Intermedial Migrations and Their Impact on Degrees of Fictionality

Abstract

Intermedia studies and the new concepts they have forged over the last decades certainly have an important role to play in the debates surrounding the concept of degrees of fictionality. This theoretical object sits at the confluence of possible worlds theories (Tomas Pavel, Nelson Goodman), with linguistic notions such as reference, intra-reference, inter-reference and pragmatic literary theory, drawing on concepts such as the reading contract or genre conventions and their role in structuring readers' expectations, etc. The starting point of our research is the question of whether the phenomenon of intermedial migration (developed by Richard Saint-Gelais), which is becoming increasingly frequent in today's artistic landscape, causes significant variations in the degree of fictionality. To answer this question, we will analyze a few examples of cinematographic adaptations of literary works, focusing on the Eric Rohmer’s rendition of the novel Perceval ou le Conte du Graal by Chrétien de Troyes in his film Perceval le Gallois, or on Robert Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, based on Denis Diderot's novel Jacques le fataliste et son maître. Our analysis will pay particular attention to indexes of fictionality and will attempt to clarify whether the variations of fictionality are due to the different aesthetic specificities and materiality of each medium or rather to authorial intention.