10.13125/2039-6597/4443
application/pdf
2039-6597
4443
20
en
urn:nbn:it:unica-26945
Mattia Petricola
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Between
Charles S. Peirce
«Everything is intermedial». A Conversation with Lars Elleström
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
10
Essay
2020-11-30
2020-11-30
2020-11-30
2020-12-07
27-45
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Mattia Petricola
2020/11/30
10.13125/2039-6597/4443
27
University of Bologna
2039-6597
20
Charles S. Peirce
45
urn:nbn:it:unica-26945
«Everything is intermedial». A Conversation with Lars Elleström
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/4443/4546
10
          «Everything is intermedial»:
       A Conversation with Lars Elleström

           Lars Elleström, Massimo Fusillo, Mattia Petricola



Abstract
      Lars Elleström needs no introduction to intermediality and comparative
literature scholars. Massimo Fusillo and Mattia Petricola had a conversation
with him just a few weeks before the publication of his new, major theoretical
work. The conversation discusses the evolution of Elleström’s theory over the
last decade, his formation and influences, Peirce’s semiotics, the history of
intermediality, and the notion of media literacy.

Keywords
     Intermediality, Transmediality, Semiotics, Interart studies, Total Work of
Art, Truthfulness, Narrative Theory, W.J.T. Mitchell, Werner Wolf, Richard
Wagner, Charles S. Peirce.




Between, vol. X, n. 20 (Novembre/November 2020)
ISSN 2039-6597
DOI: 10.13125/2039-6597/4443
                                     Between, vol. X, n. 20 (Novembre/November 2020)




     «Everything is intermedial»:
  A Conversation with Lars Elleström

     Lars Elleström, Massimo Fusillo, Mattia Petricola


     As the author of a number of publications that have redefined the
theory of intermediality over the last decade, the director of the
Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies,
and the chair of the board of the International Society for Intermedial
Studies (ISIS), Lars Elleström needs no introduction to intermediality
and comparative literature scholars. Massimo Fusillo and Mattia
Petricola had a conversation with him just a few weeks before the
publication of his new, major theoretical work.

     Mattia Petricola: It has been ten years since the publication of
your groundbreaking article The Modalities of Media (Elleström 2010).
Where would you like to begin this conversation? From ten years ago
or from today?

      Lars Elleström: These two options are actually strongly
connected, since I have just submitted the proofs for a follow-up study
of The Modalities of Media (Elleström 2020), in which I update and
considerably expand my theory from ten years ago. No matter what I
wrote and published after the publication of the Modalities in 2010, this
continues to be my most read and quoted study, and will probably
continue to be read. It is relatively short, you can read it in a few hours,
whereas my new article is ninety pages long. Two years ago, I realized
that the Modalities would remain an important part of my research, so I
decided to pick up where I left off eight years before. That article was a
breakthrough for me on more than one front. Although I had already



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Lars Elleström, Massimo Fusillo, Mattia Petricola, «Everything is intermedial»



published internationally before, it was thanks to the Modalities that
scholars started to notice me. More importantly, it was the point of my
research on intermediality where everything finally came together. I
had been working for decades on questions similar to those that I
tackle in the Modalities; however, I had been unable to find a truly
personal approach to these questions within the interart studies
framework that was dominant at the time. I knew that there was
something important there but I just could not find a way to make
concepts work. It was only when I moved to intermedial studies and
semiotics that everything finally changed.

     MP: When and how exactly did semiotics come in? Was it already
part of your background?

     LE: I have been fascinated with semiotics for a long time. I had
worked—and struggled—with it several times before the Modalities. I
had abandoned it more than one time, and more than one time I had
come back to it. Everything began a little more than thirty years ago,
when I was a PhD student in comparative literature. I was very
interested in semiotics back then. However, it was mainly based on
Saussure. On the one hand, I thought it was an invaluable method for
understanding language; on the other hand, I found Saussure’s
language-centered attitude to be quite problematic. Of course,
Saussure’s semiotics is supposed to be language-centered, but this
didn’t really match my broader interest in other art forms and their
interaction. I think I have been stuck for quite a long time, perhaps for
decades, coming back to semiotics and then leaving it, coming back to
interart studies and leaving them, coming back to semiotics once again
and so on. It was only when I started studying Peirce that I finally
found a way in, so to speak.
     Even though I had obviously known his work for a long time, my
knowledge was only textbook-based, elementary and simplified. This
is how notions are supposed to be treated in textbooks, of course. The
problem is that Peirce’s theory of signs was often adapted in textbooks
to match Saussure’s terminology. Sometimes, for instance, one reads in


