The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality

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The Emerging Contours of the Medium explores a crucial aspect of media thinking, focusing particularly on the mediality of literature, a medium that remains today on the margins of the theoretical discussion of media. Even though interest in the technological and media aspects of literature has been slowly building momentum in the past several decades, from comparative perspectives to written culture to new media, the concept of the medium has not informed this process, and its systematic integration into literary studies has never been effectively carried out. Nor has the specific mediality of literature been successfully integrated into the general concept of media/lity in media science. Contributors to this work provide both an explanation of and solution to this mutual blindness, setting out from the question: What are the conditions for elaborating a media-theoretical framework in which to situate literature as a medium The Emerging Contours of the Medium, available for the first time in English, is divided into three parts, which correlate to the three main research areas of the principles for a media theory of literature. Part I develops a perspective of the (pre)history of media thinking, grounding the principles of the genealogical integration. Part II concentrates on and develops the related perspectives of media philosophy and media anthropology. Part IIIs main focus is the way media as dispositifs interlinking the parameters of perception and communication provide the ground for making emergent media phenomena visible, whether it be between media (in their mutual synergy or discrepancies), between media artefacts, or between human and apparatus.

Author Bio

Richard Mller is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Czech Literature, CAS, Czech Republic, and is an editor of the scholarly journal Czech Literature. His research fields include literary theory and the disciplinary intersections between literary and media theory, with a focus on (the history of) semiotics, the non-intentional aspects of literary mediation, and the writings of Franz Kafka in the context of the symptomatic analysis of modernity. From fall 2019 to spring 2020 he acted as Visiting Scholar at New York University (Department of English), USA. In spring and summer 2011, he served as Visiting Assistant Professor at Department of Slavic Languages at Brown University, USA. Among his publications is the widely cited Dictionary of Modern Literary Theory: Terms and Concepts (2011, in Czech, with co-editor P. idk).