Research in aesthetics and media

An engagement with questions of transgressive and transformational aesthetics represents a significant area of research in the department.

One particular focal point is the investigation of the ways in which
various media, including literature, film and visual art, explore their own limits while also probing those of other medial forms through processes of imitation ('intermediality').

We concentrate particularly on text-image relationships from the 16th century to the present day, including:

• illustration and the 18th-century novel
• the museum, especially in its function as a 'memory paradigm' and its interaction and competition with other memory media
• the historicity of media
• the intermedial dimensions of film, including film adaptations of literary texts
• the politics of the interaction between literature and digital interfaces.
• the investigation of genre, its creative limitations and its subversive potential, in both film and literature is a further distinct area of research within the department.

We also have a strong interest in the revolutionary aesthetics of
avant-garde literary texts.