The Poem as Medium

Since Marshall McLuhan formulated his theory of "media" as "extensions of ourselves," we've come to understand the history of human communication in terms of its physical carriers, tools, and technologies. From cuneiform, hieroglyphs, and logographic writing systems, to the alphabet, to algorithms; from clay tablets, to papyrus, to LED screens; from scrolls, to books, to the gramophone, to DNA - the medium and the message shape how we store and communicate information. Poetry's place in this history of media has been both elusive and strangely consistent. In media theory, the poem, which Hans Magnus Enzensberger once called an "archaic medium" and Niklas Luhman a "paradoxical form of communication," often serves as an example of the non-ordinary, of opacity, untranslatability, self-mediation, or hypermediacy. We will read (often lesser known) texts by media theorists (McLuhan, Kittler, Flusser, Benjamin, Luhmann, Siegfried J. Schmidt, Hayles) and a selection of pre-media theory texts on the mediality and mediacy of poetry (Lessing, Hegel, Herder Schleiermacher, Hamburger), as well as one poem each week as we explore the relation between medium and message, content and form. Taught in German.