ABSTRACT
In the first section of this book, titled “Modelling Intermediality and Multimodality”, Marie-Laure Ryan opens with her chapter “On the Problematics of Building a Formal Media System, or, Why Media Drive Me Crazy”. Here, Marie-Laure Ryan addresses a question that is fundamental to intermedial studies, namely how to define and characterise different properties of ‘media’. She takes the reader through various definitions of media, including Elleström’s, and problematises the attempts to construct taxonomic models of media, in which she counts Elleström’s. The basic categories of media are not things that are found in the world but concepts constructed through language, and different media types tend to overlap, complicating models like Elleström’s. In the final part of her chapter, Ryan argues that conceptual boundaries between different types of media should be maintained (which other scholars in this volume, like Mitchell, Elliott, and Bal can be considered to break down) and that blurring happens not between media as such, but between genres.
