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SIM 4: Metareference across Media: Theory and Case Studies
Dedicated to Walter Bernhart on the Occasion of His Retirement.
Werner Wolf, ed. in collaboration with Katharina Bantleon and Jeff Thoss. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2009. ix + 656 pp.

Contents Buy from the publisher | | | Strange as it may seem, Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote, Marc Forster’s film Stranger than Fiction, Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pere Borrell del Caso’s painting “Escaping Criticism” reproduced on the cover of the present volume and Mozart’s sextet “A Musical Joke” all share one common feature: they include a meta-dimension. Metaization – the movement from a first cognitive, referential or communicative level to a higher one on which first-level phenomena self-reflexively become objects of reflection, reference and communication in their own right – is in fact a common feature not only of human thought and language but also of the arts and media in general. However, research into this issue has so far predominantly focussed on literature, where a highly differentiated, albeit strictly monomedial critical toolbox exists. Metareference across Media remedies this onesidedness and closes the gap between literature and other media by providing a transmedial framework for analysing metaphenomena. The essays transcend the current notion of metafiction, pinpoint examples of metareference in hitherto neglected areas, discuss the capacity for metaization of individual media or genres from a media-comparative perspective, and explore major (historical) forms and functions as well aspects of the development of metaization in cultural history. Stemming from diverse disciplinary and methodological backgrounds, the contributors propose new and refined concepts and models and cover a broad range of media including fiction, drama, poetry, comics, photography, film, computer games, classical as well as popular music, painting, and architecture. This collection of essays, which also contains a detailed theoretical introduction, will be relevant to students and scholars from a wide variety of fields: intermediality studies, semiotics, literary theory and criticism, musicology, art history, and film studies. (Volume 4 of STUDIES IN INTERMEDIALITY consists of the proceedings of the 2008 conference "Metareference in the Arts and Media". For more information, please consult the conference website.) |
About "Studies in Intermediality"
The book series STUDIES IN INTERMEDIALITY (SIM), launched in 2006, is devoted to scholarly research in the field of Intermedia Studies and, thus, in the broadest sense, addresses all phenomena involving more than one communicative medium. More specifically, it concerns itself with the wide range of relationships existing among the various media and investigates how concepts of a more general character find diversified manifestations and reflections in the different media. The book series is related to, and part of, the activities of the Centre for Intermediality Studies in Graz (CIMIG), an interdisciplinary research and teaching centre of the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz/Austria. STUDIES IN INTERMEDIALITY publishes, generally on an annual basis, theme-oriented volumes, documenting and critically assessing the scope, theory, methodology, and the disciplinary and institutional dimensions and prospects of Intermedia Studies on an international scale: conference proceedings, university lecture series, collections of scholarly essays, and, occasionally, monographs on pertinent individual topics reflecting more general issues.
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SIM 3: Media inter Media: Essays in Honor of Claus Clüver
Stephanie A. Glaser (ed.). Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2009. ix + 556 pp.

Contents Buy from the publisher | | | This interdisciplinary volume explores, analyzes, and celebrates intermedial processes. It investigates the dynamic relations between media in contemporary artistic productions such as digitalized poetry and installations or musical scores by Walter Steffens and Hugh Davies; in texts like Dieter Roth’s diaries, Ror Wolf’s guidebooks, Charles Baudelaire’s art criticism, or Lewis Carroll’s Alice books; and in inherently intermedial pieces like Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés and Augusto de Campos’s poetry. Through distinct and diverse methodological approaches to intermedial inquiry, the contributors probe multiple forms of interaction between media: adaptation, appropriation, transposition, transfer, recycling, grafting, recontextualization, intertextualization, transmedialization, and transcreation. In so doing, they offer perspectives which refine our understanding of the term ‘medium’ and demonstrate ways in which intermedial creations engage their audiences and stimulate creative responses. Written in honor of Claus Clüver, a groundbreaking leader in intermediality studies, the essays participate in and broaden the scope of current discourses in the international forum. The range of their subjects and methodologies will interest literary scholars, art historians, musicologists, scholars of new media as well as those working in intermediality studies, word and image or word and music studies, and anyone whose interests cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. |
SIM 2: Description in Literature and Other Media
Wolf, Werner and Walter Bernhart (eds.). Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2007. ix + 341 pp.

Contents Buy from the publisher | | | In contrast to narrative, description is a much less researched phenomenon, and where it so far has found attention at all, scholars have almost always discussed it with fiction in mind. The all but exclusive concentration on literature has hitherto obscured the fact that description transcends literature and indeed the verbal media in general and is not only a transgeneric but also a transmedial phenomenon that can be found in many other media and arts. This book is a pioneering interdisciplinary study of description since it for the first time undertakes to close this research lacuna by highlighting description and its relevance with reference to a wide spectrum of arts and media. The volume opens with a detailed introductory essay, which aims at clarifying the descriptive as a basic semiotic form of organizing signs from a theoretical perspective but also provides a first overview of the uses of description as well as its problematics in fiction, painting and instrumental music. In the main part of the book, nine contributions by scholars from various disciplines explore description in individual media and different cultural epochs. The first section of the book is dedicated to literature and related (partly) verbal media and includes a typological and historical survey of description in fiction as well as discussions of its occurrence in poetry, nature writing, radioliterature and film. The second part deals with the (purely) visual media and ranges from a presentation of the descriptive techniques used in Dürer’s graphic reproductions to general reflections on ‘the descriptive’ in the visual arts as well as in photography. A third section on description in music provides a perspective on yet another medium. The volume, which is the second one in the series ‘Studies in Intermediality’, is of relevance to students and scholars from various fields: intermedial studies, literary and film studies, history of art, and musicology. |
SIM 1: Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media
Wolf, Werner and Walter Bernhart (eds.). Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2006. viii + 482 pp.

Contents Buy from the publisher | | | This book is both a contribution to an interdisciplinary study of literature and other media and a pioneering application of cognitive and frame-theoretical approaches to these fields. In the temporal media a privileged place for the coding of cognitive frames are the beginnings while in spatial media physical borders take over many framing functions. This volume investigates forms and functions of such framing spaces from a transmedial perspective by juxtaposing and comparing the framing potential of individual media and works. After an introductory theoretical essay, which aims to clarify basic concepts, the volume presents eighteen contributions by scholars from various disciplines who deal with individual media. The first section is dedicated to framing in or through the visual arts and includes discussions of the illustrations of medieval manuscripts, the practice of framing pictures from the Middle Ages to Magritte and contemporary American art as well as framings in printmaking and architecture. The second part deals with literary texts and ranges from studies centred on framings in frame stories to essays focussing on the use of paratextual, textual and non-verbal media in the framings of classical, medieval and modern German and American narrative literature; moreover, it includes studies on defamiliarized framings, e.g. by Julio Cortázar and Jasper Fforde, as well as an essay on end-framing practices. Sections on framings in film (including the trailers of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings) and in music (operatic overtures and Schumann’s piano pieces) provide perspectives on further media. The volume is of relevance to students and scholars from various fields: intermedia studies, cognitive approaches to the media, literary and film studies, history of art, and musicology. |
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