Literature and Media

Front matter

CROSS-ROADS. POLISH STUDIES IN CULTURE, LITERARY THEORY, AND HISTORY 23

Maryla Hopfinger

Literature and Media

Part one. Contemporary cultural context. After two decades

New Carriers i add a A AA dA GOA dO AA EW Ad OE Od 30 New areas w AEO oO GOES Ad Oi 35 New participants sea O A O da aa Ów 41 Literary culture today: wade aś awa wk Gi REG 42

Polish realities a aacidawc iii sio dk ai a i akad ai 47

Features of contemporary media |... enea 55 Platform of communication owo A 58 Disputes about Culture ssweswośeoswoże ode cwe wdowi ddd AWA AAA 61 Reconfiguration of social communication 00... eee een 65

3 A common language wsiadania RGG 77 Formation of general language |... 83

Language in the new and the newest media... tess eeseeesesseeenens 91

10 Table of contents

Part two. Forms of literature. A literary book today

4 Printed literature „alk OE AA OE AOR doki 99 Offers:of the book market aaa A A LA OSA

Methods of promotion |... eee

Questions about readership

Print and the meaning of literary Work |... eee

Typographic “spacing” — from Mallarme to visual concretists

The violation of graphemic practices in prose oo... eessesessesseesseeeteeseeeees

5 Audio litefatute. „saakowodwniki kia 131 It began im the radio: wu aaa aan ad AA a ii 131 Audiosphere urracssns ania a eeu audtiaamasaunbundaawien 140 The radio after 1989 unueci a a a 146 AUG ODOOKS iwa obcasasesagevoas A A A RAEN 154 Å SODE ada taaa oni ada dada i Aidi kila 159

A:case:0f Bob Dylan we di oO Aa RAA GOA 162

6. Electronic literatürë aoc OG 165 Electronic script. Secondary literacy s... 165 Hyper-fiction. Literary hypertext n ORA A AA 173 Blogosphere ssa A etc 183 The literary life on: (KE NEC wd W A A GA GE 186

Part three. Audiovisual parallels

AME W mediumi; Cinema <oc.ccascecescosesseceesuedussacecdecdescacoseaceesesdeseasosarovadelaaseacetactea 195

Table of contents 11

Screen and literature cricetinae aena a a aieiaa 202 Honorary doctorate for the film auteur... enea 222

The future of auteur cinema yw W A O O A GW 227

S TV SErIES aa a tO O W AA AGA A GR GAGA RAA 231 Thę:decade Of TV SErIES aaa ak wwa AGA GO GOA AGA dA AE A 238 The series outside of television sssrinin aaa 252

9 Cómputet games oswoic A 255 The ludic dimension of culture sssnsssnsnsrsoninn nina RRRS 255 The evolution of games and the culture of participation wee 258 The role=playing Games: wę a A A O ani dd ii 264 The Witcher wesccesacsavsctacassczitsisasbesesenss ię Eda 266

Lara Croft wo EAC 270

From the author

I am interested in contemporary culture, the becoming, the direction of transformations, the mechanisms of continuity and change. A special insight into this problem can be provided by the observation of two areas of culture: literature and media.

Literature as the art of word has a very long tradition; from the invention of script, and later of print, it has taken the leading position not only on the Parnassus, but also in the entire culture, it has performed model-forming functions both for its readers and for other fields of culture.

Media — from film and radio to television and the Internet — illustrate well the mechanisms of transformation from silent film to audiovisual television, from analogue to digital techniques.

Mutual relations between literature and subsequent media create an important area of transformations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These are the issues I address in the first part of the book titled “Contemporary Cultural Context.” On the basis of the reconstruction of the current situation of literature and the media, I formulate questions about the change of the place of literature in culture, and I formulate a thesis on the reconfiguration of social communication and the entire culture. In the second part of the book titled “Varieties of Literature’, I analyse these consequences of changes on the platform of communication which leads to the emergence of new forms of literature — audial literature and electronic literature — and to transformations of printed literature. In the third part of the book titled “Audiovisual Parallels”, I discuss the most characteristic, as I think, examples of relations between literature and the media: auteur cinema, the closest to literature, narrations in TV series, and role-playing video games. These examples also show the development of contemporary audiovisual narratives.

Cinema used experiences and achievements of literature for its own cultural and artistic advancement. Literature, besides being a model for film, became a still-valid reference system and a repository of stories for television, and the latest media. Yet, at the same time literature infiltrates media, joins them, and changes itself thanks to their presence and impact. Cinema, imitating literature, would often become the Tenth Muse’. Television was mainly the domain of

1 Ed. note: the Tenth Muse is a popular synonym of film in Poland due to the fact that Karol Irzykowski’s book X Muza. Zagadnienia estetyczne kina (The Tenth

14 From the author communication. Similarly, the Internet. Today, literature and media are situated between art and communication.

We move through these and other areas of culture thanks to language, which plays a metacultural role as a unique system enabling interpretive operations and the primary common platform allowing inter-semiotic translation. The thesis about the contemporary reconfiguration of social communication and the entire culture includes the suggestion of a new, common platform - the digital one — developing in front of us.

