Introduction to New Perspectives on Material Culture and Intermedial Practice

New Perspectives on Material Culture and Intermedial Practice--a thematic issue of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.3 (2011): http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol13/iss3/ --presents new scholarship 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" (Call for Papers for the journal issue). Following the call for papers, authors discuss the concepts of "materiality" and "(inter)mediality" from various theoretical perspectives in the study of literature, art, philosophy, sociology, and pedagogy and explore texts from a range of genres including the novel, film, painting, comics, the graphic novel, etc. One of several connecting perspectives of the articles is the concept of materiality, with a focus on developments in the digital age. Analyzing different textual orders and forms, authors respond to the challenges emanating from the emergence of digitality and the concomitant impact of (inter)mediality. A central concern is the situation of the "book," its abiding status as a printed object, its digital recasting, and its symbolic status within different ideological systems. In the digital age, we speak of the "end of the book," but the materiality of the book is tenacious, even where new media are concerned. In the discourse about the disappearance of the "physical book," the implicit assumption is that the electronic book is something other than physical. We argue that, at most, what is taking place is a transition to a different materiality, a different set of constraints on sameness, difference, duration, change, and adaptation. The prospect of a new form for the book means that the printed book loses the invisibility and the inevitability that cloak any tool that fulfills its functions: "tools turn out to be damaged, their material unsuitable ... When we discover its unusability, the thing becomes conspicuous. Conspicuousness presents the thing at hand in a certain unhandiness" (Heidegger 68). Thus, with digitality, the "end of the book" stimulates a rediscovery of the printed book. Contrary to the notion that it is in the process of disappearing, we are witnessing the emergence of a parallel materiality: the printed book and the digital book. As the electronic book dangles before us the phantasm of a text reduced to its content of information, we recognize the paratextual roots and branches, implications, and activities of the pre-electronic book. The difference in price and timeliness between the cheap, serialized, or definitive editions of, for example, David Copperfield, had always been noteworthy to the specialist, but these facts had not previously been seen as weighing greatly on the understanding of the work or on the interests of the reader. Now they do. Attention to this kind of materiality draws the study of literature closer to the history of art--a discipline that grounds itself in the physical individuality of the objects it examines--and thus engages us to work in inter- and pluri-disciplinarity. The "book" comprehends both type and token: "three books" without further specification can refer to copies of the same book just as well as it can designate distinct works of literature. As a result, we can talk about David Copperfield or any other "book," we can agree or disagree about its properties without ever having inspected the particular copies on which our opinions are based. This facility does not depend on mass production of practically identical objects. In the manuscript era, Aristotle could talk just as confidently about what was and what was not in the Odyssey without having to point to a particular copy. We may fail to see this as noteworthy. As Martin Heidegger observed, the tool that does its job correctly vanishes, but it should be far more surprising that we can so easily share the reference, considering everything that m