Intermediality and Modernism - Detailseite

The age of modernism went hand in hand with the advent of a new intermedial ecology: Gertrude Stein’s literary portraits, Joyce’s influence on Eisenstein’s montage, Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad’s literary impressionism, and H.G. Wells’s vision for a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, just to name a few — all reflect an intensive modernist engagement with intermedial experiments starting from the fin-de-siècle to the interwar era.

Now a ubiquitous but by no means clear-cut concept, intermedia has undergone a large-scale transformation since its inception as an artistic movement in the 1960s and its subsequent formation as an academic discipline. It was Dick Higgins, a famous American co-founder of the Fluxus movement, who came to father contemporary discourse on the subject and re-purpose “intermedium” as a term, first applied in 1812 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Together with other representatives of the movement, Higgins set an artistic revolution in motion, thus reconfiguring the boundaries of the avant-garde and engaging more widely with experimental expression.

However, the intermedia we know today — at least in its much broader sense — stretches well beyond the confines of Fluxus art: its roots are to be found in Horace’s doctrines of ut pictura poesis, Ars poetica, and the sister arts. Regaining its relevance in eighteenth-century debates on aesthetics, a concern with intermedial paradigms persisted through Romanticism to eventually find its footing in modernism — a movement that has recently been defined as ‘the real age of intermediality’.

This seminar seeks to explore the most consequential historical phases of intermedial thought while connecting those to the modernist mode of expression. The discussion will prioritise the exchange between texts and the visual arts, and look into how photography, film, painting, and sculpture, each to a certain degree, inspired and “excited” modernist literature. The examples and case studies will mostly be drawn from the British tradition and feature excerpts from short stories and critical writings by Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Bryher, and Dorothy Richardson, as well as Margaret Kennedy, C.A. Lejeune, Iris Barry, and others.

The objective of the course is to introduce students to the foundations of intermedial studies. It is designed to offer a brief genealogy of intermedial thought across a range of historical periods, reaching its crescendo in modernism. During the course, students will gain an understanding of theoretical methods and approaches to the field vis-à-vis illustrative case studies, become aware of the cultural and historical landscapes informing specific interart relations over the course of time, and learn how to apply intermedial methods to literary texts and other media.