230569 Literature and Media Cultures in Britain: A Historical Survey (V) (WiSe 2006/2007)

It is a widespread conviction that the audio-visual media, especially the 'new' electronic and digital media of the late twentieth century, have had a pervasive influence on how we experience the world around us and how we communicate, and also on how we deal with fact and fiction. Consequently, the media appear to have influenced how literature is written and read. If we want to assess the relationship between literature and the media, however, we need to look at the development of literary and media systems from the introduction of the printing press - the first media 'revolution' - in Early Modern England, through to the Internet.
This lecture course will survey the major phases in the history of the literature-media interaction historically. The history of literature's own most important media product, the printed text itself (in its various formats from the broadsheet to the book), will be discussed, as will the reactions of literary texts to new media systems of communication, information and entertainment, and the development of hybrid genres such as the radio play, the TV play and the feature film, the literary adaptation, the hypertext, etc.

PLEASE NOTE: This is a lecture course, not a seminar. It will therefore yield a standard TWO credit points (for regular attendance and minutes of one session) and is offered mainly for students who need a course in the "frei wählbares Profilmodul" without "Einzelleistung", i.e. outside their obligatory modules.

Background reading:

Briggs, Asa, and Peter Burke. A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (Cambridge, 2002).
Faulstich, Werner. Einführung in die Medienwissenschaft (München, 2002).
Schanze, Helmut (Hg.). Handbuch der Mediengeschichte(Stuttgart, 2001).