Abstract
This chapter surveys the historical development of a key concept in intermediality research in the West: medium specificity. From its classical origins, the discussion progresses through the early modern period to the modern period and the present day. The timeline is divided into sections that focus on the key ideas concerning medium specificity, either directly or with crucial relevance, both in the historical period in question and the influence of the ideas on later periods. The sections are constructed around quotations from original and secondary sources interpreted and explained to forge a somewhat logical narrative on the tale of medium specificity through time. In a fundamental fashion, the historical journey has to do with this question: Is “medium” a physical thing fixed with essential qualities that set it apart from all other media and so make it “specific,” or is it a concept to be understood in a more active sense, not as a fixed thing but as a changing set of practices by which we interact with the physical world in specific ways?
References
Arnheim, Rudolf. 1974. On the nature of photography. Critical Inquiry 1: 149–161.
Babbitt, Irving. 1910. The New Laokoon: An essay on the confusion of the arts. London and New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Bao, Weihong. 2015. The trouble with theater: Cinema and the geopolitics of medium specificity. Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 56 (2): Article 6.
Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image music text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press.
———. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang.
Baumgarten, Alexander. 1750. Aesthetica. Traiecti cis Viadrum: J.C. Kleyb. https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_dopKAAAAcAAJ/mode/2up. Accessed 9 September 2022.
Benjamin, Walter. 1969 (1936). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit). In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, 217–254. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books. https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm. Transcript by Andy Blunden. Accessed 9 September 2022.
Berg, Dirk J. van den. 2004. What is an image and what is image power? Image & Narrative: Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative. Issue 8 Mélanges/Miscellaneous. http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/issue08/dirkvandenbergh.htm. Accessed 9 September 2022.
Berger, John. 1972. Ways of seeing. London: Penguin.
Blore, Francis. 2018. The importance of medium specificity in writing and drawing. Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice 3 (1): 99–106.
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 2000. Remediation: Understanding new media. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Bristow, Maxine. 2016. Pragmatics of attachment and detachment: medium (un)specificity as material agency in contemporary art. PhD thesis, Norwich University of the Arts.
Brownlee, Shannon. 2018. Fidelity, medium specificity, (in) determinacy: Identities that matter. In The Routledge companion to adaptation, ed. Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, and Eckart Voigts. London: Routledge.
Bruhn, Jörgen. 2016. The intermediality of narrative literature: Medialities matter. Palgrave Pivot. Cham: Springer.
Bruhn, Jörgen, and Beate Schirrmacher, eds. 2021. Intermedial studies: An introduction to meaning across media. London/New York: Routledge.
Bryson, Norman. 1995. Philostratus and the imaginary museum. In Vision & Textuality, ed. Stephen W. Melville and Bill Readings, 174–194. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bull, Michael, and Marcel Cobussen, eds. 2021. The Bloomsbury handbook of sonic methodologies. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Burke, Edmund. 1990 (1757). A philosophical enquiry into the origins of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
Cahir, Linda Costanzo. 2006. Literature into Film. Jefferson: McFarland.
Carroll, Noël. 2003. Engaging the moving image. New Haven: Yale University Press.
———. 2019. Medium specificity. In The Palgrave handbook of the philosophy of film and motion pictures, ed. Noël Carroll, Laura T. Di Summa, and Shawn Loht, 29–47. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cavell, Stanley. 1971. The world viewed: Reflections on the ontology of film. New York: Viking Press.
Cheeke, Stephen. 2008. Writing for art: The aesthetics of Ekphrasis. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Clüver, Claus. 1997. Ekphrasis reconsidered: On verbal representations of non-verbal texts. In Interart poetics: Essays on the interrelations of the arts and media, ed. Ulla-Britta Lagerroth, Hans Lund, and Erik Hedling, 19–33. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Collins, Christopher. 1991. Reading the written image: Verbal play, interpretation and the roots of Iconophobia. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Costello, Diarmuid. 2008. On the very idea of a “specific” medium: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell on painting and photography as arts. Critical Inquiry 34 (2): 274–312.
