Poetry in Transmedial Perspective: Rethinking Intermedial Literary Studies in the Digital Age

• Authors: Heike Schaefer
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

In the digital age. literary practice proliferates across different media platforms. Contemporary literary texts are written, circulated and rea|d in a variety of media, ranging from traditional print formats to online environments. This essay explores the implications that the transmedial dispersal of literary culture has for intermedial literary studies. If literature no longer functions as a unified single medium (if it ever did) but unfolds in a multiplicity of media, concepts central to intermediality studies, such as media specificity, media boundaries and media change, have to be reconsidered. Taking as its test case the adaptation of E. E. Cummings’s experimental poetry in Alison Clifford’s new media artwork The Sweet Old Etcetera as well as in YouTube clips, the essay argues for a reconceptualization of contemporary literature as a transmedial configuration or network. Rather than think of literature as a single self-contained medium that engages in intermedial exchange and competition with other media, such as film or music, we can better understand how literature operates and develops in the digital age if we recognize the medial heterogeneity and transmedial distribution of literary practice.

Keywords

EN

intermedial literary studies; transmedia culture; digital poetry; YouTube; E. E. Cummings; adaptation

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies
• Year: 2015
• Volume: 10
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 169-182

Dates

published

2015-08-01

online

2016-04-06

Contributors

author

Heike Schaefer

• University of Konstanz (Germany)

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Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/ausfm-2015-0033