From the “Mutual Illumination of the Arts” to “Studies of Intermediality”

This article offers an overview of the development of the interdisciplinary study of the interrelations of the arts and media during the past one-hundred years. From a focus on the binary relations of literature and the visual arts, music, and film these investigations turned into what came to be called “Interarts Studies” with a new tendency to include the interrelations of non-verbal arts and also to study configurations of a decidedly non-artistic nature. In the 1990s this would lead to the reconception of the arts as well as the applied arts and some non-artistic genres as media and their interrelations as intermediality. Simultaneously there began full-fledged attempts to construct a theoretical foundation for the study of intermediality (and transmediality) as a humanistic field, emphasizing media combination, intermedial reference, and intermedial transposition, especially adaptation. This article highlights developments in the German- and English-language discourse on these matters.