Month: October 2011

Jason Mittell, “The Complexity of Quality”

Abstract for Jason Mittel’s keynote at “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” (Leibniz University of Hannover, 15-17 December 2011):

The Complexity of Quality: Cultural Hierarchies & Aesthetic Evaluation in Contemporary Television

Jason Mittell (American Studies, Film & Media Culture, Middlebury)

In much popular and scholarly discourse about television, there is a slippage between the terms “quality television” and “narrative complexity.” The former is a well-worn signifier demarcating both an aesthetic judgment, and an assumed set of textual norms and mode of address—in the vein of Bourdieu, it is a classification that classifies the classifier. Narrative complexity, as I and other scholars have been exploring, is a textual mode that highlights particular storytelling structures, industrial formations, and strategies of consumption, but it need not inherently point to an evaluative hierarchy. In this talk, I will tease out the differences and overlaps between these two cultural categories, arguing that by dispensing with the rhetoric of quality television, we can use narrative complexity as one (of many) measures of aesthetic evaluation that might present a more nuanced way of discussing televisual taste and value.

Regina Schober, “Imagining the World Wide Web”

Abstract for Regina Schober’s talk at “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” (Leibniz University of Hannover, 15-17 December 2011):

Imagining the World Wide Web: Cultural Constructions of Virtual Space across Media

Regina Schober (American Studies, Mannheim)

From the early days of the internet, there have been attempts to understand and represent this newly emerging medial realm within other media, from William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984) to Martin Dodge’s and Rob Kitchin’s Atlas of Cyberspace (2001) to David Fincher’s recent film The Social Network (2010). What all these examples have in common is that they represent the new digital media within another, more traditional medium. In my paper I will examine a variety of such representations of the internet and discuss the aesthetic and cultural processes involved in such inverted “remediations” (Bolter & Grusin). With particular focus on the World Wide Web and its inherently multimodal nature, I will explore how this essentially hybrid configuration characterized by a complex and interactive set of highly heterogeneous data content in dynamic flow has been defined, conceptualized, and evaluated in the process of intermedial transformation.  How can media products which take up such aesthetic features and transform them within their own medial framework be critically assessed, accounted for, and categorized? In reference to some exemplary medial conceptualizations of the internet, I will discuss the question of whether certain media or medial configurations are more pertinent for such adaptations than others and if there are specific elements that can be identified in these transformation processes. In a second step, I will reflect on the cultural implications at work in such ‘translations’ of the digital. Which image of the internet as ‘new territory’ is portrayed in these cultural representations and how do these attitudes, implications, and ideologies expressed in cultural constructions of the World Wide Web relate to prevalent technological and cultural discourses of the 21st century?

Bettina Soller, “Authorship as a Category of Cultural Distinction”

Abstract for Bettina Soller’s talk at “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” (Leibniz University of Hannover, 15-17 December 2011):

Authorship as a Category of Cultural Distinction: Collaborative Writing and the Solitary Genius

Bettina Soller (American Studies, Göttingen)

When literary critics turned to questions of authorship and hypertext, they rapidly created a canon of texts worthy of discussion. The predominant concept of the singular author as the sole originator of ideas and the authority over text has strongly been shaped by literary studies and has also been applied to new media. Popular forms of collaborative writing that exemplify the more radical changes in questions of authorship in digital projects like Wikipedia or fan fiction writing are still marginalized in literary theory. It seems that, like in print media, the higher the values that are associated with a text or product, the less collaborative authorship is seen as a legitimate category. Especially advocates of a strong canon have used different forms of authorship as categories for cultural distinction. While the ‘solitary genius’ has been hailed as the producer of ‘high’ art or academic achievements, collaborative authorship has been devalued, not only by academia, but also by the public imagination. Therefore, traces of collaboration have been erased or veiled from literary texts as well as other media texts such as films or TV series that are produced through collaborations of a team of writers and producers, or with the help of spouses, friends, and editors. The performance of authorship by the producers of texts as well as the construction of authorship by texts’ recipients generally conforms to the idea of a singular author, while many actual practices include collaborations. Especially the forms of digital writing that make public the processes of collaboration that are involved in other media as well, illustrate how the development of non-evaluative concepts of collaborative authorship will enrich theoretical discourse.

