At one end of the spectrum is the book. Interestingly, many spoken word artists publish in a traditional format that simply reproduces the poem on the page – often effectively, even when stripped of its performative dimension. This is the case, for example, with Francesca Gironi’s poetry collection A. In other instances, the written collection is expanded through drawings, as in Maria Oppo’s Mostros, or/and audio CDs, such as Lello Voce’s Farfalle da combattimento. Whether in its traditional or expanded form, the book remains the most common mode of publication among spoken word performers.

Logo of the Zoopalco Poetry Label (ZPL)

However, other artists deliberately avoid the written page, viewing it as inadequate for conveying the full experience of performance. Instead, they often share their recordings on digital platforms like Bandcamp, offering an alternative means of circulating their poetry alongside the more conventional medium of book publication. A notable example in this sense is the spoken word record label ZPL, which released its productions as LPs without any accompanying written publication.

Other poets, such as Cristian Kosmonavt Zinfolino, are experimenting with what one can broadly define as videopoetry (for a useful overview on videopoetry: Valerio Cuccaroni’s Poesia Ibrida). The growing interest in this form of publication is evident in the frequent participation of spoken word poets in videopoetry prizes such as La Poesia che Si Vede and Sinestetica.

Books, LPs, Videopoetry: the proliferation of publication formats in contemporary Italian spoken word reflects the hybridity of the art form itself. However, these formats are not necessarily distinct from one another. In fact, many artists are actively exploring the interconnections between them in search of a more immersive media environment.

Such is the case with the aforementioned ZPL, where the sonic dimension of the LPs is expanded through additional formats, such as vinyls with typographical experimentation, verbo-visual compositions, and posters providing access to video clips. Refusing to commit to a single form of publication, ZPL instead adopts an intermedial approach that allows a poem or project to travel, adapt, and take shape across a range of medium-specific outputs, which together contribute in the creation of a shared, coherent environment.

The same intermedial approach informs Howphelia, a streaming platform for poetry developed by Angela Grasso and Luca Rizzatello, which merges digital and analog experiences. Through a subscription, viewers gain access to both a printed book of the performance and related video art content, along with livestreams featuring the artists and behind-the-scenes footage of the creative process. Howphelia’s goal is to foster a community in which the traditional passivity of the streaming audience is challenged by a more participatory and immersive experience.

The hybrid and flexible nature of contemporary performance poetry, already underscored by the choice of alternative forms of publication beyond the written page, is then further expanded by the intermedial approach adopted by Howphelia and ZPL. Going beyond the selection of a single output, these publications allow the poem to move across the different channels of the “media reticulum”, as Gabriele Frasca defined it, and, through the dialogue and interpenetration among the various modes of publication, to generate what can be understood as “ecosystems” of publication.

Image from the Howphelia website

L'articolo Forms and Ecosystems of Publication in Contemporary Italian Spoken Word sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

In Italy, electronic literature has a rich history. It was born in the cultural milieu of the Neoavanguardia in the early 1960s and, since then, it has produced a significant number of experimental works and practices which can be generally grouped as follows: ‘combinatory literature’, ‘kinetic and interactive poetry’, ‘hypertext fiction’, and ‘network writing’. Under these umbrella categories, a number of genres have emerged, including Nanni Balestrini’s computer poetry, Gianni Toti’s video poetry, Luigi Longo, Luisa Lux and Fabrizio Venerandi’s kinetic poetry, Caterina Davinio’s net-poetry, Enrico Colombini’s interactive fiction, and the various forms of network writing by Wu Ming (distributed narratives), Kai Zen (hypertext novel), Michela Murgia and Francesco Pecoraro (blooks), Tommaso Pincio (social network novel), and Scrittura Industriale Collettiva (wiki novel), to mention just a few. These hybrid genres tend to be multimodal and mostly employ, as well as question, technological processes such as coding, networking, hypertextuality, interactivity, virtuality, and simulation. In spite of the richness and international significance of Italian electronic literature, a systematic reconstruction of its historical phases, along with its milestones, protagonists, key genres, and the critical issues they raised, has not yet been undertaken globally. Similarly, the social, political, ideological, moral, linguistic, and educational functions of electronic literature have barely received any attention.

