy, political 1, 2
editing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
– film 1
– invisible / continuity 1, 2
– montage 1, 2
– parallel 1
– point of view 1–2
effect
– defamiliarizing 1, 2
– Kuleshov 1
– primacy 1
– reality 1, 2, 3, 4
– recency 1
– verisimilitude 1
– visual 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
eidos 1
ekphrasis 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9–10, 11–12, 13, 14–15, 16, 17, 18, 19,
20–21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28–29, 30, 31, 32
– actual 1
– ancient 1
– and poetry 1–2
– and the novel 1–2
– Byzantine 1
– cinematic 1, 2–3
– contemporary 1, 2, 3–4
– critical 1, 2–3
– digital 1, 2–3
– early modern 1, 2
– ethical 1–2
– in the age of digital reproduction 1–2
– medieval 1–2
– notional 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
– postcolonial 1–2
– prose 1–2, 3
– ekphrastic encounter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– ekphrastic fiction 1, 2, 3
– ekphrastic hope 1, 2
– ekphrastic literature 1
– ekphrastic tale 1–2
– ekphrastic writing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
eleutheromania 1
emblem 1, 2–3, 4–5, 6, 7
– emblematic 1, 2, 3
embodiment 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
– disembodiment 1
emotion 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15–16, 17, 18, 19,
20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25–26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37,
38, 39, 40
empire 1, 2, 3
– Byzantine 1
– Mughal 1
– Roman 1
enargeia 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
energeia 1
England 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
– medieval 1, 2
– New 1
– Victorian 1
engraving 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9
Enlightenment 1, 2
– intellectual 1
– visual 1
epic, the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
epistemology 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6–7, 8, 9, 10
etching 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6–7, 8–9
ethics 1, 2, 3
– Boethian 1
– descriptive / ekphrastic 1, 2–3
ethnicity 1, 2
Europe 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13–14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19,
20
evidentia 1
evocation 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10–11, 12, 13
– intermedial 1, 2
– intertextual 1
– thematic 1, 2–3
– verbal 1, 2, 3
– of another medium 1, 2
– of emotion 1, 2
– of filmic techniques 1, 2, 1
– of images 1, 2
– of musical forms 1–2, 3–4
experience
– aesthetic 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
– cognitive 1, 2–3
– embodied 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
– immigrant 1
– traumatic 1, 2, 3, 4
– visual 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
fable 1
– fabliau 1, 2
fan 1, 2–3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8
– fandom 1, 2, 3–4
fantasy 1, 2, 3, 4
– fanfic 1
– gothic 1
– scientific 1
– oriental 1
– pornographic 1
– fantastic 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Fascism 1
femme fatale 1
fiction
– cinematographic 1
– colonial 1–2
– crime 1, 2
– ekphrastic 1, 2, 3
– fan 1
– genre 1
– illustrated 1
– narrative 1–2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
– naturalistic 1
– popular 1, 2, 3
– postcolonial 1–2
– postmodern 1
– prose 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
– realist 1, 2
– science 1, 2
– Victorian English 1
– fictionalisation 1
– fictionality 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
film 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9–10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20,
21, 22, 23, 24, 25–26, 27–28, 29–30, 31–32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38,
39–40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56,
57, 58–59, 60–61, 62, 63, 64–65, 66, 67, 68, 69–70, 71, 72, 73, 74,
75
– cognitive concept of 1, 2
– combat 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– Disney 1
– documentary 1
– experimental 1, 2
– feature 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6–7, 8
– genre 1
– heritage 1
– Nazi 1, 2
– one-shot 1
– silent 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
– sound 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– war 1–2
– early film history 1–2
– film still 1, 2
– filmic mode 1, 2–3
– filmic techniques 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Fin de Siècle 1, 2, 3
Fluxus 1, 2
focalization 1, 2, 3
formalization 1–2, 3, 4
formula 1, 2
– film 1–2, 3
– pathos 1, 2–3, 4, 5
– processing 1, 2, 3
fragmentation 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
France 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
franchise 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7–8
Frankfurt School 1
fresco 1, 2, 3–4, 5–6
function
– communicative meta- 1, 2
– documentary 1, 2
– expressive 1
– intertextual 1
– metareferential 1
– narrative 1
– of avatars 1–2
– of description 1, 2
– of ekphrasis 1, 2–3, 4, 5
– of intermediality 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10–11
– of photographs 1, 2, 3–4
– performative 1
– realist 1
– functionalism 1
fundamentalism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
futurist 1, 2
game
– board 1, 2
– computer 1, 2, 3, 4
– digital 1–2
– non-digital 1
– online 1
– phone 1
– video 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6–7, 8–9, 10–11, 12–13
– let’s plays 1, 2–3, 4
gaze 1, 2–3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
– artistic 1–2
– colonial 1, 2, 3
– divine 1, 2
– male 1, 2
gender 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18
genre 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18–19,
20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36,
37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53,
54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61
– academic 1
– artistic 1
– dance 1
– filmic 1, 2, 3, 4
– hybrid 1
– literary 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
– music 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
– narrative 1, 2, 3
– of jazz poetry 1
– of the documentary book 1, 2–3, 4, 5
– of the multimodal novel 1–2
– of the photographic novel 1–2, 3, 4–5
– paraliterary 1
– poetic 1, 2, 3
– popular 1
– short prose 1, 2, 3
– still life 1
– superhero 1
– television 1
– theatre 1
– visual 1, 2
– generic 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18
– genre memory 1–2, 3
Germany 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
globalization 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Google 1, 2, 3, 4
gothic 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Greece 1
– Ancient 1, 2, 3
– Greek 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– ancient Greek 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
happening 1, 2, 3
Harlem 1, 2
heritage 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
– cultural 1, 2, 3–4
hermeneutics 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
heterogeneity 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9–10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15–16
heteromedial 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6–7, 8
Hinduism 1–2, 3–4, 5, 6–7, 8–9, 10–11
historiography 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
history 1–2, 3, 4–5, 6–7, 8, 9, 10–11, 12–13, 14–15, 16–17, 18–19, 20,
21–22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31–32, 33–34, 35–36, 37–38,
39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48–49, 50–51, 52–53, 54–55,
56–57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62–63, 64, 65
– art 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16–17, 18–19,
20–21, 22–23, 24–25, 26, 27, 28–29, 30, 31
– cultural 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12–13
– literary 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Hollywood 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8–9, 10–11, 12, 13, 14–15, 16, 17, 18–19
Holocaust 1
homogeneity 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Hudson River School, The 1
humanism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
hybrid 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11–12, 13–14, 15, 16, 17
– hybridity 1, 2–3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
– aesthetic 1, 2
– medial 1–2, 3, 4
– hybridization 1, 2, 3, 4
hyperfiction 1, 2, 3
hypermedia 1, 2
– hypermediacy 1, 2–3, 4–5, 6, 7, 8
– hypermedial 1
– hypermediality 1
– hypermediate 1, 2
hypernym 1
hyperonym 1
hypertext 1, 2, 3
– hypertextual 1, 2–3, 4, 5–6, 7–8, 9–10
icon 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
– iconic 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14–15, 16, 17
– iconic moment 1–2
– iconic sign 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– iconic turn 1, 2, 3, 4
– iconicism 1
– iconicity 1, 2, 3, 4
– iconization 1
– iconoclasm 1, 2–3, 4–5, 6
– iconography 1, 2, 3
– iconophilia 1
– iconophobia 1
– iconotext 1, 2, 3–4, 5–6, 7
identity 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
– collective 1
– cultural 1
– ethnic 1
– local 1
– national 1, 2, 3
ideology 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
illustration 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14–15, 16, 17, 18,
19, 20, 21, 22–23, 24, 25, 26, 27–28, 29–30, 31, 32, 33, 34–35, 36,
37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42
– children’s book 1–2
– Victorian 1–2
image 1, 2–3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12–13, 14–15, 16, 17–18, 19–20,
21–22, 23, 24, 25–26, 27, 28, 29–30, 31–32, 33, 34–35
– digital 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– graphic 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
– iconic 1, 2
– literary 1–2
– mental 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7–8, 9, 10, 11–12
– moving 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 7
– optical 1
– perceptual 1, 2–3
– photographic 1, 2, 3–4, 5–6, 7–8
– static 1, 2, 3
– still-life 1
– studio 1
– verbal 1
– visual 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
– word and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8–9, 10, 11–12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17,
18–19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28
– family of images 1, 2
– image-thinking 1
– imagetext 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
– imago 1
– text-image relationship 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7–8, 9, 10, 11–12, 13–14, 15,
16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27–28
imitation 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
– formal 1, 2, 3, 4
– heteromedial 1, 2
– intermedial 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
– of another medium 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
– structural 1, 2
– stylistic 1, 2
immediacy 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
– transparent 1–2, 3
imperialism 1, 2, 3, 4
in-between-ness 1, 2–3
indeterminacy 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
indexicality 1, 2, 3
– indexical 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
India 1–2
– Indian visual cultures 1–2
individualism
– liberal 1
– myth of 1
industry 1, 2, 3
– culture 1, 2, 3
– cultural-literary 1
– media 1, 2
– movie / film 1, 2, 3
– publishing 1, 2
– videogame 1
– industrialization 1
installation 1, 2, 3
– computer 1
– Sound Art 1
interface 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
intermediality 1–2, 3–4, 5–6, 7, 8–9, 10, 11–12, 13–14, 15, 16–17, 18,
19–20, 21–22, 23, 24–25, 26–27, 28–29, 30–31, 32, 33–34, 35–36,
37–38, 39, 40, 41–42, 43–44
– covert 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7–8
– explicit (direct) 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16
– extracompositional 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 7–8
– extratextual functions of 1, 2, 3–4
– formal or transmedial 1, 2
– genesis of 1
– implicit (indirect) 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
– intracompositional 1, 2–3, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10–11
– intratextual functions of 1, 2, 3–4
– medieval 1, 2
– methodology of 1–2
– musical 1–2
– ontological 1
– overt 1, 2, 3, 4–5
– postcolonial 1
– primary 1, 2, 3
– secondary 1, 2, 3
– synthetic 1
– theatrical 1, 2, 3
– transformational 1, 2–3, 4
– Ur- 1
intermedium/-a 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 8
Internet 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18,
19, 20, 21
intersemiotics 1
intertextuality 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6–7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
– intertextual 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17,
18, 19, 20, 21
intramediality 1, 2
– intramedial 1, 2, 3, 4