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a textbook that, according to Peirce, symbols are arbitrary signs. Oops!
That’s what we are used to in Saussure, but that is not at all how
Pierce’s theory works. He defines symbols as signs based on habits,
conventions, or even laws. Once I learned more about Peirce, I realized
that there was a way to actually grasp the complexity not only of the
arts but of communication in general, along all the spectrum of its
manifestations. This is what got me out of the impasse I had found
myself in.

    MP: So Peirce was the catalyst of the breakthrough that led to
your 2010 study.

    LE: It was one of them, definitively.

    MP: And what were the others?

     LE: The other catalysts were the paradigm shift from interart
studies to intermedia studies and the developments in the latter field.
A couple of decades ago, many people began to broaden the scope of
the research on arts and media, studying the interrelations not only
between the arts but also between the arts and other media types.

      Massimo Fusillo: The paradigm shift from interart studies to
intermedia studies was absolutely fundamental. Interart studies were
strictly focused on a sort of one-to-one comparison between art forms,
without really taking into consideration the broader communication
system of which these art forms were part.

    LE: Exactly. The paradigm of the ‘sister arts’.

     MF: A paradigm in which you only compare forms of expression
that are similar and related to each another. Related in the way
members of a family (sister arts) are related. This framework does not
allow one to take into account the complex and conflictual nature of
our communication system.


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Lars Elleström, Massimo Fusillo, Mattia Petricola, «Everything is intermedial»




     LE: Interart studies were of course grounded in the 18th century
idea that literature and art scholars should be interested exclusively in
what today we call highbrow art. There is nothing wrong with
highbrow art, of course; I love highbrow art. This is not the problem.
The problem is that you just cannot understand mediality if you only
focus on a very, very small section of the very, very large system of
culture and communication. A couple of decades ago, it became quite
clear for many scholars that you cannot stick to such a narrow
perspective and focus only on the ‘fine arts’. You need to enlarge your
view to film, comics, graffiti and so on, even to cookery, perhaps. It
also became clear that there were technological transformations, like
the rise of the Internet, that needed to be taken into account in order to
really understand culture and communication. I was fascinated by the
complexity of these new research areas that aimed to enrich and
transform the study of the interrelations between the sister arts.

     MP: In the Modalities there seem to be two perspectives on media-
interrelations with which you are particularly engaged: Mitchell’s
(1986) on the one hand and Wolf’s (1999) on the other.

     EL: Mitchell and Wolf were influential in a sort of paradoxical
way, because they are very different thinkers. Somehow, I wanted to
take what was good in their respective theories, while at the same time
avoiding what I thought was not that good in them. Mitchell
constantly argues for the idea that ‘all media are mixed media’. He
always tries to open up new perspectives, to make you understand that
mediality is a slippery subject, that everything is embedded in a
complex web of political, cultural, historical, and aesthetic factors. This
was very intriguing to me. On the other hand, Mitchell is reluctant to
make categorizations or give definitions. The idea that all media are
mixed media was an excellent starting point, but I wanted to add
something. Yes, all media are mixed media, but media are not all
mixed in the same way. I wanted a little more structure. And Wolf, on
the other hand, is all about structure. He manages to be very


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systematic without disregarding the complexity of culture. He is
systematic without being a structuralist. That meant something to me. I
felt that I belonged to both these schools of thought. I really think that
the world must be understood as systematically as possible, while at
the same time acknowledging the incredible complexity of the mind, of
culture, of knowledge, of communication.
      My research as a whole takes as its starting point the idea that
virtually all forms of communications can and should be understood in
terms of intermediality and multimodality. More than ten years ago, I
realized that if you take Mitchell’s theory of media and follow it to the
bitter end, so to speak, it becomes virtually impossible to find some
form of communication that is not intermedial or multimodal. At first,
this way of thinking may seem counterproductive. One might think
that, if you do not draw the line somewhere, your theory becomes a
mess. If you say that everything is intermedial or multimodal, it seems
like you become unable to make any meaningful distinction. And this
is exactly where Peirce came in. His theory of signs combines a very
clear conceptual framework, which makes it possible to see clear
differences and make categorizations, with a radical and pragmatic
openness towards the complexity of any form of communication. This
allowed me to reconcile model-making with an open attitude in which
I do not necessarily need to draw the line somewhere. Sure, Peirce
sometimes contradicts himself, but one of his famous definitions
remains an excellent starting point:

        A sign is something which stands to somebody for something
     in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates
     in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more
     developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of
     the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object (Peirce 1960:
     par. 2.228).