Opera aperta. Italian electronic literature from the 1960s to the present (2022) provides a full reconstruction of the history of Italian electronic literature from 1961 to the present day, introducing the cultural milieu in which it originated and examining how it developed across decades. In my book, I argue that Opera aperta does not only coincide with the birth of the first Italian electronic literary work, namely Nanni Balestrini’s Tape Mark I, but also provides a theoretical and methodological framework to analyse Italian electronic literature across decades from both an aesthetic and critical perspective. Umberto Eco reflects on a number of artistic questions that lie at the intersection of different social and technological theories, such as cybernetics, system theory, pragmatism, and Marxism, showing how formal experimentation and political intention are strictly intertwined and critically address some important questions about our relationship with technologies, such as automation and alienation. Ultimately, the modern concept of ‘opera aperta’ proves to be an effective methodological tool for exploring the ‘open textuality’ of electronic literature and how artists have come to terms with the novel forms of expression offered by new media.

Opera aperta. Italian electronic literature from the 1960s to the present (2022) is the runner-up of the N.Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature 2023, a prestigious award given for the best work of criticism, of any length, on the topic of electronic literature. Bestowed by the Electronic Literature Organization and funded through a generous donation from N. Katherine Hayles and others, this annual prize recognizes excellence in the field. The Prize for 1st Place comes with a $1000 award, with a plaque showing the name of the winner and an acknowledgement of the achievement, and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level. One prize for Honorable Mention is awarded and consists of a plaque showing the name of the winner and an acknowledgement of the achievement, and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level.

L'articolo Opera aperta: Italian Electronic Literature from the 1960s to the Present sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Indira Allegra, Texere: The Shape of Loss is a Tapestry (2022) © Indira Allegra

Always eager to explore…

Aren’t we so tired of hearing this word in academic writing?

Shall I say ‘observe’? Or ‘investigate’?

Even worse…

I’ll begin again.

I have always been eager to trace the geographies of where the ‘literary’ could be found, with a particular attention to those places where it was not supposed to be found.

Wordily, but let me move on for now.

Now that I look back at how my research has led me to my next book, A Textile Poetics of Entanglement, I ask myself why I should be comfortable with saying the above. Is that not the same as saying that I, as a literary critic, am going to see ‘literary’ everywhere I deem worth looking?

In trying to answer this moral dilemma, I will talk about my study on textile poetics, which looks at intermedial works that involve both the language of poetry and that of textile, from the second half of the twentieth century up to the present day.

Irene Albino and Ellen Johnson, Unravel (2018). © Irene Albino and Ellen Johnson

Up to this point, everything seems rather good. But…

I then move on to say that this study develops what I term a Textile Poetics of Entanglement which, in a nutshell, helps us renew our understanding of what lyric poetry can be considered to be today. In the process of doing so, I also claim that the works I look at are ‘textile poems’, which exhibit that kind of entanglement that supersedes any kind of hierarchical binary between the media involved.

Here, the trouble begins.

In wanting to protect a non-hierarchical division between poetry and textile, I find myself unable to find a language that can be aligned with this intention: saying ‘textile poems’ inevitably highlight the primary position of poems to which ‘textile’ is an adjective. If I were to say, ‘poetic textile’, attention would be on that work as a ‘textile’ before being a ‘poem’. What to do?

Maria Lai, Lenzuolo (1989) © Maria Lai

Elisa Biagini, Foresta bianca (2012). Courtesy © Elisa Biagini

My temporary solution is rather humble: to write this blog post. In here, with the language allowed and welcomed in this genre, I feel comfortable to both defend and denounce my work on ‘textile poems’, while also highlighting the broader challenges of engaging with intermedial works and interdisciplinary research.