Italy 1, 2, 3
– Italian 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Jew 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 8–9
– Fagin 1, 2–3, 4–5
kinesthetic, technological 1
kithara 1
Künstlerroman 1, 2, 3, 4–5
language 1, 2–3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12–13, 14–15, 16, 17, 18, 19,
20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26–27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36,
37–38, 39–40, 41–42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48–49, 50, 51, 52, 53–54,
55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60–61
– figurative 1
– fragmented 1
– materiality of 1, 2, 3
– multisemiotic 1, 2, 3
– verbal 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
– visual 1, 2
– American Sign Language 1, 2
Leitmedium 1
libretto 1–2, 3, 4–5
literature 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7–8, 9, 10, 11–12, 13–14, 15, 16–17, 18–19,
20–21, 22–23, 24, 25, 26, 27–28, 29–30, 31, 32, 33–34, 35, 36, 37,
38–39, 40, 41, 42–43, 44–45, 46–47, 48, 49, 50–51, 52, 53–54, 55
– American 1, 2, 3–4, 5–6, 7, 8–9, 10, 11–12, 13
– Anglo-American 1, 2, 3–4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9, 10
– Avant-garde 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
– Canadian 1–2, 3, 4–5, 6
– Caribbean 1–2, 3, 4–5
– children’s 1, 2, 3–4
– contemporary 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– digital forms of 1–2
– Indian 1
– modernist 1–2
– narrative 1–2
– national 1
– nineteenth-century 1–2
– postcolonial 1–2, 3–4, 5–6
– televisual 1
– visuality of 1–2, 3
– war 1–2
– West Indian 1, 2, 3
liveness 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 7
logocentrism 1, 2, 3
London 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15–16
ludification 1
magazine 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9–10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15–16, 17, 18
manuscript 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– illuminated 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Marvel / Marvel Universe 1
materiality 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18,
19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25–26
– linguistic 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– of the sign 1, 2–3
– of the text 1, 2
meaning
– compositional 1
– relational 1
– representational 1, 2
– transmodal 1, 2, 3
– meaning-making 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15–16,
17, 18, 19, 20
medium/-a 1–2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7–8, 9–10, 11, 12–13, 14–15, 16, 17–18,
19–20, 21–22, 23, 24, 25–26, 27–28, 29–30, 31–32, 33, 34–35, 36–37,
38–39, 40–41, 42–43, 44, 45–46, 47–48, 49–50, 51–52, 53–54, 55–56,
57–58, 59–60, 61–62, 63, 64, 65–66
– analog/ue 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
– basic 1, 2–3, 4
– composite 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– conventionally distinct 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
– convergence of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– digital 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
– fusion of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
– history of 1, 2
– imitation of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
– kinetic 1, 2
– ludic 1
– mainstream 1
– mass 1, 2, 3
– matrix 1
– mixed 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12–13, 14
– national 1
– new 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15
– popular 1, 2, 3, 4
– primary 1, 2
– pure 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– qualified 1, 2–3, 4–5
– quaternary 1
– secondary 1
– social 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
– source 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
– target 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– technical 1, 2
– tertiary 1
– verbal 1, 2, 3, 4
– visual 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16
– monomedia 1, 2
– media/l boundaries 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,
16, 17, 18, 19
– media change 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– media combination 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,
16, 17, 18–19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25
– media convergence 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– media differentiation 1
– media relativism 1, 2–3
– medium-specificity 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
mediality 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15–16, 17–18, 19,
20, 21, 22, 23–24, 25, 26–27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37
– metamedial 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
– mediation 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
– mediatization 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
– remediation 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10–11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18
melodrama 1–2, 3, 4
– nineteenth-century 1, 2, 3
memoir 1
memory 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6–7, 8–9, 10–11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19
– collective 1, 2, 3, 4
– cultural 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
– genre 1, 2, 3, 4
– literary 1–2, 3
– media 1
– traumatic 1, 2
metafiction 1–2, 3, 4, 5
– historical 1
– metafictional 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
metaphor 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
– conceptual 1–2
metapicture 1, 2–3
– metapictoriality 1
methodology, intermedial 1, 2, 3, 4–5
Middle Ages 1–2, 3, 4
– medieval 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
mimesis 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Minimalism 1
Minnesang 1
minuet 1, 2
mise-en-page 1
mise-en-scène 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role
Playing Game) 1, 2, 3
mnemopictoriality 1
mode 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11–12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19,
20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36,
37–38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44
– alliterative 1
– communicative 1–2
– descriptive / ekphrastic 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
– documentary 1–2
– filmic 1, 2–3
– literary 1, 2
– (non-verbal) semiotic 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6–7
– of expression 1–2, 3–4, 5
– of production 1–2, 3
– of representation 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
– of showing 1
– of signification 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– of ‘telling’ / story-telling 1, 2, 3, 4
– of writing 1, 2, 3–4, 5–6, 7
modality 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Modernism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6–7, 8, 9, 10, 11
– modernist 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9–10, 11, 12
Modernity 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6–7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18,
19
– modern 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7–8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18,
19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35,
36, 37
– modernization 1
montage 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
movement 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18,
19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30–31, 32, 33–34, 35, 36,
37, 38
– Arts and Crafts 1
– Beat 1–2
– Progressive Artists 1
movie 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16–17, 18–19,
 20, 21, 22, 23–24, 25, 26, 27, 28–29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34–35, 36,
37–38, 39, 40
multimedia 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13–14, 15, 16
– multimediality 1, 2, 3, 4
multimodality 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9–10, 11–12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17,
18, 19
– multimodal 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8–9, 10–11
music 1–2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17–18, 19, 20,
21, 22, 23–24, 25–26, 27, 28, 29, 30–31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38,
39–40, 41, 42–43, 44, 45, 46
– bebop 1, 2–3
– blues 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6
– calypso 1, 2, 3
– classical music 1, 2
– jazz 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 8–9, 10–11, 12–13, 14, 15–16, 17, 18
– jive 1, 2
– metamusic 1
– pop music 1, 2, 3–4
– rap 1, 2, 3–4
– reggae 1, 2
– rock 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8–9, 10, 11
– rock’n’roll 1
– slave song 1–2
– soundtrack 1, 2
– verbal music 1
– word music 1, 2
– musical 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11–12, 13–14, 15, 16, 17–18,
19–20, 21, 22–23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36,
37, 38, 39, 40–41, 42, 43, 44, 45
musicalization 1
– of fiction 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
– of poetry 1–2
Muslim 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8
myth 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16
– mythology 1
narration 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9–10, 11, 12–13, 14
– audiovisual 1
– filmic 1, 2–3, 4
– gamelike 1–2, 3, 4
– intermedial 1, 2–3
– transmedial 1–2
– verbal 1, 2–3, 4
– voice-over 1
narrative 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7–8, 9–10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16–17, 18,
19–20, 21–22, 23, 24–25, 26–27, 28, 29–30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35,
36–37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46
– audiovisual 1, 2, 3
– cinematic 1–2, 3, 4
– dream 1
– experimental 1
– fictional 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7–8, 9, 10
– graphic 1, 2–3, 4, 5
– literary 1, 2, 3
– multimodal 1, 2, 3–4
– multisemiotic 1
– narrative discourse 1, 2–3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9–10
– narrative fiction 1–2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
– narrative poem 1, 2, 3, 4
– picaresque 1
– self- 1, 2
– verbal 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
– narrativity 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
narratology 1–2, 3
– cognitive 1, 2–3, 4, 5
– comics 1
– film 1
– intermedial 1, 2, 3–4, 5
– literary 1, 2, 3
– ludo- 1
– media-conscious 1, 2–3
– medial 1–2, 3–4, 5
– television 1
– transmedial 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6
narrator 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12–13, 14, 15, 16, 17–18, 19,
20, 21, 22–23, 24–25, 26, 27–28, 29–30, 31–32, 33, 34–35, 36, 37–38
– autodiegetic 1, 2, 3, 4
– heterodiegetic 1, 2
– homodiegetic 1
nationalism 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7
naturalization 1, 2–3, 4
naturalism 1, 2, 3
New York 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7–8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14–15, 16, 17, 18
newspaper 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8–9, 10, 11–12, 13, 14, 15, 16
nostalgia 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 8
novel 1–2, 3–4, 5–6, 7, 8–9, 10–11, 12, 13–14, 15, 16–17, 18–19, 20, 21,
 22, 23, 24–25, 26, 27–28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36–37, 38, 39,
40–41, 42
– Anglo-American 1–2, 3
– Anglophone 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6
– Anglophone Indian graphic 1
– art 1, 2, 3, 4
– autobiographical 1, 2, 3
– contemporary Anglophone Indian 1–2
– contemporary U.S.-American 1–2, 3–4
– detective 1, 2
– digital 1, 2, 3, 4–5
– film 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– graphic 1, 2–3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8
– historical 1, 2
– historiographic 1
– hypertext 1
– illustrated 1–2, 3, 4
– monomodal 1, 2
– multimodal 1–2, 3, 4, 5–6
– Newgate 1–2, 3, 4
– nineteenth century 1, 2, 3
– photographic / photonovel 1–2, 3–4
– postcolonial 1, 2–3
– political 1–2
– realist 1, 2, 3
– serialized 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6–7, 8
– trauma 1
– Victorian 1, 2, 3
– Young Adult 1, 2
– ciné-roman 1
novelization 1, 2, 3, 4
novella 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
nude 1, 2–3
ontomediality 1
opera 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10–11, 12, 13–14, 15, 16, 17–18, 19, 20,
21–22
– rock 1
– soap 1
orality 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8–9, 10, 11
Other, the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7–8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
– othering 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8
– otherness 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7
– semiotic otherness 1, 2
