In this afterword, Jensen and Davidsson discuss potential future directions of intermedial and multimodal studies, particularly focusing on Lars Elleström’s contributions to the field and how his theories can be further developed. The authors identify several promising areas for future studies, including the integration of more social and cultural perspectives with Elleström’s systematic media theory to better address contemporary societal challenges, including media literacy and disinformation. They also discuss the ongoing exploration of complementarity between intermedial and multimodal approaches, something which is challenged by inconsistent and partly overlapping terminology, but which also holds the potential for a more nuanced understanding of different dimensions of media, as well as of media combinations. Finally, the authors touch upon the potential in expanding our view of narrativity and emphasise the importance of continuing empirical case studies to test theoretical frameworks. They conclude by acknowledging the value of intellectual conversation and collaboration in developing media theory, principles that were central to Elleström’s approach to scholarship.

This collection brings together leading scholars across disciplines to reflect on the relationship between intermediality and multimodality and future directions for the contemporary mediascape, building on a 2022 Linnaeus University lecture series honouring the legacy of Lars Elleström, following his untimely death in December 2021.

The volume contributes to ongoing dialogues about media and society, the challenges and opportunities for academia to engage with developments in the evolving mediascape, and interdisciplinary pathways towards engaging with these questions. Each chapter features an established figure in such fields as multimodality, intermediality, semiotics, narratology, art history, and adaptation studies. Each essay is prefaced with an introduction by the editors and bookended with a discussion transcribed from the original live presentations. A concluding chapter looks ahead to future directions, opening new lines of inquiry around the possibilities for intermediality and multimodality research towards continuing to build on Elleström’s seminal work in the field.

This book will be of interest to scholars in multimodality, intermediality, and media and communication studies.

In this introduction to Future Directions in Intermediality and Multimodality: Dialogues Inspired by Lars Elleström, Signe Kjaer Jensen and Matilda Davidsson provide an overview of Lars Elleström’s media- and communication model. The authors trace the developments from the original model developed in 2010 to the revised, and much more elaborate, version published in 2021, and give a summary of the entire revised version, including Elleström’s theories on media integration, media transformation, and communication. In addition to this, Jensen and Davidsson also touch on Elleström’s early career and his way into intermediality and explain some of the key interests and concepts of the broader fields of intermediality and multimodality, which inspired Elleström in his work.

In this introduction to João Queiroz’s chapter, Jensen provides an overview of the key topics of Queiroz’s text, focusing on giving a background to, and explaining, the concept of ‘intersemiotic translation’. After comparing intersemiotic translation to Elleström’s concept of ‘transmediation’, this chapter briefly explains Charles Sanders Peirce’s concepts of sign, object, and interpretant, as well as the basic ideas of process philosophy and distributed cognition.

In this introduction to Bateman’s chapter, Jensen focuses on terminology in intermediality and multimodality in order to provide a background for reading Bateman’s chapter. Jensen addresses Bateman’s concepts of ‘semiotic mode’, ‘canvas’, ‘medium’ and ‘textuality’ and discusses how they compare to similar ideas in Elleström’s theoretical framework.

In this introduction to Leitch’s chapter, Jensen takes her point of departure in Leitch’s focus on narrativity and especially on his choice to examine “less obviously narrative media”. As a background for understanding these “less obviously narrative media”, Jensen discusses Elleström’s definition of ‘narrative’ as a type of ‘virtual sphere’, and his application of narrative to mathematical equations.

Michael Halliday’s social semiotic theory is an important part of the theoretical background of O’Halloran’s contribution to this volume. In this introduction to O’Halloran’s chapter, Jensen, therefore, introduces the key ideas and concepts of Halliday’s theories, focusing especially on the concepts of ‘semiotic resource’, the idea of semiotic choice, and the relationship between language and reality, and how these concepts and ideas are important to O’Halloran’s text.

“Mankind is not vicious, mankind is stupid. Someday man will realize what he’s doing. By killing everything in the sea he is killing himself. When the sea is dead, mankind will die, too” (Hastrup, Samson and Sally, 55.30–55.45). These words, spoken by the old whale Moby Dick in the Danish animated film Samson and Sally from 1984, echo the ecological lament found in Bent Haller’s source novel, Kaskelotternes sang [The Song of the Sperm Whales, my translation]. In the novel, Moby Dick contrasts humanity’s inclination to “destroy and kill and be lonely” with the whales’ choice to “live well and happy together, play and sing” (Haller, 97, my translation). Both the film and the novel convey a powerful ecocritical message, subverting the anthropocentric perspective of Moby Dick and fostering sympathy for the hunted whales. In their depiction of multiple human-made and systemic threats towards “everything in the sea”, the two media products effectively pre-empts the idea of a global ecological emergency, warning against the mass extinction of species and the loss of vital ecosystems.In this essay, I will examine how the film and the novel represent this looming ecological emergency and construct an eco-centric worldview through two interrelated strands. First, I will demonstrate how these different media products guide audience sympathies towards non-human subjects, which can be argued to be a key aspect in learning to recognize, acknowledge and act upon ecological emergencies. Second, I will investigate the role of intermedial references. In addition to references to the classic novel Moby Dick, or, the Whale (Melville), the film even alludes to Noah’s Ark, the sinking of the Titanic, and the dumping of radioactive waste. These kinds of references work to underscore humanity’s vulnerability and their impact on, and responsibility towards, the natural environment, highlighting the relevance of an intermedial framework in understanding the communication and mediation of ecological issues.

This article explores the complementary potential of intermedial and multimodal semiotic analysis. Both multimodal and intermedial research explore the multifaceted nature of communication. However, since research fields have different foci and analytical methods, they are less connected than they could be. We approach intermediality and multimodality as complementary frameworks and argue that there is much to gain in drawing on the analytical strengths of both. To this end, underlying differences in method and theoretical assumptions need to be made explicit. Drawing on John A. Bateman and Lars Elleström’s previous explorations of the common ground between the frameworks, we map an arena where multimodal and intermedial analysis can work together. We demonstrate how a combined multimodal and intermedial perspective can function by zooming in and out between the perspectives as we explore the role of “Ride of the Valkyries” in Wagner’s opera Die Walküre (1870), in a Nazi newsreel, and in Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now (1979). The multimodal perspective provides us with nuanced language for transcribing and discussing how different semiotic resources work together, and the intermedial perspective allows us to discuss the chain of media transformation, where each instance increases and transforms the meaning potential of the “Ride of the Valkyries”.

In this essay, I use the song ‘Let It Go’ from Frozen as a steppingstone for addressing song and animated musical film as combined media, or rather integrations, and, based on the models put forward by Lars Elleström, propose a framework for discussing different kinds of synchronic intermediality. I propose that when analysing synchronic intermediality, we need to consider (at least) three types of combination: 1) combination of modalities (understood as formal structures framing the content), 2) combination of qualified aspects (understood as conventions of media products, herein those aspects tied to media representation), and 3) combination of semiotic content.