Similar to other situations, we are asked to position ourselves and position our work accordingly. In the monograph this research will be published: I will write as a literary critic. In fact, the book is to be published in a series dedicated to Lyric Theory: where ‘textile’ cannot help but be an adjective to the noun ‘lyric’. My looking at those intermedial objects at the centre of my study cannot be ‘neutral’ in any way, but charged with the implicit absent-present agendas of any literary critic: literature. This is particularly problematic in the context of textile arts, craft, and theories, which are characterised by bringing together people scattered throughout a wide range of disciplines and professions as part of a shared, for the most part, intention of not ‘disciplining’ scholarship on textiles. This scattered nature of scholarship around textiles makes it more easily approachable, or appropriable, by scholars in other disciplines such as literary studies, who, regardless of their most noble intention, will hardly, or at least this is my case, be able to put forward an interdisciplinary approach and terminology that showcases the ‘intra-action’ of the entanglement of media and disciplines involved in their study.

Detail of one of the tapestries in Numero Cromatico’s Exhibition Eternal struggle of my desire (Rome, Museo Nazionale Romano, Crypta Balbi, 2022) © Numero Cromatico

Scholarship on intermediality benefits from a sophisticated theoretical apparatus by now, while interdisciplinarity has become self-evident except by those institutions that seem to have just discovered the term. If as a doctoral student I was told to my surprise that looking at intermedial works involving visual arts and texts did not require any different toolkit, approach, terminology than those already in use in literary studies, I know that today this would not be repeated. And yet, I still find myself uneasy defending my work and presenting it as not as the result of my literary imprinting that I cannot that easily remove while walking around, be this while reading an advert on the tube to work or walking through an exhibition.

What service am I doing to these works then?

I am reading them.

Reading, observing, critically of course, is never a neutral act of criticism. This is the lesson I could learn while looking at these works, in the company of other scholars, artists, designers, artisans, and activists outside literary studies but within and across textiles.

What service am I doing to literary criticism then?

I am raising questions on how we can do it directly and with more respect towards our cross-disciplinary interlocutors who have probably looked at the works that we now look at for a very long time.  It is almost never true that we are filling a gap or looking at something that was never looked at before. And this is why Interdisciplinary Italy is a precious resource: it exists to foster that kind of collaboration, conversations, where every discipline within Italian Studies can enrich one another.

Courtesy © Alessandra Carnaroli

L'articolo The Limits of Literary Criticism and a Textile Poetics of Entanglement sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

There is, of course, a long tradition of popular culture and media engaging with the Comedy and its creator through literature, film, the visual arts, comics, games, commercial brands, and more. So much so that the reception of Dante in popular culture has developed into a research field in itself within the wider domain of Dante studies. What is striking, however, about the Dante fandom – or, at least, what struck me enough to write about it in this book – is that it invites us to rethink Dante’s poem in radically original ways.

So what has the red-hatted Florentine got to do with online fandom?

There seem to be at least two sides to this question.

On the one hand, narratives that re-imagine the Comedy, its world, and its characters can be found on every major fan fiction online repository, from fanfiction.net to Wattpad through Archive of Our Own. They differ wildly in tone, style, and genre, from prose to poetry, from tragedy to comedy, from melodrama to pornography, from epic adventures in the Underworld to intimate love stories – particularly between Dante and Virgil. One of the most popular Comedy-themed fan fictions on Archive of Our Own imagines the adventures of the characters from the Harry Potter saga as they traverse the circles of Dante’s Hell. Another text casts Dante and Virgil as an ordinary couple falling asleep on the couch. Yet another narrates in tercets (!) a sexual encounter between Dante and Virgil on the shore at the base of Mount Purgatory. Circulating online is also a profusion of Comedy-related fan art and illustrations, hosted on platforms like Pinterest, DeviantArt, and tumblr. The latter, in particular, is home to a flourishing Dante-inspired fandom, whose activities range from humorous posts (fig. 1) to webcomics like those by the user binary-bird (fig. 2), who also created a series of illustrations entitled nel mezzo – a little trip through Dante’s Inferno.

