The Intermedial Poetics of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Fiction

Abstract

The growing interest in the interrelationship between different forms of art has led to the emergence of the term intermediality, which is interaction of different ‘media,’ that is, different channels of human communication, where one media-product “thematizes, evokes, or imitates elements or structures of another medium” (Brosch, 2005, p. 343). That is, different kinds of art refer to each other, interacting both explicitly, through allusions to another art form, or implicitly, by imitating its techniques. In particular, researchers of intermediality reveal the connections between literature and cinema, with both forms of art originating from natural human thinking, which is essentially a representation of visual and verbal images. Therefore, the cinematographicness of a literary work is an example of intermedial transcoding, which, according to Mikhail Bakhtin (2010, p. 358), is “the ability of a language to represent another language.”