((( All dies - und viele weitere, vergleichbare Details 1 - sind für sich genommen natürlich keine besonders gravierenden, den Nutzen des Bandes wesentlich schmälernden Mängel. Und auch die oben monierten, weit gewichtigeren Schwächen einzelner Modellinterpretationen schränken den Gesamtwert des Bandes allenfalls graduell ein, der - und dies sei abschließend nochmals betont - in den meisten anderen Belangen erhebliche Meriten besitzt und summa summarum empfohlen wird. Gleichwohl bleibt am Ende ein etwas zwiespältiger Eindruck, hätte sich doch mit ein wenig mehr Sorgfalt und nur geringem Mehraufwand, vor allem aber mit einem insgesamt etwas sensibleren Eingehen auf die tatsächlichen Bedürfnisse der angesprochenen Leser- und Zielgruppen, ein Band vorlegen lassen, der ein noch überzeugenderes, vor allem jedoch plastischeres Bild des Themas hätte entwerfen können. So indes kann man sich, durchaus bedauernd, des Eindrucks nicht erwehren, dass hier doch - ein wenig leichtfertig und nonchalant, zum Teil vielleicht auch zu sehr aus der Elfenbeinturmschau der SpezialistInnen - so manche Chance vertan wurde, einen weit über die engeren Fachgrenzen hinaus relevanten, breite Aufmerksamkeit erregenden Teilbereich der Anglistik eingängiger, in gewisser Weise auch 'massentauglicher' zu präsentieren. " 9 ) E $ ( " 9 6, 67 ' 8 + 0 ( , *% ( - K * - - " ,D * ,% 12 = ) / " % > " " > 0 - #$ " . 0 G- )) The collection Mediality/ Intermediality contains a selection of papers from the 2007 symposium of SAUTE, the Swiss Association of University Teachers of English, held at the University of Zurich. The introduction and eight contributions cover a wide range of topics in the fields of mediality and intermediality studies. Since the 1980s ‘medium’, ‘mediality’ and ‘intermediality’ have 1 Zu nennen wären etwa so manche Tippfehler, selbst im Inhaltsverzeichnis, Inkonsistenzen nach der Neuen Rechtschreibung, z.B. potentiell/ potenziell, usw. Trefflich streiten ließe sich natürlich auch über so manches interpretatorische Detail bzw. dessen Darstellung (z.B. 147, zur "mental elephantiasis" in Ashes to Ashes), speziell jedoch über einige Einlassungen in den - zeitlich mitunter weit zurückgreifenden - historischen Herleitungen, insbesondere in den Beiträgen von Reitz ("State-of-thenation-Satire: Alistair Beaton"; 31) und vor allem auch Schnierer (zur Utopie bzw. Dystopie - 81f.). Zumindest dem Rezensenten merkwürdig scheint, obwohl grammatisch vielleicht korrekt, die Fügung "Dramatiker und -innen" (14). become the new core terms of literary debates - terms which demonstrate the heightened awareness of the material side of the production of meaning and of the relationship between literary text and painting, sculpture, film, architecture, and various forms of music. In the introduction to the volume, Martin Heusser starts off by reminding his readers of Horace’s famous dictum “ut pictura poesis”, which has fuelled the discussion from classical antiquity to the present day. His concise historical overview touches upon the Renaissance paragone, Lessing’s 1766 essay Laokoon, nineteenthand early twentieth-century developments in photography and film as well as the communication theories of the two prominent Canadian figures in media studies, Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis. Werner Wolf, a pioneer and major theoretician of inter/ mediality studies, has contributed the opening essay, which investigates the relevance of the two title concepts to academic studies of English literature and addresses a number of fundamental theoretical and methodological issues. Wolf argues that literature itself is a medium that has influenced other media, and in its turn has also been influenced and transmitted by a plurality of other media. Hence the study of inter/ mediality is actually the study of an essential aspect of literature as such, and Wolf explores ways of integrating inter/ mediality into literary studies and literary theory, especially narratology. Lukas Erne in his contribution on Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet on Stage and Page” compares the differences between the first (1597) and second quarto (1599) with regard to the flat/ round characterization of the nurse. Against the backdrop of the intersections theatricality and literariness, of orality and literacy, he comes to the conclusion that the essential differences between the first and the second quartos are medial in