On the other hand, the Comedy itself is re-interpreted – in both playful and serious tones – as a work of fan fiction. In October 2014, R.E. Parrish posted a comic on his tumblr blog (fig. 3) in which Dante is depicted as a dreamy fan fiction author who has fallen in love with Virgil. In April 2016, Vox published an article entitled Hamlet, The Divine Comedy, and 3 other pieces of classic literature that are also fan fiction. A month later, The Divine Comedy ranked n. 2 in the article 11 Classics That Are Secretly Fanfiction on Bustle magazine. Between September and October 2021, a post on Tapas Forums entitled Why can’t we call Dante’s Inferno a fanfiction [sic] developed into a 6,000-word debate.

The unfolding of the Comedy’s reception in the world of fandom could thus be summarized through the dichotomy “Dante’s poem and fan fiction” vs. “Dante’s poem as fan fiction”.

Dante’s fandom may very well be the community in which the most radical, playfully irreverent, and wildly creative transformations of Dante and the Comedy are currently taking place. The exploration of this intermedial realm requires interdisciplinary methods blending Dante studies, popular culture studies, and digital ethnography.

We have just begun to scratch the surface.

Fig. 1. A Comedy-themed post on tumblr. 2023. https://www.tumblr.com/kusurrone/721380854177431552/a-sentence-i-didnt-know-existed?source=share

Fig. 2. Webcomic by binary-bird. Dante and Virgil meet Zagreus, the protagonist of Hades, a videogame set in the underworld. 2021. https://binary-bird.tumblr.com/post/641474847486197760/a-hades-divine-comedy-crossover-on-my-dash

Fig. 3. Webcomic by R.E. Parrish. 2014. https://reparrishcomics.com/image/99437760558

L'articolo A Girls’ Night Out with Dante and Virgil: Transforming the Divine Comedy in the Age of Fandom sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

But note: if digital videoessay-making is an ever more important means of academic communication, it is also a powerful medium of research, even a means of thinking. Videoessay-making has been recognized as a powerful tool within digital humanities. I am myself interested in videoessay-making as a form of scholarship in which the scholar shares epistemic agency — the activity of knowing — with technology and automated systems. And I am working on a monograph-equivalent set of films dealing with (and exemplifying) that theme for a series at Lever Press edited by Jason Mittell, whose own ‘videographic book’ on Breaking Bad will soon be published as the first in the series.

As the example of Mittell’s work suggests, the development of videoessay-making has been led from film and media studies. In that world, the practice is referred to as videographic criticism, meaning the audiovisual analysis of audiovisual media. Videographic criticism can take a range of forms, from the illustrated lecture to something closer to artist video, and the number of videoessays produced has multiplied exponentially over the past dozen or so years. Dana Renga and I have argued that videographic criticism is an exciting opportunity for students and scholars of the Italian context (see for example these videoessays by graduate students Erik Scaltriti and Michela Bertossa, and by colleagues Danielle Hipkins and Barbara Zecchi).

My own work has moved away from Italian cinema in recent years, though I adapted a chapter of my book on The Battle of Algiers (Mimesis International, 2019) as a short videoessay, and continue to use the Italian language in my videographic work. My key scholarly concern, now, is precisely with the possibilities of the digital videoessay. I think of videographic criticism as part of a broader move in the academy to adopt ‘creative-critical’ methods in which, instead of the traditional ideal of critical distance, the scholar prefers a kind of critical intimacy that gets up close and personal with its objects of study. In such work, form is not intended to be invisible or transparent — the case with conventional academic prose — but is intended instead to be ‘constitutive of its conceptual argument’. Because the videoessay is still a novel form of scholarly communication, no one is likely to ignore the form it takes, and those suspicious of videographic criticism are right to perceive in it something of a paradigm shift. (Influential practitioner Catherine Grant has described the digital videoessay as an ‘ontologically new’ scholarly form.) What makes current work in videographic criticism so exciting is that we see the aesthetic, political and epistemic stakes of form being worked out and tested in real time. We don’t yet know where the videoessay will go, or where it will take us.

