Za obrysy média. Literatura a medialita

Richard Müller (ed.), Tomáš Chudý (ed.)

The primary ambition of this book is to establish the theoretical foundations for the integration of literary and media studies. The first step of our enquiry is to outline a genealogy of the concept of medium. As we argue, however, such genealogy cannot be separated from the “evolution” of media. The book comprises thirteen chapters divided into three sections, together with a collectively written conclusion. The first section asks some fundamental questions about the genealogical definition of medium – means, instrument, environment – and the conceptualization of media evolution. A more general understanding of mediality becomes revealed: mediality as something uncovered only when that which was beyond the threshold of perception or signification becomes perceivable. The perspective of the prehistory of media thinking is applied to two relevant fields of Czech literary theory and aesthetics, including the Prague School of Structuralism. The second section develops the perspectives of media philosophy and media anthropology. The third section shows how a number of tensions in the mediality concept has become apparent over the course of its gradual emergence: the instrumental vs environmental understanding of the “medium”, regard for media ontology vs respect for media specificity (the different paradigms of systems theory and intermediality theory are analyzed in separate chapters), technologics vs anthropologics. The historical and cultural turn, as it occurred within semiotics, provides an important context for explaining the cultural-semiotic significance of the incompatibility of differently constructed codes, channels and orientations of communication. The main focus of this section becomes the way media provide the ground for making general medial phenomena visible as they arise either between media, in their synergy or discrepancies, between media artefacts or between man and the apparatus.