     MF: Since we are on the subject of signs and categorizations—I
find it fascinating that in your work distinctions are always very
clear—I have a question about indexicality. I have been working on



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Lars Elleström, Massimo Fusillo, Mattia Petricola, «Everything is intermedial»



photography recently and, as you know, there are many indexical
interpretations of photography. In his L’acte photographique, Philippe
Dubois (1983) argues that, starting form Duchamp’s ready-mades,
indexicality has become widely diffused in performance, installation,
and contemporary art in general, where there seems to be a refusal of
representation in favor of indexes determined by contiguity, as well as
a fascination for what one may call the pre-semiotic level of
communication. I believe that Peirce’s notion of indexicality could
really illuminate the study of contemporary art. Do you have any
thoughts on these matters?

     LE: There are, of course, many ways of using the term
‘indexicality’. I would say that, in a broad perspective, indexicality
generates representation in the strictly semiotic sense of the word. It
makes something stand for something else. For Dubois, perhaps – I’m
not familiar with his work – as well as for many other authors,
representation is much more related to iconicity. In a painting, for
example, a painted horse stands for a real horse.

     MF: Or, in the theater, an actor stands for a character. On the
other hand, in performance, Marina Abramovich stands for herself. She
refuses the idea of impersonating a character and stands as herself, for
herself.

     LE: This is a good example of how basic semiotic types can be
used to understand complex forms of art, even whole art movements.
The difficult thing is—and this is one of the things I really struggle
with when I write—that sign-types can be used, produced, and
perceived on so many different levels and in so many different grades.
The index-icon-symbol trichotomy may appear simple at first, but you
soon realize that signs are never just signs. There are always chains of
signs. As soon as you interpret a sign, then, you have to move on to the
next, and this might change your previous interpretation. We can say,
for example, that language is basically symbolic; we cannot understand
a language unless we are familiar with its symbolic system. But then a


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whole world of sign functions opens up to you. There are, for example,
a lot of metaphors on the cognitive level, and this is where iconicity
comes in. As we know from court trials, language also leads to indices.
Through very sophisticated procedures, you can transform what one
says into indices, thus connecting it to the real world.
     When the analog camera was supplanted by digital photography,
it became easy—and popular—to say that there is no connection
between photography and indexicality; that there is no truthfulness in
photography, only construction. This probably contributed to making
indexicality the most under-researched of the sign-types. Things have
become even more complicated today, but I believe that the idea of a
connection between photography and the exterior world is still valid,
even in the digital age.

     MP: When talking about photography, you put it in relation with
truthfulness, which is a notion you have worked on (Elleström 2018).
How does your study on truthfulness fit into the more general
framework of your research?

     LE: It is something that emerged from my research on indexicality
which, in turn, derives from my work on the Modalities. Right after
writing the Modalities I decided to continue working on the concepts
that I posited there, so I broadened the area and dug deeper. After
focusing on iconicity, I moved on to indexicality. During that same
period, several of my colleagues became very interested in matters
related to indexicality. A wide international debate on subjects like
fake news and misinformation was also beginning. I had colleagues
working on education in the natural sciences, or on communication in
court trials, for example. In the end, such studies try to answer the
question ‘how do you get things right?’, so to speak. How do you find
the murderer? How do you really know things? To sum up, I wanted to
write about indexicality because it was part of the framework that I
had sketched in the Modalities, and I was also strongly influenced by
my colleagues and by what was happening in the world. These are
now some of the most important lines of inquiry at the Linnaeus


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Lars Elleström, Massimo Fusillo, Mattia Petricola, «Everything is intermedial»



University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies, where I
work. As you know, I am quite theoretical in my approach, but it
comforts me to know that matters related to indexicality are extremely
close to real-world matters.

