The Emerging Contours of the Medium (PDF)

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).

TomáS 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 TomáS Chudý et al., of the Czech edition of The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality (2020), and co-author, with Pavel sidák 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 sebek 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 sidák 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).