The Intermediality Messenger: Newsletter of the Centre for Intermediality Studies in Graz (CIMIG)

Summer 2024

CIMIG Voices

CIMIG Board Member Prof. Dr. Daniel Stein (Universität Siegen, Germany) agreed to an interview with IM, in which Michael Meister asked him about his previous research, his current projects, and his contributions to the continuously evolving field of intermediality studies.

MM: Which topics and areas have you, over the last decade or so, approached through the lens of intermediality theory? What kind of research projects or studies, in your opinion, lend themselves to employing a media-conscious approach?

DS: The topics I have researched range from jazz autobiography (most recently in a survey article for Jazz and American Culture (2023), edited by Michael Borshuk for the Cambridge Themes in American Literature and Culture series) to the music and prose fiction of country music renegade Steve Earle (a chapter in Popular Music and the Self in Contemporary Fiction (2021), ed. Norbert Bachleitner and Juliane Werner, published by Brill/Rodopi; another chapter in Americana: Aesthetics, Authenticity, and Performance in US Popular Music (2024), ed. Knut Holtsträter and Sascha Pöhlmann, published by Waxman). I also used an intermedial approach in an article that studied the visual-verbal narrative strategies of comics that depict the lives of musicians (for Intermediality, Life Writing, and American Studies (2018), ed. Nassim Winnie Balestrini and Ina Bergmann, De Gruyter). My contribution to De Gruyter’s Handbook of Intermediality (2015; edited by Gabriele Rippl) offers a general assessment of comics’ intermedial workings and uses graphic adaptations of Moby Dick as a case study. Finally, I’m part of the SFB 1472 Transformationen des Populären (https://sfb1472.uni-siegen.de/sfb1472), which has recently submitted its application for a second phase. If the funding comes through, I will be able to work with members of the CIMIG on bringing together intermediality theory and superhero/comics/visual culture studies.

MM: How does your research contribute to pushing the envelope of intermediality studies research?

DS: I think my main contribution to intermediality studies, and especially intermedial relations between word and music, is the push to read, listen, and look beyond the text. I have described this as a necessary move from “text-centered” to “culture-oriented intermediality” in an article published in 2008 (in American Studies as Media Studies, ed. Frank Kelleter and Daniel Stein, Universitätsverlag Winter), where the idea is to include both discourses and culturally-coded hearing and seeing practices. Part of this shift was my sense that, especially when dealing with the writings of jazz musicians, race (but also gender, class, sexuality) as a social and discursive construct with particular sonic and visual encodings had to be accounted for, which the intermediality theory I was working with at the time was not able to do.

MM: As you mentioned, you are part of several interdisciplinary research clusters and work groups of the research program SFB 1472: Transformationen des Populären. Could you please expand a bit on the role that intermediality theory plays for the research conducted there?

DS: Certainly! As indicated above, intermediality will be a central concern in the second phase (if funded). In the first phase, my co-PI Niels Werber, our project participants Laura Désirée Haas and Anne Deckbar, and I mainly looked at how popularity (defined as “getting noticed by many”: https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12010039) has shaped the serial evolution of US-American superhero comics (Captain America) and German science fiction pulp novels (Perry Rhodan) through paratextual negotiations in letter columns, fan forums, and on social media platforms (you can read some of the results in an essay we published in a special issue of Arts: https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12020077). In the second phase, which will hopefully start in 2025, we will shift our attention to what we call textual negotiations, where we look at how popular commentary about a series’ content, form, or style, is picked up and incorporated into the evolving storyworld (or not). These textual negotiations, I should add, are also always intermedial negotiations, at least in the case of Captain America comics, where the integration of text and images is the basic feature of narrative. I look forward to expanding my understanding of intermediality theory over the next four years, and I eagerly anticipate collaborating with members of the CIMIG on this project.

Curious to hear more from Daniel Stein? You can click here to read the entire interview on the CIMIG homepage.

Bookshelf Offerings

Bell, Alice and Astrid Ensslin. Reading Digital Fiction: Narrative, Cognition, Mediality. Routledge, 2024.

In their new monograph, Astrid Ensslin and Alice Bell pool the findings of years of interdisciplinary research to propose a new methodology for studying digital fiction, whose applicability they illustrate by means of five case studies. Their approach in these individual examinations blends text-based phenomenological hermeneutics with empirical qualitative methods to gauge reader responses. On the one hand, Ensslin and Bell are interested in establishing critical categories for the analysis of digital media constellations such as the degree of immersion, the use of hyperlinks, or the narrative perspective applied. On the other hand, they push the envelope of studying digital fiction empirically by paying attention to the embodied and experiential cognition of reading. Throughout their case studies, they employ either approach to interpretation in a medium-conscious manner that foregrounds a reader’s response to a text’s characteristic technological and material properties. Their examinations of fiction in the form of internet pages, social media, smartphone apps, and VR/AR simulations therefore centrally focus on “medium-specific affordances inherent in the technologies used [for their production and reception] and their site-specific, embodied implications for reader-player interaction” (11). Ensslin and Bell thus propose a theory that ambitiously reconciles the two disparate traditions of analytical reading and empirical research for literary interpretation. Moreover, they expand the scope of reader responses that have previously been analyzed as part of narratological research. By paying attention to “medial responses,” Ensslin and Bell introduce an aspect of analysis that serves as a cornerstone for a transmedial framework of comparatively studying digital media constellations with respect to their medium-specific properties. (MM)

Windleburn, Maurice. John Zorn’s File Card Works: Hypertextual Intermediality in Composition and Analysis. Routledge, 2024.

Windleburn conducts a media-conscious investigation of John Zorn’s music that makes the reader reconsider conventional ideas of musical notation, recording and composition. The monograph focuses on Zorn’s unique compositional approach, which centrally relies on notes written on index cards, improvisation, and a leitmotif that the composer and the recording musicians he collaborates with know well. Windleburn points out how the creative processes behind Zorn’s file-card compositions are, in various respects, reminiscent of the modes of production conventionally associated with other media formats, such as film or the novel. Moreover, the cards themselves are studied as hypertexts that provide material evidence for texts and works of art that have inspired his compositions in the first place. By focusing on the intermediary function of the index card in the composition process, Windleburn elaborates on a model of hypertextual intermediality that adequately sketches the development from the creative impulse of the source material to the finished piece of music. Since the index cards used by Zorn are not publicly available, Windleburn’s analysis of the former’s compositions takes paratextual dedications as a point of departure to explore further possible hypotexts, which listeners can discover based on a saliently indicated leitmotif. Windleburn’s study is therefore not so much an objective reconstruction of Zorn’s creative process as a subjective attentive listening for hypotexts. The latter might or might not be evidenced on Zorn’s file cards, but it might emerge for listeners through Zorn’s evocative intermedial citation practices. Windleburn, hence, presents Zorn’s index-card compositions and similar musical works as worthwhile subjects of future research with an intermedial and reader-centered scope. (MM)

From the Director’s Desk:

Dear Readers:

Michael Meister, who substantially contributed to making this newsletter a reality, is about to complete a Master’s Degree in English and American Studies. In the academic year 2024/25, he will serve as a German-language teaching assistant at Williams College, the highest-ranking liberal arts college in the United States. Thank you, Michael, for all of your highly appreciated work, and all the best!

Everybody at CIMIG would like to wish you a pleasant and productive summer. The Intermediality Messenger will be back in the fall!