Dimensions of Intermediality &amp; Diversions of Ekphrasis

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With the narrative and visual turn engaging research in several scholarly disciplines over the last decades, the author of this article intends to approach the issue of <italic>world-formation</italic> in such pictorial representations that have originated in response to verbal texts, mostly literary. The study assumes a semiotic vantage point, with <italic>text</italic> understood broadly as any meaningful sequence or network of signs. It draws also from Intermedial Studies, following in particular the idea of <italic>media transformation</italic> (<italic>transmediation</italic>) as proposed by Lars Elleström (2014), especially in application to “qualified” media such as artistic forms.
An analysis will be carried on the set of images (mostly Western paintings and one instance of Oriental sculpture) produced by 19th and 20th-century artists, all induced by well-known verbal narratives that represent three categories: a) Greek mythology, b) religious and literary-religious texts (<italic>The New Testament</italic>, the <italic>Rāmāyana</italic>) and c) English-language literature (drama and poetry). As such, these visual renditions — a reversal of traditionally conceived ekphrasis in which verbal descriptions commented on visual artefacts — qualify as transmedial phenomena.
The author’s main concern is to what extent storytelling static visual works, the instances of <italic>secondary narrativity</italic> (Stampoulidis, 2019), are capable of creating <italic>text worlds</italic> (partly) similar to <italic>storyworlds</italic> postulated for verbal narratives. Starting with her own taxonomy of picturing endowed with a narratorial potential (inspired by several typologies proposed for narrative images), the author will discuss the formation by pictorial means of two world-building units, namely: 1) <italic>scenes</italic> and 2) <italic>small worlds/sub-worlds</italic>, both of them only parts of full-blown text worlds. Temporality emerges as a foundational but not exclusive property of text worlds in the verbal and pictorial arts. This study is a continuation of the author’s previous research (Chrzanowska-Kluczewska, 2009, 2016, 2019) that points to an incremental growth of possible worlds into text worlds into discourse worlds in verbal and visual media.
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elzbieta.chrzanowska-kluczewska@uj.edu.pl

Transmedial Creation of Text Worlds. Pictorial Narration in Response to Verbal Texts

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While the humanities have become a multimodal domain in which visual culture is immanent and various new cross-disciplinary perspectives and theories are being employed to investigate the relationship between artistic and literary forms of representation, artists’ writings remain understudied and underappreciated. Art/literature studies often proceed by pairing a specific work of art with a particular literary text or an aesthetic style with a poetics or a narrative technique, but they rarely consider situations when both elements of the chosen pair come from the same source — an artist-writer. But questions related to whether and how an artist’s ‘natural’ visual disposition may impact on how she/he approaches and handles verbal language and vice versa need to be asked to illuminate what is still a shadow zone in word and image studies. Citing examples of major representatives of American modernism in art and literature, the essay addresses some of the problematic issues involved in studying verbal expression by visual artists and the cogency of posited correlations between the painterly and writerly intuitions and competences at play in artworks and texts produced by artist-writers.
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What Scene, What’s Seen, What’s in A… Word: Thoughts in and on Artists’ Writings

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Nicole Schneiderbauer’s adaptation of David Markson’s 1988 novel <italic>Wittgenstein’s Mistress</italic> – a first-person account of usually single-sentence paragraphs by a middle-aged woman who believes herself to be the sole inhabitant of the entire world – premiered at Staatstheater Augsburg on 18 November 2022, and quickly garnered much praise for its inventive handling of complex literary material. I saw the performance on December 9, three weeks after the premiere. In this article, I offer an analysis of some of the most important creative choices made by Schneiderbauer in terms of translating Markson’s novel into the language of the stage. As proved by my conversation with the director, her bold decisions – which may at first seem at odds with the spirit of Markson’s novel – are precisely what has ensured the remarkable success of the whole enterprise. Avoiding the novel’s more immediately theatrical aspects, reducing it to a ‘condensate,’ pluralizing the protagonist and dialing down on the absurdist humor, Schneiderbauer has succeeded at what may be the most valuable aspect of adaptation: that it is, in Linda Hutcheon’s memorable words, “repetition with variation.”
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A Frame to the Void: Some Remarks on the Staatstheater Augsburg Adaptation of <italic>Wittgenstein’s Mistress</italic> and a Conversation with Nicole Schneiderbauer

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This article examines the disputed status of narratives in the Netflix documentary <italic>Tiger King</italic> (2020—2021), and the ways in which the series’ actors use media to bolster their particular version of a narrative. While classic studies of intermediality have productively analyzed the relations between the multiple semiotic resources employed in narrative forms, I offer an approach to intermediality in documentary art that enriches the structuralist paradigm insofar as it calls additional attention to the various human actors that put the worldmaking power of media to use.
Assuming that in filmmaking the creation of a storyworld is a fundamentally cooperative, while also potentially conflictive, endeavor, I examine the Netflix hit show as a documentary in which narrative co-construction is particularly significant. The series introduces its audience to the strange world of ‘big cat owners’ in the United States — a world which is populated by dubious storytellers and full of conflicts of interests. <italic>Tiger King</italic>’s ‘hyperreal’ world is saturated with media and images that are employed by its actors for storytelling purposes on a contested narrative territory. I argue that the actors’ ‘struggle for the narrative’ resonates with the show’s Darwinian themes and its interests in documenting a world in which the true predators are not the tigers but the human ‘storytelling animals.’ By examining how the various actors boost their own narratives while discrediting those of other players, I aim to illuminate the fine line between narrative co-construction and conflict in the show’s intermedial storyworld.
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Alexander.scherr@anglistik-uni-giessen.de

