Media Culture And Mediality

Current culturally oriented media studies have significantly advanced central concepts such like mediality, media culture, media discourse, and procedures of media. Focused on this newly defined terminological field, this volume presents landmark contributions for media studies providing new insights into the current state of research on media theory and media culture, simultaneously developing an agenda for future research.

This volume explores the many facets and ongoing transformations of our visual identities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its chapters engage with the constitution of personal, national and cultural identities at the intersection of the verbal and the visual across a range of media. They are attentive to how the medialities and (im)materialities of modern image culture inflect our conceptions of identity, examining the cultural and political force of literature, films, online video messages, rap songs, selfies, digital algorithms, social media, computer-generated images, photojournalism and branding, among others. They also reflect on the image theories that emerged in the same time span—from early theorists such as Charles S. Peirce to twentieth-century models like those proposed by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida as well as more recent theories by Jacques Rancière, W. J. T. Mitchell and others. The contributors of Imaging Identity come from a wide range of disciplines including literary studies, media studies, art history, tourism studies and semiotics. The book will appeal to an interdisciplinary readership interested in contemporary visual culture and image theory.

How does contemporary literature respond to the digitalized media culture in which it takes part? And how do we study literature in order to shed light on these responses? Under the subsections Technology, Subjectivity, and Aesthetics, Literature in Contemporary Media Culture sets out to answer these questions. The book shows how literature over the last decade has charted the impact of new technologies on human conduct. It explores how changes in literary production, distribution, and consumption can be correlated to changes in social practices more generally. And it examines how (and if) contemporary media culture affects our understanding of literary aesthetics. Addressing Scandinavian and Anglo-American poetry and fiction produced around the beginning of the present century, Literature in Contemporary Media Culture highlights both well-known and unfamiliar literary texts. It offers cross-disciplinary methodological tools and reading strategies for studying literary phenomena such as intermedial aesthetics, the autobiographical novel, conceptual literature, and digital poetry, all of which are prevalent across national borders at the outset of the twenty-first century. This book will be of interest to students and established scholars in the fields of literature, film and media studies, and visual studies, as well as to members of the general reading public.

This interdisciplinary volume explores the ways in which time is staged at the threshold between the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Proceeding from the reality that all cultural forms are inherently and inescapably temporal, it seeks to discover the significance of time in mediations and communications of all kinds. By showing how time is displayed in diverse cultural strategies and situations, the essays of this volume show how time is intrinsic to the very concept of tradition. In exploring a variety of medial forms and communicative practices, they also reveal that while the beginning of the age of printing (around 1500) may mark a fundamental change in terms of reproduction and circulation, artefacts and other historical traditions continue to employ earlier systems and practices relating time and space. The volume features articles by leading researchers in their respective fields, including studies on mosaics as a medium reflecting space and time; the triptych's potential as a time machine; winged altarpieces mediating eternity; texts and images of the passion of Christ permeating past, present, and future; dimensions of time embedded in maps; a compendium of world knowledge organized by forms of time and temporality; the figuration of prophecy in times of crisis; the portrayal of time in architecture. This volume thus provides a new approach to media and mediality from the perspective of cultural history.

Narratives are everywhere--and since a significant part of contemporary media culture is defined by narrative forms, media studies need a genuinely transmedial narratology. Against this background, Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture focuses on the intersubjective construction of storyworlds as well as on prototypical forms of narratorial and subjective representation. This book provides not only a method for the analysis of salient transmedial strategies of narrative representation in contemporary films, comics, and video games but also a theoretical frame within which medium-specific approaches from literary and film narratology, from comics studies and game studies, and from various other strands of media and cultural studies may be applied to further our understanding of narratives across media.

In an era of heightened securitization, print, televisual and networked media have become obsessed with the 'pre-mediation' of future events. In response to the shock of 9/11, socially networked US and global media worked to pre-mediate collective affects of anticipation and connectivity, while also perpetuating low levels of apprehension or fear.

Examines the paradoxical situation where the media report terrible events, but the academic study of the media is increasingly trivial.

The book highlights aspects of mediality and materiality in the dissemination and distribution of texts in the Scandinavian Middle Ages important for achieving a general understanding of the emerging literate culture. In nine chapters various types of texts represented in different media and in a range of materials are treated. The topics include two chapters on epigraphy, on lead amulets and stone monuments inscribed with runes and Roman letters. In four chapters aspects of the manuscript culture is discussed, the role of authorship and of the dissemination of Christian topics in translations. The appropriation of a Latin book culture in the vernaculars is treated as well as the adminstrative use of writing in charters. In the two final chapters topics related to the emerging print culture in early post-medieval manuscripts and prints are discussed with a focus on reception. The range of topics will make the book relevant for scholars from all fields of medieval research as well as those interested in mediality and materiality in general.