Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
von
Maddalena Pennacchia Punzi
1. Auflage
message has been the theoretical problem of the XXth century, and
let us focus on the more urgent question of what the meaning of
‘intermediality’ might be. It is, in fact, a fairly new term which is
gaining ground in the crowded panorama of contemporary critical
jargon. It is a term, though, whose semantic field has not been thor-
oughly defined, although intense work on the subject has been done
since 1997, among others, both by the ‘Centre de recherche sur
l’intermédialité’ (Montréal University) and the ‘Center for Philoso-
phy and Arts’ (Rotterdam University).
The term profits much from its Latin prefix ‘inter’, which means
‘between’. ‘Being between media’ stresses the idea of a message per-
petually crossing the boundaries separating media; a message that is,
i. e. exists, only as and through an incessant movement, never attain-
ing an ultimate shape, and living as many lives as the number of the
media crossed. If we think of inter-mediality as a ‘differing’ move-
ment of the message through a system of interrelated but different
media (Oosterling), we may agree to make a meaningful contrast
with the much more renowned term multi-mediality, where the
emphasis is placed on a centripetal movement, i. e. on the storage of
a plurality of technical codes in the same device, whether off-line or
on-line (Parascandolo). I would also add that while on the multimedial
horizon the ‘literary’ work seems to enjoy a plural identity, condensed
in the same storage device, in intermediality the ‘literary work’ is in
transit, in other words: it is continually translated from one medium
into another, thus acquiring a plurality of identities, generated as a
trace of the movement itself. In this perspective, the idea of ‘inter-
medial movement’ might theoretically be conceived as a further
expansion, in specific technological terms, of Roland Barthes’s theory
of the ‘writerly text’.
It is true that the crossing of media boundaries, as well as those
of genres, is a phenomenon that has always existed in the realm of
‘Literature’ – let us keep those brackets in place for a moment longer
Literary Intermediality: An Introduction 11
on the other hand, while maintaining their own specific traits, generate
new features in the presence of new media (Bolter and Grusin).
But what kinds of alterations affect the book as a specific medium?
This is one of the most important conundrums discussed in the
articles in this volume. But, in order to introduce the question, it is
necessary to go back to the issue of the literary message.
What is a ‘literary’ message? Which is tantamount to asking ‘what
is literature’?
It is almost a commonplace that the very concept of literature has
become more and more difficult to pin down. “There is no essence
of literature whatsoever […] ‘literature’ is a functional rather than
an ontological term”: stated Terry Eagleton in the 1980s (Eagleton,
1983: 8). And I cannot but agree with him that the definition of
literature depends on “how somebody decides to read, not [on] the
nature of what is written” (7). In other words, from a materialistic
point of view, a literary work is a piece of writing to which we
agree to give importance through a series of largely concealed and
historically variable value-judgements generated and reiterated by social
institutions such as schools, libraries, universities, book-prizes, and so
on. Eagleton himself comes to the conclusion that, generally speak-
ing, we could think of ‘literature’ “as a number of ways in which people
relate themselves to writing” (8).
I would suggest, therefore, going back to the very etymology of
the word literature, which in Western cultures, comes from litera, a
letter, that is a single written sign which ‘stands’ for a sound. It is the
same root of literacy, which means being capable of writing and
reading. ‘Literature’ is therefore culturally and historically linked to
phonetic writing; actually we could say that, even today, a ‘literary
message’, in the Western tradition, still has to do with its written
form, whatever be the imaginative experience it conveys.
Many anthropologists, philosophers and scientists consider phonetic
writing as the most revolutionary technology ever invented by the
14 MADDALENA P ENNACCHIA PUNZI
human race, the watershed between prehistory and history, and the
very invention that changed the human way of perceiving the world.
