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Conference

Conference

Intermedial Literature: Concerning Image, Sound and Writing in Contemporary Literature

September 25-27, 2008
Location: A.D. White House, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

Today literary production and its reception are communicated and realized in large part via (digital) audio-visual media that profoundly shape the cultural dimension of the written word, while at the same time transcending it. Media create opportunities for marketing and image enhancement, for the formation of “habitus” and the symbolic capital of those who write within the field of literature (Bourdieu). They inflect prevailing collective paradigms of perception, just as they select and define (literary) value and sensual coherence of all that makes up the processes of remembering within the humanities. It is the task of literary studies to respond to these new forms of mediation and communication with a willingness to rethink fundamental notions of disciplinarity, and even of the “literary” itself.

Thursday, September 25

7:30p.m. Words of Welcome and Introduction

7:45-10:15p.m.

  • Heinz-Peter Preußer (University of Bremen): Medial Transgressions within the Literary Field
  • Andreas Huyssen (Columbia University): Urban Imaginaries, The Miniature, and the Feuilleton

Moderator: David Bathrick (Cornell University)

Friday, September 26

9:00-11:30a.m.

  • Peter Gendolla (University of Siegen): Concerning the Dissolution of Intermedial Differences in Virtual Space
  • Dieter Mersch (University of Potsdam): Transmedial Strategies in Aesthetics
  • Peter Gilgen (Cornell University): Literature in the Age of the Media System

Moderator: Peter Hohendahl (Cornell University)

1:00-3:30p.m.

  • Rainer Stollmann (University of Bremen): The Author as Intermedial Authority: Alexander Kluge
  • David Bathrick (Cornell University): The E in the E-Book: Medium and Message in the 22 Müller-Kluge TV-Conversations

Moderator: Leslie Adelson (Cornell University)

3:30-6:00p.m.

  • Roberto Simanowski (Brown University): ‘Eating Text’: The Life of Words as Image, Sound and Action
  • Jens Schellhammer (Cornell University): We’ll Slide Down the Surface of Things: On Pop’s Attempt to Write the Curve of the Needle

Moderator: Sara Warner (Cornell University)

Saturday, September 27

9:30-11:30a.m.

  • Anne Thurmann-Jajes (Weserburg – Museum für moderne Kunst, Bremen): Mediality and Intermediality in Concrete Poetry: From the Vienna Group to the Bielefeld Colloquium
  • Haiping Yan (Cornell University): Tropes of Home: Globalization and the Visual Turn in Chinese Urban Culture;

Moderator: Patrizia McBride (Cornell University)

1:00-3:30p.m.

  • Sabine Haenni (Cornell University): Media and the Private/Public Binary
  • Manuel Köppen (Humboldt University, Berlin): Reflected Mediality: Michael Hanecke’s Film Adaptation of The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek
  • Amy Villarejo (Cornell University): The Cities of Walls: Mediated Urbanity, Viral Circulation and Tropa de Elite

Moderator: Nick Salvato (Cornell University)

3:30-6:00p.m.

  • Wolfgang Emmerich and Matthias Wilde (University of Bremen): Literary Prizes and Their Medial Paratexts: How the Winning of Prizes and One’s Presence in the Media Increase the Symbolic Capital of an Author
  • Tim Murray (Cornell University): Asia Acoustic

Moderator: Werner Goehner (Cornell University)

Closing Words

Sponsors: College of Arts and Sciences, Cornell; Cornell University Library;
Department of Cultural Studies, University of Bremen; Department of German Studies, Cornell;
Department of German Studies, University of Bremen; Department of Theatre, Film & Dance, Cornell;
Institute for German Cultural Studies, Cornell; New German Critique; Rose Goldsen Lectures, Cornell;
Society for the Humanities, Cornell; University Provost, Cornell