Strange as it may seem, Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote, Marc Forster’s film Stranger than Fiction, Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pere Borrell del Caso’s painting “Escaping Criticism” reproduced on the cover of the present volume and Mozart’s sextet “A Musical Joke” all share one common feature: they include a meta-dimension. Metaization – the movement from a first cognitive, referential or communicative level to a higher one on which first-level phenomena self-reflexively become objects of reflection, reference and communication in their own right – is in fact a common feature not only of human thought and language but also of the arts and media in general. However, research into this issue has so far predominantly focussed on literature, where a highly differentiated, albeit strictly monomedial critical toolbox exists.
Metareference across Media remedies this onesidedness and closes the gap between literature and other media by providing a transmedial framework for analysing metaphenomena. The essays transcend the current notion of metafiction, pinpoint examples of metareference in hitherto neglected areas, discuss the capacity for metaization of individual media or genres from a media-comparative perspective, and explore major (historical) forms and functions as well aspects of the development of metaization in cultural history. Stemming from diverse disciplinary and methodological backgrounds, the contributors propose new and refined concepts and models and cover a broad range of media including fiction, drama, poetry, comics, photography, film, computer games, classical as well as popular music, painting, and architecture.
This collection of essays, which also contains a detailed theoretical introduction, will be relevant to students and scholars from a wide variety of fields: intermediality studies, semiotics, literary theory and criticism, musicology, art history, and film studies.