<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p> 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. </p></abstract>

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.

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

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.

In the digital age. literary practice proliferates across different media platforms. Contemporary literary texts are written, circulated and rea|d in a variety...

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

Online veröffentlicht: 06. Apr. 2016

Seitenbereich: 169 - 182

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/ausfm-2015-0033

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

© 2016

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.

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

Online veröffentlicht: 06. Apr. 2016

Seitenbereich: 169 - 182

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/ausfm-2015-0033

Schlüsselwörterintermedial literary studies, transmedia culture, digital poetry, YouTube, E. E. Cummings, adaptation

© 2016

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.

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