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This book explores how issues of power, form and subjectivity feature at the core of all serious thinking about the media, including appreciations of their creativity as well as anxiety about the risks they pose. Drawing widely on an interdisciplinary literature, the author connects his exposition to examples from film, television, radio, photography, painting, web practice, music and writing in order to bring in topics as diverse as reporting the war in Afghanistan, the televising of football, documentary portrayals of 9/11, reality television, the diversity of taste in the arts and the construction of civic identity. The book is divided into two parts. In the first part, three big chapters on each of the key notions provide an interconnected discussion of the media activities opened up for exploration and the debates they have provoked. The second part presents examples, arguments and analysis drawing on the author's previous work around the core themes, with notes placing them in the context of the whole book. The book brings together concepts both from Social Studies and the Arts and Humanities, addressing a readership wider than the sub-specialisms of media research. It refreshes ideas about why the media matter, and how understanding them better remains a key aim of cultural inquiry and a continuing requirement for public policy.
This chapter considers the presence of ‘borderline’ forms of Beckettian adaptation in new media. In particular, it examines the productive but critical engagement of those forms with key tenets of Linda Hutcheon's classic A Theory of Adaptation ( 2006 ), especially the constraints which Hutcheon's theory imposes upon adaptation where scope is concerned. Although Hutcheon's understanding of adaptation is broad, considering video games and interactive art, ‘brief echoes’ of works are excluded because they ‘recontextualise only short fragments
Featuring twelve original essays by leading Beckett scholars and media theorists, this book provides the first sustained examination of the relationship between Beckett and media technologies. The chapters analyse the rich variety of technical objects, semiotic arrangements, communication processes and forms of data processing that Beckett’s work so uniquely engages with, as well as those that – in historically changing configurations – determine the continuing performance, the audience reception, and the scholarly study of this work. Greatly enlarging the scope of earlier discussions, the book draws on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, such as media archaeology, in order to discuss Beckett’s intermedial oeuvre. As such it engages with Beckett as a media artist and examine the way his engagement with media technologies continues to speak to our cultural situation.
The recent uses of digital technology in war films have sparked a wave of discussions about new visual aesthetics in the genre. Drawing on the approach of film discourse analysis, this article critically examines recent claims about new visual grammar in the war film and investigates to what extent the insertion of different media channels has affected the persuasive function of the genre. Through a detailed analysis of Redacted (2007), which constitutes an extreme case of a fiction filmmaking use of a variety of digital channels, this article demonstrates that the multimedia format works within systems of classical film discourse while also generating new patterns of persuasion tied to new visual technology.
This article addresses two questions about artworks. First, why do we emotionally respond to characters and stories that we believe are fictional? Second, why are some media better than others at generating specific types of emotions? I answer these questions using psychological research that suggests our minds are not unified, but are comprised of numerous subsystems that respond differently to various aspects of artworks. I then propose a framework to help us understand how films, videogames, and literature interact with our minds in different ways, which explains why they tend to excel at generating different types of emotions.
The concept of media in Beckett has to be defined as neither a form of representation nor as a technical apparatus, nor as a symbolic system but, rather, as a means to render something visible and audible that would otherwise be beyond perception or the scope of attention. If we begin to inquire into what Beckett has to say to media studies about the vexed question of how the concept of media can be defined, the issue of exhaustion will arise. Exhaustion is to human subjects what Beckett's works are to media. From the perspective of
of address to the spectator must be understood in relation to histories of media. Beckett's work inside and against the media surround in which his plays were first staged offers an example of a technique typical of his theatrical work: the proscenium, the frame of the old medium, becomes the object of what Brecht called Umfunktionierung . Apparently unchanged, same as it ever was, the proscenium, in Beckett's theatre, undergoes a refunctioning, precisely as a result of Beckett's encounter with mass media that had remade culture. To summarise
a suitable test case to see how the digital CWE can help the reader navigate this intratextual web and test the research hypothesis; Beckett's long creative career, which spans more than fifty years and constitutes a rich and multifaceted oeuvre; the variety of genres and media (radio, TV, film) that Beckett practised throughout his life, which allows for building a model suitable for drama, poetry, prose fiction and critical essays, and which makes it relevant to research fields such as intermediality and media studies. Beckett's translingualism is yet another
3 Theorising and analysing media performance in wartime There are two principal objectives to this chapter. In order to move beyond purely empirical analysis, the first is to describe the analytical framework that serves as the basis for our theoretically informed and systematic analysis of wartime media performance. Building initially on existing work by Hallin (1986) and Wolfsfeld (1997), the first half of this chapter synthesises a range of models, hypotheses and explanatory variables, drawn from across the literature, in order to set out a framework
An important theme in current studies of environmental representation is the inadequacy of many narratological and stylistic techniques for registering ecological complexity. This article argues that, in the case of cinema, water constitutes an especially vivid example of an allusive natural subject, and it examines the means by which one film, The Bay (Barry Levinson, 2012), manages to confront that challenge. It pays particular attention to The Bay’s treatment of animal life, and its acknowledgement of water’s infrastructural currency. The article draws on the writings of ecocritical literary theorist Timothy Morton and media historian and theorist John Durham Peters.