Still from Occupying Time: ‘The Battle of Algiers’ (2018), videoessay by Alan O’Leary

Bio:

Alan O’Leary is Associate Professor of Film and Media in Digital Contexts at Aarhus University, and Visiting Researcher in the Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures, University of Leeds. He has published video essays in [in]Transition, 16:9 and ZFM, and his most recent book is a study of the 1966 postcolonial film classic The Battle of Algiers (Mimesis International, 2019). He is working on a ‘videographic book’ on the poetics of videographic criticism and his ‘Workshop of Potential Scholarship: Manifesto for a parametric videographic criticism’ was published in NECSUS in 2021.

L'articolo The Digital Videoessay: Getting Creative-Critical Audiovisually sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

YouTube logo

Thanks to this project, I will continue my research on Italian youth cultures across time, which began with my PhD. My thesis investigated representations of Italian young people in youth-oriented magazines, films and television programmes in 1965-75, the period that is commonly regarded as marking the birth of a distinctly Italian youth culture. By focusing on visual and written descriptions of young people’s style trends and bodily practices, I outlined the expectations and anxieties that were projected onto this emerging social category. I subsequently concentrated on representations of youth in novels set in Bologna in the early 1990s, focusing on the role of spatial elements, like the city, in the construction of generational identities.

For a cultural historian like myself, to shift the focus from the past to the present is challenging. However, I believe that several assumptions emerging from my previous research can be applied to contemporary youth. First, just like gender, ‘youth’ is a performatively constructed category: it is the reiteration (in the media and elsewhere) of similar practices, acts, gestures, and language that defines what ‘youth’ is, rather than reference to biological age. To analyse popular media discourse around such practices, acts, gestures and language helps us understand what the meaning of ‘youth’ is in different time periods, both as an ideal and as a social subject.

Second, popular media representations contribute to homogenising young people’s practices, values, and desires. Both in the past and in the present, youth has been constructed as a homogenous group, an ‘imagined community’ with common interests as well as common struggles. My current research investigates whether young people’s supposedly greater control over representation in social media allows for a disruption of the fictional homogeneity of ‘youth’ in contemporary societies.

Third, style and the body are fundamental elements through which young people convey their subjectivity and collective identity. Commercial trends can visually express political and social claims, are mostly based on transnational influences, and may question naturalised ideas of sex and gender. In my current project, I investigate whether representations of young people’s style and bodily practices on YouTube mirror a change in ideas about nationality, ethnicity, gender and sexuality in Italian contemporary society.

Italian youth and style: Beat band Equipe 84 in the 1960s (left), and pop rock band Måneskin in 2019 (right).

Fourth, ‘the design, definition and control of spatiality is an active ingredient in the often contested social processes of construction [of youth cultures]’, as Doreen Massey has argued (‘The spatial construction of youth cultures’ in T. Skelton and J. Valentine (eds) Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures, 1998). My current research explores what happens when the space where youth is socially constructed shifts from a physical – the city, the nation – to an online location. What are the consequences of virtual encounters within Italian youth? How does localised content produced in Italian interact with material created in English? How is content in Italian received by Italian and foreign Italian-speaking audiences? These are some of the questions that I will address in my project.

Yet, analysing contemporary youth requires the use of theories (such as Postfeminist Theory and Social Media Studies) and methodologies that I have not yet employed. For example, while my previous studies were based on archival research, I will now make use of interviews to analyse Italian YouTubers’ self-representation strategies and student surveys to examine young people’s reception of YouTube Italia content. By matching my previous expertise with the employment of new theoretical and methodological approaches, my research hopes to enrich our understanding of contemporary representations of Italian identities in popular culture. The examination of social media content as a cultural text aims to help overcome stereotypes, by giving new media the cultural relevance they deserve.

