Introduction: Intermedial Aesthetics: Korean Literature, Film, and Art

Why do we encounter the current emphasis on transnational and interdisciplinary work? The transnational and the interdisciplinary are often invoked in the same breadth, but what is the relationship between them? Both imply a reframing of scholarship in the name of crossing, moving across borders that have foreclosed an awareness of connections, combinations, intertextual/visual/aural relations that cannot be bounded off by the positing of cultural or geopolitical “areas.” Such crossings resemble the movements of the intermedial, which, in our view, can serve to place the transnational and the interdisciplinary in a closer, constitutive relationship with each other. Leena Eilittä summarizes Irina Rajewsky’s definition of “intermedial coexistence” as follows:

Media combination points to those works of art which benefit from two or three more forms of art, such as opera, film or the photo novel. Media change highlights works of art that transform one form of art into another, such as takes place in the filming of literature. The third form of intermediality draws attention to works of art in which there is reference to another artwork or to another artistic system altogether. This form of intermediality comes up, for example, in literary texts which describe a painting or piece of music.¹

Combination, change, reference to another system—like the transnational and the interdisciplinary, the intermedial brings into relief a network of disparate but related forms. The articles that make up this special issue of The Journal of Korean Studies show how an examination of movements across media can open up new ways of engaging in transnational, interdisciplinary work on Korea.

The transnational seeks to move beyond comparison of the bounded or bordered areas that inform the notion of an international. The “trans” questions the border policing brought to bear by the latter in its maintaining of the nation-form. And this questioning, in turn, calls for a consideration of the notion of culture, a term which, of course, bears relation to the nation, and its accompanying essentialisms. What is the relation between the transnational and the transcultural? What do we seek via the transnational, if not to move beyond the existing critique of the nationalizing gesture?

Transnational work often examines the networks, strands, discursive movements and rearticulations that interrogate the imposition of borders. We would also note that the notion of rearticulation implies some sort of stop, or at least pause, and, involves that other accounting of difference in carrying across—translation. How does translation, and the notion of the translingual, account for the movement of media across languages? Is intermediality itself a form of translation in a general sense? The call for Korea-related transnational work, made so frequently, cannot really proceed without a consideration both of the translingual and of medial combinations that work their way through cultural production (for example, the description of a European painting in a modernist literary text written in colonial Korea).

As for the disciplines, they have often been defined in relation to a single form of art: painting, literature, music, film, to name a few. The intermedial, in its three modes, invokes a form of interdisciplinarity: a combination of different media associated with the disciplines. This combination informs a considerable body of artistic work itself (if not, sometimes in almost unnoticed ways, all cultural production). At the same time, interdisciplinarity is usually harnessed to method. The move across disciplines, the combinatory approach this implies, entails a move across media, sometimes in easily discernible ways (the combination of art history and literature, for example) and sometimes in more general frame, if we think, say, of the kinds of materials (sounds, images, texts) and approaches that define anthropology in relation to those that make up film studies. The call to the interdisciplinary, like that to the transnational, requires an engagement with the intermedial.

This special issue of The Journal of Korean Studies takes up the question of what lies in between and across the large spectrum of media that includes literature, film, photography, art exhibition, and technology in their interactions with each other and as inflected by the colonial and postcolonial histories...