Guest seminar: The Emerging Contours
Welcome to the weekly IMS seminar!
Alice Jedličková, Richard Müller and Tomáš Chudý: On The Emerging Contours of the Medium (Bloomsbury Academic 2024) – presentation by three authors, based at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences, on their newly released collective monograph.
About the seminar
The book written by a collective of eight authors is an attempt to explore the prerequisites for a media theory of literature and to develop its foundations.
"We examine under what specific conditions and why literary criticism has done without the medium concept and how literary studies ended up ill-suited to account for the position of literature as a medium in the changing media systems of the past and today. Conversely, we map out how media studies have diverged from researching the media specificity of literature in the need to set up its own agenda – a negativity which becomes our starting point. We thus draw a ‘genealogy’ of this mutual blindness, which makes the crucial, slowly emerging and revolving aspects of the medium concept in both older and newer discourses and fields of research apparent. The discourses mentioned include the comparison of the arts, intermedial theory, literary semiotics, the theory and philosophy of technics, critical theory, media philosophy, media anthropology, and systems theory.
We are leaning on Lars Elleström’s system of media modalities (which provides a fully developed medium concept) and John Guillory’s exploration of the genesis of the media concept (which prompted us towards adopting the genealogical method). This combined methodological approach enables us to identify the terms for developing a media-informed set of key principles for literary study today.
The three major aspects of our shared exploration are 1) the prehistory of media thinking; 2) the inspirations of media philosophy and media anthropology to literary thinking; and 3) the points of possible integration between literary and media theory and thought."
Alice Jedličková will talk about her and Stáňa Fedrová’s comprehensive last chapter which explores the long genealogy of intermedial thinking.
Tomáš Chudý will present the main lines of argument in his three chapters which explore the genesis of the media concept, the philosophy of technics and systems theory in order to identify and confront the most general ‘instrumental’ and ‘locative’ meanings of the medium concept.
Richard Müller will introduce the book as a whole, and then will speak about his four chapters, where several key lines within the literary, reader’s and cultural semiotics are identified which contribute promisingly to the development of media thinking and media literary theory.
How to attend the seminar
It is possible to attend the seminar from Dacke in Växjö and via Zoom. Contact us at ims@lnu.se if you want to participate via Zoom, or sign up for our external email list to receive automatic updates on our events (zoom link and additional information are sent out one week in advance).
Photo: 'Aurora - Connecting Senses’, Cristina Pop-Tiron & Signe Kjær Jensen