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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
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 PENNACCHIA 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 PENNACCHIA 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
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 ance.
Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006.
De Kerckhove, Derrick. The Alphabet and the Brain. London: Springer Verlag,
1988.
—. “L’uomo ‘letterizzato’.” Origini della scrittura. Genealogia di un’invenzione. Eds.
Gianluca Bocchi, and Mauro Ceruti. Milano: Mondadori, 2002. 268–80.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. An Introduction. London: Blackwell, 1983. Fidler,
Roger. Mediamorphosis: Understanding New Media. London: Pine Forge Press, 1997.
Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. Knopf: New York, 1995. Oosterling, Henk.
“Sens(a)ble Intermediality and Interesse. Towards an Ontology of the
In-Between.” Intermédialités 1 (Printemps 2003): 29–46. Parascandolo, Renato. La
televisione oltre la televisione. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 2000. Proust, Marcel. On
Reading. London: Macmillan, 1974.
Sini, Carlo. Filosofia e scrittura. Bari: Laterza, 1994.