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Literary Intermediality

The Transit of Literature through the Media Circuit

von
Maddalena Pennacchia Punzi

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Literary Intermediality – Pennacchia Punzi


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Inhaltsverzeichnis: Literary Intermediality – Pennacchia Punzi
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Literary Intermediality: An Introduction


Imagine entering one of the multilevel bookstores which can be
found in any large city around the globe and asking, for example,
for Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Together with a wide variety of
book formats – hardcover, paperback, abridged, illustrated, and so
on – you will also be offered comic-strip adaptations, audio-books,
in cassette or CD, and many a movie adaptation, in VHS and DVD.
If you are an internet-surfer, you might prefer to go on line and
look for an e-book version to download and read on your laptop,
perhaps in an edition with critical notes and links to useful related
sites. If the object of your search is a more recent best-seller, like
Harry Potter for instance, you will very likely find video-games and
internet sites with which you can extend the ‘pleasure’ of the story.
If your favourite singer is someone like Bruce Springsteen or Nick
Cave, you will be able to find their lyrics published in book format,
like any poetry book; if you like Philip Larkin or T.S. Eliot, you
might want to listen to their poems set to jazz music; and if you are
a passionate reader of Tony Harrison you might want to look at his
video-poems.
Although the examples given here may seem quite
heterogeneous, when observed from a distance they all appear
within the domain of a common dynamics: in each case a ‘literary
message’ has been dis seminated in many different media,
undergoing a transformation, or mediamorphosis (Fidler). We can
refer to this general phenomenon as ‘literary intermediality’.
Let us, for the moment, put the adjective ‘literary’ between
brackets, being aware that the definition of what is specifically
‘literary’ in a
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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

– but within a paradigm based on a hierarchical opposition


between the centre and periphery, the original and its
reproductions or adapta tions (having in mind, for example,
adaptations for theatre or cinema of literary classics).
The transition from the ‘Gutenberg Age’ to the ‘Age of Inter
mediality’ is marked by the move from a monocentric to a poly
centric type of logic. The new logic is thus a logic without a centre:
it is the logic of the network. From a monocentric point of view
the adaptation for cinema of great theatrical and narrative
masterpieces was perceived as a migration from the original
birthplace towards a new communication territory to which the
‘literary’ work had to adapt itself in order to survive (Giuseppe
Martella wittily suggested during the seminar that the word
‘adaptation’ reveals, in this meta phorical context, a telling
Darwinian connotation). In the metaphor of migration, therefore,
there is an implicit value judgement, fuelled by a sort of nostalgia,
and finally attributing to the written medium a higher dignity in
comparison to the audiovisual ones. I wonder, however, if this
approach to the question is still valid today, when not only the
‘literary’ message seems to leave the printed page in order to travel
indefinitely through the entire media circuit but, and even more
relevantly, the younger generations do not even perceive, let alone
acknowledge, a priority of the written word over other semiotic
systems. Seen in this perspective, the transit of the ‘literary’ work
through different media has become nomadic rather than migratory
(Rosi Braidotti). The ‘literary’ work seems not to have a fatherland
anymore – a birth-place to be left in exchange for asylum in a new
mediatic, definitive homeland – but it keeps moving, seem ingly
acquiring at any stage a new identity.
This new status of ‘literary’ messages was prompted also by the
extraordinary development of new communication technologies.
As many media critics have pointed out, starting with Nicholas
Negro ponte, the passage from the analog to the digital marked a
revolution
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in communication practice and theory because digital message


processing transforms lines, colours and sounds into bits, i.e.
binary digits, a sequence of zeros and ones – that Negroponte
imagines as the electronic equivalents of atoms – which can be
decoded by the same data medium thus making any traditional
difference among sign-systems even more fuzzy.
Over the last two or three decades, in fact, the rapid spread of
digital technologies has been creating an increasingly closer inter
connection among the so-called new-media, speeding up the move
ment of the message through the whole communication system.
Images, sounds, written texts, recoded in the language of binary
digits can freely circulate in media as different as the radio and tele
vision, personal computers and mobile phones, digital fax
machines, and so on. It is the conversion from the analog to the
digital which creates an epochal difference between the electric age
and the electronic age, with one crucial consequence for
‘literature’: the book as we have learnt to know it – an object made
of a number of paper pages where a sequel of letters is printed and
spatially arranged in lines forming columns to be read according to
a linear and sequential logic – becomes only one of the many
possible information-storage devices and not necessarily the first,
chronologically speaking, when a ‘literary’ message is involved.
What happens, then, to this most traditional ‘literary’ medium,
the book? Does the technological revolution spell the death of the
book, as some prophets of a near-future brave New World would
seem to suggest (Negroponte)? Or is it rather the logic of
intermediality – a logic that not only calls for the passage from one
medium to another but also refers to the constant exchange
between old and new media – that guarantees, specifically, the
survival of the book? After all, the contemporary debate on the
relationship between old and new media is ever more asserting the
idea that new media do not replace the old ones but establish a
symbiosis with them. Old media,
Literary Intermediality: An Introduction 13

