CfP: ‘Transmediality and the Classics’
King’s College London, 29-30th June 2023
The event will evolve around key note speeches given by Jonathan Mannering (Chicago) Morgan Palmer (Nebraska) Bettina Reitz-Joosse (Groningen) Lydia Spielberg (UCLA)
and responses presented by
Anthony Corbeill (Virginia)
Rebecca Langlands (Exeter)
Katherina Lorenz (Giessen)
Niall Slater (Emory)
Thanks to the generous support of KCL we expect to be able to cover speakers’ accommodation in London. Further support for graduate bursaries will be sought. Please submit abstracts of up to 300 words to the conference organizer Martin Dinter (martin.dinter@kcl.ac.uk) by 21st November 2023. Responses will be sent out within ten days.
Those unacquainted with transmediality will find the first twelve pages of the online open access paper below useful which outlines this concept and its applications.
Gabriel, Nicole; Kazur, Bogna; Matuszkiewicz, Kai: Reconsidering Transmedia(l) Worlds. In: Claudia Georgi, Brigitte Johanna Glaser (Hg.): Convergence Culture Reconsidered. Media – Participation – Environments. Göttingen:
Universitätsverlag Göttingen 2015, S. 163–194. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/12019.
With growing interest in media-specific communication strategies, including phenomena like intertextuality and interpictoriality, recent decades have seen increasing numbers of intermediality studies. Kristeva‘s (1974) interpretation of texts as ‘complex signs’ that resonate not only with other texts (= intertextuality) but also with works in different media (= intermediality) has influenced subsequent scholars, foremost among whom Wolf (1999), who defines intermediality as ‘an intended or identifiable use or incorporation of two usually distinct media in one artefact’. This conceptualization was later refined by Irina Rajewsky, who understands literature to be intermedial when it ‘thematises, evokes and imitates other media […] while still retaining its textual character’ (2002). Intermedial passages then complement wider narratives by challenging generic conventions and carving out hidden nuances (Bruhn 2016). However, while intermediality might provide a neat vehicle for describing ancient media practices, its target-oriented process, including the requirement for a ‘pre-text’ for a medial phenomenon (in the sense of medium referenced), limits its reach over Classical media.
With much of the Greek and Roman output lost in transmission such a ‘pre-text’ might rarely be identified with any certainty. Moreover, presupposing at all the existence of a ‘pre-text’ and any stages in a motif’s, an aesthetics’, a concept’s or a discourse’s ‘journey’ from A via B to C and/or reverse might be limiting our chances of unpacking the intermingling strategies of ancient media.
By using transmediality we might be able to account for one of the key characteristics of ancient media as it confronts us today: as medial communications that manifest themselves (synchronously or diachronically) in a similar way in a variety of media as ‘travelling phenomena’ (Rajewsky 2002: 12 and 2013: 22 and 24), but with no clear indication of any share in a target-oriented process.
We will thus need to distinguish between intermediality as relations between media (i.e. medial interactions, interplays or interferences) and transmediality as pointing to phenomena that appear across media and do not automatically imply, or presuppose, relations between media in the sense of intermedial references or transpositions [however, there is undoubtedly overlap]. Transmediality thus extends to theoretical categories as well as social discourses and paradigms, the most frequently researched of which is narrative, and also includes the scaffolding of ruler concepts such as the Neronian Sun King (i.e. the appearance of material across media) and displays the following characteristics:
- Annulment of temporal linearity (Aufhebung des Zeitpfeils) not only in terms of referentiality but also in terms of production – there is no chain of reference and no finished product
- This results in a fluidity of production, ’original’ and ‘copy’ are replaced by ‘variations’.
- This in turn questions the concept of oeuvre and authorship, the latter being replaced by a form of participation shaped by practitioners.
References:
Bruhn, Jørgen (2016). The Intermediality of Narrative Literature: Medialities Matter. London.
Dinter, Martin. T. and Reitz-Joosse, Bettina. (guest eds.) (2019) Intermediality and Roman Literature. Trends in Classics (special issue): 11.1.
Freyermuth, Gundolf S. (2007). Thesen zu einer Theorie der Transmedialität. FIG_HEFT_2007_2.indd 104.
Kristeva, Julia (1980) Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Language and Art. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez, ed. Leon S. Roudiez. New York Rajewsky, Irina O. (2002). Intermedialität. Bern.
Rajewsky, Irina O. (2013) “Potential Potentials of Transmediality. The Media Blindness of (Classical) Narratology and its Implications for Transmedial Approaches”. In: Translatio. Transmedialité et transculturalité en litérature, peinture, photographie et au cinema, ed. Alfonso de Toro, Paris: L’Harmattan, 17-36.