Medienkomparatisk; Schlüsselbegriffe und anderes Inhalt Flashcards
According to Scott McCloud, what is the ontology of comics?
Comics are a narrative art form with a very specific dimensional property, being that they are still visually drawn images sequenced into a panel. This is different to film, as the film contains only one panel (the screen) and is an uninterrupted series of moving images.
What does “Volksaufklärung” mean and to which medium does the term relate to?
“Volksaufklärung” is a term which has been used in the history of comic studies. Coined by Richard Topeffer, the term refers to the institutionalisation of comics in newspapers and their signature intellectually satirical style.
What was the first comic to appear in a newspaper and who made it?
The Yellow Kid by Richard F. Outcault in The New York World in 1895.
When comics first emerged as a popular medium, what did Classics Illustrate produce in order to attract audiences?
Classics Illustrate commissioned comic adaptations of popular literary success, especially stories with horror/gothic elements as well as sexual motives.
Who established comics as a socially respectable medium?
Art Spiegelman through his creation of Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, depicting an allegory of his parent’s survival of the Shoah in which the Jews are represented as mice and the Nazis as cats. Serialised between 1988-91, Spiegelman won the Pulitizer Prize in 1992.
Which key terms are crucial to the analysis of comics?
Besides medium itself being a crucial aspect of comics, as the visual ontology of a comic informs the reading experience of a comic, intermediality is a key aspect in the media analysis of comics.
Two aspects of intermedial appreciation are crucial to the study of comics: intermediale Bezüge (intermedial references) and adaptation. The latter is clear: comics and graphic novels, even today, are often adaptions of famous literary stories with the aim of re-presenting the story to a new, often younger, audience.
Regarding intermedial references, comics are often referenced in other media. In films and television, onomatopoeic sounds and speech bubbles are often referenced as well as a comic’s typical panel design (think Batman on TV for the former as well as Ah-Ha’s music video for “Take on Me” for the latter).
Name an example of intermedial referencing in Literature to comics:
“Populäres Gedicht N. 17” von Rolf Dieter Brinkmann. It refences both classic comic figures as well as typical tropes of comics as a medium, such as “POW”
Heavily ironic and terrible.
What important aspects underlie the study of literary adaptations in comics?
1: Canonicity; which texts are typically selected?
2: Motivation: Is the comic being produce as a contract with a company or for private enjoyment.
3: The template of the genre: which genre specific characteristics are changed, adapted or removed once adapted into a comic strip?
4: Source: This is of course linked to canonicity but is a particular source privileged? For example, in a comic adaptation of a Greco-Roman myth, which source for the story is used as there could be many versions of the same/similar story?
Discuss Sappho and the problem which lyrics pose for adaptations in x medium
According to Wojcik, lyrics pose a serious problem for comic adaptations in comics, as well as most visual mediums. Wojcik’s argument for this is that lyrics only resist narrative or do not contain a narrative which can easily be transposed onto the panel design of a comic strip.
This just strikes me as a lack of imagination on the part of comic writers as well as a reflection of increasingly minor position poetry has in contemporary society.
What is peculiar about video games as a medium?
As well as inheriting much the visuality of a film, a video games is comprised of an interactive, fictional storyworld whose logic is built on real rules. This is Juul, J Hauf
What is the link between narrative, interactivity and immediacy in video games?
Immediacy is the phenomenological term delineating how strongly an individual’s focus is directed towards an aesthetic object. It seems that the strengthened aspect of narration as well as interactivity augments the phenomenological immediacy of a video game.
I am somewhat sceptical of this assertion (candy crush as a counter-example. The immediacy does not seem dependent on narrative to me).
Explain this quote:
“With the exception of some art games, most videogames function under the logic of “remediation”, a tendency within digital media to incorporate, contain, reform, and re-establish old media forms for a new cultural moment”.
- Kevin. M. Flanagan, “Videogame Adaptation” from the Oxford Handbook to Adaptation Studies
It’s pretty straightforward. Remediation is the process whereby a new medium, especially digital media, absorbs and reconstitutes aspects of a previous media. The radio remediated the media of music and therefore altered the grammar, the underlying expectations and conventions, of music in the 20th century, for example. Video games seem to assimilate many media, both in terms of content as well as structure.
What is Medienkomparatisk (Comparative Media studies) and how does it differentiate to comparatives arts (inter artes)?
Comparative media studies investigates the unique properties of differing media in order to analyse and differentiate how certain functions or informs experience. Historically, comparative arts (inter artes) has been the study of contrasting art forms in order to differentiate the characteristics of artistic mediums. For example, the famous Lakoon debate initiated by Lessing, which instigated a discussion among 18th century elites as to the question how did literature differentiate itself from sculpture. Naturally, such debates often incorporated phenomenological as well as ethical questions in addition to the basic ontological definition of an art form.
Crucially, the object of analytical focus in comparative media studies is much wider than comparative arts as it includes other everyday or non-artistic forms of media.
Can Medienkomparatistik be studied diachronically and/or sychronically? Give examples.
Yes.
Diachronic media analysis can be analysed in terms of media development and ,,koevolutionen”.
This being said, it would seem that most media analysis seems to centre on synchronic analyses. Synchronic analyses of media can include the following topics:
- Intermediale Spannungen
- Wechselwirkungen (interdependence)
- Adaptation studies
According to Henry Jenkins, what are the key features of Medienkonvergenz (media convergence) to remember?
1: Medienkonvergenz defines the condition and/or process of new media being created from the fusion of older media.
2: The cultural-historical process of Medienkonvergenz seems to have intensified at the end of the 19th century.
