Transmediations: Communication Across Media Borders

This collection offers a multi-faceted exploration of transmediations, the processes of transfer and transformation that occur when communicative acts in one medium are mediated again through another. While previous research has explored these processes from a broader perspective, Salmose and Elleström argue that a better understanding is needed of the extent to which the outcomes of communicative acts are modified when transferred across multimodal media in order to foster a better understanding of communication more generally. Using this imperative as a point of departure, the book details a variety of transmediations, viewed through four different lenses. The first part of the volume looks at narrative transmediations, building on existing work done by Marie-Laure Ryan on transmedia storytelling. The second section focuses on the spatial dynamics involved in media transformation as well as the role of the human body as a perceptive agent and a medium in its own right. The third part investigates new, radical boundaries and media types in transmediality and hence shows its versatility as a method of analyzing complex and contemporary communicative discourses. The fourth and final part explores the challenges involved in transmediating scientific data into the narrative format in the context of environmental issues. Taken together, these sections highlight a range of case studies of transmediations and, in turn, the complexity and variety of the process, informed by the methodologies of the different disciplines to which they belong. This innovative volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars in multimodality, communication, intermediality, semiotics, and adaptation studies.

Niklas Salmose is an Associate Professor of English at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He has published and presented internationally on nostalgia, Nordic noir, Hitchcock, cinematic style in fiction, modernism, the Anthropocene and Hollywood, animal horror, intermediality and sensorial aesthetics in fiction. He co-edited an issue on the Anthropocene for the journal Ekfrase 2016, a special issue on contemporary nostalgia for the journal Humanities 2018 and a book on experimental Swedish filmmaker Eric M. Nilsson 2019. At Linnaeus University, he is a member of the Linnaeus University Center of Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS).

Lars Elleström is Professor of Comparative Literature at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He presides over the Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies and chairs the board of the International Society for Intermedial Studies. Elleström has written and edited several books, including Divine Madness: On Interpreting Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts Ironically (2002), Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality (2010), Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics among Media (2014), and Transmedial Narration: Narratives and Stories in Different Media (2019). He has also published numerous articles on poetry, intermediality, semiotics, gender, irony, and communication.