Aesthetic Amalgams and Political Pursuits

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.

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.