Abstract
This is a book about intermedial studies. The term itself does not necessarily speak for itself and might not be familiar to many but engaging in intermedial practices is something most people do without realising that this term describes their practice. So what are intermedial studies? As the editors Jørgen Bruhn and Beatte Shirrmacher explain, it is the ‘interaction of similarities and differences between media and the changes that may occur in communicative material when it is transported from one media type to another’ (p. 3). For example, a book might have an audiobook version or a film adaptation to it. As Bruhn and Shirrmacher point out, ‘The strange thing is that despite having no knowledge of or training in intermedial studies most people are very good at using and understanding intermedial relations, though of course not many of them would be able to use academic terminology to describe what they are doing, nor would they be interested in doing so’ (p. 3). They advocate the view that ‘all communicative situations and all media types are multimodal’ and ‘all communication involves all senses’ (p. 3). Intermedial studies in general and their book in particular explore ‘this heterogeneous relation between different forms of meaning-making, either within a particular media product or between different media types’ (p. 3). To this end, the book offers ‘a kind of analytical toolbox of intermedial studies’, which includes an introduction to its central terms and methodologies and lots of short case studies illustrating the blend of theory and method. The book is split into three main parts. Part I, ‘Introducing intermedial studies’, consists of six chapters – the introductory one and chapters focused on film, literature, music, computer games and news media. Part II, ‘Intermedial studies – the three fundamental intermedial relations’, comprises four chapters on media combination, transmediation and media representation. Part III, ‘Applying intermedial perspectives’, includes seven chapters on the intermediality of performance, truthfulness, media modalities of theatrical space and social media, and a toolkit for intermedial analysis of computer games. All in all, this is a well-organised volume, which would be of use to scholars and students interested in framing their work within the remit of intermedial studies with a focus on multimodal perspectives and methods.