Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewIn this extensive and intricate book, which explores the complex and still inadequately explored connections between “literature” and “media,” numerous critical historical, philosophical, cybernetic and semiotic intersections are brought to the forefront. The significant volume examines and critiques various theoretical stances, with the authors delving deeply into historical contexts to understand the reasons behind the lack of fruitful dialogues between literary studies and media theory. Rather than providing a definitive conclusion to the issue, the authors instead lay the groundwork for a potential medial literary theory to emerge: a new “Prague” school of intermediality, or literary media theory, sees the light of day. * Jørgen Bruhn, Professor in the Department of Film and Literature, Linnaeus University, Sweden *
Emerging Contours of the Medium is an event in two disciplines, media studies and literary studies. The authors of this volume attempt nothing less than a conceptual integration of the media concept into the study of literature, and literature into the study of media. The problem of literature’s status as a medium and relation to other media has long been neglected, but this brilliant collective of Czech scholars has in one volume brought us far along the road toward a new understanding of the relation between literature and the media system. The individual essays range broadly across the domains of media studies and literary scholarship, creating nothing less than a conversation among European and Anglo-American theorists that did not exist before. For scholars of the English-speaking world,
Contours of the Emerging Medium gives us access to profound scholarship in the Czech language that the Anglo-American academy needs to know. A particular benefit of the book is its reminder also of the Prague School’s great historical contributions to literary and media theory. This volume of essays shows that the Prague School is thriving today and has much to teach us. * John Guillory, Julius Silver Professor of English, New York University, USA *
Table of ContentsList of Figures List of Tables and Diagrams Author Profiles Acknowledgments Introduction: Genealogy of the Concept of the Medium and Literary Studies
Richard Müller (Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic) Chapter 1. The ‘Medium’ – Concept and History
Tomáš Chudý (independent scholar) Chapter 2. Reflections of Mediality in Prague School Thinking
Richard Müller and Pavel Šidák (Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic) Chapter 3. The Media Philosophy of Walter Benjamin
Martin Ritter (Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic) Chapter 4. ‘Let the Ghosts Come Back’: Modern Spectrology and its Media
Josef Vojvodík (Charles University, Czech Republic) Chapter 5. Gesture and its (Proto-)Medial Thresholds
Richard Müller (Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic) Chapter 6. Openness: The Information (Cybernetics) Moment in Literary Theory and Experimental Poetry of the 1950–1960s
Richard Müller (Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic) Chapter 7. Technics and Media
Tomáš Chudý (independent scholar) Chapter 8. Communication, Solution and Mediality: The Paradoxical Character of Williams’s Thinking on the Medium
Josef Šebek (Charles University, Czech Republic) Chapter 9. Social Systems Theory and the Medium
Tomáš Chudý (independent scholar) Chapter 10. Poetics - Semiosphere - Medium: Lotman’s Cultural Semiotics at the Crossroads
Richard Müller (Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic) Chapter 11. The Theory of Intermediality: Apparentness of Relations, Elusiveness of the Medium
Stanislava Fedrová and Alice Jedlickova (Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic) Polylogue: Steps to a Media Theory of Literature
Richard Müller, Alice Jedlickova, Stanislava Fedrová (Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic), Josef Šebek (Charles University, Czech Republic) and Tomáš Chudý (Independent Scholar) References Index
