Remediating Literature

An international conference on Literature and the new media entitled Re-mediating Literature will take place at Utrecht University (the Netherlands) 4-6 july 2007, with keynote speakers Katherine Hayles, Marie-Laure Ryan, Jan Baetens, and Samuel Weber. Our website features all relevant information concerning the conferencem including the call for papers (deadline is November 6, 2006).

The conference revolves around the following issues: Recent developments in digital and electronic media have stimulated new theoretical reflections on the nature of media as such and on the way in which they evolve across time. The particular aim of this conference is to examine how recent technological changes have affected the 'old' medium of literature.

Multimedial and interactive texts, digitalized archives, cyberpoetics, and technological innovations such as foldable screens: together these have influenced the production and reception of literature, along with the ways in which we think about writing and reading. These ongoing developments call for a critical examination both of the relations between literature and the new media, and of the relations between literary studies and media studies.

The concept of 'remediation' in our title thus has a double thrust. Firstly, it refers to the transformative exchanges that have occurred in the past, and continue to occur, between literature and new media: how has digitilization affected literature as a cultural medium? Secondly, it indicates a relocation of literary studies within the broader field of (new) media studies: how could literary studies profit from the various analytical tools developed in (new) media studies and conversely, how could our understanding of earlier phases in the evolution of the literary medium contribute to our understanding of present developments? By working on both these issues, we hope to locate the place of literature within the milieu of modern media networks and technologies, but also to relocate the aims and practices of literary studies within the field of (new) media studies.

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