Dryden, John. 1695. The art of painting. London, Printed by J. Heptinstall for W. Rogers. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A36766.0001.001?view=toc. Accessed 9 September 2022.
Elleström, Lars. 2019. Transmedial narration: Narratives and stories in different media. Palgrave Pivot. Cham: Springer.
Elliott, Kamilla. 2012. The adaptation of adaptation: A dialogue between the sciences and humanities. In Adaptation and cultural appropriation, ed. Pascal Nicklas and Oliver Lindner, 145–161. Berlin: de Gruyter.
———. 2014. Rethinking formal-cultural and textual-contextual divides in adaptation studies. Literature/Film Quarterly 42 (4): 576–593.
———. 2020. Theorizing adaptation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1973. Seeing and knowing. In The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medial perception, 131–151. New York: Pantheon Books.
Fried, Michael. 1998. Art and Objecthood. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Gasché, Rodolphe. 2003. The idea of form: Rethinking Kant’s aesthetics. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Gaut, Berys. 2010. A philosophy of cinematic art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Greenberg, Clement. 1939. Avant-Garde and Kitsch. Partisan Review 6 (5): 34–49. http://archives.bu.edu/collections/partisan-review/search/detail?id=283920. Accessed 9 September 2022.
———. 1940. Towards a Newer Laocoön. Partisan Review 7 (4): 296–310. http://archives.bu.edu/collections/partisan-review/search/detail?id=283925. Accessed 9 September 2022.
———. 1962. After abstract expressionism. Art International 6 (8): 24–32.
Grennan, Simon, and Hague, Ian. 2018. Medium, knowledge, structure: Capacities for choice and the contradiction of medium-specificity in games and comics. Image & Narrative. Text and Image in Children’s Literature/Texte et image dans la littérature de jeunesse. http://www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/1765. Accessed 9 September 2022.
Guillory, John. 2010. Genesis of the media concept. Critical Inquiry 36 (2): 321–362.
Harvey, Judith. 2002. ut pictura poesis. The University of Chicago, theories of media, keywords glossary. https://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/utpicturapoesis.htm. Accessed 9 September 2022.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 2004. Print is flat, code is deep: The importance of media-specific analysis. Poetics Today 25 (1): 67–90.
Heffernan, James A.W. 1993. Museum of words: The poetics of ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Hegel, Georg. W. F. 1977 (1807). Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
Horace. Ars poetica. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69381/ars-poetica. Accessed 9 September 2022.
Houwen, Janna. 2017. Film and video intermediality: The question of medium specificity in contemporary moving images. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A theory of adaptation. New York: Routledge.
Jay, Martin. 2005. Songs of experience: Modern American and European variations on a universal theme. Berkeley: The University of California Press.
Jenkins, Henry. 2008. Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: NYU Press.
Jensen, Klaus Bruhn. 2016. Intermediality. In The international encyclopedia of communication theory and philosophy, ed. Klaus Bruhn Jensen, Robert T. Craig, Jefferson D. Pooley, and Eric W. Rothenbuhler, 3–12. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.
Jones, Caroline A. 2005. Eyesight alone: Clement Greenberg’s modernism and the bureaucratization of the senses. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the power of judgment. ed. Paul Guyer. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. New York/London: Cambridge University Press. Original Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790). http://www.archive.org/details/kritikderurteils00kantuoft. Accessed 9 September 2022.