nature and that Shakespeare wrote with the medial differences in mind. Barbara Straumann’s essay “Medial Effects: The Singer and Her Voice in Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark” discusses how the oral mediality of human voice can be represented in a literary text through the mediation of other figures and focalizers and how in Cather’s novel it mediates between the individual and the collective, the USA, whose universal song the individual American female voice sings. In his article “Photography and the Death of the Author in Julio Cortázar’s ‘Blow-Up’” Michael Röösli reads the 1959 short story in the theoretical framework provided by the ‘death of the author’ and convincingly argues that the story’s publication a decade before Barthes’ and Foucault’s essays suggests that a cultural mechanism was at work in the 1960s, which exploited the contradiction inherent in the reception of the photographic medium as representational of the outside world or of the artistic vision of the photographer. Matt Kimmich’s article on the graphic novel adaptation by Mazzucchelli and Karasik’s of Paul Auster’s highly self-referential novel City of Glass examines the visual techniques used to translate Auster’s postmodernist textual universe, which is characterized by a number of crises: the crisis of identity, the crisis of the sign, and the crisis of the reader/ writer. Florence Widmer-Schnyder offers a close reading of Dorothy Wordsworth’s non-fictional travel narrative Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland (1803/ 1874). By tracing the politicaldidactic subtexts and intertextual and intermedial references of this female- authored narrative and by evaluating its proto-feminist strategies, Widmer- Schnyder manages to demonstrate how Dorothy Wordsworth renegotiated the dominant aesthetic discourse of her time. Ladina Bezzola Lambert’s article on “The Art of Anamorphosis in New Historicist Criticism” discusses the new historicist rhetoric - particularly the interplay of anecdotes and familiar canonical literary texts - and detects a close structural relation to the anamorphic depiction of the skull in Holbein’s painting “The Ambassadors.” Finally, Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman undertake an analysis of the intermediality of the Round Table by comparing Edwin Austin Abbey’s 1901 series of murals “The Quest of the Holy Grail” and images of the Round Table from other media, including a late fourteenth-century copy of the illustrated manuscript of Wirnt von Gravenberg’s Arthurian romance Wigalois and John Boorman’s 1981 film Excalibur. Their discussion convincingly demonstrates that representations of the Round Table are a means of charting the ascendancy of the visual over the discursive in political representation during the twentieth century. Ideologies of hierarchy, power, and submission to authority can be registered in the depictions of the Round Table, which by the middle of the European twentieth century reached their apotheosis in the Nazi state. Against the backdrop of Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s concept of ‘remediation’ and its formal double logic of ‘immediacy’ and ‘hypermediacy’, Finke and Shichtman “read backwards and forward between the different media describing struggles to appropriate the image of the Round Table for particular political ends” (141). However, not all authors link their articles to the topical debates in inter/ mediality studies, as Finke and Shichtman do. Likewise, the majority of scholars omit any definition of the basic concept of ‘medium’. This would have been desirable for the very reason that the term is a semantically shifting one. Some contributors, Kimmich and Widmer- Schnyder, for instance, use the term medium, classifying literary genres such as comics and graphic novels, travel narratives and poetry as media (cf. p. 88 and p. 123) - a definition which will certainly be questioned by other literary scholars. Considering the large number of Swiss scholars working in the field of inter/ mediality studies, the collection could have included many more contributions - as a matter of fact, a whole series of volumes on the topic ‘mediality/ intermediality’ could have been published. However, the articles collected for presentation and publication in this carefully edited volume are doubtlessly of great interest to the general reader and specialist alike. )) ) 5 / " % > " " > 7 ' B