Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media

497 Pages·2006·6.638 MB·English

by  Bernhart, Walter;Wolf, Werner

Framing Borders in
Literature and Other Media
S I (SIM)
TUDIES IN NTERMEDIALITY
1
Executive Editor:
Walter Bernhart, Graz
Series Editors:
Lawrence Kramer, New York
Hans Lund, Lund
Ansgar Nünning, Gießen
Werner Wolf, Graz
The book series STUDIES IN INTERMEDIALITY (SIM), launched in
2006, is devoted to scholarly research in the field of Intermedia Studies
and, thus, in the broadest sense, addresses all phenomena in-volving
more than one communicative medium. More specifically, it concerns
itself with the wide range of relationships established among the various
media and investigates how concepts, of a more general character, find
diversified manifestations and reflections in the diffe-rent media. The
book series is related to, and part of, the activities of the Intermediality
Programme of the Humanities Faculty at the Karl-Franzens-Universität
Graz/Austria.
STUDIES IN INTERMEDIALITY (SIM) publishes, generally on an annual
basis, theme-oriented volumes, documenting and critically as-sessing
the scope, theory, methodology, and the disciplinary and in-stitutional
dimensions and prospects of Intermedia Studies on an inter-national
scale: conference proceedings, university lecture series, col-lections of
scholarly essays, and, occasionally, monographs on per-tinent individual
topics reflecting more general issues.
Framing Borders
in Literature and Other Media
Edited by
Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006
Cover-Illustration:
Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts. Painting Turned Round (c. 1670-1675).
Oil on canvas. 26 x 34 inches. Copenhagen, State Museum of Art
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 90-420-1789-9
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2006
Printed in The Netherlands
Contents
Preface .............................................................................................. vii
Werner Wolf
Introduction: Frames, Framings and Framing Borders
in Literature and Other Media ............................................................ 1
Framing in/through the Visual Arts
Anja Grebe
Frames and Illusion: The Function of Borders
in Late Medieval Book Illumination ................................................. 43
Vera Beyer
How to Frame the Vera Icon? ........................................................... 69
Götz Pochat
Framing, Actual and Virtual: The Crossing
of St. Peter’s in Rome ....................................................................... 93
Patricia Allmer
Framing the Real: Frames and Processes of Framing
in René Magritte’s Œuvre ............................................................... 113
Daniel F. Herrmann
Touching Upon Framing: Medial Conditions of Printmaking
in Dieter Roth’s Komposition I-V (1977-1992) .............................. 139
Richard Phelan
The Picture Frame in Question: American Art 1945-2000 ............. 159
Framing in/of Literary Texts
Werner Wolf
Framing Borders in Frame Stories .................................................. 179
Haiko Wandhoff
Found(ed) in a Picture: Ekphrastic Framing in Ancient,
Medieval, and Contemporary Literature ......................................... 207
Christian Quendler
Frame Analysis and Its Contribution to a Historical and
Cultural Theory of Literary Fiction: A Comparison of
Initial Framings in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy
and Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans ............................. 229
Till Dembeck
(Paratextual) Framing and the Work of Art:
E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Prinzessin Brambilla .................................... 263
Werner Wolf
Defamiliarized Initial Framings in Fiction ..................................... 295
Maria Stefanescu
The (Dis)Continuity of Framings ................................................... 329
Margarete Rubik
Frames and Framings in Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair .............. 341
Remigius Bunia
Framing the End ............................................................................. 359
Framing in Film
Roy Sommer
Initial Framings in Film .................................................................. 383
Erik Hedling
Framing Tolkien: Trailers, High Concept, and the Ring ................ 407
Framing in Music
Michael Walter
Framing and Deframing the Opera: The Overture .......................... 429
Walter Bernhart
Narrative Framing in Schumann’s Piano Pieces ............................. 449
Notes on Contributors ..................................................................... 477
Preface
The initial idea for this book dates back to autumn 1994. During an
excursion of the English Department of the University of Graz into the
Styrian wine growing region, discussions with my colleague Hugo
Keiper, to whom I am grateful for this initial ‘spark’, triggered my
interest in the field of framing – an interest which then was still
exclusively literature-centred. In the course of the following years the
project to which this volume is dedicated received additional fuel from
various sources and events, and was broadened to its present cognitive
and intermedial dimensions. In particular, I would like to mention
discussions with colleagues, including one of our specialists in
cognitive linguistics, Annemarie Peltzer-Karpf, but above all with
Walter Bernhart, to whom I am especially thankful for his untiring
assistance and encouragement. A further incentive was the foundation
of the ‘Faculty Programme Intermediality’ (a special field of teaching
and research within the Faculty of Humanities of the University of
Graz). All of this led to the realization of a long-planned international
conference on ‘Framing in Literature and Other Media’. It was co-
organized by Walter Bernhart, Michael Walter and myself and was
held at our Department of English in June 2004. It is this conference
which became the basis of the present volume, the first of the book
series ‘Studies in Intermediality’.
Besides the persons already mentioned, the volume has benefited
from the assistance of a number of people and organisations, whose
support I hereby gratefully acknowledge, also on behalf of co-editor
Walter Bernhart, who himself has contributed much more to it than his
function of co-editor would suggest. Our thanks are especially due to
my secretary Ingrid Hable for valuable work in the preparation of the
manuscript and to Sarah Mercer for her careful proof-reading. For the
logistic support of the conference we are indebted to the English
VIII
Department of the University of Graz and to various technical and
organizational assistants from whose help the present volume as the
conference proceedings profited indirectly. We would also like to
thank the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Graz under Dean
Walter Höflechner and the Land Steiermark for their willingness to
support the conference and in part also the present volume in spite of
financial constraints. Last but not least, we would like to thank the
conference attendants and the contributors to this volume, without
whose interdisciplinary expertise a transmedial investigation of fram-
ing borders in literature and other media would not have been possi-
ble, for the frame of intermediality studies by far transcends what a
single scholar can cope with.
Werner Wolf Graz, December 2005
Introduction
Frames, Framings and Framing Borders
in Literature and Other Media1
Werner Wolf
Over the past few decades it has become a received notion that there is
no human signifying act, no meaningful perception, cognition and
communication without ‘frames’ and that frames are practically every-
where. Indeed, since the mid-1970s, when Erving Goffman’s influ-
ential study Frame Analysis was published, the concept of the cogni-
tive ‘frame’, which Goffman had taken over from Gregory Bateson
(1955/1972; cf. Goffman 1974: 7), has become widely accepted in lin-
guistics and related areas: especially in cognition theory, psychology
and psychotherapy, artificial intelligence research, sociolinguistics and
above all in discourse analysis2. The present volume is dedicated to
the application of frame analysis to a field in which it has not found
much attention to date, namely literature and other media, and fo-
cusses on the coding of frames in ‘framing borders’ (in temporal me-
dia notably on initial framings). The following “Introduction” aims
above all at clarifying the theoretical basis of such an analysis. This
means in particular elucidating the concepts of ‘frame’, ‘framing’ and
‘framing borders’ and also giving an overview of their most important
functions in the interpretation of works of literature and other media.

1 Parts of this “Introduction”, which was not read at the conference ‘Framing in Lit-
erature and Other Media’, are revised versions of the first two chapters of Wolf
1999a.
2 For a survey see Müller 1984, esp. ch. 3, Drew/Wootton, eds. 1987, Tannen, ed.
1993, and the excellent summary of almost all previous research in the field,
MacLachlan/Reid 1994.