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
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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

The mediatic specificity of the book seems to me more interest


ing today than ever, when, after centuries of predominance as the
unchallenged site of writing and, consequently, as the literary
medium par excellence, it has lost its pivotal place, becoming one of
the many possible concretions of a literary message. The logic of
intermediality, in fact, cannot but conceive the book as a
communica tive ‘stage’, ready to be left in order to be modulated
somewhere else, in another medium (think, for example, of the
complex process through which a written script turns into a film).
All the same, it is precisely in the intermedial perspective that the
book, as an object and a medium, can find again its reason of
being; I am convinced that the book may be considered not only a
gymnasium of the critical spirit, but also a paradigm of the critical
distance needed by the user of the literary work, whatever the
medium in which the latter takes its form, in order for the former
to remain subject of the whole intermedial system.
***
The variety of issues and case studies dealt with in this volume are
evidence both of the transversal nature of intermediality and of the
interest it arouses in all literary fields. For reasons strictly linked to
the contents of the articles, I have divided the volume into four
thematic sections.
The first section, Literary Intermediality and Cinema, is devoted to
one of the most fruitful critical areas in terms of intermediality:
film and literature. Here most of the discussion is about the issue
of adaptation and how writing gradually gets transformed into
dynamic recorded images and sounds.
In Writing, the Body, and Cinema: Peter Greenaway’s ‘The Pillow
Book’, Joy Sisley opens new critical perspectives on adaptation
theory. Sisley’s analysis of Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book aims
at demonstrating how the English film director succeeds in
overturn
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ing the conventional relationship between word and image,


drawing attention to the very materiality of the written sign. Being
a film on writing, written words continually appear on the screen
when the protagonist, Nagiko, inscribes them on the skin of her
lover, remind ing us, in Sisley’s analysis, that writing is a visual
medium. Therefore, The Pillow Book ideally closes the semiotic gap
between word and image that has been felt as a longstanding
contradiction by adapta tion theory. From her convincing
post-structuralist critical horizon, Joy Sisley stresses that, “unlike
the metaphor of translation in adap tation theory, which implies a
movement from one place to another and by default a starting
point and a destination, ‘inter’ implies a place, a position in relation
to other places […] Like the metaphor of the signpost, ‘inter’
points in many directions at once” (41). Sisley’s bold suggestion, in
the end, is that the term intermediality replaces other terms such
as ‘adaptation’ and ‘inter-semiotic translation’ in Film Studies
terminology.
Celestino Deleyto’s essay, From Among the Dead: Identity and Truth
in Filmic Letters, draws our attention to the fact that cinema seems
to be literally ‘haunted’ by the presence of written language, in the
form of letters written by dead characters, letters which, in some
cases, seem even to gain the power to ‘direct’ the filmic action.
Starting from the analysis of the function of the “most famous
letter in the history of cinema” (44), Letter from an Unknown Woman
(1948) by Max Ophüls, Deleyto sets out to analyse three
contemporary examples, Love Liza (2002), My Life without Me (2002)
and Happy Times (2002), in order to find out how they subvert, each
in its own way, the convention that, “the written word feels reliable
whereas the image has a more ephemeral quality” (43). The fixity
of written words on paper, Deleyto suggests, acquires a
metaphorical sense by being linked, in the plot, to dead people, i.e.
to those whose identity can not change anymore, and makes a
meaningful contrast to the flux of moving images which is the very
stuff cinema is made of. There is, in
Literary Intermediality: An Introduction 17

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-
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ates the medium-specific transformations this text has undergone


