Sym: 0609.24

Date: 1 september 2006
From: huizinga-fgw <huizinga-fgw@uva.nl>
Subject: Sym: 0609.24: Conference 'Re-Mediating Literature' (call for papers), Utrecht, wo 4 - za 7 juli 2007

Conference Re-Mediating Literature

1. Introduction

Recent developments in digital and electronic media have stimulated new theoretical reflections on the nature of media as such and on the way in which they evolve across time. The particular 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 ongoing 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 our title thus has a double thrust. Firstly, it refers to the transformative exchanges that have occurred in the past, and continue to occur, between literature and new media: how has digitilization affected literature as a cultural medium? Secondly, it 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 locate 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 (new) media studies.

2. Main themes

A. New technologies and literary practice: 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 digitilisation affecting reading practices and the circulation of literary texts? What new forms of 'inter-medial' and multimedial literature 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 compatibilities 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 of compatibility and competition be mapped and analyzed, and what are the insights that such analyses might yield into media formations as techno-cultural formations?

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

3. Set-up

The 2,5 day conference will consist of plenary lectures by the keynote speakers, parallel sessions, panel discussions, and poster presentations. We estimate ca. 125 participants.

4. Keynote Speakers

N. Katherine Hayles is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is one of the leading scholars across the disciplines of science and literature and the author of 'The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century' (Ithaca, 1984); 'Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science' (Chicago, 1991); 'How We Became Post-Human: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics' (Chicago, 1999), 'Writing Machines' (Cambridge, 2002); and 'My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts' (2005).

Katherine Hayles works at the crossroads of science, digital and literary culture and explores the ways in which media technologies (cybernetic technologies especially) shape and reshape the boundaries of the human, and how new (codified) and old (arbitrary) language games have interacted and affected artistic, literary practices.

In 'How We Became Posthuman', she presents a history of the cybernetic and informatic sciences and traces the concept of technological, disembodied 'information'. While Hayles still resists the idea of a post-biological future in 'How We Became Posthuman', 'My Mother Was a Computer' instead acknowledges the reality of such expectations. Corporeal embodiment, she argues, no longer serves to define the limits of the human: these limits have become optional.

Hayles positions literary texts in this context as inevitably intertwined with the digital. This intertwining is made manifest in the interactions between language and code, print and electronic text, and the dialectic between analogue and digital representations. Hayles calls this entanglement intermediation. She presents intermediation as a dynamic process, or a series of cycles, in which media constantly remediate each other without any one being privileged as 'more original' than the other. Instead, Hayles contends, media always operate in clusters.

Samuel Weber is the Avalon Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University and one of the leading American thinkers across the disciplines of literary theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. He is the author and editor of several important books in the field of philosophy, theology, media and theatre studies, such as: 'Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media' (Stanford, 1996), 'Religion and Media' (Stanford, 2001), 'Theatricality as Medium' (New York, 2004), and 'Targets of Opportunity' (New York, 2006). In 'Mass Mediauras' Weber explores the ways in which modern modes of 'inscription' - television, radio, film, and writing - are constituted as media: how they transgress their conventionally set boundaries and thus link up with each other in a complex network. Indeed, according to Weber these media were always already inscribed into each other, rather than being in any way distinct. This linkage also questions the presumed radical difference between old and new media: new media are used in ways that are not 'something completely different', but hark back to the uses of older media.

In 'Theatricality as Medium', Weber reassesses (amongst others) the relation of theatricality to the introduction of electronic media. Unlike the standard perspective, Weber defends the viewpoint that the new media never break with the characteristics of live staged performance. He argues that such performance already incorporated the potentials of the new media, while the latter indeed intensify problems and challenges central to the theatre since the Greeks. Weber questions traditional conceptions of the theatre that favor the plot (as a totalizing structure) as its central feature, seeking instead to emphasize aspects relative to the materiality of theatre as a medium: not the narrative, but the embodiment of performance, the process and place of staging, or the processing of information.