painting 1, 2–3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9, 10–11, 12–13, 14–15, 16–17, 18–19,
20–21, 22–23, 24, 25–26, 27, 28, 29–30, 31, 32–33, 34–35, 36, 37–38,
39, 40–41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48–49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56,
57–58, 59–60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66–67, 68, 69–70, 71–72, 73, 74,
75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90
– body 1, 2
– cave 1, 2, 3
– landscape 1, 2, 3
– word-painting 1
palimpsest 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6
panel 1, 2–3, 4–5, 6–7, 8, 9, 10, 11
paragone 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7–8, 9–10, 11, 12–13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18–19,
20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26–27
parapicture 1–2, 3, 4, 5
– parapictoriality 1
paratext 1, 2, 3–4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9
– paratextual 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7–8, 9, 10–11, 12, 13
parergon 1–2
parody 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
pastiche 1, 2
– postmodern 1, 2
pathos 1, 2
– pathos formula 1, 2–3, 4, 5
perception 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12–13, 14, 15, 16, 17–18,
19, 20–21, 22–23, 24, 25–26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31
– aesthetic 1, 2
– sense 1, 2, 3, 4
– spatial 1
– visual 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6
performance 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7–8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17,
18–19, 20–21, 22–23, 24–25, 26, 27, 28–29, 30
– embodied 1–2
– film 1
– in games 1–2
– live 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7–8
– mediatised 1
– mental 1
– multi-media 1, 2, 3–4, 5–6, 7
– musical 1–2, 3, 4
– narrative 1
– theatrical 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
performativity 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
period
– early modern 1, 2–3
– medieval 1
– modern 1, 2, 3, 4
– Victorian 1, 2, 3
peripeteia 1
phantasmagoria 1
phenomenography 1
phenomenology 1, 2, 3
photonovel 1, 2–3
photofiction 1
photogram 1
photograph 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7–8, 9–10, 11–12, 13–14, 15, 16, 17, 18,
19, 20, 21–22, 23, 24, 25–26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36,
37, 38
– calotype 1, 2
– daguerreotype 1, 2, 3, 4
– press 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
photography 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8–9, 10–11, 12–13, 14–15, 16–17, 18,
19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32
– analog 1
– composition 1
– digital 1, 2, 3
– documentary 1, 2–3
– ghost 1
– narrative 1
– realist 1
– still 1
– stop-motion 1
– time-lapse 1
– war 1
physiognomy 1, 2, 3
pictorialism 1, 2, 3
– pictoriality 1, 2, 3
– hypopictoriality 1
– hypopicture 1, 2
picturebook 1
picturesque 1
– naturalising the 1–2
play 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12–13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20,
21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26–27, 28–29, 30–31, 32, 33, 34
player, single 1
pluri-media 1
– plurimediality 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9–10, 11, 12, 13–14, 15–16,
17–18, 19, 20–21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26–27, 28
poem 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 9–10, 11, 12, 13–14, 15–16, 17, 18, 19, 20,
21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28–29, 30–31, 32, 33, 34, 35–36, 37, 38,
39
– blues 1–2
– digital 1, 2, 3–4
– ekphrastic 1–2, 3–4, 5
– jazz 1, 2, 3, 4
– narrative 1, 2, 3, 4
– pattern 1, 2, 3
poetry 1, 2–3, 4–5, 6, 7–8, 9–10, 11, 12, 13–14, 15–16, 17–18, 19–20,
21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29–30, 31, 32, 33, 34–35, 36, 37, 38,
39, 40
– alliterative 1
– blues 1–2
– concrete 1, 2
– urban 1, 2–3
– digital 1, 2–3
– ekphrastic 1, 2–3, 4, 5–6, 7
– jazz 1–2, 3
– musicalization of 1–2
– musicalized 1, 2, 3, 4
– performance 1
– sound 1
– visual 1, 2, 3
polyphony 1, 2, 3, 4
polyrhythm 1
portrait 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15–16, 17, 18, 19,
20, 21
postcard 1, 2, 3, 4
postcolonial 1, 2–3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8–9
postmodernism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– postmodern 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17,
18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28
– post-postmodern 1
postmodernity 1, 2, 3
poststructuralism 1
– poststructuralist 1, 2, 3, 4
pregnant moment 1, 2–3, 4
presence 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7–8, 9–10, 11, 12, 13–14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19,
20–21
– photographic 1, 2, 3, 4
print 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20
– calotype 1
– woodblock printing 1
printing press 1–2, 3–4
Progressive Era 1
progymnasmata 1
projection 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18
prolepsis 1
propaganda 1, 2, 3
prosopopeia 1
Puritan 1, 2
purity 1, 2
– cultural 1, 2
– ethical 1
– medial 1
radio 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
– radio play 1, 2, 3
Ram (deity) 1
Raumkunst 1
reader response 1, 2–3, 4
– act of reception 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10–11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,
17, 18, 19–20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29
ready-made 1
real, imprint of the 1, 2
realism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8–9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
reality
– actual 1
– alternative 1, 2, 3
– concrete 1, 2, 3
– textual 1
– virtual 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
record 1, 2, 3, 4
– authentic 1–2
– music 1, 2
recycling 1, 2, 3, 4
– (postmodern) culture of 1, 2
– postmodern 1, 2
reference 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11–12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17–18,
19–20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36,
37, 38, 39, 40–41, 42, 43, 44, 45–46, 47, 48–49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54,
55
– cross-medial 1, 2, 3
– explicit (intermedial) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
– frame of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– implicit (intermedial) 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6
– intermedial 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12–13, 14, 15, 16, 17,
18–19, 20, 21, 22, 23–24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30–31, 32–33, 34,
35–36, 37, 38, 39–40, 41, 42–43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48–49, 50–51,
52–53, 54–55, 56–57, 58
– metareference 1, 2
– musical 1
– self- 1, 2, 3–4
– transmedial 1
– referentiality 1
– self-referentiality 1–2, 3, 4, 5
refiguration 1, 2
– aesthetic 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
– narrative 1, 2
Reformation 1–2, 3, 4
– Counter-Reformation 1
reimagination, historical 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
relation/ship
– intermedial 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17,
18, 19, 20, 21, 22–23, 24, 25, 26, 27
– transcultural 1
– transfictional 1
– verbal-visual 1–2
– interart 1, 2
– musico-literary 1, 2–3, 4–5
Renaissance 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16–17
– American 1, 2
– Canadian 1
– European 1
– Italian 1
representation
– cultural 1, 2, 3
– intermedial 1
– mental 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7
– mimetic 1, 2
– modes of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
– narrative / narratorial 1–2, 3–4, 5
– pictorial 1, 2, 3
– simultaneous 1
– verbal 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19
– visual 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19,
20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26
reproduction 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
– age of digital 1–2
– of filmic elements 1
– partial 1, 2–3, 4–5, 6
– photographic 1, 2
– techniques 1, 2
rhythmicity 1, 2
role-playing 1, 2, 3
romance 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
– romantic 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
Romanticism 1
– Romantic 1, 2, 3, 4–5
Rome 1, 2, 3
– ancient 1
Russia 1
satire 1, 2
– political 1, 2, 3–4
score, musical 1, 2, 3–4, 5–6
screenplay 1–2, 3–4, 5, 6
script, iconicity of 1
scripture, fourfold sense of 1–2
sculpture 1–2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9
self-portrait 1–2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 8
self-reference 1, 2, 3–4
– self-referentiality 1–2, 3, 4, 5
self-reflexive 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15–16,
17–18, 19, 20, 21, 22
– pragmatically 1, 2
– semantically 1
– self-reflexivity 1, 2
semiotics 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
– film 1
– social 1–2, 3, 4
– semioticisation 1
sensibility, eighteenth-century cult of 1
sequence
– credit 1–2, 3–4
– statement-reaction 1
sequentiality 1, 2, 3
series
– BBC 1–2, 3, 4–5, 6
– CBS 1
– web 1
– seriality 1–2
– serialization 1–2, 3–4, 5–6
show
– crime 1
– HBO 1
– TV 1, 2, 3
sign 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11–12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19–20,
21–22
– cultural 1–2
– iconic 1, 2, 3
– indexical 1
– linguistic 1, 2, 3
– medial 1
– mobility of 1
– natural 1–2, 3, 4
– pictorial 1, 2
– symbolic 1, 2
– visual 1
– sign system 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8–9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
signifier 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7–8, 9–10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16
signification 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10–11, 12, 13–14, 15 , 16, 17, 18,
19, 20–21, 22–23, 24, 25
– linguistic 1–2
– modes of 1, 2, 3, 4
– process of 1, 2, 3
– systems of 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
sitcom 1–2
South, Jim Crow 1
space
– mnemonic 1
– third 1–2, 3
– spatialisation 1, 2
Spain 1, 2
– Arab Spain 1–2
spectrality 1, 2
sport/s 1, 2–3, 4–5
stardom 1, 2, 3
still life 1, 2–3, 4–5, 6, 7–8
story
– cinematic 1
– multiform 1
– picture 1, 2, 3, 4
– short 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14–15, 16, 17, 18, 19,
20, 21–22, 23
– story-about-writing-a-story 1
storytelling 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12–13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18,
19
– comics 1, 2
– extended 1–2
– interdependent 1
– intermedial 1, 2, 3
– multimodal 1
– transmedia 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6
– transmedial 1, 2, 3, 4
– visual 1, 2, 3
storyworld
– transmedial 1–2
– work-specific 1–2
stream-of-consciousness 1, 2
structure
– aesthetic 1, 2
– blues 1–2
– cinematographic 1
– dialogic 1–2
– discursive 1–2
– formal 1, 2–3, 4
– layout 1
– narrative 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6
– of a text 1, 2, 3
– palimpsestic 1
– panel 1–2
– plot 1, 2, 3
– semiotic 1, 2
– shot-reverse-shot 1
– visual 1, 2
studies
– adaptation 1, 2, 3, 4
– American 1, 2–3
– comics 1, 2, 3, 4
– comparative 1
– cosmopolitan 1, 2
– critical discourse 1
– cultural 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
– discourse 1, 2, 3–4
– English 1, 2
– film 1, 2, 3
– game 1, 2, 3
– image 1, 2
– information technology 1
– interart 1, 2
– intermediality 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6–7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12–13, 14, 15, 16, 17,
18, 19, 20–21, 22, 23, 24, 25
– literary 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16–17, 18, 19
– literary visuality 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– media 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9–10, 11, 12, 13, 14
– musico-literary 1
– postcolonial 1–2, 3–4, 5–6
– sound 1–2, 3, 4, 5
– television / TV 1, 2, 3
– visual 1
– visual culture 1, 2, 3, 4
subjectivization 1
sublimity 5, 6–7, 8
– sublime 1, 2, 3
supernaturalism 1
– supernatural 1, 2, 3
Surrealist 1–2, 3
survival, cultural 1
Switzerland 1, 2, 3
symbolism 1, 2, 3
– French 1
synaesthesia 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
system
– canon 1–2
– media 1–2, 3–4, 5–6
– semiotic 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11–12, 13, 14–15, 16–17, 18
tableau/x 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– tableau vivant 1, 2, 3
technique
– call-and-response 1, 2–3
– cinematic 1, 2, 3, 4
– film/ic 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
– montage 1
– shot-reverse-shot 1, 2
technology 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16–17, 18,
19–20, 21
– communication 1–2
– computer 1–2, 3, 4
– digital 1, 2, 3–4, 5–6, 7, 8–9, 10, 11
– media 1–2, 3–4
– multimedia 1, 2–3
– mobile 1, 2, 3–4, 5–6
