Intermediality as Cultural Literacy and Teaching the Graphic Novel

In their article "Intermediality as Cultural Literacy and Teaching the Graphic Novel" Geert Vandermeersche and Ronald Soetaert argue for the inclusion of the graphic novel for the teaching of cultural literacy and literature. As the printed book is no longer the sole carrier of cultural literacy, Vandermeersche and Soetaert postulate that literary culture must be repositioned in intermedial culture and practices. In order to do so, Vandermeersche and Soetaert apply Werner Wolf's typology of intermediality, aspects of narratology, and scholarship about comics. Following a theoretical discussion they analyze the graphic novel series The Unwritten, a text that thematizes the intermedial nature of (Western) culture today and mediates the function of literature and cultural literacy. Consequently, as Vandermeersche's and Soetaert's analysis suggests, narration incorporates references to and the thematization of other media and literary texts, which, in turn, creates embedded stories that try to link the entire fabric of literary culture together. As such, it changes the way we look at the transfer of cultural literacy to readers and students of literature and culture. Geert Vandermeersche and Ronald Soetaert, "Intermediality as Cultural Literacy and Teaching the Graphic Novel" page 2 of 10 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.3 (2011): Thematic issue New Perspectives on Material Culture and Intermedial Practice. Ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, Asunción López-Varela, Haun Saussy, and Jan Mieszkowski Geert VANDERMEERSCHE and Ronald SOETAERT Intermediality as Cultural Literacy and Teaching the Graphic Novel Western culture has undergone "the broad move from the now centuries-long dominance of writing to the new dominance of the image" and this occurs hand in hand with the decline of the book as the dominant medium for the dissemination and acquisition of knowledge (Kress 1; on the relationship between verbal literacy and image, see, e.g., McCloud; Kibédi Varga). We postulate that in pedagogy the transmission of cultural literacy must be repositioned to follow interand multimedial culture (on this, see, e.g., Soetaert, Top, Van Belle). There is a large corpus of scholarship about the current situation of the humanities with specific reference to the culture of reading (see, e.g., Birkerts; Darnton; Dreyfus and Kelly; Edmunson; Garber; Hirsch; Stephens; Ulin). For example, E.D. Hirsch argues that the disappearance of (literary) books would entail a loss for humanism and cultural literacy and, in consequence, for democracy. At the same time, most agree that narrative as the "culturally most potent formal expression of [speech or writing]" (Kress 2) has reached the status of a central notion in the humanities and qualitative research in the social sciences (see, e.g., Kreiswirth). Hence, the discourse on the "crisis" of literature, the book, and the study of literature ought to be countered by an understanding that literature is but one of the genres in which the human need to tell stories is actualized. In and through narratives much of our shared cultural knowledge is stored and communicated (see., e.g., MacIntyre). Rather than seeing the narrative as linked specifically and exclusively to print culture (Kress; Goody), we need to see it as a transmedial phenomenon (Herman; Ryan, "On the Theoretical"; Sommer; Wolf, "Intermediality Revisited," "Intermediality"). Research into and the implementation of intermediality in pedagogy — followed by social practices — thus acquires immanent relevance (see, e.g., Tötösy de Zepetnek and López-Varela). In pedagogy discussions about curricula for the teaching of literature are focused mainly on the inclusion versus exclusion of certain books in the literary canon including argumentation about thematic and/or ideological perspectives (see Guillory; Bloom). In contrast, Mikko Lehtonen argues that "language and culture have been multimodal since the beginning of history ... different media have been inter-related in terms of both structure and content, has been a blind spot to the human sciences" (Lehtonen 72; see also Soetaert, Verdoodt, Van Kranenburg). Further, it appears that the debate about the changing landscape of media in curricula for the teaching of literature is confined to the field of cultural studies where media genres such as cinema and the other arts are studied. Developments in digital culture confront pedagogy with the question of how narratives are transformed in the diversity of media. The currency of the concept of "intermediality" and the development of interlinking (new) media lead us to question an important aspect of teaching literature and culture as to whether certain practices, cultural literacy, or knowledge altogether are medium specific (see Semali and Pailliotet). Some argue that cultural literacy as entwined exclusively with a particular medium (books) and a practice (paper-based reading) (see, e.g., Birkerts; Hirsch). Therefore, the survival of that knowledge in a different medium (e.g., internet) is assumed to be impacting cultural literacy negatively (Birkerts; Stephens; Ulin). Among others, Marie-Laure Ryan objected to this thinking because "it regards media as a self-contained system of signs, and their resources as incommensurable with the researches of other media" (Ryan, Narrative across Media 3). For example, graphic novels often thematize and incorporate literary themes, techniques, or even complete storylines through adaptations or references. They are proof that "a core of meaning may travel cross media, but its narrative potential ... [is] actualized differently when it reaches a new medium" (Ryan, Narrative across Media 1; see also Hatfield). Intermediality is a concept to describe a system of relations between different media objects, "regardless of their status as recognized art" (Wolf, "Intermediality Revisited" 16). Werner Wolf differentiates media by "their underlying semiotic systems" ("Intermediality" 253) and postulates that the analysis of intermediality should be with focus on the "transgression of boundaries between conventionally distinct media of communication" ("Intermediality Revisited" 17). A related concept to intermediality is "intertextuality"; however, scholars of literature use the concept to denote the interGeert Vandermeersche and Ronald Soetaert, "Intermediality as Cultural Literacy and Teaching the Graphic Novel" page 3 of 10 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.3 (2011): Thematic issue New Perspectives on Material Culture and Intermedial Practice. Ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, Asunción López-Varela, Haun Saussy, and Jan Mieszkowski pretation of texts in the presence of other texts (see, e.g., Moraru 256). In contrast, Wolf reserves "intertextuality" for the relations between identical media such as literary references in novels and specifies it as a subtype of intermediality ("Intermediality" 252). Likewise, Lehtonen defined intermediality as "intertextuality that transgresses media borders" (76). The extension of the term "intermediality" confronts us with a problem: we can either analyze how it functions between different artifacts, i.e., extracompositional intermediality (ECI) or how it functions within the work itself, i.e., intracompositional intermediality (ICI). ECI is divided into two forms whereby there is first transmediality (see Rajewsky), which denotes phenomena which appear in diverse media but "are non-specific to individual media" (Wolf, "Intermediality" 253). The development of these phenomena no longer occurs in one specific medium or they cannot be said to "belong" to one specific medium. Such similarities can "form points of contact or bridges between different media" (Wolf, "Intermediality Revisited" 18). A second form of ECI is intermedial transposition, in which "one medium acted as an origin in a process of medial transfer" (Wolf, "Intermediality" 253) for either an element (e.g., the "literary" voice-over in cinema) or the whole content (e.g., book-to-film adaptations). A concept relevant here is Jay David Bolter's and Richard A. Grusin's concept of "remediation" which seeks to describe "what is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media" (200): new media borrow from old media, e.g., leafing through an e-book — that is based on a printed book — on a digital reading device, but also "older media can remediate newer ones within the same media economy" (Grusin 497). While media forms can try to erase signs of such influence (called "transparent immediacy"), particularly relevant is what Grusin calls "hypermediacy, in which a medium multiplies and makes explicit signs of mediation" (497). A first form of ICI is "multimediality," which happens "whenever two or more media are overtly present in a given semiotic entity at least in one instance" (Wolf, "Intermediality" 254) and "in this form intermediality itself and the original components of the intermedial mixture are directly discernible on the surface of the work, that is, on the level of the signifiers, since they appear to belong to heterogeneous semiotic systems, although these components need not always be 'quotable' separately" (Wolf, "Intermediality Revisited" 22). The second form of ICI are intermedial references in a work to another medium, genre ("system reference"), or to an individual work ("individual reference"). Wolf defines ICI to denote "the involvement of another medium [which] takes places only covertly or indirectly: through signifiers and sometimes also signifieds pointing to it" whereby intermedial references enter "the other medium ... as a conceptual rather than a physical presence" ("Intermediality" 254) and "this means that a monomedial work remains monomedial and displays only one semiotic system, regardless of the existence of an intermedial reference. For this reference is carried out by the signifiers of the 'dominant' medium which is used by the work in question, so that the other, 'nondominant' medium (the medium referred to) is actually only 'present' as an idea, as a signified and hence as a reference" (Wolf, "Intermediality Revisited" 23). References to other media are represented with the semiotic means of the dominant medium, for example the reference to a text in an oil painting. These references can be explicit, which then are called "intermedial thematizations" or implicit, which are then called "intermedial imitations" (Wolf, "Intermediality Revisited" 25). In explicit references, the reference "resides in the signifieds of the referring semiotic complex, while its signifiers are employed in their usual way and do not contribute to heteromedial imitation" (Wolf, "Intermediality" 254). In other words, it is "present whenever another medium (or a work) produced in another medium is mentioned or discussed in a text" ("Intermediality Revisited" 24). On the other hand, in implicit references there is "the effect of some kind of imitation of another medium or a heteromedial artifact and leads to an imaginative representation of in the recipient's mind" ("Intermediality" 255). We now turn to narratology with regard to intermediality, a concept we employ for the study of the graphic novel. In narratology, the idea that narrative is a transmedial phenomenon has engendered the concept of "transmedial narratology" (see, e.g., Kukkonen; Ryan, Narrative). It had always been a claim that narrative transcend cultures, distinct media, and genres. However, while such claims in the past served to legitimate the pursuits of narratology, these objectives were not translated in scholarship for attention to more than one medium and thus research into narrative remained largely language based. The reason for this approach was narratologists's specialization in Saussurian strucGeert Vandermeersche and Ronald Soetaert, "Intermediality as Cultural Literacy and Teaching the Graphic Novel" page 4 of 10 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.3 (2011): Thematic issue New Perspectives on Material Culture and Intermedial Practice. Ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, Asunción López-Varela, Haun Saussy, and Jan Mieszkowski turalism (see Ryan, "Narration in Various Media"), which led them to reject "the possibility of visual or musical forms of narrative" (Ryan, "Transmedial Narratology" 2). However, in the last few decades, we have seen a change in "the increasingly interdisciplinary profile of the research being conducted in this domain" (Wolf, "Intermediality" 252, "'Cross the Border'"), which is the reason for "the emerging preference for 'intermediality' over rival terms such as 'interart relations' and 'intertextuality' (252). Karin Kukkonen, for example, examines how medium specific features of comic books influence how stories are told: "the project of investigating how particular media constrain as well as enable storytelling practices" (34). Her perspective is retrospective as she focuses on how the graphic novel Fables 7: Arabian Nights (and Days) retells "earlier versions of Arabian Nights, particularly the nineteenthcentury fairy book and its illustrations, remediating and recontextualizing their storyworld and characters ... how the different modes in comics — especially images, words, and sequence — have an impact on narration, and also how those modes allow comics to draw on storytelling traditions and thus become part of a larger cultural conversation" (35). The relationship between literature and comic books has been pointed out repeatedly (see., e.g., Versaci). As suggested, in graphic novels it occurs with some frequency that literary content is borrowed from high culture (see Figure 1). The graphic novel thus not only adapts literary content, it uses all strategies of intermedial transposition as described by Wolf. In recent decades, creators of graphic novels have placed their work in a new relationship with literature. There is not yet a clear term for what could be called a new genre. Graphic novel creator Bill Willingham has identified this strand of graphic novels as literature-based fantasy: it can be characterized by its meditation on both the older genres of popular comic books (resulting in the deconstruction of the superhero myth, for instance in Alan Moore's Watchmen), and on narrative practices in general (for instance in reflection on the makings of autobiography in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home). This genre often retains the structure of the action or quest story of their comic book predecessors: graphic novels "foreground these retellings and revisionings, as new writers constantly reinvent characters, the characters' motivations, their stories, and even their worlds" (Taylor 172). As examples, the graphic novels we list below share these characteristics, but even go further in thematizing the act of storytelling and adapting and of transferring literary knowledge (cultural literacy) with a postmodern twist (see Figure 1). With the multiand intermediality of the graphic novel, the question arises whether the graphic novel is a graphic with words, a text with graphics, or whether it should been seen as a fully hybrid artifact? The search for a definition of the medium of comics has been a project riddled with objections and counter arguments. Scott McCloud defines the comic as a medium "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer" (9). What we propose is that the graphic novel is characterized by a specific combination of words and images. The symbiosis of two semiotic modes has made it difficult to determine the affordances and constraints they separately offer storytelling, because "comics are a key instance of the cooperation between different modes in narrative ... [comics] cut across the categorical distinctions between words and images and their functions" (Kukkonen 36-37) and "there is a tendency for readers who come from literary backgrounds to read over design, as though the artwork existed only to render the plot visible and move protagonists from place to place, while readers with design backgrounds often see the art as existing in a narrative void, an end in itself. Yet in the best instances, the design of a comic is inseparable from the narrative" (Rosen 58). Rather than differentiating between the possibilities of, on the one hand, words, and, on the other hand, of images, in comics "these different modes work together in their storytelling, and this suggests that they are perceived in a dynamic process of narrative cognition, rather than in a piecemeal combination of noncommensurable semiotic resources" (Kukkonen 39). Others have shy away from definitions, because "if you try to draw a boundary that includes everything that counts as comics and excludes everything that doesn't, two things happen: first, the medium always wriggles across that boundary, and second, whatever politics are implicit in the definition always boomerang on the definer" (Wolk 17). The definition of the specific genre of graphic novels is no less problematic. Stephen E. Tabachnick defines the graphic novel as "an extended comic book that treats nonfictional as well as fictional plots and themes with the depth and subtlety that we have come to expect of traditional novels and extended nonfictional texts" (2). Importantly, with regard to reading, too, comics are different in that "comics chalGeert Vandermeersche and Ronald Soetaert, "Intermediality as Cultural Literacy and Teaching the Graphic Novel" page 5 of 10 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.3 (2011): Thematic issue New Perspectives on Material Culture and Intermedial Practice. Ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, Asunción López-Varela, Haun Saussy, and Jan Mieszkowski lenge most of the ways we learned to read: left to right, top to bottom, linearly, and progressively" (Rosen 58). In sum, a definition of the graphic novel depends on qualitative discriminations and readers' expectations, both — essentially — subjective categories and thus they become "not merely analytic but also tactical" (Hatfield 19). As examples, we present in Figure 1 selected comic books with literary thematics: Figure 1: Examples of comics with literary themes. Title Creator(s) Year Adaptation from Content The Sandman Neil Gaiman, et al. 19891996 Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream and The Tempest Morpheus is the King of Dreams, as well as the King of Stories.