Andreas Jahn-Sudmann, “Independent Games and the Cultural Logic of Distinction”

Abstract for Andreas Jahn-Sudmann’s talk at “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” (Leibniz University of Hannover, 15-17 December 2011):

Desperately Seeking the Mainstream. Independent Games and the Cultural Logic of Distinction

Andreas Jahn-Sudmann (Media Studies, Göttingen)

For decades, the label “independent” has been associated with a form and practice of film that evidently seeks to distance itself from Hollywood as the epitome of the cultural mainstream. At the same time, a closer look at the history of American cinema reveals that independent films never just represented a radical alternative to Hollywood cinema; au contraire. In fact, one can argue that especially the success of many contemporary American indie films results from their ability to combine and balance the logic of the popular (accessibility, intelligibility, coherency) with the logic of radical distinction and anti-conventionality, thus shaping the values and forms of “edginess” and “hipness” that have become so central for our postmodern culture.

In my contribution, I would like to show how, since the 1990s, designers and producers of digital games have taken note of American independent film’s popularity, presence, and cultural capital, and how indie films serve as a cultural model and reflective agency for the evolving independent games movement. Comparing these two cultural spheres, their similarities are as interesting as their differences. While in the world of digital games the independent label is also closely connected to the ideas and rhetorics of (autonomous) creativity and innovation, I would argue that, distinguished from film culture, contemporary independent games still lack a formal logic of opposition that could be understood as challenging the forms and practices of mainstream games.

Florian Groß, “‘Quality TV’ and ‘Graphic Novel’: What’s in a Name?”

Abstract for Florian Groß’s talk at “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” (Leibniz University of Hannover, 15-17 December 2011):

‘Quality TV’ and ‘Graphic Novel’: What’s in a Name?

Florian Groß (American Studies, Hannover)

The terms Quality TV and Graphic Novel have become almost synonymous with a broad revaluation of television and comics, two media that have traditionally been related exclusively to popular, even mass, culture. And yet, both terms are less about a democratization of taste than about new forms of cultural distinction. Reminiscent of, though by no means identical with, historical processes of cultural distinction, both Quality TV and Graphic Novel refer to a certain subset of texts with higher aesthetic value and emphasize the role of creativity and education in their production as well as reception. Given the media to which these two categories of cultural distinction are applied and the timeframe in which they have developed, it is necessary to come to terms with their specific forms of distinction, which can no longer be read along the lines of high/low culture, but rather as embedded processes of an ever-expanding popular culture that ultimately have to be considered on their own.

Through an analysis of the terms Quality TV and Graphic Novel with respect to collaborative and individual authorship/production, seriality, and media convergence, this talk attempts to highlight the specific cultural work performed by the terms and thus shed light on related intra-/intermedial developments. Furthermore, it will explore their instrumentality in redefining television and comics, as well as media culture in general, in times of a rapidly changing media landscape.

Christina Meyer, “Popular Visions of War, Gender, and Nation in [High]-Art-Advertising-Comics”

Abstract for Christina Meyer’s talk at “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” (Leibniz University of Hannover, 15-17 December 2011):

Popular Visions of War, Gender, and Nation in [High]-Art-Advertising-Comics: Reading Nell Brinkley’s Newspaper Romance Serials

Christina Meyer (American Studies, Osnabrück)

This paper will engage with the female newspaper illustrator, artist, and writer Nell Brinkley (1886-1944). It will focus on her graphic serials, asking how they locate themselves in the discourse of gendered mass culture and how, while drawing on conventions of sentimental fiction and the conventionalized cliffhanger continuity of nineteenth-century serialized narratives, they defy the ideology of feminine domesticity mediated, for example, in the visual language of the well-known and popular Gibson Girl illustrations by Charles Dana Gibson.