Marie-Laure Ryan is a famous independent scholar in the fields of literature and new media technologies. She is author and editor of a number of key-texts in narrative theory and new media: 'Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory' (Bloomington, 1991); 'Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory' (Bloomington, 1999); 'Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media' (Baltimore, 2001);'Narrative Across Media: the Languages of Storytelling' (Lincoln, 2005), and 'Avators of Story' (2006).

Marie-Laure Ryan's work is devoted to narrative, narrative functions (cf. simulation), and narrative effects (cf. immersion) in a transmedial setting. Media, Ryan argues in 'Narrative Across Media', are not simply a tube-like means to an end. Rather, they are a means whose distinct materiality matters in processes of storage, transmission, encoding, and decoding.

In 'Narrative as Virtual Reality', Ryan repositions the study of literary texts in the context of new media and virtual reality. She shows how two key concepts in virtual reality - immersion and interactivity - are linked to the ideas of simulation and the potential respectively. Subsequently, she develops both an aesthetics and poetics of immersion and interactivity, indicating how both are equally viable in new, digital media and the old, printed medium of the literary. Traditionally, according to Ryan, these dimensions of the immersive and interactive are mutually exclusive, yet the two can be reconciled through an intervention of the body in church rituals, electronic games, and interactive drama.

Jan Baetens is professor in literary studies and director of the Institute for Cultural Studies at the Catholic University Leuven, and editor of Image and Narrative. He is the author and editor of several books on cultural studies, comics, graphic novels, and one of the leading scholars in the field of novelizaton and constrained writing: 'Romans contraintes' (2005), 'La novellisation: du film au roman/Novelization: from film to novel' (2004), 'L'archivage numrique. Conditions, enjeux, effets' (co-edited with Smir Badir) (2004), 'Close reading new media: analyzing electronic literature' (2006), 'Made in the USA' (2002), 'The Graphic Novel' (2001), 'Time, narrative and the fixed image' (coedited with Mireille Ribire) (2001). Baetens is also the author and editor of several anthologies of poetry, including 'SLAM!' (pomes sur le basketball) (2006), and 'Vivre sa vie. Une novellisation en vers du film de Jean-Luc Godard' (2005).

In his research, Baetens typically focuses on criss-crosses between (especially) verbal and visual media in popular culture and 'high' culture at the same time. Thus, he has shown how novelization - novels based on films and television series - has functioned as a premediation of video, before viewers could record their favourite programmes. The 'newer' medium of video is, in this context, thus foretold in the 'older' medium of literature and the novel. According to Baetens, however, the impact of the visual is not diminished by the contamination of the verbal in this instance: it is an indirect contamination.

Baetens situates this concept and practice of novelization in the context of three key concepts in contemporary media theory: adaptation, remediation, and specificity. On this basis, he has developed a broader theory of medial contamination and medial differentation in the era of medial hybridity.

5. Abstract Submissions

Topics

• Changing conceptions and manifestations 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 reworkings be theorized in terms of cultural memory and media archeology? This could, for instance, focus on the representation of new media in literature (cf. James Joyce, William Gibson), and the way in which these representations have in turn been stored in the practices of such new media;
• 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 form 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 on the object of literary studies: the impact of new mediations of the literary through foldable screens and other flexible, wearable, handheld 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, the emergence of new forms and practices of literary criticism on the internet, as well as the institutional development of new strategies and conventions in editing techniques;
• Institutional remediations II: literary studies from cultural to media studies: will we witness, in the foreseeable future, a 'post-human' paradigm shift in the humanities that redirects our focus from cultural studies to media studies?

• Abstracts may be submitted as of September 1, 2006, through the following mailing address, indicating the applicant's name, email address and present academic function: remediatingliterature@let.uu.nl.
• Abstracts should be no longer than 250 words, should summarize the topic of the paper, and must be written in English;
• Abstracts should conform to one or more of the conference topics;
• Abstracts will be selected by the Program Committee on the basis of originality, significance of contribution, and relevance to the conference topics;
• Abstracts can be submitted until November 6, 2006
• Authors will be notified of acceptance or rejection by e-mail by December 22, 2006
• Deadline: November 6, 2006.