Travels in Intermediality: Reblurring the Boundaries

Product Description How do fiction, film, music, the Internet, and plastic, performative, and fine arts negotiate their shapes, formats, and contents in our contemporary world? More important, how does their interaction shape their techniques of representation, strategies of communication, and forms of reception? In the light of these ongoing interactive (and intermedial) processes, the fields of cultural studies and American studies are challenged to restructure and reorganize themselves. Less interested in the mere fact of traditional art forms meeting new media such as film, video, and digital arts, this collection concentrates on the ways in which the fundamental theoretical constructs of the media have forever changed. This book offers the latest in global intermedial studies, including discussions of digital photography, comics and graphic novels, performance art, techno, hypertext, and video games. Review “This collection offers a remarkably broad and diverse set of studies addressing advanced notions of mediation, complexity, and hybridity in the semiotic sphere, crossing an impressive range of interests and disciplines. Anyone concerned with the future of humanistic studies in rapidly changing social and technical contexts will find this book enormously valuable.” (Stuart Moulthrop, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)“Travels in Intermedial[ity] crosses over a diverse and theoretically-nuanced range of contemporary media practices and European and American media philosophies. As significant, the book—the mixed, rigorously tangled whole of it—enacts a version of the liminalities that its authors address: at the intersections of these sophisticated and varied chapters the reader will discern evidence of an arch-intermediality, from which (as Herzogenrath proposes), modern media studies has been extracted.” (Terry Harpold, author of Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path) About the Author BERND HERZOGENRATH is a professor of American studies at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.