Intermediality

An Interruption to our Line of Logical Expectation:

Virginia Woolfs The String Quartet








Valeria Guzmn Gonzlez
Type of mediation in The String Quartet
Type of media: transformational intermediality
(Schrter, 2011)

A model centered around the representation of one
medium through another medium
Intermedia: Music and Literature
Most common types of this intermediality:
Inputs from music to literature
Inputs form literature to music
(Saffle)


Impossiblity to classify relationships between music
and fiction
Music and Literature
Musicology as a discipline defined itself between the
late XIXth and early XX Century
What can literature teach us about music?
Separating music and fiction
The heightened awarness of life
Fictions may be (or not be) musical.
Virginia Woolf and music
Virginia Woolfs musical awareness
She wrote essays about music
Hamlet or a Beethoven quartett is the truth about
this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no
Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and
emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we
are the music; we are the thing itself Woolf
Thesis of Elicia Clements


Formal aspects and features of The String
Quartet
Reception [of the reader] as the principal musical
value of fiction (Saffle)
Reproduce emotional effects (Sensations: rythm,
stream of consciousness, rethorical questions,
dialogues, description, enumeration, judges, two
level structure, narrator)
Two leves of writing in the tail
Showing the difficulties of communication and the
unspoken (Sutton)

Intermedia: Literature and Painting
Description

Intertextuality in the tail (knight tales)
Conclusion
Virginia Woolf puts together fine arts (literature,
poetry, painting) in The String Quartet without a
defined structure to create an artistic sensation, and
relating them at the same time with the down to
earth vain relations that surround any cultural
expression (and which are also formed by these).
Sources
Clements, Elicia. Transforming Musical Sounds into Words: Narrative Method in Virginia
Woolf. York: York University. Available the 10th of January, 2014 in
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/narrative/v013/13.2clemen
ts.html.
Lacourarie, Chantal. Painting and Writting: A Symbiotic Relation in Virginia Woolfs Works.
Amiens: University of Amiens. Available the 10th of January, 2014 in
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/41207003?uid=3737528&uid=369299241&uid=2&uid
=3&uid=60&sid=21103228308971.
Saffle, Michael. Musicology and Fiction. Virginia: University Polythecnic Institute and State
University. Available the 10th of January, 2014 in
http://www.rilm.org/historiography/saffle.pdf.
Schrter, Jens. Discourses and Models of Intermediality. Siegen: Siegen University. Available
the 10th of January, 2014 in the CLC Web: Comparative Literature and Culture,
http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol13/iss3/3/.
Sutton, Emma. Simple Songs: Virginia Woolf and Music. Available the 10th of January, 2014
in The Public Domain Review, http://publicdomainreview.org/2013/01/09/simple-songs-
virginia-woolf-and-music/.
Woolf, Virginia. The String Quartet, 1921. Available the 10 th of January,2014 in
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/woolf/monday/monday-05.html.