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Title: Intermediality, Rhetoric, And Pedagogy
Author : CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Release Date : January 01, 2011
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
Pages : * pages
Size : 81 KB

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The objective of the thematic issue New Perspectives on Material Culture and Intermedial Practice of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture as stated in the call for papers of the issue is to publish new work about how "intermediality influences the negotiation of culture and education (in theory and application), and how, in turn, cultural and educational practices shape the use of media and their social significance." In this article, we discuss how the notion of intermediality challenges institutions that traditionally "mediate" culture and we introduce the field of rhetoric as a frame of reference for exploring the social and educational significance of new media. During the second half of the twentieth century we have been confronted with different but related "turns" in the human and social sciences: linguistic, cultural, anthropological/ethnographic, visual, interpretive, semiotic, narrative, rhetorical, etc. All these turns emphasize that "there is no such thing as human nature independent of culture" (Geertz 49) and that there is no such thing as culture independent of language. The importance of signs and symbols in our interpretations of reality is emphasized and, more specifically, the cultural construction of meaning both through language and narratives. From this perspective, the focus shifts to the understanding of humans as "symbol-using" (Burke, Language 16), "story telling" (MacIntyre 201) animals, and "living in a world of signs" (Smith i). For Clifford Geertz this implies: "man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning" (5). These webs of significance are increasingly part of a digital and globalized network and this has important consequences for our interpretive analyses of meaning-making processes. Thus we postulate that the above-mentioned "turns" need to be reconsidered in relation to current developments in new media. Mikko Lehtonen comments that in the study of language and culture there has been relatively little attention to the fact that "the past and present of contemporary culture and media are indeed part and parcel of multimodal and intermedial culture and media" (71). Not only has the (digital) processing of information become an important "communicative vehicle" of culture today, "technological applications and intermediality play an important role in developing educational and cultural policies and practices; expanding the stock of shared heritage while maintaining cultural diversity and the multiplicities of identity formation" (Totosy de Zepetnek and Lopez-Varela Azcarate 40). We postulate further that there is a need to study and assess critically how these developments change traditional institutions such as schools, libraries, and museums. There is a strong connection between the advent of postmodernism and larger social and cultural developments: postmodernism moved away from master narratives (i.e., Lyotard) and this has important implications for traditional institutions where these master narratives are/were conserved. It is no coincidence that these developments are also related to the emergence of a discipline such as cultural studies that deflects the attention away from a focus on high culture to a focus on different and contextualized cultures (on the relevance of the comparative and contextual for "comparative cultural studies" and intermediality, see Totosy de Zepetnek, "From Comparative," "The New Humanities," Comparative Literature). One of the most important changes is that traditional institutions are confronted with new forms of institutionalization that need to be more fit to a society that is increasingly confronted with intermediality and the crossing of different cultural boundaries.