<nettime-ann> literature & new media conf in utrecht (july 4-6)

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

.
http://www2.let.uu.nl/remediatingliterature/

Re-Mediating Literature

Recent developments in digital and electronic media have stimulated new 
theoretical reflections on the nature of media as such and ont he way 
in which they evolve across time. The aim of this conference is to 
examine how recent technological changes have affected the 'old' medium 
of literature.

Multimedial and interactive texts, digitalized archives, cyberpoetics, 
and technological innovations such as foldable screens: together these 
have influenced the production and reception of literature, along with 
the ways in which we think about writing and reading. These onging 
developments call for a critical examination both of the relations 
between literature and the new media, and of the relations between 
literary studies and media studies.

The concept of 'remediation' in ourt title thus has a double thrust. 
Firstly, it refers to the transformative exchanges between literature 
and the new media: how has digitalization affected literature as a 
cultural medium? Secondly, 'remediation' indicates a relocation of 
literary studies within the broader field of (new) media studies: how 
could literary studies profit from the various analytical tools 
developed in (new) media studies and, conversely, how could our 
understanding of earlier phases in the evolution of the literary medium 
contribute to our understanding of present developments? By working on 
both these issues, we hope to relocate the place of literature within 
the milieu of modern media networks and technologies, but also to 
relocate the aims and practices of literary studies within the field of 
media studies.

Main themes:

A. New technologies and literary practices - the state of the field:  
will literature continue to develop as a schizophrenic medium, a hard 
medium of printed matter and an unstable medium of electronic data at 
the same time, or will it fork out in one of two directions? How is 
digitalization affecting reading practices and the circulation of 
literary texts? What new forms of intermedial and multimedial 
literatures are emerging?

B. Literature and the new media - the longer view: what new light do 
recent developments throw on the history of literature as a cultural 
medium and, conversely, how might insights from the history of the 
literary medium contribute to our understanding of recent developments? 
How can literary history be rewritten in conjunction with such media 
technologies?

C. Media compatabilities and competitions: new media hardly ever 
completely subject and annihilate older media. Rather, the two tend to 
co-exist, each taking on different tasks and responsibilities (cf. film 
and the novel in the earlier twentieth century). At the same time, 
however, they often interrupt and compete with each other (cf. 
television and the digital in the later twentieth century). How can 
this duplicity or compatability and competition be mapped and analyzed, 
and which are the insights that such analyses might yield into media 
formations as techno-cultural formations?

D. Disciplinary reolcations: will literary studies become a branch of 
media studies in the foreseeable future - and if so, how? Will literary 
studies profit from such a relocation and how will this relocation 
affects its objects and methodologies?

Keynotes:

Marie-Laure Ryan
"Self-Reflexivity in Net-Art"

Self-reflexivity is widely considered by cognitive scientists a 
distinctive feature of the human mind. It is therefore not surprising 
that this fundamental thinking process should manifest itself in most 
human artistic and intellectual projects. The postmodern fascination 
with self-reflexivity can be attributed to the sense of pastness that 
permeates turn-of-the millennium culture. But self-reflexivity could 
also be a response to the curiosity aroused by the development of a new 
medium in search of its cultural function. By filling the World Wide 
Web with images and inverted images of its own utilities and by often 
making these utilities dysfunctional, Net.art invites us to reflect on 
the kind of immersion in digital culture that fools us into thinking 
that we fully control the technology that supports it.

Samuel Weber
"'Seagulls': A 'Script-Image' of Walter Benjamin"

No writer-critic of the 20th century was more attentive to intermedial 
questions than was Walter Benjamin. One of the forms this attention 
takes is his notion, and practice, of the "Schriftbild". This talk 
translates and reads this as a 'Script-Image' (Schriftbild). A 
Script-Image is both a written image, and one that  "scripts"  a  
scenario. This presentation will address one particular staging of a 
script-image: the short piece entitled "Seagulls" (Möwen), one of five 
that Benjamin wrote in the summer of 1930 during a three-week trip to 
Scandinavia and then published under the title, "Nordic Sea" (Nordische 
See). (An English translation will be made available).

N. Katherine Hayles
"Narrative and Database:  Remediating Literature Through Data"

Recently several theorists have proposed that database is replacing 
narrative as the dominant cultural form, among them Lev Manovich and Ed 
Folsom. This presentation will argue for that narrative is essential 
for human communication and culture, but it will also acknowledge that 
contemporary narratives are transforming through the impact of data.  
Remediation here implies that the feedback cycle described by Bolter 
and Grusin in Remediation can also be understood to take place through 
different cultural forms as well as through different media, where the 
dynamics are informed not by the hypermediation/transparency dialectic 
they describe but rather by the circulation through narrative and data.

Jan Baetens
"Novelization and Intermediality"

This paper tackles first of all the major characteristics of the 
novelization, a very popular although badly known example of 
intermediality in 20th Century storytelling (not "the film of the 
book", but "the book of the film"). Il will give a broad historical 
survey of the genre, which is actually as old as cinema itself, so to 
speak. In its second part, the paper tries to define what is really at 
stake when we study this genre, and why it can be interesting to focus 
closely on such a "minor", and often  espised, practice. Finally, this 
paper presents a short analysis of one or two case studies, among them 
the novelization of Jacques Tati's "Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot" by 
Jean-Claude Carrière, a famous French screenwriter (his collaboration 
with Bunuel is still very famous) and author of various novelizations 
since his first attempt in the late fifties until today( cf. Goya's 
Ghosts, 2006).

Joanna Zylinska
"Logos bio-ethikos: What If Foucault Had Had a Blog?"

This paper focuses on one particular domain of contemporary media 
culture which blurs the boundary between the literary
and the literal:blogging. Arguing that blogs aim at creating an 
experience of ‘total life’ by building intricate systems of connections 
between online and offline spaces, personae and narratives, I will 
explore the extent to which practices facilitated by blogging can be 
interpreted in terms of bioethics. However, bioethics for me is not 
limited to the study of ethical issues arising from the biological and 
medical sciences. Rather it becomes a broadly conceptualised ‘ethics of 
life’, which requires judgement on what we understand by ‘life’ in its 
different forms, and on what ‘our’ position as those who deem 
themselves to be ‘human’ is in this bioethics. Interestingly, Foucault 
associates the practice of self-writing precisely with an ethos of 
life. The keeping of individual notebooks focused on the recollection 
of the past is for him ‘a matter of constituting a logos bioethikos for 
oneself … , an ethics quite explicitly oriented by concern for the self 
toward objectives defined as: withdrawing into oneself, getting in 
touch with oneself, relying on oneself, benefiting from and enjoying 
oneself’. This phrase ‘logos bioethikos’ provides a key for my ereading 
of bioethics as a practice of good life, always on the way to 
becoming-a-good-life. But I suggest Foucault has in mind something much 
more material and direct than just a story about one’s life and about 
how it should be lived: this practice of self-writing is actually said 
to produce ‘a body’. Drawing on Seneca, Foucault claims that ‘writing 
transforms the thing seen or heard into tissue and blood’. From this 
perspective diaries and blogs are not just commentaries on someone’s 
life, already lived to this point but also somehow more ‘real’ outside 
its narrative; rather they are materialisations of it, as I will argue 
in this paper. In doing so I will show that in blogging this 
materialisation occurs very much through an enactment of a different, 
more embodied, aware, and ‘lively’ relationship with technology.

_______________________________________________
nettime-ann mailing list
nettime-ann@nettime.org
http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-ann