The ‘Struggle for the Narrative’: Cooperation and Conflict in <italic>Tiger King</italic>’s Intermedial Universe

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The <italic>Alice in Wonderland</italic> ride in Disneyland, which opened in 1958, was designed to place visitors inside the action, as if seeing things through Alice’s eyes. It drew on the film and on concept artwork, as well as the Lewis Carroll book; and can be seen as a transmedial work, which utilised a complex set of media elements. It can also be considered ekphrastic, in the way it referred to source media texts, but elaborated on them, and repurposed them.
The concept of ekphrasis has traditionally been applied to verbal representations of visual art works. Modern theoretical approaches, however, have challenged the idea that language is the only acceptable target medium; the concept has been applied to different media products, including films, music videos, video games, etc. Cecilia Lindhé (2016) has emphasized the ancient Greco-Roman understanding of ekphrasis, which highlighted the question of <italic>enargeia</italic>: the imaginative and physical response in the reader or viewer. The <italic>Alice</italic> ride was like a journey through a strange dream, a series of random, even surreal encounters; it exemplified the concept of <italic>enargeia</italic>, in making visitors feel, not only as if they were present at events, but that it was happening to them.
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Ekphrasis in Disneyland: The <italic>Alice in Wonderland</italic> Ride (1958)

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This paper explores the complex relationship between the parts and wholes of prospective narratives and the form and function of those narratives. Applying Goethean science and dynamic ways of seeing to storytelling in futures and transition design, the paper proposes a methodological approach to surfacing and disrupting fixed assumptions about the future with the intention of reanimating the narrative to create space for novelty to emerge. This reanimation is made possible because of the holographic nature and inherent systemicity of stories, which provides multi-scalar affordances through the wholes and the parts of the narrative. The paper delves into an experiential futures case study, <italic>The Museum of Food</italic>, to demonstrate the role that encounters with the future can play in disrupting future fixedness in playful but meaningful ways. By entangling reanimated prospective narratives with staged experiential encounters, participant audiences are provided with the incremental scaffolding, the prospective plot points, to reimagine and reauthor their own stories about the future, dismantling used and colonized futures in the process.
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Dynamic Ways of Prospecting: Parts, Wholes, Experiential Futures, And Eating a Banana for the First Time

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Throwing food at famous paintings (e.g., a can of soup thrown at Van Gogh’s <italic>Sunflowers</italic>) represents a rather novel form of climate change protest. The study, which is further presented in the article, seeks to unpack the way British mass media cover the food-throwing incidents that take place in the context of climate change activism. To that end, a corpus of texts was collected on the official websites of the leading British mass media outlets that describe the instances of throwing food at the world-known canvases by climate change activists. The corpus was analysed qualitatively in line with the theoretical premises of i) intermedial ecocriticism proposed by Bruhn (2020a, 2020b) and ii) framing methodology developed by Entman (2007). The results of the corpus analysis indicated that British mass media frame the famous paintings involved in the climate change protest incidents by foregrounding the monetary value of the paintings and the extent of damage done to them concurrently with de-emphasising the climate change component. The findings are further discussed and illustrated in the article.
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Throwing Soup at Van Gogh: The Framing of Art in Climate Change Activism by British Mass Media

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Discourses on Culture

Discourses on Culture is a semi-annual scholarly journal. The journal explores and develops the ideas of ‘interculturality’ and ‘interdisciplinarity’ insofar as these constructs are relevant to scholarship. Content published in the journal crosses disciplinary boundaries and often represents the collaborative efforts of authors from disparate backgrounds in Humanities and Social Sciences. The journal’s editors welcome academic discussions which bridge boundaries traditionally separating scholars from the disciplines of applied linguistics, literature and organisation and management studies. Diverse approaches to addressing theoretical, conceptual and methodological issues facilitate plurality in intellectual exchange.  Highlights   Intercultural and multi-disciplinary research approach which crosses subject-specific boundaries.  Innovative tools and methods for exploring aspects of human communication.  New theoretical insights that particularily advance our understanding of applied linguistics, second language learning and teaching, translation studies, literature, cultural studies and organisation and management studies.  Scholarly-based forum for researchers representing different fields of Humanities and Social Sciences. To enrich possibilities for cross-disciplinary synergy, we publish thematic issues which offer scholars, students and trainers the possibility to broaden their conceptual and practical approaches to a wide variety of topics and establish an inclusive  and participatory  academic environment.  To access the open calls for submissions click the tab below. Calls for SubmissionsThe latest version of the index of journals published by the Polish Ministry of Higher Education attributes 100 points to publications in the journal. Open Access Statement  The journal is an Open Access journal that allows a free unlimited access to all its contents without any restrictions upon publication to all users.  Open Access License This journal provides immediate open access to its content under the Creative Commons BY NC ND 4.0 license. Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY NC ND 4.0 license.   Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 

Discourses on Culture

Volume 19 (2023): Issue 1 (June 2023)

Dimensions of Intermediality & Diversions of Ekphrasis

Transmedial Creation of Text Worlds. Pictorial Narration in Response to Verbal Texts

What Scene, What’s Seen, What’s in A… Word: Thoughts in and on Artists’ Writings

A Frame to the Void: Some Remarks on the Staatstheater Augsburg Adaptation of Wittgenstein’s Mistress and a Conversation with Nicole Schneiderbauer

The ‘Struggle for the Narrative’: Cooperation and Conflict in Tiger King’s Intermedial Universe

Ekphrasis in Disneyland: The Alice in Wonderland Ride (1958)

Dynamic Ways of Prospecting: Parts, Wholes, Experiential Futures, And Eating a Banana for the First Time

Throwing Soup at Van Gogh: The Framing of Art in Climate Change Activism by British Mass Media

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