Kinder, Marsha, and Tara McPherson, eds. 2014. Transmedia frictions: The digital, the arts, and the humanities. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Király, Hajnal. 2010. The dance of Intermediality: Attempt at a semiotic approach of medium specificity and intermediality in film. In Media borders, multimodality and intermediality, ed. Lars Elleström, 199–210. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Krämer, Sibylle. 2015 (2008). Medium, messenger, transmission: An approach to media philosophy. (Medium, Bote, Übertragung. Kleine Metaphysik der Medialität). Trans. Anthony Enns. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Krauss, Rosalind. 2009. The guarantee of the medium. In Studies across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences 5, ed. Tiina Arppe, Timo Kaitaro, and Kai Mikkonen, 139–145. Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.
Krieger, Murray. 1992. Ekphrasis: The illusion of the natural sign. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lee, Rensselaer W. 1940. Ut Pictura Poesis: The humanistic theory of painting. New York: Norton. The Art Bulletin 22 (4): 197–269.
Lehmann, Karl. 1941. The imagines of the elder Philostratus. The Art Bulletin 23 (1): 16–44.
Lessing, Gotthold E. 2005 (1766). Laocoon: An essay upon the limits of painting and poetry. Trans. Ellen Frothingham. Mineola: Dover Publications.
Lopes, Dominic McIver. 2014. Beyond art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Louvel, Liliane. 2011. Poetics of the Iconotext. Trans. Laurence Petit. Farnham: Ashgate.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1984 (1979). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
de Man, Paul. 1996. In Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press.
McGann, Jerome. 1991. The textual condition. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding media: The extensions of Man. London/New York: McGraw-Hill.
Meyrowitz, Joshua. 1999. Understandings of media. et Cetera 56 (1): 44–52.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 1999. An introduction to visual culture. London/New York: Routledge.
Mitchell, W.J.T. 1994. Picture theory: Essays on verbal and visual representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Noë, Alva. 2015. Strange tools: Art and human nature. New York: Hill & Wang.
Packer, Jerome. 2013. Epistemology not ideology OR why we need new Germans. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 10 (2–3): 295–300.
Parikka, Jussi. 2013. Afterword: Cultural techniques and media studies. Theory, Culture & Society 30 (6): 147–159.
Peters, John D. 2015. The marvelous clouds: Toward a philosophy of elemental media. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.
Petersson, Sonya, Christer Johansson, Magdalena Holdar, and Sara Callahan, eds. 2018. The power of the in-between: Intermediality as a tool for aesthetic analysis and critical reflection. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press.
Philostratus the Elder. Imagines. https://www.theoi.com/Text/PhilostratusElder1A.html. Accessed 9 September 2022.
Pop, Doru. 2020. The gamification of cinema and the cinematization of games. In Transmediations: Communication across media Borders, Routledge studies in multimodality, ed. Niklas Salmose and Lars Elleström, 52–74. New York/London: Routledge.
Quintilian. Institutio oratoria. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Quintilian/Institutio_Oratoria. Accessed 9 September 2022.
Rajewsky, Irina O. 2005. Intermediality, intertextuality, and remediation: A literary perspective on intermediality. Intermédialités 6: 43–64.
Rancière, Jacques. 2011. What medium can mean. Trans. Steven Corcoran. Parrhesia 11: 35–43.
Richon, Oliver. 2011. Introduction: On literary images. Photographies 4 (1): 12.
Rippl, Gabriele, ed. 2015. Handbook of intermediality: Literature – image – sound – music. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Rose, Gillian. 2001. (Fourth edition in 2016). Visual methodologies: An introduction to the interpretation of visual materials. London: Sage.
Ruskin, John. 1848. Modern Painters, Vol. III. London: Dent. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59392/59392-h/59392-h.htm. Accessed 9 September 2022.
Ryan, Marie-Laure, and Jan-Noël Thon, eds. 2014. Storyworlds across media: Toward a media-conscious narratology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Salmose, Niklas, and Lars Elleström, eds. 2020. Transmediations: Communication across media borders. Routledge studies in multimodality. New York/London: Routledge.
Schrock, Andrew Richard. 2015. Communicative affordances of mobile media: Portability, availability, locatability, and multimediality. International Journal of Communication 9: 1229–1246.
