Introduction

Interdisciplinarity and intermediality are becoming more and more important across the 21st-century humanities. While the former, broader concept has been used increasingly since the 1980s, the latter’s appeal has grown particularly over the last decade. In a range of fields, the body of work done in intermedial studies has expanded steadily. The time has come, we believe, for a more sustained and articulate examination of the premises, ramifications, and overall principles of intermedial scholarship—indeed, for a systematically metacritical engagement with the existent critical corpus as well as with new topics, approaches, and projects in this area.

Meta-, we argue, is the crux of all intermediality insofar as the Greek prefix designates the very protocol of self-reflexiveness and, more generally, of all self-evaluation discourse or debate, which is what intermedial studies needs to foster more vigorously so as to come to terms with its interdisciplinary and methodological conditions as well as with the academic and epistemological crises its rise responds to. It is meta-work in this new cluster of fields that ultimately enables us to draw new maps for available or emerging research territories, to imagine previously uncharted ways of communicating among disciplines and ourselves, and to blaze fresh trails in analog and digital projects, in print or Web-based. Thus, the meta- operator works constructively and deconstructively, making possible future work while uncovering the systemic fallacies and power structures embedded in current scholarship.

In this sense, our goal is to add a strong self-critical—metacritical—dimension to interdisciplinary, intermedial, and new comparative studies.

Aims and scope

Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory is an open-access, double blind peer-reviewed, online publication for academic research, published twice a year (July and December) by the Faculty of Letters, Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj, Romania. It promotes free-access for academic work, and it welcomes authors who want to share their research and resources with their peers. It encourages, recognizes, and rewards intellectual excellence  in interdisciplinary and intermedial approaches of literary culture, visual culture, and theory. The journal welcomes papers in English (or, for regionally oriented topics, Romanian) from the following domains: comparative studies, including digital and posthuman studies; literary studies, cultural studies, including social and gender studies; media and film studies, literary criticism and theory, cultural poetics.

All articles must explore metacritic, reflexive dimensions of the issues covered, whether their objectives are theoretical, methodological, pragmatic, or analytic. No publication fees.

Open access policy

The journal allows readers to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, link to the full texts of its articles, and use them for any other lawful purpose.

Indexing and abstracting