Appropriations of Literary Modernism in Media Art: Cultural Memory and the Dynamics of Estrangement

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By analyzing appropriations of literary modernism in video, experimental film, and installation art, this study investigates works of media art as agents of cultural memory. While research recognizes film and literature as media of memory, it often overlooks media art. Adaptation studies, art history, and hermeneutics help understand ‘appropriation’ in art in terms of a dialog between an artwork, a text, and their contexts. The Russian Formalist notion of estrangement, together with new concepts from literary, film, and media studies, offers a new perspective on ‘appropriation’ that illuminates the sensuous dimension of cultural memory . Media artworks make memory palpable: they address the collective body memory of their viewers, prompting them to reflect on the past and embody new ways of remembering. Five contextual close-readings analyze artworks by Janis Crystal Lipzin, William Kentridge, Mark Aerial Waller, Pawel Wojtasik, and Tom Kalin. They appropriate modernist texts by Gertrude Stein, Italo Svevo, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Guillaume Apollinaire, Virginia Woolf, and Robert Musil. This book will be of value to readers interested in cultural memory, sensory studies, literary modernism, adaptation studies, and art history.