Intermedial Encounters Between Image, Music and Text: With and Beyond Roland Barthes

The essays in this collection reconsider Roland Barthes as a crucial figure in intermedia studies, arguing that the concepts and forms of analysis he pioneered are of continuing importance for students and scholars working in the field. These essays utilize an interdisciplinary methodology, drawing on Barthes’ own intermedial critical practice, to examine the multiple relationships between art, literature, music, performance and across different languages. The collection places Barthes’ writing in critical dialogue with other theorists, including Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Dick Higgins and Emmanuel Levinas, investigating the work of figures as varied as André Breton, Giordano Bruno, Alain Cavalier, Alfred Hitchcock, Marcel Schwob, W. G. Sebald, Steven Spielberg, Yoko Tawada and Leo Tolstoi. The collection demonstrates that Barthes’ intermedial critical and theoretical practice provides a means of challenging fixed critical narratives and exploring crucial intermedial issues, including how narrative crosses media, the close relationship between image and text throughout history, and how twentieth-century consumer capitalist culture transformed the relationship between image and text.