Issue 6, Fall 2005
Edited by Philippe Despoix and Yvonne Spielmann
The French verb remédier has not adopted yet the sense of “medial” that the English term “remediation” seems to have acquired in recent years. In French, “remedy” takes semantic precedence over “medium,” whereas the recent definition proposed in the book Remediation: “a medium is that which remediates,” shifts the term’s meaning from the fields of medical or environmental sciences towards the techniques of transmission and representation. This journal issue is dedicated to the possible meanings of the verb remédier in an intermedial perspective, without being excessively preoccupied with the other usages of the term in each of the languages used here (French and English). The issue opens with a theoretical section that focuses primarily on the different ways of conceiving the relations between various media. Here, the use of the term “remediation” is rooted in a reflection on the nature of digital objects. The second part of this inquiry discusses cinema, theater and writing.