Phonetic writing, born in Greece and spread by Latin culture, is the
invention through which men have been able to store information
with relatively little effort and in a limited space. Derrick de Kerck-
hove, the Canadian philosopher who has further expanded McLuhan’s
reflection on the media, coined the term homme littéré (man of let-
ters), a ‘misspelling’ of homme littré (literate man), in order to stress how
much the alphabet code changed the neurobiological response of
men to the world, previous to any cultural apprehension of it (2002:
268). For his part, the Italian philosopher Carlo Sini, in an essay
entitled Filosofia e scrittura (Philosophy and Writing), suggests that it
is precisely through the invention and use of phonetic writing that
Ancient Greeks ‘invented’ Philosophy, i. e. a critical, detached way of
reflecting on a world translated into language and dissected by
logic. It is perhaps to the loss of that critical distance that modernist
intellectuals as F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot, in England, or T. Adorno
in Germany, were referring when they gave vent to their anxieties on
the new illiteracy brought about by mass-media such as the radio,
cinema and television. It cannot be denied that the loss of a critical
distance involves the real risk of becoming ideologically involved with
the content of apparently transparent messages; at the same time,
however, it is also true that new media always betray their artful
nature exactly as they are trying to efface it (what Bolter and Grusin
in their updated critical jargon would call “the double logic of
remediation”).
As I see it, writing remains, when compared to audiovisual forms
of communication, an intrinsically opaque medium, which forces
the user to exert a high degree of involvement to extract meaning. But
more important still is the fact that the act of reading requires a peculiar
quality of time, which is different for each user and intolerant of any
standard, as Proust suggested throughout his work (On Reading).
Literary Intermediality: An Introduction 15
other words, a sort of wrestling between the written and the audio-
visual medium to win the spectator’s trust, which results, in the
examples discussed, in the questioning of the capacity traditionally
attributed to writing to fix human identity once and for all.
In Jane Austen on Screen: Deference and Divergence, Lydia Martin
focuses on the discrepancy between the pre-1995 and the post-1995
productions of Jane Austen’s film adaptations, considering it not so
much in terms of historical accuracy, but in terms of style, acting,
use of camera and sound work. If before 1995 adaptations from Jane
Austen’s novels were static, almost theatrical and mostly indoors,
after 1995, a taste for freedom and ‘fresh air’ pushed its way through
taking the viewers on a journey through the English delightful land-
scape: exterior settings were employed, in Martin’s view, as a technical
means to see Austen’s narratives under an entirely new light, more
palatable to a contemporary audience. In order to carry out her read-
ing, Martins relies on Geoffrey Wagner’s classification of adaptations
into three categories, “a transposition, which tries to remain as close
to the novel as possible; a commentary, which modifies the novel by
bringing to light certain elements or by modifying the overall structure;
an analogy, which only uses the novel as a point of departure” (68).
Leaving aside the first category, Martin reflects on the other two closely
analysing Northanger Abbey (1986), Sense and Sensibility (1995),
Mansfield Park (1999), Clueless (1995), Kandukondain Kandukondain
(2000).
In the section Literary Intermediality and Theatre I have collected
the articles that deal with contemporary theatre. Live performance
has changed radically in the age of analog and digital technology,
and so has the work of playwrights and performance artists.
Johan Callens building on current developments in media theory
and stressing the critical concept of ‘remediation’ launched by Jay
David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999), presents an essay entitled
Intermediality in David Mamet’s ‘ The Water Engine’, where he evalu-
18 MADDALENA P ENNACCHIA PUNZI
into the world of ballet, which, she claims, has always been a highly
intermedial art, at least since “many ballets take as their starting point
texts that already exist in other media, a verbal text, typically, which
has been transformed into a musical score” (127). It is the case of
Nureyev’s Romeo and Juliet, based both upon Prokofiev’s score and
on Shakespeare’s play. In Bennet’s analysis of the choreography, the
reader’s attention is also drawn to one important factor frequently
underestimated by those who are not ballet scholars, i. e. that, being
an ephemeral art, ballet, more than other performance arts needs
to be fixed with the aid of other media and this means that it must
rely on written and photographic records (for older works) or on
modern technological resources, like videos and DVDs. Stressing the
symbiosis between ballet and modern technologies, Bennet states
that they have even influenced the creation of choreography, since
Nureyev’s staging, in her view, imitates filmic devices such as ‘freeze-
frame’, ‘slow-motion’, ‘cross-dissolve’ and ‘multiple simultaneous
frames’.