L'articolo Researching Italian Youth Across Time: An Interdisciplinary Approach sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

In re-telling histories of empire, war, borders, and mobility through objects, Daša Drndić, Valeria Luiselli, Maaza Mengiste and Olga Tokarczuk collage together literary, archival and journalistic sources, traces of visual and material culture, song and photography, effectively assembling their books as mobile, living archives on display. Their works start with inventories or lists of contents, and build material archives of their own narration as they simultaneously work to question what these object collections signify, what knowledge they hold, and what purpose their accumulation serves within the construction of each novel. These are narratives that aim to supplement the material notion of the object collection with a sense of creative fabulation. In so doing, they enact an intimate, imaginative archive, mobile and wayward in its methods, that signals new directions in potential re-tellings of historical moments. Through a series object prompts taken from Trieste, Lost Children Archive, The Shadow King and Flights, my current book project shows that a critical understanding of museum practices such as collecting, curation, conservation and display can offer alternative methods of both reading and interpreting the vernacular, amateur or informal archives contained in contemporary world literature texts.

The museum is a constantly active and dynamic agent in creating the narrative of its own collection, and in so doing, creates its own narrative of history. This narrative can shift or it can stay the same, but either way, it requires a huge and collective effort to bolster, maintain, develop or overhaul. Each object in the museum collection is narrativized not only in its accompanying text label, but also through its position in relation to other objects, its physical display (in a case, on a shelf, in a drawer), and of course in relation to the overarching narrative constructed by the space of the building itself. This all combines into an enormous labour of storytelling. I believe that we can read objects, displays, rooms and whole exhibitions in much the same way as we can read literary fiction, and that these parallel processes of reading, writing and interpretation can shed new light on how history is written in both of these narrative spaces: the museum and the novel. Specifically, I want to argue that we can identify a new class of contemporary world literature novels that enact a set of museum practices (collecting, preserving, researching, interpreting, exhibiting) in order to create books that function as mobile object collections on display. If we learn to read texts in tandem with object displays and collections and texts, new strategies of encounter and engagement with both will allow us to enact a shift in what we think of as a museum, and what we think of as a text, and identify where the overlap between the two lies.

References

Daša Drndić, Trieste, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać, London: MacLehose Press, 2012

Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive: A Novel, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019

Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King: A Novel, New York: W. W. Norton, 2019

Olga Tokarczuk, Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft, London: Fitzcarraldo, 2017

The research introduced in this blog piece is funded by a Philip Leverhulme Prize (Languages and Literatures), awarded to the author in 2019.

L'articolo Museum Practices in World Literature sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

(Dziga Vertov, Kynoks: A Revolution, 1923)*

* In Michelson, Annette, and Kevin O’Brien (eds). Kino-eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2008: 17.

Henry Jenkins is Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. Among his books are Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Participatory Culture, By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activists, and most recently, Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change and Comics and Stuff. He blogs regularly at henryjenkins.org and cohosts the podcast, How Do You Like It So Far?

L'articolo Convergence Culture in the Age of Covid 19: A Fever Dream sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

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Of course, this critique is justified, necessary and productive. Nevertheless, it will never be possible to abandon these criticised concepts. I don’t think that their extraordinary longevity is primarily a sign of people’s inability to face a complex reality and an inclination to fall back on easy solutions – that is, simplistic concepts – even though the concepts are indeed sometimes used in simpleminded ways. Instead, concepts insist on forming our thoughts because they correspond to certain basic perceptual inclinations and fulfil vital cognitive needs. Because of our embodied minds, deeply formed by our experiences of a material world where things are definitely inside and outside of each other, where objects and bodies are clearly constantly transferred in space, and where we perceive palpable borders between various areas and materials, we simply cannot avoid thinking in terms of form/content, transfer and borders. Perceiving our own body in the world, we perceive it as a form containing internal substance and sensations, moving around in space and encountering borders of all sorts. And cognition does not appear out of nothing, but it is built on, and evolves from, such perceptions.