technopaignium/-a 1, 2
television / TV 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16–17,
18, 19–20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25–26, 27, 28–29, 30, 31–32, 33–34, 35,
36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52,
53, 54
– convergence 1–2
– literary 1–2
– novelistic 1–2
– post-TV 1–2
tertium comparationis 1, 2
text 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6–7, 8, 9–10, 11, 12–13, 14–15, 16–17, 18–19, 20–21,
22, 23, 24–25, 26–27, 28–29, 30, 31–32, 33–34, 35–36, 37
– and dance 1–2
– and image 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8–9, 10, 11, 12, 13–14, 15–16, 17, 18,
19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30–31
– cinematic 1, 2
– dance and 1–2, 3, 4, 5–6
– hypotext 1, 2
– illustrated 1, 2
– literary 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8–9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19,
20, 21, 22, 23–24, 25, 26, 27–28, 29–30, 31, 32–33, 34, 35, 36,
37–38, 39–40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47–48, 49, 50, 51, 52–53, 54,
55–56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65–66, 67–68, 69, 70
– materiality of the 1
– moving 1–2
– sculptural 1
– source 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10–11, 12, 13, 14, 15–16
– text-picture 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7
– verbal 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16
– writerly 1
textuality 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10–11
– metatextuality 1
theater
– ancient Greek 1
– avant-garde 1–2, 3–4
– mainstream 1
theatricalization 1, 2–3
thematization, intermedial 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6
theory/-ies
– art 1
– communication 1, 2
– conceptual metaphor 1
– cursor- 1
– information 1, 2
– intermediality 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– literary 1, 2
– media 1, 2, 3
– systems 1
– tool- 1
– visual culture 1
tourism 1–2, 3–4
trans-figuration, aesthetic of 1–2
transcoding 1, 2, 3–4
– computational 1
– media 1–2
transfer
– media 1–2
– somatic 1–2
transfictionality 1–2
transformation
– descriptive 1
– intermedial 1–2
– media 1–2
translation, intermedial 1–2
transmedia 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– transmedial 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,
17–18, 19, 20
– transmediality 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7–8, 9, 10–11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16–17,
18, 19–20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27
transposition
– intermedial 1, 2–3, 4–5, 6–7, 8–9
– media 1–2, 3–4, 5, 6–7, 8–9
– medial 1, 2–3, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10–11
transfictional 1–2
trauma 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6–7, 8, 9–10, 11–12
turn
– acoustic 1–2
– iconic / imagic / pictorial / visual 1–2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7–8, 9
– intermedial 1, 2–3
– linguistic 1
– material 1
– spatial 1
– transmedial 1–2
typography 1, 2
– typographic 1, 2, 3
– typographical experimenting 1, 2, 3–4, 5
Twitter 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6
United States / U.S. / U.S.A. 1, 2–3, 4–5, 6, 7–8, 9–10, 11, 12, 13–14,
15–16, 17, 18–19, 20–21, 22–23, 24–25
unrepresentable, the 1, 2
– unrepresentability 1
Utilitarianism 1
veracity, aesthetic 1, 2, 3
Victorian
– illustration 1–2
– literature 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– period 1, 2,
– society 1–2, 3, 4
– Victorianism 1
– Victorianness 1
videogame 1, 2–3, 4–5, 6–7
– narrativity of 1–2
vignette, multimodal 1, 2, 3–4
violence 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9–10, 11, 12, 13
– aesthetics of 1, 2, 3–4, 5–6
– communal 1, 2, 3, 4–5
– traumatic 1, 2, 3, 4
vision 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10–11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16–17, 18–19,
20–21
– impaired 1
– intromission theory of 1
– Romantic concept of 1
visuality, literary 1–2, 3, 4–5, 6–7, 8, 9, 10–11, 12–13, 14, 15, 16–17
visualization 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6–7, 8, 9, 10
– cultural 1–2
– embodied 1
– enactive 1, 2
– expressionist 1
– filmic 1
– highlighted 1, 2
– intensified 1–2
– kinetic 1
– readerly 1, 2
– stream of 1–2
– transient 1, 2–3
voice-over 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7
War
– British colonial 1–2
– Civil War (United States) 1, 2
– Crimean 1–2
– mediatization of war 1–2
– Trojan 1
– Vietnam 1–2, 3–4
– Yugoslav 1–2
– World War I / WWI / Great War 1, 2–3, 4, 5–6, 7
– World War II / WWII 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6–7, 8–9, 10, 11, 12
world
– textual 1–2
– transmedia 1–2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8–9, 10, 11
– virtual 1, 2–3
writing
– cinematic 1
– filmic 1, 2–3
– intermedial 1–2
– life 1–2
– realistic 1–2
– visual modes of 1–2
YouTube 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6–7, 8, 9
Index of Names
2Pac 1
50 Cent 1
Abbott, Porter H. 1
Achilles 1, 2, 3, 4
Acker, Kathy 1
Ackroyd, Peter 1, 2–3, 4–5
Agard, John 1
Agee, James
– Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 1, 2–3
Akbar the Great 1–2
Alan Parsons Project, The
– Tales of Mystery and Imagination Edgar Allan Poe 1–2
Alberti, Leon Battista 1, 2
Alciato, Andrea 1–2
Alder, Erik 1
Alexandrov, Grigori, 1
Alexie, Sherman 1–2, 3
Alhacen 1–2
Ali, Mir Sayyid 1
Allen, Graham 1, 2
Allen, Henry 1–2
Allen, Maud 1
Allen, Woody 1
– Play It Again, Sam 1
Allrath, Gaby 1
Almereyda, Michael 1, 2
Alsop, George 1
Altman, Robert 1
Andersen, Kenneth M. 1
Anderson, Ho Che 1
Anderson, Laurie 1, 2–3
– “O Superman” 1, 2, 3–4
– United States 1, 2, 3
Anderegg, Michael 1, 2
Arbeau, Thoinot 1
Aristotle 1
Armstrong, Nancy 1, 2
Arroyas, Frédérique 1
Ashbery, John 1, 2–3
– “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” 1–2, 3–4
Assmann, Aleida 1
Attali, Jacques 1
Atwood, Margaret
– Cat’s Eye 1, 2, 3–4
Auden, W. H. 1–2, 3, 4
– “Musée des Beaux Arts” 1–2, 3–4, 5–6
Auslander, Philip 1, 2
Austen, Jane 1, 2
– Pride and Prejudice 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Auster, Paul
– Moon Palace 1–2
Babbitt, Irving 1–2
Bach, Johann Sebastian 1
Bacon, Francis 1–2, 3
Bacon, Roger 1
Baetens, Jan 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Bailey, Brigitte 1–2
Baker, Kyle 1
Bal, Mieke 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Ball, John Clement 1–2, 3–4
Banerjee, Sarnath 1, 2
– The Harappa Files 1
Banville, John 1
Baraka, Amiri 1
Barkan, Leonard 1–2
Barker, Pat 1
Barnes, Djuna 1, 2
Barnett, Morris
– Mrs G. of the Golden Pippin 1, 2
Baron, Sabrina Alcorn 1
Barry, Iris 1
Bart, Lionel 1
Barthelme, Donald
– “And Now Let’s Hear It for the Ed Sullivan Show!” 1, 2
Barthes, Roland 1, 2–3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9–10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17,
18, 19
– Camera Lucida 1, 2
Bartlett, William Henry 1
Basu, Balaka 1–2
Bath, Michael 1
Baudrillard, Jean 1
Baumgarten, Murray 1, 2
Baxandall, Michael 1
Bayeu, Francisco 1
Bazin, André 1, 2, 3–4, 5
BBC One 1, 2–3
– Sherlock 1, 2, 3–4, 5–6
Beastie Boys 1
Beatles, The 1
Beaujour, Michel 1–2
Beckett, Samuel 1–2, 3, 4
– Film 1
Beethoven, Ludwig van 1, 2
Behzad, Kamaleddin 1
Bell, Bernard 1
Bell, Joseph 1
Belsey, Catherine 1–2, 3, 4, 5
Belting, Hans 1, 2
Benjamin, Walter 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Bennett, Louise 1
Bentham, Jeremy 1
Bentley, Tony 1
Berger, John 1
Berlioz, Louis Hector 1
Bernhardt, Sarah 1
Bernhart, Walter 1–2, 3, 4, 5
Bernstein, Charles 1
Bernstein, Leonard 1
Berry, James 1
Bertolussi, Marisa 1–2
Best, Susan 1, 2
Beuthner, Michael 1
Beuys, Joseph 1
Bewes, Timothy 1
Bhabha, Homi 1–2, 3
Biggs, Simon 1
Bijsterveld, Karin 1
Bioware 1
Birringer, Johannes 1
Black, Joel 1
Blackburn, Paul
– “Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five– Spot” 1–2
Blakelock, Ralph
– Moonlight 1, 2
Blast Theory 1
Bleckmann, Ulf 1
Blizzard 1
Bloom, Harold 1
Bluestone, George 1
Blunt, Anthony 1
Boccaccio, Giovanni 1, 2–3
Boccioni, Umberto 1
Bode, Christoph 1, 2–3
Boehm, Gottfried 1, 2, 3
Boenisch, Peter 1
Böger, Astrid 1, 2, 3, 4
Bohnenkamp, Anne 1–2
Bolter, Jay David 1, 2–3, 4–5, 6, 7–8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16–17,
18
Bonds, Mark Evan 1
Boorstin, Daniel J. 1
Borden, Lizzie 1, 2
Bosch, Hieronymus 1
Boschenhoff, Sandra Eva 1, 2
Botticelli, Sandro 1
Bourdieu, Pierre 1
Bourke-White, Margaret 1
– You Have Seen Their Faces 1–2
Bowen, Elizabeth 1, 2–3
Bowie, David 1
Božović, Velibor 1–2, 3
Bradbury, Ray
– Fahrenheit 1 2–3
Bradley, Adam 1
Bradley, David 1
Branagh, Kenneth 1
Brando, Marlon 1
Branigan, Edward 1–2
Brathwaite, Edward Kamau 1, 2, 3
– “Caliban” 1–2
– The Arrivants 1–2
Braudy, Leo 1
Brautigan, Richard 1
Brecht, Bertolt 1, 2
Breger, Claudia 1–2
Brennan, Marcia 1
Brennan, Timothy 1
Brett, Jeremy 1
Brewster, Ben 1
Britschgi, Jorrit 1–2
Britten, Benjamin 1
Britton, Chris 1
Britton, Tim 1, 2
Bronson, Charles 1
Brontë, Anne
– The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 1
Brontë, Charlotte 1
– Jane Eyre 1–2
– Villette 1
Brooks, Peter 1
Broomfield, Charles 1
Brosch, Renate 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Brown, Arthur 1
Brown, Caroline 1
Brown, Ford Madox 1–2
Brown, Hablot K. 1
Brown, Harry 1
Brown, Susan Hunter 1
Brown, William 1, 2
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 1
Breughel, Peter 1, 2–3, 4
– Landscape with the Fall of Icarus 1–2
– The Triumph of Death 1
Bryher, Winifred Ellerman 1–2
Bryson, Norman 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Builder’s Project 1
Bull, Michael 1
Buñuel, Luis 1
Burgess, Anthony 1, 2–3
Burgoyne, Robert 1
Busch, Wilhelm 1
Busse, Kristina 1, 2, 3
Butler, Judith 1
Butzer, Günter 1
Buxtehude, Dietrich 1
Byatt, A. S. 1–2, 3–4, 5
– “Art Work” 1–2
– “Christ in the House of Martha and Mary” 1, 2
– Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice 1
– Matisse Stories 1, 2–3
– Still Life 1, 2–3
– The Virgin in the Garden 1, 2–3
Byerly, Alison 1, 2
Byrd, William 1
Byron, Lord Gordon 1
– “The Waltz: An Apostrophic Hymn” 1, 2–3
Caldwell, Erskine
– Tobacco Road 1
– You Have Seen Their Faces 1–2
Caldwell, John T. 1, 2
Cameron, James 1
Cameron, Julia Margaret 1, 2, 3
Camus, Albert 1
Caracciolo, Marco 1
Carlos, Laurie 1
Carlson, Marvin 1–2
Carr, Caleb 1
Carrier, David 1
Carroll, Lewis 1, 2, 3
Carson, Wil 1
Carter, Benjamin 1, 2
Carter, Jimmy 1
Cartmell, Deborah 1, 2
Cartwright, Lisa 1, 2, 3
Castro, Guillén de 1
Caws, Mary Ann 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–6
Celan, Paul 1
Chadha, Gurinder 1
Chaplin, Charlie 1, 2–3, 4, 5
Chapple, Freda 1
Chatterton, Thomas 1–2
Chaucer, Geoffrey 1–2
– House of Fame 1, 2
– The Canterbury Tales 1, 2–3
– The Knight’s Tale 1–2
– The Squire’s Tale 1–2
– Troilus and Criseyde 1
Cheeke, Stephen 1, 2, 3–4
Chessman, Harriet Scott 1
Chichester, Dan 1–2, 3–4
Chirico, Giorgio de 1, 2
Chopin, Kate 1
Chow, Kai–Wing 1
Christ, Carol T. 1
Christo 1
Chute, Hillary L. 1, 2
Clark, Lygia 1
Clarke, Adrian 1
Claviez, Thomas 1, 2
Clüver, Claus 1, 2, 3
Coburn, Alvin Langdon 1
Cohen, Jane R. 1, 2, 3
Cohen, Marshall 1
Cohn, Al 1
Cole, Thomas 1
Coleman, James 1–2, 3
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1
Collins, Christopher 1, 2
Collins, Jim 1
Complicite 1
Constandinides, Costas 1, 2
Conducting from the Grave 1
Conrad, Joseph 1
– Heart of Darkness 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9
Constable, John 1
Cooper, James Fenimore 1
– The Pioneers 1, 2–3
Cooper, Judge William 1
Cooper, Wyn 1
Coover, Robert
– A Night at the Movies or, You Must Remember This 1, 2–3, 4, 5–6
– “Gilda’s Dream” 1
– “Cartoon” 1
– “Lap Dissolves” 1, 2–3
– “Shootout at Gentry’s Junction” 1
– “The Babysitter” 1
– “You Must Remember This” 1
Copeland, Roger 1
Coppa, Francesca 1–2
Coppola, Francis Ford
– Apocalypse Now 1, 2, 3, 4–5
Corcoran, Kelvin 1
Corneille, Pierre
– Le Cid 1
Cortez, Jayne 1
Cottier, Annie 1–2, 3
Cowan, Jennifer 1
Crane, Hart 1
Crane, Stephen 1
Cranko, John 1
Crary, Jonathan 1–2, 3–4
Crouch, Stanley 1
Crow, Sheryl 1
Cruikshank, George 1, 2–3
– “Fagin in the Condemned Cell” 1
– “George Cruikshank Frightening from His Presence Those
Unacquainted with Him” 1
– “Monks and the Jew” 1
– “Oliver Introduced to the Respectable Old Gentleman” 1–2
– “Oliver’s Reception by Fagin” 1–2
– “The Jew and Morris Bolter Begin to Understand Each Other” 1
Cukor, George 1
Culler, Jonathan 1, 2
Cumberbatch, Benedict 1, 2, 3
Cuney, William Waring 1–2
Cunningham, Valentine 1
Currie, Gregory 1
Curtin, Michael 1
Curtis, Gerard 1–2
Curtis-Hall, Vondie 1
Dabydeen, David 1
– Slave Song 1–2
Dafoe, Willem 1
Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé 1–2, 3, 4, 5–6
Danielewski, Mark Z.