3: Greater Medienkonvergenz in society contributed to the emergence of mass and popular culture.
4: 19/20th century Mediankonvergenz marks the spread of new media through society.
5: Medienkonvergenz is one of the central processes which allows for intermediality.
Explain with examples the following quotes from Marshall McLuhan:
“The medium is the message”. P1
“The ‘message’ of any medium is always another medium” P1
“The power of technology to create uits own world of demand is not independent of technology being first an extension of our own bodies and senses”. P7
As German critic Sybille Krämer pointts out, what McLuhan means with “he medium is the message” is that any the content of any medium, be that a technological medium or any other form of communication, such as speech, is inflected by the properties of the medium itself. The classical example being that the prose, especially prose written after the advent of the Gutenberg printing press, has a distinctive character contrasting with earlier prose and property. Early poetry, for example that inscribed on papyrus or on clay tablets, often displays the aesthetics of orality. The printing press also allowed fort he creation of new genres, a new readership as well as for what Jürgen Habermas termed “the public sphere”.
“The ‘message’ of any medium is always another medium” refers to what would nowadays be called premediation or remediation. Premediation designating the process by which an earlier medium, or even convention, influences a later medium or genre. For example, an “odyssey” is often the default, canonical metaphor in travel writing, even in travel stories of Shoah survivors. Remediation is process by which a new medium reconstitutes a previous media, such as the video game reorganising and assimiliating many elements of film and literature as well as other games. McLuhan gives the example of the content of writing being the medium of speech, which obviously a conflation of premediation and remediation.
The final point, I think, is that medium always has a distinctive phenomenological character, especially insofar as it demands a suspension of our disbelief, greater or lesson span of attention, etc.
What’s the difference between a soft and hot medium?
A soft medium is the institutionalisation of a medium as a system of signification (zeichensystem) and communication. A hot medium, such as Adolf Kittler has argued, is when the institutionalisation of a medium alters and redefines the content of communication. For example, the printing press would be a hot medium as its widespread introduction influenced the nature of prose writing thereafter, whereas an alphabetic script or paper itself would be a soft medium.
Analyse Lessing’s Lakoon and how it relates Medienkomparatisk.
As Sabine Schneider points, the 18th century saw the emergence of new aesthetic theories which were considerate of the limitations of language, rationality as well as the beauteous self-referential nature of the image. Lessing’s Laokoon captures the discrepancies within this discourse by representing the disjuncture between the aesthetic ontologies within the media of language versus image.
Because medium is a broad category which resists tradition and may not necessarily be material, there are seven categories of possible medial analysis. Name them all with examples.
1: Channels of mass communication (radio).
2: Communication technologies (smart phones and the printing press)
3: Applications of digital media (Whatsapp, X, social media)
4: Techniques for the preservation and codification of language (script, voice recordings)
5: Form of semiotic expression (Language itself, movement, image, sound)
6: Art forms (painting, poetry, novels etc)
7: material substances which facilitate communication (papyrus, paper, clay tablets etc.).
Who was Ferdinand de Saussure and why is he relevant?
Ferdinand de Saussure was an early 20th century French linguist’s whose theory of signification became the basis of structuralism. Saussure theorised that a unit of communication could be condensed to the sign, which is constituted by two components: the signified, the unit of information conveyed, and the signified, being the visual and/or aural codification of within the signified. For example, the signifier of a tree, being the written word and its sound, communicates the notion of a tree, which is signified concept inherent to the signifier of a tree.
This crucial as it allows for the analysis of channel of media comparative studies, being semiotics, as well as provides a clarifying model for communication which could elaborate the different methods of communication distinct to a medium.
For Saussure, a sign with a widespread meaning would be a icon or index. For example, the sun as a sign for warmth. A culturally varying sign, on the other hand, was denoted by Saussure as a symbol, such as the multitudes of symbols for the good and evil. There can be, of course, medium-specific symbols.This observation would later become the basis for the concepts of cultural icons, as it is contemporaneously used in media comparative studies, and interfigurality.
What is the difference intramediality, intermediality and transmediality?
Intramediality refers to a medium sui generis and which also doesn’t contain the features of an intermedial medium, such as opera.
According to Irina Rajewsky, there are three forms of Intermedial composition. Intermedial reference, such as allusions within a work, adaptation (Medienwechsel), like Literaturverfilmungen, and mixed medial objects (Mischformen), such as operas and musicals.
Transmediality denotes the study of content which reappears across various media, such as the study of cultural icons and interfigurality. Objects of analysis in the study of transmediality include tnasfictionality (Transfiktionalität), Transmedia Storytelling, and transmedial narratology (Transmediale Narratologie)
What is the difference between pluri and multimediality?
Plurimedial:
Dramentexte
Songtexte…
Multimedial (multimodal):
Film
Comic
Photo-Fiction
The difference between these two concepts is the instance of consumption. A dramatic script can be consumed separate from the film with dramatises the words on the page.
Give two examples of intermediale Bezüge (intermedial referencing)
Filmic writing (filmisches Schreiben), such as a voiceover in a film. Wojcik does concede that filmic writing can be difficult to identify.
Referencing in terms of content: pop music within a film or the recitation of a poem. This can be function as an important feature of world-building within a piece of fiction. It must be noted that intermedial referencing abides the logic of canonicity, whereby more common or canonical aesthetic objects are more likely to be reference i.e. the Bible.
What is the example of photo-fiction given by Wojcik?
Photos, such as the frontispiece, for Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald. The images are an aspect of Sebald’s world-building, advertisement for the novel and are multimodal, not plurimodal, in that photo-fiction in Sebald cannot be separated from the novel Austerlitz.
