Framing Media: The Periphery of Fiction and Film

The research project contributes to a new literary and media history of the Modernist period, concentrating on the novel and the film as the two major competing narrative leitmedia between 1919 and 1936, which in the history of both narrative film and literary fiction is characterized by a multiplicity of media exchanges. On the one hand, the period marks the time from the late silent era to the coming of sound film. On the other hand, this interwar period generated in modernist fiction a productive interest in cinematic interrelations, ranging from Hollywood fiction to the simulation of cinematic devices. Revisiting this fecund period of filmic-literary exchanges this project sets out to explore hidden cultural dynamics in modernist interrelations between literary fiction and narrative film. Unlike other literary or media histories of the period, the project`s frame analytical approach privileges the periphery of the works of art. The project focuses on media exchanges in peripheral framings of novels such as publishers` advertisements, book covers, prefaces and meta-commentaries at the beginning of the main texts, as well as liminal framings of fiction films such as film posters, opening and closing credits and sequences. It analyzes these framings as historical and culture-specific signposts that illuminate the respective positions and functions of literary and filmic narratives in the social and media landscape during the period of Modernism. As an interface between work of art and audience, framings - like archaeological sites - preserve the socio-representational climate of a particular historical period. A history of framings in Modernism makes a substantial contribution an integrative history of literature and film, combining narratology, reception aesthetics, word-and-image studies, and advertising with the larger socio-economic dimensions of this period.

The aim of the research project Framing Media: The Periphery of Fiction and Film was to contribute to a new literary and media history of modernism by approaching intermedial relations between literature and film from a new analytical perspective. Unlike other literary or media histories of the period, the projects frame analytical approach privileged the periphery of the works of art. The project focused on media exchanges in peripheral framings of novels and films, including their advertising, book covers and film posters, as well as paratexts that appear in the literary and film work (e.g. film credits, prefaces and opening sequences). These framings were analyzed as historical and culture-specific signposts that illuminate the respective positions and functions of literary and filmic narratives in the social and media landscape. As interfaces between the work of art and the audience, such framings preserve the specific socio-representational climate of a particular historical period, but also lend themselves to an integrative study of literature and film that combines narratology, reception aesthetics, word-and-image studies, and advertising with larger socio-economic dimensions. A key objective in investigating filmic and literary exchanges was to elucidate feedback mechanisms between literature and film in their historical processes of narrative specialization. The project developed along three lines of inquiries contributing to three important areas of research: (1) the intermedial semiotics of textual framings (2) the study of conceptual, generic, narrative, and fictional frames of literature and film and (3) a history of word-and-image relations in literature and film. The first area of inquiry dealt with semiotic and textual framings in the sense of concrete signals or devices that mark a conceptual difference (work vs. non-work, fiction vs. non-fiction, story-telling realm vs. storyworld, etc.). The second research perspective explored mental frames that informed basic conceptions of film and literature as media, their uses as narrative forms and appropriations for fictional purposes. Both lines of investigation contributed to a more comprehensive understanding of historical word-and-image conceptions.