– House of Leaves 1, 2, 3
Danes, Claire 1–2
Davidson, Michael 1
Davis, Whitney 1–2, 3
Deaver, Jeffery 1
Defoe, Daniel 1, 2
DeKoven, Marianne 1, 2
Deleuze, Gilles 1
DeLillo, Don 1, 2, 3, 4
– Falling Man 1–2
– White Noise 1, 2–3, 4
Delius, Frederick 1
Denis, Ruth St. 1
Denniston, John Dewar 1
Derrida, Jacques 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9, 10
DiCaprio, Leonardo 1, 2
Dickens, Charles 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7–8, 9
– David Copperfield 1
– Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress 1, 2–3
Diderot, Denis 1–2
Diehl, Huston 1–2
DiPrete, Laura 1
Dirks, Rudolph 1
Discherl, Klaus 1
Dixon, Peter 1, 2–3
Döblin, Alfred 1
Dogg, Snoop 1
Doherty, Thomas 1
Doležel, Lubomír 1
Domsch, Sebastian 1–2
Donaldson, Peter S. 1, 2
Döring, Tobias 1, 2, 3–4
Dörr, Marianne 1
Dos Passos, John 1
– U.S.A. Trilogy (The Big Money) 1–2
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 1
Downey Jr., Robert 1, 2
Doyle, Arthur Conan 1, 2–3
– Sherlock Holmes 1–2
– “The Final Problem” 1, 2
Drew, Richard 1–2
Drexler, Peter 1, 2
Drooker, Erik 1
Drügh, Heinz J. 1
DuBois, Andrew 1
Duchamps, Marcel 1–2
Dulac, Nicolas 1
Duve, Thierry de 1
Dylan, Bob 1–2
Eastlake, Elizabeth 1
Eastwood, Clint 1
Eder, Jens 1
Edgecombe, Rodney S. 1
Edwards, Steve 1
Egan, Jennifer 1
Eicher, Thomas 1
Eidsvik, Charles 1–2
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. 1, 2
Eisenstein, Sergei M. 1, 2, 3, 4
Eisner, Will 1–2, 3
El Greco 1
Eliot, George 1, 2–3, 4
– Middlemarch 1, 2–3
Eliot, T. S. 1
Elleström, Lars 1–2, 3, 4–5
Ellis, John 1, 2
Elliott, Kamilla 1, 2
Ellison, Ralph 1
Emden, Christian J. 1
Emery, Mary Lou 1, 2, 3
Emich, Birgit 1
Eminem 1
Enck, John 1–2
Eno, Brian 1
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 1
Epstein, Jean 1
Esrock, Ellen 1–2, 3, 4
Etter, Lukas 1–2, 3–4, 5–6, 7
Evans, Elizabeth 1–2, 3
Evans, Walker
– Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 1, 2–3
Evaristo, Bernardine
– Blonde Roots 1
– Mr Loverman 1
Everet, Rupert 1
Eykman, Christoph 1
Faber, Dominique 1
Fairclough, Norman 1, 2
Falco, Edward
– “Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales” 1–2, 3, 4–5
Forkbeard Fantasy
– Frankenstein 1
– The Fall of the House of Usherettes 1, 2–3, 4
Farago, Claire 1
Fauconnier, Gilles 1
Faulkner, William 1
Faulstich, Werner 1
Fehrman, Craig 1
Fekadu, Sarah 1
Fellini, Federico 1
Fellmann, Ferdinand 1
Fendt, Matthew W. 1
Fenton, James 1
Fernandes, Isabel 1, 2
Fiasco, Lupe 1
Fielding, Henry 1, 2
Fielding, K. J. 1, 2
Fischer-Lichte, Erika 1, 2, 3
Fish, Stanley 1
Fisher, Bud 1
Fisher, Caitlin 1
Flaubert, Gustave 1
Fleischman, Seymour 1
Fluck, Winfried 1, 2, 3, 4
Fludernik, Monika 1, 2, 3, 4
Foer, Jonathan Safran 1
– Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6
Ford, Henry 1
Ford, Sam 1
Forster, E. M. 1
Forster, John 1
Forster, Margaret 1
Forsythe, William 1
Foucault, Michel 1–2, 3, 4, 5
Fowles, John 1, 2
Frank, Gustav 1–2, 3
Fratto, Elena 1, 2
Freeman, Martin 1
Fregoli, Leopoldo 1
Freiburg, Johanna 1–2, 3
Fresnault-Deruelle, Pierre 1
Freud, Sigmund 1–2
Freedberg, Sydney 1
Frye, Northrop 1
Fuller, Loie 1
Fullop, Rob 1–2
Fuseli, Henry 1
Fussel, Paul 1–2, 3, 4, 5
Gabriel, Peter 1
Gaiman, Neil 1, 2
Galactic Café 1
Galeotti, Vincenzo 1
Garber, Marjorie 1, 2, 3
Gardner, Jared 1–2
Garrington, Abbie 1
Gass, William H. 1
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1
Gatiss, Mark 1–2, 3
Gaudreault, André 1, 2, 3, 4
Gayk, Shannon 1
Geckle, Richard 1
Genette, Gérard 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7–8, 9
Geometris, Ioannis 1
George, Luks 1
George, M. Dorothy 1
Georgi, Claudia 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Gerrig, Richard 1
Gersht, Ori 1
Ghosh, Amitav 1
Ghosh, Bishnupriya 1
Giacometti, Alberto 1–2, 3
Gibbons, Dave 1–2
Gier, Albert 1
Giet, Sylvette 1
Gilbert & George 1
Gill, Stephen 1, 2
Gillespie, Dizzy 1
Gillette, William 1, 2, 3
Gillray, James 1
Ginsberg, Allen 1–2
– “Howl” 1, 2
Gitelman, Lisa 1
Glover, Miranda 1
Gob Squad
– Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good) 1, 2, 3–4
– King Kong Club 1
– Live Long and Prosper 1
– Prater-Saga 3: In This Neighbourhood, the Devil Is a Goldmine 1–2
Goffmann, Erwin 1
Gogh, Vincent van 1–2, 3–4, 5–6
Goldberg, Roselee 1–2, 3–4, 5
Goldhill, Simon 1–2
Golding, William 1
Gombrich, E. H. 1–2
Gordon, Ian 1
Gordon, Mack 1
Gorky, Ashile 1, 2–3
Gournelos, Ted 1, 2
Gourraud, François 1
Goya, Francisco de 1
Grant, Hugh 1
Green-Lewis, Jennifer 1–2, 3, 4, 5
Green, Joshua 1
Greenberg, Clement 1
Gregory the Great, Pope 1
Greiner, Norbert 1
Griem, Julika 1, 2
Griffith, D. W. 1, 2
Grishakova, Marina 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6
Grodal, Torben 1
Groeben, Norbert 1–2
Groff, Lauren 1
Groß, Konrad 1
Gross, Sabine 1
Groth, Helen 1–2, 3
Grusin, Richard A. 1, 2–3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13–14, 15
Guha-Thakurta, Tapati 1–2
Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 1, 2–3
Gunkel, David J. 1, 2
Gunning, Dave 1
Gunning, Tom 1, 2, 3–4
Gunzenhäuser, Randi 1
Gutenberg, Johannes 1
Gymnich, Marion 1
H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) 1, 2–3
Haddon, Mark
– The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time 1, 2–3
Hadley, Louisa 1
Hadley, Tony 1
Hagstrum, Jean 1, 2
Haiman, John 1
Hallet, Wolfgang 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6
Halliday, M. A. K. 1, 2
Halliwell, Michael 1, 2
Hamburger, Jeffrey F. 1
Hamon, Philippe 1, 2
Hansen-Löve, Aage 1, 2, 3
Hardy, Thomas 1–2, 3–4, 5–6
– “An Imaginative Woman” 1, 2, 3–4
Harlan, Veit 1–2
Harper, Michael 1
Harrow, Susan 1, 2
Harry, Debbie 1
Hartley, John 1
Hartmann, Johanna 1–2
Harvey, John 1
Harvey, Robert C. 1, 2
Hatoum, Mona 1
Hauck, Dietmar 1
Haward, Clementia 1
Hawkes, John 1
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 1–2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7
Hayden, Robert 1
Haydn, Joseph 1
Hayles, Katherine 1
Hayworth, Rita 1
HBO 1
Heckerling, Amy 1–2
Heer, Jeet 1
Heffernan, James A. W. 1, 2, 3–4, 5–6
Hefner, Brooks E. 1
Heckscher, William S. 1
Helbig, Jörg 1, 2
Heliodorus (of Emesa) 1
Helmers, Marguerite 1
Helyer, Ruth 1
Hemon, Aleksandar 1–2
– The Lazarus Project 1, 2–3
Herbert, George 1, 2
Herman, David 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6–7
Herodotus (of Halicarnassus) 1
Herr, Michael 1–2
Herrmann, Max 1
Herzogenrath, Bernd 1–2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7
Hesse, Petra 1
Hickethier, Knut 1–2, 3
Higgins, Dick 1, 2
Hills, Matthew 1, 2, 3–4
Hindle, Maurice 1–2
Hine, Lewis 1
Hirst, Damien 1–2
Hitchcock, Alfred 1
Hjelmslev, Louis 1
Hockney, David 1
Hodgson, Barbara 1
Hogarth, William 1–2, 3–4, 5, 6
