Intermediality in the Age of Global Media Networks – Including Eleven Theses on its Provocative Power for the Concepts of “Convergence,” “Transmedia Storytelling” and “Actor Network Theory”

Narrative allegory is distinguished from mythology as reality from symbol; it is, in short, the proper intermedium between person and personification. Where it is too strongly individualized, it ceases to be allegory […].

(Coleridge 33)

In the community of scholars of intermedia research, the above quoted citation is commonly regarded as Coleridge’s coining of the term “intermedium” or “intermediality” (Higgins). However, a short glance at the discursive strategy of his argument emphasizes that his notion of “intermedium” must be closely linked to the poetics and aesthetics of 19^th-century romanticism. For the romantic poet, the term of “intermedium” does not (yet?) point to media relations or intermedia processes but to the narratological phenomenon of allegory, to its specificities and narrative functions.