     MF: Which leads us to the relation between our research and the
non-academic community, a subject that I would gladly explore with
you. But first, since we are talking about some of the key terms around
which your research revolves, I would like to ask you a question about
one of them: meaningfulness. In a recent book (Elleström 2019) you
define narration as a temporal sequence of events that are «interrelated
in a meaningful way»1. While I agree with this definition, I tend to ask
myself: how can experimental forms of mediality fit into this
framework? Experimental media, by definition, constantly push the
very limits of mediality, and I think that experimental art and literature
have been challenging the notion of ‘meaningfulness’ at least since
Joyce’s Ulysses and are still doing so today. Can we still see narration
as a series of events that are meaningfully interrelated? You also apply
the notion of narration to the experience of a sequence of smells or
tastes2. We can construct a meal as a narration but, again, how does

      1
        «I propose defining a narrative as a virtual sphere, emerging in com-
munication, containing events that are temporally related to each other in a
meaningful way. Thus, the core of a narrative is exactly this: represented
events that are temporally interrelated in a meaningful way. As the core consists
of several elements, it might also be described as a scaffold. I also suggest
that a whole virtual sphere containing such a core and normally also other
media characteristics should be called a narrative and that the scaffolding
core should be called a story. Narration should simply be understood as the
communication of narratives» Elleström 2019: 37 (italics in the original text).
      2
        «I presume that it would also be possible, in principle, to construe lan-
guage systems mediated by taste or smell. In practice, however, they would
probably be rather inefficient as a speedy decoding of symbols requires
quickly performed sensory discriminations. However, taste and smell can no
doubt be used to create at least rudimentary narratives. A well-planned meal



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this relate to meaningfulness? I think that meaningfulness can be quite
a problematic notion, especially when one aims at constructing a
coherent and totalizing theory of communication.

     LE: The short answer to your questions is: it is all in the eyes of
the beholder. Or in the nose of the smeller. I believe that an important
characteristic of narration is that events are arranged in such a way as
to make sense, in some ways. As to give the sense that certain things
belong together, so to speak. That is why the study of narration has
become so important in fields quite far from literary studies, like
psychotherapy. To understand things means to interrelate them. It is
true, on the other hand, that I left the idea of ‘meaningful interrelation’
quite open in that little book, and I did that for two reasons. Firstly, I
wanted that book to be concise; secondly, I thought that attempting to
give a more precise definition would lead me too far away from the
book’s conceptual core. This is one of those cases where I go back to the
fundamental definition of sign that I mentioned earlier. If we think
about the events that are represented in a narrative, we can say—
simplifying a bit—that each event is represented through sets of signs
that are, in turn, interconnected. Narrative events are the result of a
concatenation of signs that for someone, at some point, means
something. In this sense, different people can interpret a certain sign
system as being narrative or non-narrative. One person perceives
something as a narrative, another doesn’t. In someone’s mind
determinate sets of events interrelate meaningfully, in someone else’s
they don’t. This is not simple relativism. To me, this is the most
accurate way to understand how minds work. There is no such thing

with several courses served in a certain order may be construed as narrative
to the extent that tastes and taste combinations may be developed, changed,
and contrasted in such a manner that gives a sense of meaningfully interre-
lated events. A series of scents may be presented in such a way that repre-
sents, say, a journey from the city through the woods and to the sea, includ-
ing encounters with people and animals with smells that reveal certain activ-
ities» Elleström 2019: 56.



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Lars Elleström, Massimo Fusillo, Mattia Petricola, «Everything is intermedial»



as a set of signs that has the same meaning for everybody and there is
no such thing as a narrative that is a narrative for everybody.
However, in a more precisely defined context, where a group of people
share what Stanley Fish—an author who was very influential on me, as
he was for many people doing research in the ‘80s—called an
‘interpretive community’, there is certainly more intersubjectivity
when it comes to interpreting signs and understanding narratives as
narratives. Nevertheless, the notion of meaning no doubt remains
problematic. Therefore, I nowadays often prefer to reason in terms of
‘cognitive import’ to point to a broader and less value-laden idea about
things going on in the mind in less determinate ways. Much
communication no doubt results in ‘cognitive import’ in the perceiver’s
mind without being ‘meaningful’ in a narrower sense.

