Summary and Elaborations

This is the closing chapter in the two-volume Beyond Media Borders: Intermedial Relations among Multimodal Media. It begins with a brief summary of the achievements of the previous contributions, including Lars Elleström’s introductory piece “The modalities of media II”. This is followed by more extensive explanations of three concepts that are central for many of the chapters in the volumes, but not elaborated in the opening chapter: adaptation, narration and language.

Building Bridges: The Modes of Architecture

The crossing of borders between architecture and literature has been scrutinized under various scopes. However, the two media types are rarely studied together in terms of “architectural ekphrasis”. The aim of this chapter is to elaborate on this notion by investigating the modes of architecture. To achieve that goal, the author counts on architecture as a medium, as suggested by Patrick Schumacher. Since the limited amount of architectural media traits that are likely to be satisfactorily transmediated by literature are not fully identified by the parameters of already consolidated pictorial models, the author also uses Elleström’s model for analyzing media transformations. The four modalities of media, along with their qualifying aspects, are the backbone of an interpretative framework proposed to explore the presence of architecture in literature. The chapter also leans on the notions of embodiment and perspective.

Transferring Handmaids: Iconography, Adaptation, and Intermediality

This chapter examines the intermedial transfer of Handmaid iconography across platforms and contexts, and the mechanisms that facilitate such movement. The author begins with a consideration of the intermedial network established within Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale to show that, even prior to adaptation, the Handmaid is understood as a product of intermedial transfer. The author then surveys the movement of Handmaid iconography in a variety of print- and motion-based media, such as book cover design, illustration, graphic novel, ballet, film, and television, and also in more generalized spheres. The image of the Handmaid transfers through processes of adaptation that interpret visual markers in distinct modalities, each of which emphasizes particular traits or characteristics over others. The emphasis or disclosure that characterizes each iteration is accompanied by concealment; that is, as an adaptation foregrounds one particular modality, it simultaneously represses another. This tension between disclosing and concealing operates thematically and in terms of its foregrounded media.

Media Representation and Transmediation: Indexicality in Journalism Comics and Biography Comics

This article analyzes the ways in which journalism comics and biography comics create indexicality through intermedial relations. These strategies include media representations of different qualified media types (journalistic report, biography, and autobiography) and of specific media products (such as familiar images of people and places). The article starts with a short history of comics. It then offers a theoretical discussion of intermediality, media representation, and transmediation, with specific focus on the tactics that journalism and biography comics use to represent reality indexically through media representation and transmediation. Furthermore, the authors analyze intermedial relations in the comic albums The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, and Frederic Lemercier; Il mondo di Aisha—Storie di donne dello Yemen by Ugo Bertotti; Maus by Art Spiegelman; To the Heart of the Storm by Will Eisner; Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot; and Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco.

Seeing the Landscape Through Textual and Graphical Media Products

Space is a central element in human communication. In this chapter, the authors compare representations of landscapes in different media types, including texts, maps, and virtual reality to show how they express spatial conceptions. Such a comparison is necessary to understand the mechanisms behind combinations and transformations among different media; hence, it forms a useful basis for analysing media interacting with spaces more generally. Taking a step back, the authors then discuss how the materiality and concreteness of space interact with the abstract conceptual level of models. This makes it possible to study traditional two-dimensional maps and texts as well as three-dimensional modelling and virtual reality systems. Finally, the authors introduce virtual reality as a new media form in the light of empirical experiments conducted at the University of Cologne.

Finding Meaning in Intermedial Gaps

Media is generally conceptualized as any communicative conduit that conveys ideas or meaning between one place or person and another. However, media products—and particularly intermedial products—do not always transmit meanings and ideas smoothly. This chapter explores a series of historical and contemporary media objects and performances that do not facilitate “successful” transfers of meaning, partly due to their intermedial configurations. Each of these media objects and performances both conceal and reveal, either accidentally as a byproduct of experimentation with the medium’s modalities or purposefully as an aesthetic, social, or cultural intervention. The author argues that these concealments and intermedial “gaps” generate new modes of expression, new artistic experiences for audiences and performers, and new conceptual understandings of existing genres and media.

Metalepsis in Different Media

The generally acknowledged definition of metalepsis excludes the existence of metalepsis in other media than literature. Therefore, one of the aims of the chapter is to analyse the transmediality of metalepsis; that is, its potential to be employed in various media. Based on a number of different specific media products (from the media types of literature and film), the author analyses closely how metalepsis can depend on the modalities of different media. He argues that one can create metalepsis in other ways than only using a narrator’s voice. This is because one can expand the notion of narrative levels, which seems indispensable in the case of metalepsis, to representational levels. Defining metalepsis based on representation rather than narrative voice allows for the study of metalepsis in other media types, of which film is one example.

Towards an Intermedial Ecocriticism

The starting point for this chapter is that natural scientific research on the ecological crisis must be communicated by media products to the general public, industries, and policymakers. Such communication takes place via a wide array of different media types, from arts and literature to journalism and politics—media types that are, broadly speaking, the objects of environmental humanities. The problem is that it is very difficult to analyse, discuss, and compare such a diversity of texts or media products (here called ecomedia). This chapter tries to combine the basic ideas of ecocriticism concerning the environmental crisis with the vocabulary and analytical possibilities developed in intermedial studies to perform such a task, resulting in what the author calls intermedial ecocriticism. The chapter sketches out the main theoretical backgrounds of this position and suggests taking an analytical approach. It also compares and discusses two different media products: an online popular science article from CarbonBrief and a Danish novel about climate change.