In a world where change has become the only constant, how does the perpetually new relate to the old? How does cinema, itself once a new medium, relate both to previous or outmoded media and to what we now refer to as New Media?
This collection sets out to examine these questions by focusing on the relations of cinema to other media, cultural productions and diverse forms of entertainment, demarcating their sometimes parallel and sometimes more closely conjoined histories. It makes visible the complex ways in which media anticipate, interfere with and draw on one other, demonstrating how cinematicity makes itself felt in practices of seeing, reading, writing and thinking both before and after the 'birth' of cinema.
Examining the interrelations between cinema, literature, photography and other modes of representation not only to each other, but amid a host of other minor and major media - the magic lantern, the zoetrope, the flick-book, the iPhone and the computer - Cinematicity in Media History provides crucial insights into the development of media and their overlapping technologies and aesthetics.
About the Author: Jeffrey Geiger is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex, where he founded the Centre for Film Studies in 2001. Books include Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the U.S. Imperial Imagination (2007), American Documentary Film: Projecting the Nation (2011), the co-edited Film Analysis: A Norton Reader (expanded edition 2013), and Cinematicity in Media History. His essays have appeared in many books, and journals such as Film International, Third Text, African American Review, Cinema Journal, and PMLA.
Karin Littau is Director of Research in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. She is the author of Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania (2006; reprinted 2008), The Routledge Concise History of Literature and Film (forthcoming), and co-editor of two issues of Comparative Critical Studies: Inventions: Literature and Science (2005) and Cinematicity (2009). Recent publications include an article on cross-media for Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (2011) and on media philosophy in New Takes in Film-Philosophy (2011).