over the years. The story (a melodramatic thriller that takes place in
Chicago during the ‘Century of Progress’ Exhibition) was
concocted by Mamet for the movies, but first put on stage on the
basis of its transformation into a radio play. It was only after
several years that it was adapted for the small screen. This restless
media-changing has had, in Callen’s view, “a profound impact on
the work,” causing it to be “no dead art ‘object’ but a medium
similar to radio and television or cars and planes, or the road and
corridors travelled,” (84) thus widening its scope to a very
articulated critique of performance and media in the postmodern
society.
Bruce Barton’s Imaginary Spaces in MacIvor’s ‘House’ focuses on a
specific group of Canadian film productions, i.e. the screenplays
adapted from stage plays by the original dramatists, thus highlight
ing the relation between cinema and theatre which is becoming, in
Canada, ever more worth investigating. Barton, in his analysis of
House by MacIvor, a one-person play, defines it “a ‘reverent demysti
fication’ of the concept of theatrical truth” (107), for the only char
acter, a man whose life has been a chain of unsuccessful events,
ironi cally called Victor, continually forces the audience to
acknowledge the ‘lie’ on which the ‘house’ of theatre is built. What
happens to this very theatrical model, where the presence of the
audience is ab solutely necessary to operate the central issue of
authenticity and fraudulence, when it moves to a different medium,
i.e. cinema? Barton’s answer – conceived in the context of an
updated audience response criticism – is that the film generates
and exploits “a specifi cally cinematic imaginary space” (107), thus
reproducing an effect on the audience which is an analogue of, but
not identical to, that produced by the play, so that “what the film
spectator witnesses is the potential plenitude in perception itself ”
(118).
Karen Bennet in “Star-Cross’d Lovers” in the Age of AIDS: The
Intermediality of Rudolf Nureyev’s‘Romeo and Juliet’, brings the reader
Literary Intermediality: An Introduction 19

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
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Allué’s view, Ellis manages to transform MTV style into narrative


prose, imitating the language, style and concerns of MTV
television and aiming at the very same audience: young,
fashion-conscious, urban readers. As a result, the story is
reinforced by the MTV-like structure of the novel, which offers
itself as a good example of inter mediality in literature.
Barbara Antonucci’s Mediatic Metamorphoses and Postmodern Novels
by Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis and Nick Hornby, reflects on the
way in which contemporary novels are thrown on the market as if
they were fast-consuming cultural products, undergoing many a
mediatic metamorphosis at a cybernetic speed, which seems to
deprive the novel’s author of his/her authorship. In analysing the
best-sellers written by Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis and
Nick Hornby, Antonucci stresses how their novels have been
almost immediately absorbed into cinema production precisely
because of their ‘intermedial elasticity’. In her view, in fact, these
film adapta tions “look more like an extension of the written text
rather than an alien ‘other.’ As if the written text had been
pre-arranged for a filmic metamorphosis, cinema adaptation of
[these] novels appears complementary and parallel to the written
text” (166). Reading the novels and then watching the movies or
vice versa is therefore like ‘zapping’ from one genre to the other,
an act for which the “mediatic body” (181) of the reader/spectator
is very well equipped today.
Nancy Isenberg’s Repurposing ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ in
the Postmodern Age argues that the afterlife of Coleridge’s literary
masterpiece – a poem irrefutably in the English Canon – has been
assured by the same spread and development of mass-media that
many critics see as the main cause of the end of Literature: “the
very techno logical advances responsible for the decline of interest
in the written text have provided new gateways to Coleridge’s
poem. And as new technologies evolved, those gateways soon
proved also to be escape routes for Rime out of the mainstream
and into new, previously
Literary Intermediality: An Introduction 21

untrodden territories of cultural ‘otherness’” (184). Ranging from


the analysis of the ‘faithful’ radio drama of Rime broadcast in 1949
by the Canadian Broadcasting Company, to that of the
‘postmodern classical’ musical score by British composer David
Bedford (1970) to that of animated film versions – in particular
Raul DaSilva’s (1976) and Larry Jordan’s (1977) – ending with the
unusual translation of Rime into ‘heavy metal’ music by Iron
Maiden (1984), this essay charts an updated and refreshing map of
the long, ‘strange’ and exciting journey of the ageless Mariner in
the sea of new technology media.
The last section, entitled Literary Intermediality and New Critical
Issues, aims at investigating how the impact of new media can
deeply change the critical perspective on theoretical issues such as
the notion of author and cultural industry, or the educational
question, or the relationship between the formation of national
identity and the literary imaginary in an intermedial cultural
context.
Combining research on newspaper (re)presentation of fiction
with a study of popular media imaginary and depictions of
contemporary consumerism within fiction, Ana Vogrincic’s Literary
Effects of Author Stardom, shows how reading a certain novel
through the evaluation of its non-literary, commercial context (i.e.
as a certain book is presented in the media) enables us to recognize
otherwise perhaps unnoticed characteristics of the literary work,
and thus to open it to new interpretation. Vogrincic’s essay stems
from two different though thematically connected research
findings. The first arises from re search on changes in the
representation of fiction, mostly novels, in selected French and
English dailies in the period from 1960 to 2000, while the second
derives from a reflection on how commercializa tion,
popularization and mediatization are mirrored in contemporary
fiction, in the writing process and novelists’ self-presentations, and
is based on the case study of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho
(1991) as the most representative example of the so-called ‘blank
fiction’.
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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.

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Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Con temporary
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Chapple, Freda and Chiel Kattenbelt, eds. Intermediality in Theatre and Perform ance.
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De Kerckhove, Derrick. The Alphabet and the Brain. London: Springer Verlag,
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