In the last decades, studies on intermediality have been facing the continuous hybridization and diversification of the digitalized and multisensory milieu in which we live. The emergence of the “culture of convergence”, as defined by Henry Jenkins, is one term covering aspects of this; another notion is “mediatization” which designates the structuring presence of media-aspects in all aspects of life, in the arts, or outside. The intermedial perspective can thus cover aspects normally reserved for social science approaches (in media and communication studies) but it clearly includes classic humanities questions, including core issues in comparative literature.
Literature, like all other communicative activities, are incresingly becoming a part of a complex galaxy of media, languages, cultures. Consequently, intermediality as a phenomenon, and intermedial studies as a theoretical and methodological perspective, can occupy a central place in the comparative literature tradition based on insights of earlier inter-art studies and of course from the essential learnings gained from intertextuality. Intermedial studies offer a medium-aware analysis of media types and literary genres, from musical theatre and theatrical performance to filmic adaptation, TV series, graphic novels, computer games, video-art, video-clips, advertising. But even the more “conventional” literary and cultural forms – novels, poems, essays – deserves to be reread in the light of intermedial categories.
Established in 2018, the Research Committee on Literature, Arts, and Media (CLAM) deals with the new roles and the new configurations of literature, including literature related media types’ confrontations with and responses to technological and philosophical and ideological issues that confront 21st century literary and cultural studies.
ICLA members are free to join activities organized by or related to CLAM.
Students and early-career scholars are most welcome to join the work of CLAM, which seeks to involve them at all levels (the CLAM workskhop in May 2025, on “Intermediality and New Materialisms”, at Linneaus University in Växjö, Sweden, was for example co-organized by a postdoctoral scholar).
