ENGL 582 B1: Reading Media

M. Litwack

Media permeate contemporary life. Media also increasingly permeate the fields of literary and cultural studies. But what exactly do we mean by “media,” and why has the term acquired its current critical prominence? If “media studies” designates one name given to the study of media, what precisely should this practice of study entail? This seminar addresses these issues through readings in a range of accounts of media and mediation. We will approach media theory not in terms of a predefined object or a fixed disciplinary protocol but rather as a heterogeneous terrain with multiple, at times incommensurate, aims and applications. Although the current disciplinary division between media studies, literary studies, and cultural studies would suggest that media could be partitioned from the wider field of critical and theoretical practice, this seminar will proceed from the speculation that questions of media and mediation are inseparable from the general problematics of reading, culture, and politics that cut across—and beyond—the humanities. Accordingly, alongside our engagement with some important canonical and recent texts central to the (inter)disciplinary formation of media theory, we will also ask how media and mediation have figured, whether explicitly or implicitly, in conceptual and methodological debates that have emerged in other domains of contemporary criticism.

Tracking and assessing the travels of the media concept across the discipline(s), some of our lines of inquiry will include: Can one “read” recorded sound or a photograph like one “reads” a poem and what, in turn, would be a “reading” of literature that took seriously its mediatic status? What, if anything, might be gleaned when a topic or object familiar to students of literature and culture (e.g., race, sexual difference, the literary institution, the body, etc.) is reimagined as a medium? How has the proliferation of so-called communication media contoured the reinvigorated turn to issues of ethics and relationality, such as in the relationship between self and other, reader/spectator/user and text, subject and world? Is language analog or digital? What about experience, or politics? Indeed, can we speak of a “politics of media” and, if so, do different media forms demand different political imaginations and strategies? Is, finally, anything unmediated or unmediatable? Staging these and other problems to consider the forms of study that an attention to media might make available, our seminar will resist the impulse simply to “apply” theory to media or amiably add media to the long list of objects that one might address in the discipline of English Studies. Instead, we will collectively evaluate the difference that media and mediation make in order to think together through the potential challenges and opportunities that these analytics pose to the critical protocols that we practice. 

For students with no background in media theory, this seminar will serve as an introduction to some of its key problematics and texts; for students interested in culture, theory, aesthetics, or politics, this course will offer you the opportunity to articulate your own work to, and test it against, questions of media; for all students, this seminar will provide an occasion to reflect upon and clarify your own practices of reading.

Readings in R. Barthes, L. Berlant and L. Edelman, J. Byrd, J. Dean, G. Deleuze, J. Derrida, S. Hall, R.A. Judy, K. Keeling, F. Kittler, A. Galloway, L. Liu, E. Manning, K. Marx, K. McKittrick and A. Weheliye, M. McLuhan, F. Moten, E. Sedgwick, B. Siegert, K. Silverman, N. Tadiar, Tiqqun, T. Terranova, N. Wiener, A. Wilden.