The Emerging Contours Of The Medium

"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"--

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). TomᚠChudý 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 TomᚠChudý 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).

Small and medium enterprises (SME) have attracted increasing interest in the last few years, and industrialization is no longer seen as a linear way of development. This book analyzes how SME clusters emerge in a developing economy. Using India as a case study, it addresses one central question: If growth has largely failed to be inclusive so far, and if employing a work force in increasing returns activities through a different trajectory of industrialization is largely dependent upon industrial clusters of small and medium sized firms, then what are the structural infirmities and asymmetries that need to be taken into account in the context of framing policies related to industrial clusters? The book identifies the structural infirmities in industrial clusters in India, which could be typical to any of the developing countries and sharply in contrast to European success stories. Blending theory and empirical material, it provides a middle ground between the two extremes of a uniform policy assuming ‘one size fits all’, and a specific policy based on individual cases. The book redraws the broad contours where space and production processes mutually constitute each other, giving rise to outcomes somewhat generic to underdevelopment. It is of interest to academics working in the fields of economics, business administration/ management and development economics.

This study cuts across book arts and literary stylistics in a revisionary theory of language as medium in textual action.

South Africa - a land of paradigm shifts. A land where we are willing to leave behind the old, to bravely accept the new. What do we need to exit the dark ages in the morphology of galaxies? How prevalent is the cherishing of old concepts? Traditional morphology has been `mask-oriented', focusing on masks of dust and gas which may constitute only 5 percent of the dynamical mass of a galaxy. Some of the world's foremost astronomers flew to South Africa to address morphologically related issues at an International Conference, the proceedings of which are contained in this volume. Examine predicted extinction curves for primordial dust at high redshift. Stars evolve; why not dust? Read about the breakdown of the Hubble sequence at a redshift of one. Explore the morphology of rings; the mysteries of metal-rich globular clusters; vigorous star-formation in the Large Magellanic Cloud; the world of secular evolution, where galaxies change their shapes within one Hubble time. And much more. Examine a new kinematical classification scheme of the unmasked, dust-penetrated near-infrared images of spiral galaxies. This volume contains over 80 refereed contributions (including 18 in-depth keynote review articles), 40 pages of questions and answers, a panel discussion transcribed from tape and 24 colour plates. The volume is unique in that contributions from both high and low redshift experts are represented at a level readily accessible to postdoctoral students entering the exciting world of morphology - whether it be of the local, or more distant, Universe.

The Cologne-Bonn-Zermatt symposium is a well established series of conferences, occurring on a 5-year cycle, on the dense interstellar medium and related topics. The main results constitute valuable proceedings that offer everyone working in this field an authoritative and comprehensive source of reference.

A new “textual studies” and archival approach to the investigation of works of new media and electronic literature that applies techniques of computer forensics to conduct media-specific readings of William Gibson's electronic poem “Agrippa,” Michael Joyce's Afternoon, and the interactive game Mystery House. In Mechanisms, Matthew Kirschenbaum examines new media and electronic writing against the textual and technological primitives that govern writing, inscription, and textual transmission in all media: erasure, variability, repeatability, and survivability. Mechanisms is the first book in its field to devote significant attention to storage—the hard drive in particular—arguing that understanding the affordances of storage devices is essential to understanding new media. Drawing a distinction between “forensic materiality” and “formal materiality,” Kirschenbaum uses applied computer forensics techniques in his study of new media works. Just as the humanities discipline of textual studies examines books as physical objects and traces different variants of texts, computer forensics encourage us to perceive new media in terms of specific versions, platforms, systems, and devices. Kirschenbaum demonstrates these techniques in media-specific readings of three landmark works of new media and electronic literature, all from the formative era of personal computing: the interactive fiction game Mystery House, Michael Joyce's Afternoon: A Story, and William Gibson's electronic poem “Agrippa.”

The question whether molecular primitives can prove to be real alternatives to contemporary semiconductor means or effective supplements extending greatly possibilities of information technologies is addressed. Molecular primitives and circuitry for information processing devices are also discussed. Investigations in molecular based computing devices were initiated in the early 1970s in the hopes for an increase in the integration level and processing speed. Real progress proved unfeasible into the 1980 ́s. However, recently, important and promising results were achieved. The elaboration of operational 160-kilobit molecular electronic memory patterned 1011 bits per square centimeter in the end of 90 ́s were the first timid steps of information processing further development. Subsequent advances beyond these developments are presented and discussed. This work provides useful knowledge to anyone working in molecular based information processing.