Therefore, spatial thinking is vital for cognition in general, including the conceptualization of media and media interrelations. Although sometimes misleading, there is no way of getting rid of ideas about form and content in media, transfer of meaning among minds or among different media, or borders between media. I’d rather argue that these concepts are indispensable for any effort to describe and interpret media and their interrelations. Used in considered ways, they help us to conceptualize complex phenomena. A concept such as media borders is not ‘only metaphoric’, understood as a substitute for something more real; it is ‘necessarily metaphoric’, because we cannot escape the deep and inherent similarity between the outer world and our cognitive spaces.

L'articolo Media Borders in Our Minds sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

However, there are some disciplines whose commitment to investigate interartistic and intermedial cultural practices has been restricted to this day. In postcolonial literary studies, comparative literature and world literature studies, for example, intermediality has not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves. Scholars have only recently, for instance, started to investigate the intermedial aesthetics of the new Anglophone world literature, which includes writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, NoViolet Bulawayo, Teju Cole and Taiye Selasi, to list a few of the most prominent (Birgit Neumann/Gabriele Rippl, Verbal-Visual Configurations in Postcolonial Literature, 2020). The fiction of these transcultural Afropolitan writers exhibits productive intermedial techniques and creative word-image configurations which are based on semiotic and material in-between-ness. These word-image configurations lend themselves to a critical examination of the inequalities and hierarchies that exist in our complex networks of transcultural exchanges. What is more, these intermedial techniques have the potential to unsettle common epistemologies: they manifest new meaning-making processes, imagining worlds beyond global late capitalism, and make visible the unevenly distributed geo-political and socio-cultural power constellations of our neo-liberal world.

Ekphrasis is one of the most productive types of word-image relationships. In this intermedial category, termed intermedial reference (Werner Wolf; Irina O. Rajewsky), only text is present in its medial form. The second medium, image, is evoked via verbal description – Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield in Book 18 of the Iliad is a famous example. According to James A.W. Heffernan’s widely accepted definition, ekphrasis is ‘the verbal representation of visual representation’ (The Museum of Words, 1993, 3). To give some examples: Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo mobilizes ekphrasis in her novel We Need New Names (2013) to question the socio-political conditions that regulate media access and the global circulation of images. She foregrounds the close, but often precarious, ties between subjectivity, materiality and mediality in globalized media landscapes. Bulawayo’s intermedial aesthetics investigates both unstable African postcolonial politics and the powerful role of western mass media and media corporations in world-making by producing reductive, highly stereotypical representations of Africa. In addition to images of documentary TV pictures and pornographic films, Bulawayo’s ekphrases also present African batik painting and masks. These ekphrases invite readers to think about western systems of cultural value, symbolic capital and notions of ‘world’ and to question hidden ideological agendas that legitimize western hegemony.

Another contemporary Anglophone novelist is Teju Cole, an American-Nigerian, whose Every Day Is for the Thief (2007/2014) and Open City (2011) are excellent examples of how contemporary Anglophone world literature engages with today’s media cultures. These works are preoccupied with visuality, practices of seeing and dense networks of intertextual and intermedial references to art. They explore forms and effects of contemporary digital media while simultaneously addressing violence, trauma, memory and diaspora. Their intermedial aesthetics engages readers in meta-representational reflections on the socio-formative impact of visuality. While Every Day Is for the Thief contains a number of black-and-white photographs that depict (seemingly) random vignettes of life in Nigeria’s megacity Lagos, Open City is rife with ekphrastic passages which contemplate the changing nature of writing in the digital age. Both Bulawayo and Cole create open, non-Eurocentric worlds-in-motion that serve as invitations to imagine plural, enmeshed (if uneven) worlds characterized by transcultural entanglements and exchanges, openness and polycentricity, locally situated practices and experiences and global networks. Their ‘worlding’ (Pheng Cheah) involves intermedial literary configurations based on interactions between different media, semiotic systems, poetic traditions, various settings, transcultural characters, multiple perspectives and generic transgressions. The ‘worlding’ of contemporary Anglophone writers invites readers to imagine worlds beyond global neo-capitalism – even if Anglophone world literatures will never be able to escape enmeshment with global market dynamics.

L'articolo Intermediality, Literary Studies and Anglophone World Literature sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.