Vibrant Materialities Across Media, Literature, and Theory
Monique Tschofen and Lai-Tze Fan (Waterloo)’s co-edited issue of Imaginations: A Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies titled Vibrant Materialities Across Media, Literature, and Theory (external link) was published in December of 2023. This issue, which emerged from a working group of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association that Monique and Lai-Tze co-led with Marcello Vitali-Rosati from the University of Montreal, asks about what the centering of materiality can bring to the discipline of Comparative Literature and Comparative Media Studies.
Monique’s contribution to the volume “Becoming Matter/Becoming Mother: Wilding in Ali Abbasi’s Border (Gräns) (external link) ” brings feminist new materialist methods to a horror film by Iranian-Swedish filmmaker Ali Abbasi, focusing on what she calls “wiliding” – a process of worlding that involves the unlearning of anthropocentric epistemologies.
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This special issue of Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies takes materiality as the critical touchstone for a new comparative literary and media studies, asking how an examination of the modes of inscription across media, platforms, and interfaces, and more broadly, of the entanglements of bodies and things, can expose the vitality of materiality. The impetus behind this issue is the work of the Media and Materiality Working Group in the Association Canadienne de Littérature Comparée/Canadian Comparative Literature Association (ACLC/CCLA) from 2021-2022. As leaders of this Working Group, our aim was to expand the scope of the field of comparative literature to include comparative media by promoting innovative, interdisciplinary, and intercultural scholarship.
We were first inspired by Marcello Vitali-Rosati’s call to action for expanding the study of comparative literature in the study of media. He argues that “instead of ‘literature and media’ one could say: literature is media.”1 (external link) He draws a connection between media and materiality through the very material act of inscription, building from media scholars who insist that it is a mistake to focus on content (narratives, images, information) to the exclusion of form (interfaces, platforms, hardware, screens, surfaces, code, markup schema, etc.).
We were similarly inspired by phenomenology, feminism, and new materialism’s attention to entanglements between bodies and the world, seeing the political possibilities embedded in their reconceptualization of interrelationality.
We highlight researchers who draw attention to the media and materiality of scholarship, and feature works that use research-creation and critical making methodologies.
Topics in this issue include:
- Studies of materiality of/in images, texts, subjects, and objects.
- Philosophical approaches to materiality and interrelationality.
- Cultural considerations of user relationships to media materiality.
- Mediums of scholarship, including critical applications in open-source publishing, critical making, and research-creation.
- Experiences, interactions, and representations of digital spaces.
PUBLISHED: 2023-12-18