Literature and Media

The research project "Literature and Media" concentrates on the complex influences media have on the structure and form, not the contents of literary texts. It is made up of several focuses of research. In the media historical field of writing, printing and facsimile-printing there are two areas of inquiry: On the one hand there is the area in which an analysis of the development of drama-structures is to be done within the context of printing and the press (especially the questions concerning plot, intrigue, gesture and other non-verbal signs of communication in the 18th century) [Kogler], and on the other hand research in connection with the concept of narrating and writing in the facsimile-novels in the era of completely developed printing and photosetting (i.e. the late works of Arno Schmidt) [Plöschberger]. A third area comprises the analysis of the dialectic between literature as an art of the written word and the illusionistic media photography, film and television. Thereby the further development and transformations of the central categories of Lessing`s "Laokoon"-aesthetics - fiction, mimesis and meaning - are to be examined and the possibilities of poetic presentation techniques in the aftermath of the decline of mimetic illusionism are to be surveyed systematically [Walitsch]. A fourth part of the project deals generally with the form of literary culture within the context of analogue media being established between 1880 and 1933; furthermore, it deals with the impact that the media techniques writing and printing have on literature at that time, and highlights this with the help of a concrete literary study concerning aspects of form in the poetry of Stefan George [Hiebler].