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: How was intermediality theory integrated into your university education and, if it was not, how has your perspective on your research changed once you had familiarized yourself with intermediality theory?
DS: The first time I heard of intermediality theory was after completing my Master’s degree in American Studies in Mainz. I had written my final thesis about the autobiographical writings of two African American jazz musicians, Louis Armstrong and Charles Mingus, and had begun to develop this into a dissertation project. I had just started as a wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the University of Göttingen. Frank Kelleter, my PhD supervisor, suggested that I get in touch with Gabriele Rippl, who was professor of English Literature in Göttingen at the time and was turning her Habilitation into her second book, which was subsequently published as Beschreibungs-Kunst. Zur Intermedialen Poetik angloamerikanischer Ikon-Texte (1880-2000) (Fink, 2005). Frank thought that intermediality theory might be a fitting framework for my PhD, and Gabi enthusiastically supported this idea. She also shared the list of references from her Habilitation with me, which started me on a long reading path through intermediality theory (Werner Wolf, Irina Rajewsky, Gabriele Rippl, etc.). My initial sense was that intermediality would be a very fruitful way to think about the relationship between a jazz player’s musical practices and his/her autobiographical writings. I got the impression though that intermediality theory, especially the type invested in word and music studies, was focused too much on the representation or evocation of music in literature and could not account for cases in which music and text are related in different ways when musicians become autobiographers of their own life and music. I ultimately developed a more culture-oriented approach in my dissertation and the book that grew out of it (Music Is My Life: Louis Armstrong, Autobiography, and American Jazz, 2012), which I have continued to employ in later publications on jazz autobiography. I have also extended this into the realm of comics and graphic narratives, one of my major fields of research, such as when I wrote about musical biographies in the comics medium as well as about adaptations of literary classics (especially Moby Dick) in comics. I continue to think that intermediality theory constitutes a significant approach, and I usually use it in conjunction with other theories and concepts (e.g. multimodality, media convergence, transmedia storytelling).
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: (How) do you integrate intermediality theory into the classes you teach at the University of Siegen? To which extent is interdisciplinary research with an intermedial focus present at your department and at the entire university more broadly?
DS: Intermediality theory has a long tradition at the University of Siegen, with its strong investment in literary, cultural, and media studies going back to the 1980s. In the early 2000s, Siegen had a graduate school called “Intermedialität” that was funded by the German Research Foundation, just around the time when I, as a graduate student in Göttingen, first learned about intermedia theory. Now, media studies in Siegen has a somewhat different focus (especially digital culture), and literary and cultural studies now often means studying the popular. But I feel that it’s time to bring back intermediality theory, but perhaps in an updated and more digitally-oriented fashion. I have used it in courses on musical autobiographies and comics, and I know that some of my colleagues continue to work with it.
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.
MM: Thank you for sharing your experiences and ideas with CIMIG.