– Four Prints of an Election 1–2
Holbein, Hans 1
Holinshed, Raphael 1
Holland, Charles 1
Hollander, John 1, 2–3, 4, 5
Hollies, The 1
Holmes, John Clellon 1
Homer 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
– Iliad 1, 2
Hoover, J. Edgar 1
Horace 1
Horlacher, Stefan 1, 2, 3
Hornung, Alfred 1, 2, 3, 4
Horowitz, Anthony 1
Horstkotte, Silke 1
Hothead 1
Houdini, Harry 1, 2
Houellebecq, Michel 1, 2
– La carte et le territoire / The Map and the Territory 1–2, 3–4
Houfe, Simon 1
Hugh of St. Victor 1
Hughes, Langston 1–2
– “The Backlash Blues” 1
– “The Weary Blues” 1–2
Hughes, Ted 1
Huk, Romana 1
Humphrey, Helen 1
Hunt, John Dixon 1
Hunt, William Holman 1
Husain, Maqbool Fida 1
Huston, John 1–2, 3, 4
Hustvedt, Siri 1, 2
– The Sorrows of an American 1, 2, 3–4
– What I Loved 1, 2–3, 4–5
Hutcheon, Linda 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Huxley, Aldous 1
Huysmans, Joris-Karl 1, 2
Inge, M. Thomas 1–2, 3–4, 5, 6
Isekenmeier, Guido 1, 2, 3, 4
Iser, Wolfgang 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6
Jackson, Peter 1
Jackson, Shelley
– Patchwork Girl 1, 2, 3, 4–5
Jacobs, Lea 1
Jäger, Ludwig 1, 2
Jahn, Manfred 1
Jakobson, Roman 1
James, Henry 1, 2–3, 4, 5–6, 7
– “Art of Fiction” 1
– The Portrait of a Lady 1, 2–3, 4
– “The Real Thing” 1, 2, 3
Janequin, Clément 1
Jannidis, Fotis 1–2
Janzing, Godehard 1
Jarniewicz, Jerzy 1–2
Jaworski, Adam 1–2, 3, 4–5
Jay-Z 1
Jenkins, Henry 1–2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
Jerrold, Douglas William 1
Jesurun, John 1
Jewitt, Carey 1, 2, 3
Jha, Raj Kamal
– Fireproof 1–2, 3, 4–5, 6–7
Jobling, Ed 1
John, Gwen 1
Johns, Jasper 1
– Shade 1–2
Johnson-Laird, Philip N. 1
Johnson, Linton Kwesi 1
Johnson, Mark 1–2
Johnson, Samuel 1
Johnston, Andrew James 1, 2, 3–4
Jolie, Angelina 1
Jonson, Ben 1–2, 3
Jost, François 1
Joyce, James 1, 2, 3
– Ulysses 1–2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7
Joyce, Michael 1
Mackrell, Judith 1
Jung, C. G. 1
Jütte, Robert 1
Kaemmerling, Ekkehard 1
Kaeppler, Adrienne L. 1
Kahn, Gus 1
Kaplan, E. Ann 1, 2
Kaprow, Allan 1
Kapur, Geeta 1, 2
Karasik, Paul 1
Kashtan, Aaron 1
Kattenbelt, Chiel 1, 2
Katz, Ruth 1
Kaufman, Bob 1
Kaufman, Philip
– The Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1–2
Kay, Jackie
– Trumpet 1–2
Kazin, Alfred 1, 2–3, 4
Kearney, Mary Celeste 1
Keaton, Buster 1
Keaton, Diane 1
Keats, John 1
– “Ode on a Grecian Urn” 1, 2–3, 4–5
Keller, Gottfried 1
Kelleter, Frank 1, 2
Kelly, Sean Dorrance 1
Kennedy, A. L. 1
– Day 1, 2–3
Kermode, Frank 1
Kerouac, Jack 1–2
Kestner, Joseph 1
Khakhar, Bhupen 1
Khomeini, Ayatollah 1
Kienholz, Edward 1
Kincaid, Jamaica 1
Kinder, Marsha 1
Kinney, Jeff 1
Kipling, Rudyard 1
– “Mrs Bathurst” 1
Kirkman, Robert 1
Kisselgoff, Anna 1
Kittler, Friedrich A. 1
Kjeldsen, Jens E. 1
Klages, Ludwig 1
Klarer, Mario 1, 2–3, 4, 5
Klein, Yves 1
Klepper, Martin 1
Klevjer, Rune 1
Klooß, Wolfgang 1
Köhnen, Ralph 1
Komunyakaa, Yusef 1
Koons, Jeff 1–2
Koritz, Amy 1
Korthals, Holger 1–2
Kosinski, Jerzy 1–2
Kosslyn, Stephen Michael 1, 2
Kozloff, Sarah 1
Kramer, Lawrence 1
Krämer, Sybille 1, 2, 3, 4
Krauss, Rosalind 1, 2–3, 4
Kress, Gunther 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7–8, 9, 10–11
Krieger, Murray 1–2, 3
Kromm, Jane 1
Kubitschek, Missy Dehn 1
Kubrick, Stanley 1
Kucich, John 1
Kuester, Martin 1
Kuhn, Thomas S. 1
Kukkonen, Karin 1, 2
Kunzle, David 1
Kuo, Chia-chen 1–2
Kuortti, Joel 1–2
Kureishi, Hanif 1
Kurosawa, Akira 1
Lachmann, Renate 1
Laforgue, Jules 1
Lakoff, George 1–2
Lange, Dorothea 1
– An American Exodus 1, 2–3
Langer, Susanne 1–2
Lanham, Richard 1
Lanier, Douglas 1
LaRose, John 1, 2
Lars, MC 1
Larsen, Reif 1–2, 3, 4–5
Latifa, Queen 1
Latour, Bruno 1
Laurel, Brenda 1–2
Laurie, Hugh 1
Lavrovsky, Leonid 1
Lawrence, D. H. 1
Laxman, R. K. 1
Lean, David 1
Lee, Don L. 1
Lee, Russell 1–2
Leeuwen, Theo van 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6–7, 8–9
Léger, Fernand 1
Leguizamo, John 1
Lehmann, Courtney 1, 2, 3
Lennon, John 1
Lenoir, Tim 1
Leone, Sergio 1
Leonhard, Karin 1
Lepage, Robert 1, 2
Leschke, Rainer 1, 2
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
– Laocoön / Laokoön 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6
Lewes, George Henry 1
Lewis, Wyndham 1
– Time and Western Man 1
– The Childermass 1
Lil’ Kim 1
Limón, José 1–1
Lindhé, Cecilia 1
Link, Caroline 1
Lippi, Filippo 1
Liu, Lucy 1
Lively, Penelope 1
Lodge, David 1–2, 3, 4, 5
Loizeaux, Elizabeth Bergman 1, 2, 3
Lollards, The 1, 2
Longenbach, James 1
Longinus
– On the Sublime (Peri Hyposus) 1
– Daphnis and Chloe 1, 2
Loos, Anita 1
Losano, Antonia 1, 2–3
Louvel, Liliane 1, 2–3, 4, 5–6
Lowood, Henry 1
Loy, Mina 1
Luhmann, Niklas 1, 2–3, 4
Luhrmann, Baz
– William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet 1, 2, 3–4
Luks, George 1
Lumière, Auguste and Louis 1, 2
Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen 1
Machin, David 1
MacMillan, Kenneth 1
Macpherson, Kenneth 1–2
Madonna 1–2
Magnussen, Vidar 1
Magritte, René 1
Mahne, Nicole 1
Malevich, Konstantin 1–2
Malinowski, Bernadette 1
Mallarmé, Stéphane 1, 2–3, 4, 5–6, 7–8
Manasses, Constantine 1
Mann, Anthony 1
Mann, Thomas 1–2
Marcsek-Fuchs, Maria 1, 2–3, 4–5
Marcus, Ben
– The Age of Wire and String 1, 2–3
Margolin, Uri 1
Marinetti, Filippo 1
Marion, Philippe 1, 2
Markham, E. A. 1
Marks, Laura U. 1
Marr, David 1
Marx, Adolf Bernhard 1
Marx, Karl 1, 2
Massenet, Jules 1–2
Mathieu, Marc-Antoine 1
Matisse, Henri 1
– L’artiste et le modèle reflétés dans le miroir 1
– La Porte noire 1–2
– Le nu rose 1
Matthews, David 1
Mattotti, Lorenzo 1, 2
Matz, Jesse 1
Maus, Katherine Eisaman 1–2
Mayhew, Henry
– London Labour and the London Poor 1, 2
Mazzucchelli, David 1
McCann, Colum 1
McCausland, Elizabeth 1, 2, 3
McCloud, Scott 1, 2
McElroy, Collen 1
McGinn, Colin 1
McGrath, Charles 1, 2
McGuigan, Paul 1
McLuhan, Marshall 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
McMahan, Alison 1
McMullan, Gordon 1
McWilliams, Carey 1
Meek, Margaret 1
Meek, Richard 1, 2
Meisel, Martin 1–2
Meister, Jan Christoph 1
Méliès, George 1–2, 3, 4, 5
Melville, Herman
– Moby-Dick 1, 2–3
Mendes, Ana Cristina 1, 2, 3
Meyer, Michael 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6
Meyer, Petra Maria 1, 2
Meyerhold, Vsevolod 1
Meyers, Jeffrey 1–2
Michael, George 1
Michals, Duane 1
Michelangelo 1–2, 3
Micklethwait, Lucy 1
Micznik, Vera 1
Middleton, Thomas 1
Milano, Francesco da 1
Milestone, Lewis
– A Walk in the Sun 1, 2–3, 4
– All Quiet on the Western Front 1–2
Milius, John 1
Millais, John Everett 1, 2
Miller, Anna Riggs 1
Miller, Frank 1
– Sin City 1, 2
Miller, J. Hillis 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Miller, Jonny Lee 1
Milne, A. A.
