The Emerging Contours of the Medium - (Thinking Media) by Richard Müller (Paperback)

About the Book

"Explores a crucial - yet largely neglected - 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"--

Book Synopsis

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 dispositifsinterlinking 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).
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).

Review Quotes

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

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.
Jørgen Bruhn, Professor in the Department of Film and Literature, Linnaeus University, Sweden

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. Sidák).