Intermediality in the Classroom

Intermediality and transmediality are well-represented in classes taught at various departments of the University of Graz. Please find an overview here. In the winter semester of 2023/2024, the colloquium of the doctoral program “Visual Cultures and Intermediality” gathered an enthusiastic group of students in Romance languages, American Studies, English linguistics, and Slavic Studies. Several hybrid sessions made it possible for one of the PhD students from the Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium, to present her project-in-progress and for a second one to join sessions as a listener. For the fall of 2024, we are planning a doctoral colloquium on “Architecture and Photography.” In the course of this class, we will cooperate with students from the Department of Architecture at Graz University of Technology—thanks to CIMIG Board Member Prof. Dr. Anselm Wagner.

Intermediality is also a vital component of the new MA Module Plus “Media and Their Public(s),” which was launched in March 2024. The “Module Plus” concept seeks to intertwine foundational knowledge of scholarly theories, methods, historical depth, and current concerns with insights into professional contexts that depend on such approaches and contextual knowledge. Students from more than a dozen departments registered for the two-semester module “Media and Their Public(s).” This semester, they are delving into the multi-disciplinary study of media and mediality, as conveyed by nine professors who are co-teaching a lecture course and who are part of the interdisciplinary team of colleagues from various disciplines in the humanities and in legal studies. In the second course for this semester, students have already met and worked with professionals from the contexts of communication, public relations, and media-content production in cultural institutions.

Bookshelf Offerings

Geal, Robert. “Towards an Ecocritical Adaptation Studies.” Adaptation, vol. 16, no.1, March 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apad001.

Geal’s article provides an overview of recent research in the field of adaptation studies that addresses ecological issues. Adaptations are presented as particularly promising subjects to be studied through the lens of ecocriticism. Drawing on the useful analogy of adaptation as replication, Geal proposes that different media have unique ways of conveying ecological issues. Like genes, memes—that is, the often virally distributed formal and substantial characteristics of any kind of cultural artifact—mutate as they are replicated in a new environment. Geal takes this central claim from Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation as a point of departure to elaborate on adaptations’ affordances for portraying the historically and culturally malleable human perception of nature. He argues that every media product is implicitly informed by such subjective attitudes, which can be updated and even deliberately rewritten through the process of adaptation. Geal underlines that a diachronic or intercultural scope of research lends itself particularly well to revealing the multiple and various ways with which humans approach the non-human world at a specific time and place.

Singh, Rosy. Aesthetics across Cultures: Intertextuality, Intermediality and Interculturality. Routledge, 2024.

Singh’s essay collection resulted from the international online conference “Aesthetics across Cultures” that was held in November 2021. Taken together, the individual contributions provide a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the transcultural investigation of aesthetics as an inherently intercultural phenomenon. Even though intermediality is prominently featured in the collection’s subtitle, the individual chapters only sporadically employ it as a critical category of analysis without linking their usage to recent conceptualizations advanced by intermediality theorists. Nonetheless, the volume’s interest in intermediality arises from its focus on processes of “semiotic mixing” that are inherent to the critical study of aesthetics. That is, the individual contributions examine instances of borrowing that have significantly influenced and continue to shape contemporary forms of literature and art. Singh’s collection approaches aesthetics as an abstract entity of collective knowledge that shapes the production of cultural artifacts in printed, oral, and visual forms and which is itself informed by discourses that transcend national and historical boundaries as well as those delineating distinct modes of artistic production. Be it architecture, storytelling, theatrical performance, or print techniques such as the woodcut, Singh encourages readers to study these distinctive styles as part of myriad in-between spaces where existing aesthetic forms coalesce and new ones continuously proliferate. With its focus on the discipline of philosophy, Aesthetics across Cultures complements the findings of media-conscious hermeneutical research that analyzes aesthetics in relation to perception.

From the Director’s Desk:

Dear Readers:

I am happy to share the good news that, earlier this month, Stefano Franceschini (Universitá Roma III), whom we interviewed for the first issue of the Intermediality Messenger, received his Ph.D. with flying colors. Congratulations, Dr. Franceschini, on behalf of everyone at CIMIG and everyone else who met you during your two-month research scholarship in Graz in January and February 2023!

Cooperation with the Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings (CLIC) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) will continue this semester. Among other things, I look forward to giving a keynote at the International PhD Conference on “Lived Experiences,” which will be a hybrid event on-site at VUB and online. I also hope that we will be able to welcome VUB students to the doctoral colloquium in the fall.

Best wishes for an enjoyable summer semester,
Nassim Balestrini