In the section Literary Intermediality and Postmodernism I have
collected the essay that can be overtly related to a postmodernist
aesthetics.
In her essay Intermediality in Literature: Bret Easton Ellis and the
MTV Novel, Sonia Baelo Allué states that, “due to our global, image-
driven, electronic culture, we are witnessing a progressive approach
of literature to the languages of mass culture – cinema, television,
radio, popular music and consumer culture” (147) which may come
as a result of the progressive convergence of high and low culture
produced by postmodernism. Focusing on the ‘blank generation’, a
group of contemporary US writers who use intermediality in their
works to represent the reality they live in by mixing, in a very plain
register, references to mass popular products, characters and events,
Baelo Allué selects US author Bret Easton Ellis and the use of MTV
language and style in his first novel, Less Than Zero (1985). In Baelo
20 MADDALENA P ENNACCHIA PUNZI
The first part of the article deals with the socially mediated literary
context, while the second tries to show how it affects the actual
fiction-creation.
In his essay, Internet, E-Learning, and Critical Distance, Giuseppe
Martella discusses some of the issues concerning the deep changes in
our way of perceiving literature after the World Wide Web revolution.
Starting from the remarks that, “more than a medium, the internet
constitutes a media environment, a technological habitat […] pro-
ducing ways of behaviour and styles of discourse which, by and large,
we can call ‘post-modern’” (222), Martella states that the idea itself
of literacy acquires new meanings in our new hyper-medial environ-
ment. Since the knowledge /power maps of the global village are con-
stantly being re-drawn, we need, in Martella’s view, to re-design the
methods of transmission of this knowledge to the younger genera-
tions, both in the form of specific know-how (competence) and in
that of ways of behaviour (education). Martella extensively discusses
bonds and opportunities set out for literary teaching by the present
multimedia environment. He, therefore, focuses on the use of the
hypertext both as an instrument and as a model of knowledge, while
sketching, at the same time, his theory of ‘critical distance’.
In the last essay, Shaping G / Local Identities in Intermedial Texts:
The Case of ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’, Maddalena Pennacchia Punzi ex-
plains her idea of intermediality through the example of Bridget Jones’s
Diary. Started by Helen Fielding in 1994 as a column on the Inde-
pendent newspaper, this first person narration of the ordinary life of
a single thirty-something woman living in London, soon became
a novel and a film and is now the model for many blogs on the inter-
net. Over the last ten years, “Bridget Jones has travelled incessantly
through the entire media circuit, winning a wider audience each time
a media boundary is crossed and gaining more and more energy from
the movement” (241). As a self-narrating character, she has suffered
as many mutations as are the number of media through which she
Literary Intermediality: An Introduction 23
(as a narrating I) has transmitted her story: different media have shaped
different Bridgets for different users. Through the intermedial re-
shaping of Bridget and the setting she moves in, a ‘commonplace’
English (local) identity comes to be fashioned for the global market,
one that is made to be laughed at, but that still is a form of national
identity; Pennacchia Punzi proposes to call it a ‘g / local’ identity.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill & Wang,
1977.
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation. Understanding New Media.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.
Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Con-
temporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Callens, Johan. “Introduction.” Degrés. Intermediality. 101 Ed. Johan Callens
(Printemps 2000): 1–6.
Chapple, Freda and Chiel Kattenbelt, eds. Intermediality in Theatre and Perform-
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De Kerckhove, Derrick. The Alphabet and the Brain. London: Springer Verlag,
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Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. An Introduction. London: Blackwell, 1983.
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Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. Knopf: New York, 1995.
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Parascandolo, Renato. La televisione oltre la televisione. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 2000.
Proust, Marcel. On Reading. London: Macmillan, 1974.
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