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

«This volume locates itself neatly in the growing collection of publications on intermediality by relating such practices to Roland Barthes. Barthesian motifs and writerly concerns are found within a variety of intermedial practices, as the analysis moves, historically and globally, across visual, aural and literary cultures. Such an approach is both appropriate and innovative within Barthes Studies and in cultural theory more generally.» (Andy Stafford, Professor of French and Critical Theory, University of Leeds)

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’s own intermedial critical practice, to examine the multiple relationships between art, literature, music and performance and across different languages. The collection places Barthes’s 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 Lev Tolstoy. The collection demonstrates that Barthes’s 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.

Fabien Arribert-Narce is Senior Lecturer in French and Comparative Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Photobiographies: pour une écriture de notation de la vie (2014) and (co-)editor of L’Autobiographie entre autres (2013), Réceptions de la culture japonaise en France depuis 1945 (2016), The Pleasure in/of the Text (2021), Michaël Ferrier: un écrivain du corail (2021), and «Le quotidian au Japon et en Occident» (Revue des Sciences Humaines, vol. 345, March 2022).

Alex Watson is Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Letters, Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan. His major publications include Romantic Marginality (2012) and British Romanticism in Asia (2019), co-edited with Laurence Williams.