      MF: Another fundamental aspect of your research is the key role
that music plays in it, whereas intermedial studies usually tend to
privilege audiovisual media. Like you, I am a music lover. Do you
think that Wagner’s utopia of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of
art, has something to do with intermedial studies? Or is it confined to
Wagner’s aesthetic theory? In other words: can Wagner still tell us
something about the synergy between media?

      LE: I am sure that Wagner has something to say to intermedia
scholars. Unfortunately, my research has led me quite far away from
these regions. My opinions on Wagner depend more on my personal
tastes in music than on my work in intermedia studies. I have listened
to Wagner a lot over the years, but I have not read his writing for a
long time. I have found out that if I tackle such questions in my
writing, it becomes difficult to make my theory work as general model
for the study of communication. Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk is probably
one of the earliest attempts to create a work of art that crosses all kinds
of border. Such attempts have been repeated over and over, for
example during modernism, then with the avant-garde movements, all
the way through the ‘60s. Since Wagner, there has been a perpetual
drive for some artists to embrace more and more media in a totalizing


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work of art. Does this totalizing approach works? I think this is up to
each of us to answer. There is a bit of a paradox here: I research
intermediality, studying any kind of communication and any kind of
media border-crossing. However, when it comes to my personal taste, I
am quite conservative. I work with intermediality not necessarily
because I like so-called intermedial works of art—a category that
changes from historical frame to historical frame and from culture to
culture. I work with multimodality and intermediality because they are
general conditions for all communication that are vital to understand.

     MP: Especially when one reflects on the genealogy of the
intermediality theory, Wagner cannot be ignored. When did we start to
think about intermediality from a theoretical perspective? In respect to
this question, I found it fascinating that, in the Modalities, you mention
Moses Mendhelssohn’s On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and
Sciences (1997 [1757]). Were you attempting to draw a genealogy of
your own research there? After the Modalities, have you come across
other authors that helped you reconstruct a genealogy for your work?
Was genealogy one of your concerns?

     LE: I have never published anything that claims to tackle the
history or genealogy of interart/intermedial studies. Claus Clüver
(2009; 2016 [2007]), among others, did quite a lot of research in that
direction. I think that much of the modern genealogy of interart
studies, covering approximately the last 100-150 years, remains hidden
for many, since it mostly developed in Germany. In my new version of
the Modalities, I do write a little bit more about the historical
background of my research. I also write on Roman Jakobson, whom I
neglected ten years ago. But it was never my ambition to tackle these
subjects. From a broad perspective, one might think about the history
of intermediality as developing in parallel along two lines, one
scholarly and one artistic, so to speak. We should ask ourselves two
questions: how long have intellectuals and scholars been thinking and
writing about such issues? And how long have artists been practicing
intermediality? Wagner obviously belongs to both these lines. From


                                                                                37
Lars Elleström, Massimo Fusillo, Mattia Petricola, «Everything is intermedial»



these same two lines, in a way, two different approaches within the
field of intermedial studies have developed. Dick Higgins was perhaps
the first person to use the term ‘intermedia’ in a theoretical text. There
are some scholarly ambitions in his work, but his thought is much
more rooted in artistic practice than in academic reflection. So much
important theory has been made from a perspective similar to
Higgins’. While going in somewhat different directions, these two lines
of inquiry cross-fertilize each other. They help each other answer
questions like: what is an intermedial work of art? In which ways can
artworks be intermedial?
      For my part, I feel I belong to the scholarly, academic line. Music
gives me immense satisfaction, pleasure, and well-being; however, my
interest for semiotics and communication led me to put aside a direct
engagement with aesthetics and the analysis of works of art. I feel that
I belong to a long scholarly tradition in the humanities in which people
think about the arts in very abstract ways, and I would like to spread
this kind of knowledge to other research areas as well. For example, I
try to communicate with the field of multimodal studies, which is not
that far away from the field of intermedia studies. It is made up of
scholars working mostly on language and education. It did not take me
long to realize that many of these otherwise brilliant people, who work
in a neighboring discipline, have no clue about what the humanities
have been finding out about multimodality for many years. One
possible mission of my work might be to try to write something that
can reach at least a few disciplines beyond intermedia studies, so that
they can cross-fertilize each other.
      This spirit of border-crossing between disciplines is also part of
my background. I approached the study of literature and the arts quite
late in my life. When I was young I was all into maths, physics,
chemistry, and the natural sciences.

