The theory of intermediality in the context of modern humanities

The theory of intermediality is a relevant scientific field attracting an increasing number of researchers in recent years. Such interest is quite natural, because intermediality meets the basic tendencies of modern humanities: the pursuit of interdisciplinarity; high interest in the problems of the media against the background of the active development of digital culture; search for fresh methodological approaches that are appropriate to the new cultural realities. Nevertheless, for all the indisputable merits of the theory, we can say that it contains a number of “fleeting” places that, despite the rather serious developments, so far have not received a final solution and significantly slow down the pace of development of the theory. In particular, at the moment there is no consensus on the conceptual framework of intermediality, in connection with the observed mobility of the typological borders covering a wide variety of conditions (from language arts to political strategies) and the principles of their interaction (multimodality, media convergence and integration, synthesis, crossing, etc.). In turn, intermediality is open to a wide range of the humanities (the theory of communications and cultural studies, philosophy, literature and music theory, art history, film studies, etc.), which makes it difficult to develop a universal method of intermediality analysis. In this paper, the existing points of view on key issues of intermediality (terminology, history, typology and perspectives) are analyzed in order to determine its current state and prospects for the future and establish the place of Russian studies in the general intermedial context. It is particularly significant since domestic science, with its rich tradition in the field of comparative and structural semiotic research (A. Mikhailov, Bakhtin, Lotman, Ilyin et al.), learnt about the theory of intermediality not so long ago (since the 2000s), so the theory is not so widespread in Russia as abroad. It is concluded that a broad approach to the understanding of intermediality and its role in addressing issues of the media continues to be relevant in the humanities today. The ambiguity of the concept “media” highly sought after by modern science has identified three key vectors in the study of intermediality: media technological, cultural-aesthetic and social-communicative. In addition, the potential inherent in it is not to determine this theory as the prerogative of any single discipline. At the same time, there is a growing trend of no search for universal methods of studying intermedial phenomena towards increased specialization, i.e the formation of terminology and methodological principles particularly for various scientific fields. In this respect, broad prospects open up for domestic researchers since intermediality is mainly represented by works on literary criticism in Russia.

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