Overview

This open access book illustrates how intertextuality in music videos can be used to create new aesthetic patterns and develop a political agenda. In an age when most people are immersed in popular culture, music videos often bridge the gap between readily accessible and more demanding artistic forms. Music videos can sensitize the audience to various eminent themes, motifs, and artistic conventions by means of transferring them into a familiar medium. The efficacy of this process is enhanced through the use of intertextual references to other culture products, whereby meanings are conveyed in a highly condensed form. At the same time, intertexts connected with particular art forms can undergo significant revisions through the cultural context in which a new music video is produced: the amalgam of word, sound and image initiates innovative readings of familiar motifs, and transforms the understanding of literature, music, film, and fine arts. Located at the intersection of different semiotic systems, music videos can juxtapose notions from contrasting areas – folk culture, myth, politics, psychology, aesthetics – in unconventional ways. Authored by a group of international scholars, implementing various conceptual approaches, and analyzing an original selection of artists, this collection of essays examines music videos as an innovative transmedial practice which employs intertextuality both to create new aesthetic patterns and to develop a political agenda. The book views creative intertextuality as a token of the hybrid nature of present-day audio-visual popular culture and contemporary (post)human subjectivity in general. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

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Aesthetic Amalgams and Political Pursuits: Intertextuality in Music Videos offers a wonderfully varied series of studies showing us how music videos borrow, reshuffle and reinvent elements from the surrounding culture. While other treatments of intertextuality in music video too often reduce it to simple source-spotting, this volume theorizes the notion in rigorous ways which draw on some of the most advanced work in textual theory. From canonical artists like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift through midwestern emo bands and Norwegian eco-feminists, the articles collected here show artists using music video to reanimate art-historical traditions, key moments of cinematic history and collective rhetorics of political struggle. This book marks a significant advance in the study of music and audiovisual media. * Will Straw is Professor of Urban Media Studies at McGill University, Quebec, Canada * With a strong focus on intertextuality, this fascinating collection explores the rich potential for diverse social, political, and cultural meanings to be developed in the visual, textual, and sonic spaces of the music video. Distinguished by its gathering of international scholars, writing on a range of musical genres and intermedia contexts, the volume offers unique interpretive themes and perspectives that will enlighten audiovisual scholarship. * Lori Burns is Professor of Music at the University of Ottawa, Canada. She is also co-editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis (Bloomsbury, 2019) * Radical Inter-ship: this incredibly rich volume lays out, in many different voices, the cultural potential of a genre traditionally seen as “popular culture”. The in-depth scholarly examination validates the music video as an important artform. Dedicated by her colleagues to the late Dorota Fillipczak, an exceptionally creative and committed scholar who initiated this project before her untimely passing in 2021, this book shines with multiplicity: many authors, many artefacts/cases, many approaches, musical and (inter-)textual styles, are not simply accumulated but made to meet up to produce resourceful, innovative modes of analysis. Due to the importance of that meeting I advocate the preposition “inter-” which, for me signifies encounter, traversing media, times, disciplines, areas of interest as well as the genre’s political potential, to characterize the book. The editors tend to call it “trans-”, as is usual, but for me, the “inter-ship” that demonstrates connectivity in difference, in so many cultural and social domains that it is impossible to sum it up, describes it more adequately. A monumental achievement. * Mieke Bal is based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Netherlands *

Author Information

Tomasz Dobrogoszcz is Professor in the Institute of English Studies at the University of Lodz, Poland. He is the editor of Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition: Cultural Contexts In Monty Python (2014) and the author of Family and Relationships in Ian McEwan’s Fiction (2018). Agata Handley is Assistant Professor in the Institute of English Studies at the University of Lodz, Poland. She is the author of Constructing Identity: The Poetry of Tony Harrison (2021) and Editor-in-Chief of the interdisciplinary academic journal Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture. Tomasz Fisiak is Assistant Professor in the Department of Canadian, Intermedial and Postcolonial Studies, Institute of English Studies at the University of Lodz, Poland. He is the author of She-(d)evils?: The Construction of a Female Tyrant as a Cultural Critique (2020) and the co-editor of The Postworld In-Between Utopia and Dystopia: Intersectional, Feminist, and Non-Binary Approaches in 21st-Century Speculative Literature and Culture (2021, with Katarzyna Ostalska). He is Managing Editor of the interdisciplinary academic journal Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture.

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