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, allowing theatre-makers greater scope for their own interpretation of a Beckettian performance aesthetic inspired by the published prose text and by Beckett's own theatrical experimentation. Such a ‘re-invention’ of Beckettian theatre (Gontarski, 2006 ) in the case of performances of the author's prose texts is at least partly enabled by the intermedial exchange between the writing and reception conventions of prose and theatre, the latter being a multi-sensory medium, relying (usually) on the embodied presence of the actor. There is a long history
point. Remediation, intermediality and embodiment Originally, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin coined the term ‘remediation’ to counteract the dominant ‘modernist myth of the new’ (1998, back cover), according to which digital technologies in particular were thought to break free from older media by setting new aesthetic and cultural principles. Yet, as Bolter and Grusin have shown, using a wide selection of examples from computer games to digital photography, film, television, virtual reality and the World Wide Web, such
were intermedial with the press; the viability of a design depended on its ability to encode public opinions but to present them as iconographic riddles. Allusive imagery made prosecution more difficult. Recondite symbolism offered protection to ‘authors’ – a loose, and usually anonymous, affiliation of draughtsmen, engravers, publishers and sponsors. Graphic satires like the European Race
Intermedial synergy in Angela Carter’s short fiction 17 1 Intermedial synergy in Angela Carter’s short fiction Michelle Ryan-Sautour We travel along the thread of narrative like high-wire artistes. That is our life. (Carter, 1992: 2) I n the introduction to Angela Carter’s The Curious Room: Collected Dramatic Works, Susannah Clapp speaks of a startling array of images discovered in Carter’s study following her death: ‘Drawings and paintings spilled out of these drawers’ (Clapp, 1997: ix). For Clapp these elements are more than anecdotal; they open up new
7 The intermedial parallax: on Regie, media and spectating Our spectatorial attention and reflexive experience of Scènes uit een huwelijk by Flemish director Ivo van Hove (b. 1958) was particularly foregrounded and intensified. His stage adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s 1970s TV series Scenes from a Marriage, which the director created in 2005 for Toneelgroep Amsterdam, the foremost Dutch ensemble company he has been leading as artistic director since 2001, multiplied the story’s protagonists.1 The couple of Johan and Marianne was here played by three pairs of
Film Studies is a refereed journal that approaches cinema and the moving image from within the fields of critical, conceptual and historical scholarship. The aim is to provide a forum for the interdisciplinary, intercultural and intermedial study of film by publishing innovative research of the highest quality. Contributions from diverse perspectives that are formed by the crossing of institutional and national boundaries are encouraged.
The body in the swimming pool as metonym for trouble in paradise is a recurrent motif bordering on cliché in Hollywood/West Coast sunshine noir. Through an intermedial survey of film, TV and literary fiction, photography, design and architectural history, crime and environmental, reportage, public health and safety documents this article examines the domestic swimming pools ambiguous status as a symbol of realised utopia within the Californian mythos from the boom years of the backyard oasis in the wake of the Second World War to the era of mass foreclosures, restricted water usage and ambient dread inaugurated by 9/11, the global recession and the severest drought in the states recorded rainfall history.
This essay uses Edward Said’s theory of affiliation to consider the relationship between James Baldwin and contemporary artists Teju Cole and Glenn Ligon, both of whom explicitly engage with their predecessor’s writing in their own work. Specifically, Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village” (1953) serves a through-line for this discussion, as it is invoked in Cole’s essay “Black Body” and Ligon’s visual series, also titled Stranger in the Village. In juxtaposing these three artists, I argue that they express the dialectical energy of affiliation by articulating ongoing concerns of race relations in America while distinguishing themselves from Baldwin in terms of periodization, medium-specificity, and their broader relationship to Western art practice. In their adoption of Baldwin, Cole and Ligon also imagine a way beyond his historical anxieties and writing-based practice, even as they continue to reinscribe their own work with his arguments about the African-American experience. This essay is an intermedial study that reads fiction, nonfiction, language-based conceptual art and mixed media, as well as contemporary politics and social media in order consider the nuances of the African-American experience from the postwar period to our contemporary moment. Concerns about visuality/visibility in the public sphere, narrative voice, and self-representation, as well as access to cultural artifacts and aesthetic engagement, all emerge in my discussion of this constellation of artists. As a result, this essay identifies an emblematic, though not exclusive, strand of African-American intellectual thinking that has never before been brought together. It also demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Baldwin’s thinking for the contemporary political scene in this country.
Featuring twelve original essays by leading Beckett scholars and media theorists, this book provides the first sustained examination of the relationship between Beckett and media technologies. The chapters analyse the rich variety of technical objects, semiotic arrangements, communication processes and forms of data processing that Beckett’s work so uniquely engages with, as well as those that – in historically changing configurations – determine the continuing performance, the audience reception, and the scholarly study of this work. Greatly enlarging the scope of earlier discussions, the book draws on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, such as media archaeology, in order to discuss Beckett’s intermedial oeuvre. As such it engages with Beckett as a media artist and examine the way his engagement with media technologies continues to speak to our cultural situation.
Beckett’s Afterlives is the first book-length study dedicated to posthumous reworkings of Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre. Contextualised against the backdrop of his own developing views on adaptation and media specificity, it nuances the long-held view that he opposed any form of genre crossing. Featuring contemporary engagements with Beckett’s work from the UK, Europe, the USA and Latin America, the volume does not approach adaptation as a form of (in)fidelity or (ir)reverence. Instead, it argues that exposing the ‘Beckett canon’ to new environments and artistic practices enables fresh perspectives on the texts and enhances their significance for contemporary artists and audiences alike. The featured essays explore a wide variety of forms (prose, theatre, performance, dance, ballet, radio, music, television, film, visual art, installation, new/digital media, webseries, etc.), in different cultural contexts, mainly from the early 1990s until the late 2010s. The concept of adaptation is broadly interpreted, including changes within the same performative context, to spatial relocations or transpositions across genres and media, even creative rewritings of Beckett’s biography. The collection offers a range of innovative ways to approach the author’s work in a constantly changing world and analyses its remarkable susceptibility to creative responses. Viewed from this perspective, Beckett’s Afterlives suggests that adaptation, remediation and appropriation constitute forms of cultural negotiation that are essential for the survival as well as the continuing urgency and vibrancy of Beckett’s work in the twenty-first century.