Intermediality, Multimodality and Medial Chronotopes: A Comparison between the Travel Book and the Travel Blog

• Main Author: Stefano Calzati
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Editorial Delirio 2014-06-01
• Series: Caracteres: Estudios Culturales y Críticos de la Esfera Digital
• Subjects: intermediality; multimodality; chronotope; travel book; travel blog
• Online Access: http://revistacaracteres.net/revista/vol3n1mayo2014/travel-book-travel-blog/

Using Bakhtin’s “chronotope”, this paper advances a comparison between the travel book Il mondo oltre il fiume dei peschi in fiore by Sino-Italian Bamboo Hirst and the travel blog Emil’s Trip to China, by American Emil Kang. Firstly, it is assumed that these texts are two “intermedial transpositions” of the same genre: travel writing. Secondly, it is argued that the process of transposition affects how the genre is realised insofar as the book and the blog, as medial formats, embed different chronotopes. It is in this respect that the notion of “genium”, as a conceptual field of generic and medial negotiations, is introduced. Moreover, because both texts are multimodal, the paper discusses the extension of the chronotope to photography, starting from Barthes’s Camera Lucida. This provides a chronotopic study of some pictures in the texts, in terms of both what is represented and its mode of representation.