     MP: You mentioned this in one of your previous interviews
(Pethő 2018). You said that, at one point, you had to abandon these
interests to focus on literature and philosophy. Do you think that these
interests have somehow remained active in your scholarly personality?


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It is not by chance that a literary scholar with an interest in
mathematics becomes a semiotician, I think.

    LE: I do not believe in chance either. After all, Peirce was a
mathematician.

    MP: And taxonomy and categorization, which are among the
main goals of your research, are also two of the main objectives of the
natural sciences as an intellectual enterprise.

       LE: I am sure that I have been deeply influenced by those
interests. I still read a lot of popular science books. However, I believe
that the gap between the humanities and the hard and natural sciences
cannot be bridged easily. On the other hand, I do believe that
humanities scholars have a lot to learn from the methodological
approaches and the ambition to create models that animate these
disciplines. I mean, I create models; that is what I do, all the time. My
model of the modalities of media is actually a conglomerate of a lot of
different models. Anyhow, what fascinates me the most about working
in the humanities is that, contrarily to what happens in the hard and
natural sciences, we will never find the ‘x’ particle. Our work is not
about finding things like that; the difficult questions will always be
pushed forward and the truth will always be postponed over and over
again. Nevertheless, I think that we can and should strive towards
frameworks that are increasingly fertile, and this is where models come
in. A model does not aim to represent something as it really is. It
represents certain sets of relations. This, in turn, makes it possible for us
to understand things in a better way. If we make a model of climate
change, in fifty years we will know if that model was correct. This is
not the case with a model of intermedia relations. We will never know
if it is right or wrong, but we will certainly know if it has been useful
or not.

    MP: Which leads us to the relation between our research and the
non-academic community that Massimo mentioned earlier. Artists like


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Lars Elleström, Massimo Fusillo, Mattia Petricola, «Everything is intermedial»



Peter Greenaway (2011) constantly argue for the need of a better visual
literacy among people. We are painstakingly trained to understand
written forms of communication but we are never really trained to
understand images. When we go to a museum and see a painting—this
is Greenaway’s classic example—the first thing we often tend to do is
read the little plaque on the side of the painting which contains the
artist’s name and the painting’s title. In other words, our visual literacy
is not nearly as developed as our linguistic literacy. Have you ever
thought about literacy in general and media literacy in particular? One
of the books that you quote in the Modalities has to do with the
construction of critical media literacy among students (Semali –
Pailliotet 1998). Do you see a relation between your work and media
literacy?

      LE: Yes, I often think about media literacy. There certainly is a
connection between my work and the notion of media literacy. Several
of my colleagues with whom I often discuss my research work with
education, communication, and mass media. They are deeply involved
with questions concerning media literacy. Even if we start from
different premises, our respective studies meet at some point. Those
who study media literacy often start from a practical, hands-on
perspective, whereas I start from a more abstract point of view. It is not
my academic style to work in such a way as to make my ideas readily
applicable in the real world, but questions about literacy are always in
my mind. In the end, what I think and write must have some practical
consequence, although I am not inclined to link the theoretical and the
practical levels myself. I am very happy, though, that several people
who research media literacy know my work. As I said, cross-
fertilization between disciplines is one of the aims of my research, so I
am truly glad when my publications reach readers outside the field of
intermedia studies.

     MP: We could conclude our conversation with two very classic,
interview-like questions. The first question is aimed at students and
PhDs who are just approaching intermedia studies: what advice would


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you give to a younger version of yourself, knowing what you know
today? Is there any advice that you usually give to your students? Are
there any suggestions or hopes that you would like to transmit to the
readers of this conversation?