– Winnie-the-Pooh 1–2, 3–4
Milton, John 1
Minger, Jack 1
Mingus, Charles 1–2
Minuit, Marion 1
Mitchell, Katie 1
Mitchell, Tony 1
Mitchell, W. J. T. 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 7–8, 9, 10–11, 12, 13, 14–15, 16–17,
18–19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24–25, 26, 27, 28–29, 30–31, 32, 33, 34–35,
36, 37–38, 39, 40, 41–42, 43, 44–45, 46
Mittel, Jason 1, 2, 3–4
Moebius, William 1
Moffat, Steven 1–2, 3
Moggach, Deborah 1
Monch, Pharoahe 1
Moncrieff, William Thomas
– Tom and Jerry 1, 2–3
Monet, Claude 1–2, 3
Monk, Thelonious 1
Montandon, Alain 1
Moore, Alan 1
– Watchmen 1–2
Moore, Marianne 1
Morandi, Giorgio 1–2
Moréas, Jean 1
Moreau, Gustave 1–2
Morgan, Catrin 1, 2–3
Morreale, Emiliano 1, 2–3
Morricone, Ennio 1
Morris, Wright 1
Morrison, Toni
– Jazz 1–2, 3–4
Morton, Stephen 1, 2
Motter, Dean 1
Moulthrop, Stuart 1
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 1
Mukherjee, Meenakshi 1–2
Müller, Jürgen E. 1–2, 3
Munch, Edvard 1, 2
– The Scream 1, 2, 3
Münch, Gerhart 1–2
Murdoch, Iris 1
Murray, Janet H. 1–2, 3
Muybridge, Eadweard 1
Myers, Kenneth 1–2
Naipaul, V. S. 1
Narain, Mona 1–2, 3
Naremore, James 1–2, 3
Nas 1
Nazeri, Hafez 1
Nehru, Jawaharlal 1, 2–3
Nelson, Sonny 1
Nelson, Tim Blake 1
Nerlich, Michael 1
Nesingwary, Hemet 1
Neubauer, John 1
Neumann, Birgit 1, 2, 3, 4
Neumeier, John 1
Newborn, Phineas 1
Newton, Adam Zachary 1
Niantic 1–2
Nicolai, Friedrich 1
Nischik, Reingard M. 1
Noe, Alva 1
Nöth, Winfried 1–2, 3–4, 5
Novak, Daniel A. 1, 2–3, 4
Nünning, Ansgar 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Nünning, Vera 1, 2
Nurejew, Rudolf 1
Nussbaum, Martha 1
O’Brien, Tim 1–2
O’Flynn, Siobhan 1–2
O’Sullivan, Maggie 1
– “Elegy” 1
– “Melancholia” 1
– “Rothko” 1
– Tonetreks 1–2
– “Van Gogh” 1
Olcay, Tijen 1
Olivier, Laurence 1
Olsen, Lane 1
Olson, Greta 1
Olsson, Jan 1
Ondaatje, Michael 1, 2
Opera Magna 1
Opper, Frederick Burr 1
Orff, Carl 1
Orvell, Miles 1–2, 3
Orwell, George 1
Osborn, Marijane 1
Otto, Ulf 1
Outcault, Richard Felton 1–2
Ovid 1, 2, 3–4, 5
Oyama, Rumiko 1
Ozick, Cynthia 1
Paech, Joachim 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7–8, 9
Paget, Sidney 1
Paivio, Allan 1
Panofsky, Erwin 1, 2, 3
Paraskeva, Anthony 1
Parker, Charlie 1
Parsons, Alan 1–2
Party, Bharatiya Janata 1, 2
Pater, Walter 1–2
Patten, Robert L. 1–2, 3–4
Patten, Sean 1–2
Patterson, Lee 1
Paul, St., the Apostle 1
Paulson, William R. 1–2
Pearson, Roberta 1
Peck, Gregory 1, 2
Peirce, Charles Sanders 1, 2, 3, 4
Peppin, Brigid 1
Perrineau, Harold 1
Persephone 1
Pessl, Marisha 1–2
Petit, Laurence 1–2
Petrarch 1, 2
Pfaff, Judy 1
Pfeiffer, Karl Ludwig 1, 2
Phelan, James 1
Philostratus
– Eikones 1–2, 3–4
Pinch, Trevor 1
Pinney, Christopher 1–2, 3
Pinsky, Robert 1
Piozzi, Hester Lynch 1
Piper, Myfanwy 1
Pirinen, Mikko 1–2, 3
Piscator, Erwin 1
Pitt, Brad 1
Plath, Sylvia 1
Plessner, Hellmuth 1
Plett, Heinrich F. 1, 2
Plissart, Marie-Françoise 1
Plutarch 1, 2, 3
Poe, Edgar Allan 1, 2–3
– “The Fall of the House of Usher” 1
– “The Raven” 1–2
Polasek, Ashley 1
Pollesch, René 1
Pollock, Griselda 1, 2
Poole, Kristen 1
Postlethwaite, Pete 1
Postman, Neil 1
Potter, Dennis 1
Pound, Ezra 1–2
– “Canto LXXV” 1–2
– “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” 1
Powell, Andrew 1
Powers, Richard 1
– Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance 1–2
Pradilla, Francisco 1
Prasad, Anyl 1
Presley, Elvis 1–2
Presley, Frances 1
Price, Steven 1
Prokofiev, Sergei 1–2
Pross, Harry 1
Proteus 1
Proust, Marcel 1–2, 3
Puckett, John Rogers 1–2, 3, 4–5
Pudovkin, Vsevolod I. 1, 2
Puig, Manuel 1–2
Pygmalion 1
Pynchon, Thomas 1, 2
Quintilian 1
Rabb, Jane M. 1, 2, 3–4
Radcliffe, Ann 1
Rainey, Lawrence 1
Raja, Javed 1–2
Rajewsky, Irina O. 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6–7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12–13, 14–15, 16–17,
18, 19, 20, 21–22, 23, 24–25, 26–27, 28–29, 30, 31, 32–33, 34, 35,
36, 37–38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44–45, 46, 47–48
Rampersad, Arnold 1
Rancière, Jacques 1, 2
Ranks, Shabba 1
Rathbone, Basil 1
Reagan, Ronald 1
Redling, Erik 1, 2, 3
Reed, Ishmael 1
– Mumbo Jumbo 1
Reed, Lou
– POEtry 1–2
– “The Tell-Tale Heart, Part I” 1–2
Remarque, Erich Maria 1
Rembrandt (Harmenszoon van Rijn) 1
Rexroth, Kenneth 1
Richard II 1
Richardson, Dorothy 1–2, 3
Richardson, Tony 1, 2
Ricoeur, Paul 1
Riffaterre, Michael 1, 2
Riggs, Ransom
– Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children 1–2, 3, 4
Rigney, Ann 1–2, 3
Riis, Jacob 1, 2
Rilke, Rainer Maria 1
Rimbaud, Arthur 1
Rimmele, Marius 1, 2, 3
Rippl, Gabriele 1–2, 3–4, 5–6, 7, 8–9, 10–11, 12–13, 14–15, 16–17,
18–19, 20–21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30–31, 32–33, 34–35,
36, 37, 38, 39–40, 41, 42, 43, 44
Rishin, Abigail S. 45–46
Ritchie, Guy 1
Rivera, Diego 1–2
Robert, Jörg 1, 2
Roberts, W. Rhys 1
Robeson, Paul 1
Robin, Christopher 1–2
Robinson, Earl 1
Robinson, Henry Peach 1
Rodriguez, Robert 1
Rollins, Sonny 1–2
– “There Will Never Be Another You” 1–2
Rollinson, Philip B. 1
Rorty, Richard 1
Rosenberg, Harold 1–2
Rosenthal, Caroline 1
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 1
Rosskam, Edwin 1–2
Rothko, Mark 1, 2–3
Rowlands, Mark 1
Rozema, Patricia
– Mansfield Park 1, 2
Rukeyser, Muriel 1
Rumi, Jalal ad-Din Muhammad 1
Rushdie, Salman 1–2, 3–4, 5–6
– “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” 1
– Midnight’s Children 1–2, 3
– The Enchantress of Florence 1, 2–3
– The Ground beneath Her Feet 1–2
– The Moor’s Last Sigh 1, 2, 3–4, 5
– The Satanic Verses 1
Ruskin, John 1–2
Ryan, Marie-Laure 1–2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7–8, 9, 10, 11, 12–13, 14–15, 16–17,
 18, 19
Sacco, Joe 1
Sachs, Hans 1–2
Sadoff, Dianne F. 1
Sadoski, Mark 1
Said, Edward 1, 2
Saint-Georges, Jules-Henri Vernoy de 1
Salieri, Antonio 1
Salkey, Andrew 1, 2
Sandburg, Carl 1
Sander, August 1
Sanders, Joe Sutliff 1, 2
Sanders, Julie 1, 2–3, 4, 5
Sarkowsky, Katja 1
Sarto, Andrea del 1
Saunders, Penny 1
Saussure, Ferdinand de 1–2, 3
Sayer, Andrew 1
Scalapino, Leslie 1
Scarry, Elaine 1, 2, 3
Schachterle, Lance 1
Schafer, R. Murray 1
Schechner, Richard 1, 2, 3, 4
Scheffer, Bernd 1
Scher, Steven Paul 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6–7
Schlickers, Sabine 1
Schmidt, Johannes N. 1, 2
Schmidt, Siegfried J. 1, 2–3, 4, 5
Schmitz-Emans, Monika 1, 2, 3, 4
Scholz, Oliver R. 1
Schröter, Jens 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6–6, 7, 8, 9–10
Schubert, Franz 1
Schubert, Willie 1–2, 3, 4–5
Schultz, Elizabeth A. 1–2, 3–4
Schwenger, Peter 1, 2
Schwitter, Kurt 1
Scott, Ridley 1
Scott, Sir Walter 1
– Waverley 1–2
Scrope, Harriet 1
Seamon, David 1
Sebald, W. G. 1, 2, 3, 4–5
Sen, Orijit 1
Serres, Michel 1–2
Seth, Vikram 1, 2–3
Shaftesbury, Lord (Anthony Ashley-Cooper) 1
Shah, Harsh 1–2
Shakespeare, William 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
– Hamlet 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– Macbeth 1, 2, 3–4
– Othello 1, 2–3
– Romeo and Juliet 1–2, 3, 4–5
– Timon of Athens 6–7
– The Rape of Lucrece 1–1, 2–3
Shannon, Claude E. 1–2
Shapton, Leanne
– Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of
Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion,
and Jewelry 1, 2–3
Sheen, Martin 1, 2
Shelley, Mary 1, 2, 3
Sher-Gil, Amrita 1
Shklovsky, Victor 1, 2
Showalter, Elaine 1
Shuker, Roy 1, 2
Shusterman, Richard 1, 2
Sienkiewicz, Bill 1, 2–3
Silcox, Paula 1
Silver, Carole G. 1–2
Simic, Charles 1
Simone, Nina 1
Simonides of Ceos 1, 2, 3
Simpson, James 1, 2
Simpson, O. J. 1
Sims, Zoot 1
Sinclair, Iain 1
Sinha, Ajay J. 1–2
Sitwell, Edith 1
Smith, Ali 1
Smith, Bessie 1
Smith, Grahame 1
Smith, Mack 1
Smith, Mamie 1
Smith, Sharon 1
Smollett, Tobias 1
Snyder, Zack 1
Sontag, Susan 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Spackman, Helen 1
Spandler, Horst 1
Spellman, A. B. 1
Spencer, Edmund 1
Spiegel, Alan 1, 2
Spigel, Lynn 1
Spielberg, Steven 1
Spielmann, Yvonne 1
Spitzer, Leo 1, 2
Spohr, Louis 1
Spolsky, Ellen 1
Stainer, Pauline 1
Stam, Robert 1–2, 3
Stanbury, Sarah 1
Stange, Maren 1
Stein, Daniel 1, 2, 3–4
Stein, Gertrude 1, 2, 3–4, 5
– “Portraits and Repetition” 1
Stein, Louisa Ellen 1, 2, 3
Stein, Mark 1–2
Stein, Richard 1, 2–3
Steinbeck, John
– The Grapes of Wrath 1, 2, 3
Steinberg, Leo 1, 2–3, 4
Stelarc 1
Stemmler, Susanne 1
Sterne, Jonathan 1
Steward, Tom 1
Stiegler, Bernd 1, 2, 3
Stockwell, Peter 1, 2
Stone, Harry 1–2, 3
Stoppard, Tom 1
Strauss, Johann 1
Strauss, Richard 1
Stumpf, Berit 1
Sturken, Marita 1, 2, 3
Summit, Jennifer 1
Surkamp, Carola 1
Suter, Beat 1, 2
Sutherland, John 1
Svoboda, Josef 1
Swift, Jonathan 1–2
Sylvester, Terry 1
Tagore, Gaganendranath 1
Takodjerad, Bruno 1
Talbot, Fox Henry
– The Pencil of Nature 1–2
Tan, Shaun 1
Tandt, Christophe den 1–2
Tassi, Marguerite A. 1
Tatius, Achilles 96–1
Tay, Jinna 1
Taylor, Paul S.
