Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: The medium of music represents a pioneering force of crossing boundaries on cultural, ethnic, racial, and national levels.Critics such as Wilfried Raussert and Reinhold Wagnleitner argue that music more than any other medium travels easily across borders, language barriers, and creates new cultural contact zones (Raussert 1).With the turn to reception and rise of cultural studies, the field of American Studies has expanded its focus on literature and historical narratives to include a broad range of media and practices.As a transdisciplinary field of investigation, the conjuncture between American Studies and media studies has produced new transnational approaches to the functions, attractiveness, and uses of American culture in the age of a digitally connected world.In our special volume we want to put a particular focus on intermediality and American music as an emerging field in transnational American studies.While intermediality as a theoretical concept has been most widely used with reference to "multiple discourses and modalities of experience and representation, as examined in aesthetic and other humanistic traditions of communication research" (Paech and Schröter, 10, see also Jensen), we are putting our academic spotlight on material mediality (rather than discursive intermediality or institutional intermediality) signaling discursive approaches to media and texts that are interrelated.1 In comparison to communication theorists, we, as transnational American studies scholars, are particularly interested in the interplay between music and other art forms such as literature, painting, photography, video, film, television, graphic novels, and performance cultures.How can we critically analyze, map, and evaluate the nexus between sights, sites, and sounds in different media and genre?How can we trace the effects, exchange, transformations, appropriations, and cultural flows (William Uricchio) as well as processes of (re)mediation (Jay David Bolter, Richard Grusin) of American music?Our volume brings together German scholars and critics in the field of American Studies to investigate the potential of innovative research agenda with a focus on music in transnational contexts. Introduction. Sound and Vision: Intermediality and American Music
DOI: 10.4000/ejas.12384
Authors: Frank Mehring, Eric Redling
Language: English
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2792222899