     LE: The first thing that came to my mind while you were asking
these questions is: je ne regrette rien! But seriously, in hindsight it would
be easy for me to say things like: if I had not been engaged in writing
for newspapers, I might have saved some time; If I had not spent much
of my time studying Swedish poetry, perhaps I would have reached
international recognition sooner. The only problem is that, at the time I
was doing those things, it was impossible for me to make up my mind
about my goals. I followed my instincts and my interests as they
transformed over the years. When I was eighteen I was not even that
interested in literature. I felt embarrassed when people talked about
poetry! But when I started my university studies, the only thing I knew
was that I was not interested in maths and the natural sciences as much
as before. I had a sort of existential crisis. I felt bad for many years and
the only things that kept me going were reading, listening to music,
working, and studying philosophy. These interests kept me alive and,
at the time, I had no idea where they would lead me. After four years
of university studies, I hardly knew what a PhD was. I had only very
vague ideas about what it meant to be a doctoral candidate and to
work in a university. Nevertheless, I had the opportunity to work
along this path, and that is what I did. In the end, what I would say to
the person I was thirty or forty years ago probably is: well, Lars, you
may be lucky! Even though you have no idea of where you are
heading, things may work out quite well anyway. Also, I think that all
the detours I made in my professional life, doing this and that, inside
and outside academia, not really knowing where I was going, and
being interested in so many different subjects as an academic, were all
invaluable things for me. Perhaps it would be too simplistic to sum
everything up in a cheesy slogan like ‘just follow your heart’—even if,
in a way, this is what I am saying. Or perhaps I should say: OK, follow
your heart, but also, do not forget to work really hard. I think a lot


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about how lucky I am to be able to live the life I live, spending my time
studying what I love and being paid for it. I think that one must be
allowed to make mistakes and take many wrong turns. Unfortunately,
the current academic system, while having more than one positive
side, often does not allow for this anymore. We must provide the
opportunity for people in general—and for young researchers in
particular—to wander around a little bit more and to work from a
more interdisciplinary perspective.

     MP: Second question: where do you go from here? What are your
next projects?

      LE: I will go on developing the research that I began ten years ago
with the Modalities. I have already mentioned that my new study on
the modalities of media is about to be published. There is some
research left to do on symbolicity, so I will write an article on
symbolicity. After this, I will do everything all over again, one more
time, trying to put everything together in a major publication. There
are so many things that still need to be developed. I think this research
will keep me busy for quite some time, maybe until my retirement. We
will see.




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                             Works Cited
Clüver, Claus, “Interarts Studies: An Introduction”, Media inter Media:
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    el Askander - Jørgen Bruhn - Heidrun Führer, Lund, Intermedia
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Dubois, Philippe, L'acte photographique et autres essais, Bruxelles, Labor,
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Elleström, Lars, “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding
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Elleström, Lars, “Coherence and truthfulness in communication:
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Elleström, Lars, “The Modalities of Media II: An Expanded Model for
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Lars Elleström, Massimo Fusillo, Mattia Petricola, «Everything is intermedial»



Mitchell, William J.T., Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago-London,
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                                       The Author
Lars Elleström

       Lars Elleström is Professor of Comparative Literature at
Linnaeus University (Sweden). He leads the Linnaeus University
Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS) and chairs the
board of the International Society for Intermedial Studies (ISIS). His
latest publications include, among others, The Modalities of Media II: An
Expanded Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations (2020) and
Transmedial Narration: Narratives and Stories in Different Media (2019).

        Email: lars.ellestrom@lnu.se

Massimo Fusillo

    Massimo Fusillo is Professor of Literary Criticism and
Comparative Literature at the University of L’Aquila and member of



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the Academia Europaea. He is the author of The Fetish: Literature,
Cinema, Visual Art and the coeditor of Imaginary Films in Literature.

      Email: massimo.fusillo@gmail.com

Mattia Petricola

       Mattia Petricola is postdoc research fellow in comparative
literature at the University of L’Aquila (Italy). His research interests sit
at the crossroads of thanatology, speculative fiction, and media studies.
He has published articles on Peter Greenaway, Bill Viola, Philip K.
Dick, and the notion of spectrality in media studies. He is the Italian
Ambassador of the Association for the Study of Death and Society
(ASDS).

      Email: mattia.petricola@gmail.com



                              The Article
Date sent: 15/09/2020
Date accepted: 20/10/2020
Date published: 30/11/2020



                       How to cite this article
Elleström, Lars – Fusillo, Massimo – Petricola, Mattia “«Everything is
intermedial»: A Conversation with Lars Elleström”, Transmediality /
Intermediality / Crossmediality: Problems of Definition, Eds. H.-J. Backe, M.
Fusillo, M. Lino, with the focus section Intermedial Dante: Reception,
Appropriation, Metamorphosis, Eds. C. Fischer and M. Petricola, Between,
X.20 (2020), www.betweenjournal.it




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