– An American Exodus 1, 2, 3–4
Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilych 1
Tecklenburg, Nina 1, 2
Telltale 1
Tenniel, John 1
Tennyson, Alfred Lord 1
– Idylls of the King 1
Terrell, Carroll Franklin 1
Teukolsky, Rachel 1
Teverson, Andrew 1
The Who 1, 2
Theon, Ailios 1, 2
Theroux, Paul 1
Thiara, Nicole Weickgenannt 1–2
Tholen, Georg Christoph 1
Thom, Sarah 1–2
Thomas, Sophie 1
Thompson, Evan 1–2
Thon, Jan-Noël 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6–7, 8–9
Thorburn, Robin 1
Thorpe, Adam
– Still 1, 2
Thurlow, Crispin 1, 2–3
Tissot, James 1, 2–3
Tjøstheim, Bjarte
– “Mind Phallus” 1
– “Oklahomo” 1
Todorow, Almut 1, 2
Tolkien, J. R. R. 1
Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe 1
Tonks, Henry 1
Toomer, Jean 1
Töpffer, Rodolphe 1
Torgovnic, Marianna 1
Tracy, Stephen 1–2
Tremain, Rose
– “Death of an Advocate” 1, 2–3
– “The Beauty of the Dawn Shift” 1
– The Darkness of Wallis Simpson 1
Tripp, Ronja 1, 2–3
Trost, Bastian 1
Trotter, David 1
Truax, Barry 1
Trussler, Michael 1
Tschilke, Christian von 1
Turner, Graeme 1, 2, 3
Turner, Joseph Mallord William 1–2
Turner, Mark 1–2, 3
Tydeman, William 1
Tykwer, Tom 1
– Run Lola Run 1
U2 1
Ubisoft 1–2
Ullman, Tracey 1
Updike, John 1, 2
Urquhart, Jane
– The Underpainter 1, 2–3
Vakil, Zeenat 1
Vanderbeke, Dirk 1, 2
Vasari, Giorgio 1
Vaszily, Scott 1
Velázquez, Diego 1
– Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary 1–2
Verlaine, Paul 1
Verma, Raja Ravi 1
Verrone, William 1
Vidal, Belén 1
Vidal, Gore 1
Vidor, Charles 1
Vinci, Leonardo da 1
– Paragone of Poetry and Painting 1, 2
Viol, Claus-Ulrich 1, 2
Virgil 1, 2
Virilio, Paul 1, 2
Visser, Arnaud S. Q. 1
Voigts, Eckhart 1, 2, 3, 4
Voßkamp, Wilhelm 1–2
Vreeland, Susan
– Life Studies: Stories 1
Wagner, Peter 1–2, 3–4, 5–6, 7–8, 9, 10, 11
Wagner, Richard 1, 2
– “Ride of the Valkyries” 301
– Tristan und Isolde 1
Waldenfels, Bernhard 1
Wall, Cynthia 1–2
Wallace, David 1
Wallace, David Foster 1–2
Wallhead, Celia 1
Wallis, Henry
– Chatterton 1, 2
Walsh, Richard 1, 2
Walton, Kendall L. 1–2
Warburg, Aby 1
Warhol, Andy 1–2
Warnke, Martin 1
Warren, Harry 1
Waugh, Evelyn 1
Waugh, Patricia 1
Weaver, Warren 1
Webb, Ruth 1, 2, 3, 4–5
Weber, Max 1
Webster, Ben 1
Weibel, Peter 1
Weichert, Stephan A. 1
Weingart, Brigitte 1–2, 3
Weiss, Ruth 1
Weisstein, Ulrich 1
Wells, H. G. 1
– The Invisible Man 1–2
– “The New Accelerator” 1–2
Wells, Marion A. 1
Welz, Gisela 1–2
Wendorf, Richard 1
Wenzel, Horst 1
West, Cornell 1
West, Kanye 1
West, Simon
– Lara Croft: Tomb Raider 1
Wharton, Edith 1, 2
– The Age of Innocence 1
Whelehan, Imelda 1, 2
White, Edmund 1
White, Roberta 1, 2
Wilde, Oscar 1
– Salome 1, 2–3
Wilden, Anthony 1
Will, Simon 1–2
Williams, Raymond 1
Williams, Sherley Anne 1
Wilson, Robert 1, 2
Wilson, Sharon R. 1
Winko, Simone 1, 2
Wolf, Werner 1–2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7–8, 9, 10–11, 12, 13, 14–15, 16, 17,
18–19, 20–21, 22, 23–24, 25, 26–27, 28, 29, 30–31, 32–33, 34–35, 36,
37, 38–39, 40, 41, 42, 43–44, 45, 46–47, 48, 49, 50–51, 52–53,
54–55, 56, 57, 58–59, 60
Wölfflin, Heinrich 1
Woolf, Virginia 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
– Orlando 1
– “The Cinema” 1–2
– To the Lighthouse 1, 2, 3
Woolfson, Eric 1–2
Wooster Group, The 1, 2
Worcester, Kent 1
Wordsworth, William 1
Wright, Richard
– 12 Million Black Voices 1, 2–3
Wychwood, Charles 1–2
Wycliffe, John 1
Yacobi, Tamar 1, 2, 3
Yap, Tyng Shiuh 1
Yeats, William Butler
– “Among School Children” 1
– At the Hawk’s Well 1
Yeazell, Ruth Bernard 1–2
Young, Kevin 1, 2
Young, Lester 1
Zahavi, Dan 1–2
Zansky, Louis 1
Zapf, Hubert 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Zappa, Frank 1
Zeffirelli, Franco 1
Zemeckis, Robert 1
Zinneman, Fred 1
List of Contributors
Jan Baetens is Professor of Literature and Culture at the KU Leuven,
Belgium, and currently coordinator of the BELSPO/PAI program
“Literature and Media Innovation.”
Astrid Böger is Professor of American Literature and Culture, and
Director of the “Arbeitsstelle für Graphische Literatur (ArGL)” at the
University of Hamburg, Germany.
Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor and Chair of English and American
Studies at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and Global
Distinguished Professor at New York University.
Renate Brosch is Professor and Chair of New English Literature at
the University of Stuttgart, Germany.
Danuta Fjellestad is Professor and Chair of American Literature and
Culture at Uppsala University, Sweden.
Claudia Georgi, Dr., is Assistant Professor of English Literature and
Cultural Studies at the University of Göttingen, Germany.
Wolfgang Hallet is Professor and Chair of Teaching English as a
Foreign Language, Member of the Executive Board of the GCSC and
Head of the Teaching Centre at the Justus Liebig University Giessen,
Germany.
Johanna Hartmann, Dr., is Visiting Assistant Professor at the
University of Texas at Austin, U.S.A., and Research Assistant and
Editorial Assistant at the University of Augsburg, Germany.
James A. W. Heffernan is Emeritus Professor of English at
Dartmouth College, U.S.A.
Guido Isekenmeier, Dr., is Senior Researcher of New English
Literature at the University of Stuttgart, Germany.
Andrew James Johnston is Professor and Chair of Medieval and
Renaissance English Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin,
Germany.
Sylvia Karastathi, Dr., is Junior Research Fellow at the Institute of
Advanced Study in the Humanities and the Social Sciences (IASH) at
 the University of Bern, Switzerland.
David Kennedy, Dr., is Senior Lecturer in English and Creative
Writing at the University of Hull, United Kingdom.
Christina Ljungberg, is Honorary Professor of English and
American Literature at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.
Maria Marcsek-Fuchs, Dr., is Research Assistant at the Technische
Universität Braunschweig, Germany, and holds a diploma in
Choreography from the Palucca University of Dance in Dresden.
Laura Marcus is Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature and
Professorial Fellow at New College, University of Oxford, United
Kingdom.
Michael Meyer is Professor and Chair of English Literature at the
University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany.
Britta Neitzel, Dr., is Visiting Professor of Media Studies (with a
focus on the Theory and History of Technology) at the University of
Arts at Design Linz, Austria.
Birgit Neumann is Professor of English Literatures at the Heinrich
Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany, and a Board Member of the
German Association for Eighteenth-century Studies (Deutsche
Gesellschaft zur Erforschung des 18. Jahrhunderts).
Erik Redling is Professor and Chair of American Literature at the
Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, and
Managing Director of the Muhlenberg Center for American Studies.
Gabriele Rippl is Professor and Chair of Literatures in English at the
University of Bern, Switzerland, and Co-editor of Anglia. Journal of
English Philology and the Anglia Book Series.
Margitta Rouse, Dr., is Associate Fellow of the Collaborative
Research Centre Episteme in Motion at the Freie Universität Berlin,
Germany.
Christine Schwanecke, Dr., is Research Coordinator at the Justus
Liebig University Giessen, Germany.
Philipp Schweighauser is Associate Professor and Head of
American and General Literatures at the University of Basel,
Switzerland.
Daniel Stein is Professor and Chair of North American Literary and
Cultural Studies at the University of Siegen, Germany.
Julia Straub, PD Dr., is Senior Assistant in Literatures in English at
the University of Bern, Switzerland.
Barbara Straumann is Assistant Professor of English Literature at
the University of Zurich, Switzerland.
Jan-Noël Thon, Dr., is Research Associate in the Department of
Media Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany.
Crispin Thurlow is Professor of Language and Communication at
the University of Bern, Switzerland, and on the editorial board of,
amongst other journals, Critical Discourse Studies and Discourse,
Context & Media and is co-editor of the book series Language and
Social Life.
Eckart Voigts is Professor and Chair of English Literature at the
Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany.
Peter Wagner is Emeritus Professor of English and American
Literature at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany.
Werner Wolf is Professor and Chair of English and General
Literature at the University of Graz, Austria, and (Co-)Editor of
several volumes of the book series Word and Music Studies and
Studies in Intermediality.