CFP: Re-Mediating Literature

Re-Mediating Literature

NWO-TKC / Utrecht University
Department of Literary Studies
July 4-6, 2007
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.

Topics
* Changing conceptions and manifestions of the text from print to the digital age;

*Cyberpoetics and the hypertextual in digitalized and printed form;

*Remediation as a cultural process: how have different media reworked and incorporated each other, and how can such reworkigns be theorized in terms of cultural memory and media archeology?

*Copy-cats and mutations: how have textual, visual, aural, digital, and performative media functioned alongside each other, how have they co-existed? Which tasks and aspects do old media delegate to new media, or which tasks and aspects do new media copy from old media, and how has this changed the status and identity of the old medium?

*Old narratives, new games: narrative and narrative transformations across media;

*Technological inventions and their effects ont he object of literary studies: the impact of new mediations of the literary through foldable screens and other flexible, wearable, hand-held paper displays, as well as mobile acoustic networks;

*Institutional Remediations I: web publishing, accessibility, and canonization of hyperfiction, funding of literary projects on the internet, as well as the institutional developments of new strategies and conventions in editing techniques;

*Institutional Remedations II: literary studies from cultural to media studies: wil we witness, in the foreseeable future, a ‘post-human’ paradigm shift in the humanities that redirects our focus from cultural studies to media studies – or integrates the two?

Abstracts may be submitted until November 6, 2006

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