Reformulating the Theory of Literary Intermediality: A Genealogy from Ut Pictura Poesis to Poststructuralist In-Betweenness

The Horatian dogma of ut pictura poesis positions itself at the interdisciplinary confluence not only of poetry and painting, but also, to a large extent, of rhetoric and aesthetics, epistemology and philosophy, cognition and other related social sciences. The theoretical discussion on the relationship of different media first emerged as a structural parallel that stressed kinship and harmony in Aristotelian poetics, and was then transformed into paragonal debates that emphasized difference and exceptionality during the Renaissance. Later, it arrived at an extreme delimitation of temporal and spatial arts, which deepened the historically empirical concern regarding philosophical and aesthetic fundamentals in the implications of binary opposition. Therefore, to sidestep the formal comparativity or time/space dichotomy as delineated from a genealogical approach, the notion of intermediality should be reformulated as a conceptual and ideological extension of ut pictura poesis. Its intermedial core shall be better understood on a theoretical basis of in-betweenness underpinned by a poststructuralist tendency. These both provide alternatives to the universality, radicalism, grand narrative, and fixed identity championed in the traditional literary and other art forms. Coming from the position of the in-between, intermediality has offered a series of new perspectives that transcend a limited point of view, cross the boundaries of stereotyped sections, decenter long-established authorities, link disconnected fragments, and search for revolutionary potentials. At the ultimate end, it creates a dynamic, fluid, and highly interactive communication that was scarce in the preexisting literary and art historiography.