Schröter, Jens. 2012. Four models of intermediality. In Travels in intermedia[lity]: ReBlurring the boundaries, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath, 15–36. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press.
Smith, Anthony N. 2018. Storytelling industries: Narrative production in the 21st century. Cham: Springer.
Soules, Marshall. 2002. Animating the language machine: Computers and performance. https://web.archive.org/web/20060224032144/http://www.mala.bc.ca/~soules/animate.htm. Accessed 9 September 2022.
Stewart, Garrett. 2010. Bookwork as demediation. Critical Inquiry 36 (3): 110–157.
Sturken, Marita, and Cartwright, Lisa. 2001. (Second edition in 2009). Practices of looking: An introduction to visual culture. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thoben, Jan. 2020. Media parasites, specificity and the unheard. Auditive Perspektiven. https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/18452/21841/5-JThoben_kunsttexte2020AP.pdf. Accessed 9 September 2022.
Thon, Jan-Noël. 2016. Transmedial narratology and contemporary media culture. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Thorburn, David, and Henry Jenkins, eds. 2003. Rethinking media change: The aesthetics of transition. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Toikkanen, Jarkko. 2013. The intermedial experience of horror: Suspended failures. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2015. Transcendental puppets: Kant and Kleist. In The poetics of transcendence, Currents of encounter series, ed. Elisa Heinämäki, P.M. Mehtonen, and Antti Salminen, 159–178. Amsterdam: Brill Rodopi.
———. 2017. Välineen käsite ja välinemääräisyys 2010-luvulla. (The concept of medium and medium-specificity in the 2010s). Media & viestintä 40 (3–4): 69–76.
———. 2019. Intermedial experience and ekphrasis in Wordsworth’s “Slumber”. Partial Answers 17 (1): 107–124.
———. 2020. Feeling the unseen: Imagined touch perceptions in paranormal reality television. The Senses and Society 15 (1): 70–84.
———. 2021. At the cutting edge: Touch images in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum”. Connotations – A Journal for Critical Debate 30: 1–23.
———. 2022. Endless north: Intermedial experience of motion and balance in H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”. In Shaping the north through multimodal and intermedial interaction, ed. Juha-Pekka Alarauhio, Tiina Räisänen, Jarkko Toikkanen, and Riikka Tumelius, 233–246. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Torregrossa, Clotilde. 2020. Remember the medium! Film, medium specificity, and response-dependence. PhD thesis. University of St. Andrews.
Verstegen, Ian. 2014. Dispositional realism and the specificity of digital media. Leonardo 47 (2): 159–163.
Virtanen, Ira A., and Jarkko Toikkanen. 2020. Co-creating study of experience in dialogue. Research in Art Education 1: 74–92.
Wagner, Peter, ed. 1996. Icons – Texts – Iconotexts: Essays on ekphrasis and intermediality, European cultures: Studies in literature and the arts. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Webb, Ruth. 2009. Ekphrasis, imagination and persuasion in ancient rhetorical theory and practice. Farnham: Ashgate.
Williams, Raymond. 1977. From medium to social practice. In Marxism and literature, 158–164. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wolf, Werner. 2011. (Inter)mediality and the study of literature. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13: 3. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol13/iss3/2/. Accessed 9 September 2022.
Wordsworth, William. 1800. Lyrical ballads, with other poems, volume 1. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8905. Accessed 9 September 2022.
Yacobi, Tamar. 1997. Verbal frames and ekphrastic figuration. In Interart poetics: Essays on the interrelations of the arts and media, ed. Ulla-Britta Lagerroth, Hans Lund, and Erik Hedling, 35–46. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Toikkanen, J. (2023). Intermediality and Medium Specificity. In: Bruhn, J., López-Varela, A., de Paiva Vieira, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91263-5_13-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91263-5_13-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-91263-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-91263-5
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities