About the Book
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. The book was written by a collective of authors based in the Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic.
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 1 develops a perspective of the (pre)history of media thinking, grounding the principles of the genealogical integration. Part 2 concentrates on and develops the related perspectives of media philosophy and media anthropology. Part 3’s 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.
Stanislava Fedrová is Head of the Department of Art Historiography and Theory at the Institute of Art History at the Czech Academy of Sciences, researcher at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Assistant Professor of Literature and Intercultural Communication at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. Her scholarly interests include literary theory, art theory, visual culture and intermedial research, with a focus on the relations between verbal and visual media. She is co-author, with Alice Jedlicková, of Visible Descriptions: Visuality, Suggestivity and Intermediality of Literary Description (2016).
Tomáš Chudý works as an independent researcher, translator (Kittler, Luhmann, Taylor etc.) and lawyer for the Czech National Bank. His research interests include media philosophy and the interrelation of technical and humanist paradigms by means of working with signs, as well as interlinking social and economic aspects in technically mediated communication. He has published in scholarly journals, such as Social Studies, and he is the co-author, with Richard Müller et al., of the Czech edition of The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality (2020).
Alice Jedlickova is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and Associate Professor of Literature and Intercultural Communication at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. Her research interests include intermedial studies (socio-spatial relations of cultural representations) and its history, literary theory, diachronic poetics and the theory of narrative. She is the editor of, and principle contributor to Narrative Modes of 19th Century Czech Prose (2022), and co-author, with Stanislava Fedrová, of the interdisciplinary inquiry Visible Descriptions: Visuality, Suggestivity and Intermediality of Literary Description (2016). She has published on transmediation as a marker of cultural continuity and on the potential of intermedial approach in education recently.
Richard Müller is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences, professor of Comparative Literature at New York Univeristy Prague, and professor of Literary Criticism and Writing at the Prague School of Creative Communication. His research interests include the contextual transformations of literary mediality, the history of semiotics, (post)structuralism and cultural materialism, the genealogies of literary and media theory, and the writings of Franz Kafka. He is the editor of the scholarly journal Czech Literature, co-author, with Tomáš Chudý et al., of the Czech edition of The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality (2020), and co-author, with Pavel Šidák et al., of The Dictionary of Modern Literary Theory (2011).
Martin Ritter is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. His research interests lie in phenomenology (especially concerning Jan Patocka), critical theory and German medial philosophy. As editor and translator, he has prepared a three-volume edition of Walter Benjamin’s work, and is author of Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy of Language (2009). His most recent book is Into the World: The Movement of Patocka’s Phenomenology (2019, in English).
Josef Šebek is Assistant Professor of Czech and Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. His research concerns cultural materialism, the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and current French sociology of literature and works also on contemporary theory of discourse and rhetoric, media theory of literature, genres of life writing and queer studies. He is the editor of the scholarly journal Word &Sense, and author of Literature and the Social: Bourdieu, Williams, and Their Successors (2019).
Pavel Šidák is researcher at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences editor-in-chief of the scholarly journal, Czech Literature, and professor of Literary Criticism and Writing at Prague School of Creative Communication, Czech Republic. His research interests include literary theory, literary genology and the relation between literature and folklore. He is the co-author, with Richard Müller et al., of The Dictionary of Modern Literary Theory (2011) and author of Introduction into the Study of Genres (2018).
Josef Vojvodík is Professor of Czech and Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. His research focuses on modern literature and visual arts (specifically, symbolicist and post-symbolicist modernism and the avant-garde movements of the 1920s–1930s with ‘transhistoric’ links to Mannerism and Baroque), as well as German and French media, social and cultural anthropology, and phenomenology. He is the author of Surface, Latency, Ambivalence: Mannerism, Baroque and the (Czech) Avant-Garde (2008) and Pathos in Czech Art, Poetry and Artistic-Aesthetic Thinking of 1940’s (2014).
Table of Contents:
List 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
About the Author :
Richard Müller 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. Šidák).
Review :
In 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.
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.
