GERST 6481 - [Literature, Media, Form]

Fall. Next Offered: 2019-2020. 4 credits. Student option grading.

P. McBride.

This seminar investigates the productive relationship that ties literary criticism to media studies in the North-American and European humanities—for the latter we will especially focus on the German-language context. We will trace the exchange that in recent decades has drawn on literature as a heuristic point of reference for appraising the rhetorical performativity and ideological effects of communication in both analog and digital media. In so doing we will develop a cross-disciplinary framework for examining the evolving relation between literary practices, technological developments, and conceptions of media within signiﬁcant historical junctures and by drawing on inﬂuential methodological paradigms. Topics include reading and writing as cultural techniques and as spatialized processing of text/image dynamics; literary practice, materiality, and embodiment; Critical Theory and the digital humanities.