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

Summary/Abstract: In the digital age, literary practice proliferates across different media platforms. Contemporary literary texts are written, circulated and read 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 UNIFlED SINGLE MEDIUM IF IT EVER DID BUT UNFOLDS in a multiplicity of media, concepts central to intermediality studies, SUCH AS MEDIA SPECIFlCIITY 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 CONFlGURATION OR NETWORK FATHER than think of literature as a single self-contained medium that engages in INTERMEDIAL EXCHANGE AND COMPETITION WITH OTHER MEDIA SUCH AS FlLM 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.

• Details
• Contents