1 - Theorizing the Musical Novel

Summary

THOUGH ARTISTS AND CRITICS ALIKE have often explored the relationships between the arts, a shared critical vocabulary has yet to be developed. Scholars in diverse fields have approached the subject from various disciplinary positions, such as media and communication studies, comparative literature, individual philologies, musicology, and art history, offering many perspectives on the issue, but leading to widespread terminological ambiguity and the lack of a common discourse. In response, I propose a model of intermediality that aims at a more precise terminology and methodology for analysis. In the first part of the chapter, I offer definitions of key terms and a differentiation between intermediality and the related phenomena of transmediality, multimediality, and intramediality or intertextuality, before briefly discussing prior models. The section concludes with a detailed presentation of my own model. A diagram can be found in the appendix. Graphically represented, this model provides a tool with potential cross-disciplinary applications for the analysis of different media products ranging from musical novels to multimedial dance productions, from instances of intermediality in painting to those in mono- or multimedial musical works. Sample diagrams of three of the musical novels analyzed in this study are also included in the appendix.

In addition to intermediality, semiotics forms an important basis for the analyses of textual imitation of music in the novels selected. An attempt to be “like music” involves the transposition of a different kind of sign and signification into literature. The analyses will thus draw on theories of verbal and musical signs in order to examine the specific processes of signification that are common to both media as well as those aspects of musical signification that remain foreign to the text.

Intermediality

Terminology and Definitions

When Samuel Taylor Coleridge first used the term “intermedia” in 1812, it represented a conceptual fusion of different media and had programmatic- aesthetic implications for intermedial art works. Coleridge used the word “to define works which fall conceptually between media that are already known” (Higgins, 23). Yet his application of the term to allegory, which he called an “intermedium” between person and personification, makes it clear that his definition is still quite a ways away from today's usage (Paech, 17).