Literatur und Literaturvermittlung im Zeitalter der Digitalisierung

Bogna Kazur

Born in 1988 in Lodz. Bachelor studies in English Speaking Cultures and German at the University of Bremen and the University of Malta. Master's Studies in transnational literary studies, literature, theatre and film at the University of Bremen, 2013. Master's thesis on the subject Through The Transnational Lens: Mobile Identities in Contemporary Cinema. Concentration of studies: film studies, post-colonial and transcultural studies, whiteness studies, (cultural) identity in consumer society Sat in on lectures among others in the script department of the Staatstheater Kassel and the stage direction of the Theater Bremen. Participation in varied film productions, organisation of the 45th edition of the Bremen short film competition Young Collection and voluntary work, giving the 15th Bremen Film Prize to Béla Tarr.



Publications:




Project: The (Literary) Special Effect: "Filmic Writing" in the Digital Age and the Contemporary US-American Novel
In order to identify new forms and practices of novel-based intermediality, the study proceeds from a necessarily broad understanding of film culture in the digital age. One essential point is that film arrives at a new form of abstraction and loses its already fragile physical reality in the course of digitization. At the same time its complex invisible code complicates the distinction between fictional live-action footage and special effects, thus relativizing the latter and introducing a so-called "elastic reality". Still, the concept of digital film definitely exceeds a mere, digitally recorded or digitally adapted motion picture. It is a highly dynamic process that equally manifests itself in transmedia storytelling and fan practices and the permeating logic of self-reflexivity on both the level of content and interface. Another characteristic of digital film culture is certainly the paradox of digital perfection producing a resurgence of humanism and "mistakism" in terms of grainy, fragmented, hand-held camera aesthetics, for instance.
While being informed by these ambiguous dynamics, contemporary US novels such as Marisha Pessl's Night Film (2013), Mark Z. Danieleweski's House of Leaves (2000) and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1995) convey a highly complex idea of filmic authenticity in our digital age. In fact, this idea leads to the question whether the originally film-specific special effect migrates into the aesthetic and physical reality of the novel, expressing itself through "special" instances of literary verisimilitude, for example. In order to capture the nuances of these innovative as well as experimental forms of "filmic writing", the project will resort to the terminology of "intermedial references" and "multimodal literature". Another methodological basis is provided by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin's "Remediation" and its double logic of immediacy and hypermediacy. After all, a narratological investigation of the thin line between the illusion of transparency and the hyper-awareness of mediation is crucial for the study's focus on the novel-based "reality" of film in the digital age.