Looking at Nell Brinkley’s serialized First World War saga “Golden-Eyes and Her Hero, Bill” (1918-1919) and situating it within the wider socio-historical context, this paper seeks to trace the intersections of the following discourses: patriotism, female identity, and representation in the battles over standards of taste in art and advertising and modern nation swirling around Brinkley’s popular success. It will further be argued that these and Brinkley’s other pages exemplify the cross-infiltrations of cultural forms (e.g. vaudeville, film, advertisement, poster art); in the debate about women’s social and political roles that took place across a range of media, Brinkley’s romance serials interact with, negotiate, and re-mediate, the widely disseminated images of (at times allegorical) female figures of the era. An analysis of Brinkley’s “serial queen heroines” (Lambert, 2009: 6) reveals not only the changing attitudes about the roles available to women during the 1910s and 1920s; it also allows for new insights into the interconnection between sentimental themes, commercial success and the economic context of (cultural) consumption in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Shane Denson, “Lady Gaga’s Mainstream Queer”

[UPDATE: a revised version of this paper was presented at the “Nonhuman Turn” conference in Milwaukee, May 2012. A screencast video of the complete presentation is available here: Object-Oriented Gaga.]

Abstract for Shane Denson’s talk at “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” (Leibniz University of Hannover, 15-17 December 2011):

Lady Gaga’s Mainstream Queer: A Serial Media Remix

Shane Denson (American Studies, Hannover)

In this paper, I propose looking at Lady Gaga as a “serial figure”—as a persona that, not unlike Batman, Frankenstein, Dracula, or Tarzan, is serially instantiated across a variety of media, repeatedly restaged and remixed through an interplay of repetition and variation, thus embodying seriality as a plurimedial interface between trajectories of continuity and discontinuity. As was the case with classic serial figures, whose liminal, double, or secret identities broker traffic between disparate—diegetic and extradiegetic, i.e. medial—times and spaces, so too does Lady Gaga articulate together various media (music, video, fashion, social media) and various sociocultural spheres, values, and identifications (mainstream, alternative, kitsch, pop/art, straight, queer). In this sense, Gaga may be seen to follow in the line of Elvis, David Bowie, and Madonna, among others. Setting these stars in relation to iconic fictional characters shaped by their many transitions between literature, film, radio, television, and digital media promises to shed light on the changing medial contours of contemporary popularity. Serial figures define a nexus of seriality and mediality, and by straddling the divide between medial “inside” and “outside” (e.g. between diegesis and framing medium, fiction and the “real world”), they are able to track media transformations over time and offer up images of the interconnected processes of medial and cultural change. This ability is grounded, then, in the inherent “queerness” of serial figures, which Lady Gaga transforms from a medial condition into an explicit ideology, one which sits uneasily between the mainstream and the exceptional. As a serial figure, I propose, Lady Gaga may be an image of our contemporary convergence culture itself.

Lynn Spigel, “Designer TV”

Abstract for Lynn Spigel’s keynote at “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” (Leibniz University of Hannover, 15-17 December 2011):

Designer TV: Television and the Taste for Modernism in Mid-Century America

Lynn Spigel (Screen Cultures/Communication, Northwestern University)

This talk explores the history of television, modern design, and taste cultures in mid-century America. Television’s rise in mid-century America coincided with the boom in mid-century modern design, and the widespread idea among designers that “good design” (if made affordable to average consumers) could elevate American tastes.  In the first period of television’s commercial rise TV was a virtual showroom for new trends in modern design, from graphic design to set design to furniture design to package design for products advertised on TV. Numerous leaders in graphic and industrial design  (from Saul Bass to Ben Shahn to Charles and Ray Eames to Ronald Searle) all worked for the networks and helped to introduce TV audiences to these new forms of mid-century modernism. More than just a visual style, the aesthetics of modern design on television had broad industrial, national, political, and social dimensions. Television’s modern design aesthetic was integral to how mid-century publics would literally see the world and their place in it. At least in the view of some of the loftier marketers and designers for television, modern design would ultimately democratize taste, elevate the ‘masses,’ invigorate consumption, and re-design America itself as the leader of the modern world.  Yet not all people shared the enthusiasm for avant-gardism on television or in design, and some viewers and industry workers protested the use of a mass medium for visual styles that they associated with the intellectual, “highbrow,” and (in some people’s minds) “communist” goals of democracy through design. This talk considers those broader concerns and explores how American tastes (and distastes) for modern art and design relate to the history of television as an aesthetic and cultural form.