Media Studies (Spring 2011)
Convened by Jacob Risinger and Matthew Ocheltree.
This year's Recent Publications Seminar will follow a slightly modified format from previous iterations of the event. Reading will focus on how media studies has shaped recent scholarship on the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the relationship between the two. Media studies challenges many of the assumptions underpinning our understanding of how intertextual relations operate in history. The history of ideas and genre criticism are two traditional methods that are particularly vulnerable to a media studies critique. While none of our readings will be drawn from either of these two approaches, the claims made on behalf of media and (re)mediation against those of genre should always be at the forefront of our minds. The core readings total approximately 180 pages.
Group A: Seminal Studies
1. David Wellbery, "Foreword," in Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1990) [25pp]
2. Susan Stewart, "Notes on Distressed Genres," in Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (1991) [40pp]
3. Celeste Langan, "Understanding Media in 1805: Audiovisual Hallucination in The Lay of the Last Minstrel," Studies in Romanticism 40.1 (Spring 2001) [20pp]
Group B: Second Generation Reflections
4. Celeste Langan and Maureen McLane, "The Medium of Romantic Poetry," in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry (2008) [20pp]
5. John Guillory, "Genesis of the Media Concept," Critical Inquiry36.2 (Winter 2010)
6. William Warner and Clifford Siskin, "This is Enlightenment: An Invitation in the Form of an Argument," in This is Enlightenment (2010) [40pp]
Group C: Optional Supplementary Readings
7. Clifford Siskin and Michael Warner, This Is Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2010)
Introduction: "This is Enlightenment: An Invitation in the Form of an Argument" [33pp]
8. Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (2005)
Introduction: "Literature and Creative Destruction" [15pp]
Chapter 9: "The Tribe of Cool" [10pp]
Chapter 10: "Historicizing Cool: Humanities in the Information Age" [15pp]
Chapter 12: "Speaking of History: Towards a New Alliance of New Humanities and New Arts" [10pp]
9. Alan Liu, "Understanding Knowledge Work," Criticism 47.2 (2005) [10pp]