The contemporary reconfiguration had two phases. It began in the nineteenth century with the invention of photography and sound recordings. Its climax has been shaped by analogue media: sound film and television which have transformed the verbal type of culture into the audiovisual culture. The second phase of this audiovisual reconfiguration is associated with digitization processes. They form a new, common platform on which all previously known ways of expression meet and the new ones come into being.

Contemporary transformations of the entire culture are of a great importance and cause significant consequences. Braudel’s perspective of longue durée suggests a comparison with the only such fundamental transformation that took place in the distant past and over many centuries caused the transition from orality to the culture of writing and then printing. The foundation of this change was the invention of the phonetic alphabet. The second phase of the current change is based on digitization. While working on this book, I was becoming aware of this direction of changes.

However, I am focusing on the twenty-year period that began after the 1989 breakthrough. I derive my empirical material mainly from these two decades. For us it was a time of great change. The launched mechanisms, the exposed processes provide arguments for the main point and at the same time illustrate our changes. Hence the title: Literature and Media. After 1989.

Muse: Aesthetic Problems of Cinema) published for the first time in 1924 was the most important achievement of Polish film theory before World War II. Its following editions appeared after the war, establishing it a classic collection of essays on film in Poland.

Post scriptum

I am honoured to be able to present this book to English-speaking readers. It was originally published eight years ago, yet my views on the changes of culture in Poland after the 1989 breakthrough have not changed since then. What has changed for the last three years, however, is the officially controlled style of culture. I did not foresee the dismantling of the democratic foundations of the political system and the drastic division of the communication platform into the faction associated with the Law and Justice Party, the Catholic church, using nationalistic and clerical rhetoric, and supporting authoritarian style of government on one hand and the faction supporting pluralistic, civic, prodemocratic, and pro-European positions on the other hand. At the same time, from today’s perspective, the direction of changes in the whole culture persists and strengthens — we are still a part of global modernity. Thus today I would have removed the cautious question marks put in the Polish edition of the book where I was discussing a changing place of literature and the change of the entire culture.

The audiovisual analogue culture is becoming more and more a digital culture. The role of the Internet as an arena of cultural institutions and various dimensions of life — including literary life - has been confirmed and is increasing. The virtual and digital space is more and more interwoven with the real space. New technologies generate new phenomena (for example, streaming services) and new communication tools (for example, smartphones). The digital environment shapes its own communication patterns, and ways of distributing contents - assuming communication activity of the users. It is conductive to creation of printed literary works that benefit from the lessons learned from the Internet and use online platforms for their practices. In the Web, electronic literature — genuinely digital, and redefining the properties of signs and literary texts — has been created for thirty years. This form of literature, different from the print and audio form, became the object of thorough analyses of the researchers.

Printed literature not only changes its place on the shared communication platform where it coexists with other significant ways of expression. It also changes itself: from art to communication, from uniqueness to everyday life, from fiction to non-fiction, and from contemplative to performative reception. And on the publishing market, it still remains popular and takes up unevenly more space than its digital or audial form. What is more, the growing popularity of non-fiction literature means that “paper is back” and publishers are looking

16 Post scriptum for faster printing lines. Moreover, literary works that favoured the artistic ennoblement of many films and were the basis of numerous TV series, are now still chosen for adaptation by gigantic streaming platforms. The output of literature also today is an inspiration for the media. And the literature uses the media experience in its own peculiar way.

For me, literature and media after 1989 remain an area of intriguing questions’.

Warsaw, Fall of 2018

2 Ed. note: Maryla Hopfingers book was published in Poland in 2010. It is an original proposal to look at the relations of literature and media in Polish culture after the fall of communism, when Poland regained its independence and entered the path towards full democratization of social life. The volume can also be read as a testimony of the reception not only of Polish but also of foreign literature on the media, which has been translated into Polish, and shaped the discussion about the role of the media in Polish culture between 1989 and 2009.

Part one. Contemporary cultural context. After two decades

The breakthrough events of 1989 opened to the Poles the path to freedom and democracy. Transformation of the political system, acceleration of processes of civilizational advance, as well as social and economic transformations triggered hopes and fostered delusions that led both to inevitable disillusionments and undisputed successes. The latter include the rapid growth of technological infrastructure and the development of higher education. The modernized technological infrastructure expanded and intensified the base and access to social communication, while the enlargement of educational institutions contributed to the increase of abilities of participants of culture. The achievements of the two decades after the 1989 breakthrough certainly did not meet many expectations. However, changes caused by the breakthrough have had enormous consequences for the entire culture and for its various domains, especially since the political transformation made it possible to remove barriers separating Poland from the rest of the world. The new opening, apart from the macroscale transformations, changed our way of experiencing culture.

I have always treated the category of culture as an integrative concept. In such a view, “culture” constitutes a comprehensive complex of areas, phenomena, practices and behaviours, aspects and dimensions, patterns and symbols. It connects everything what we call material culture and spiritual culture, individual culture and collective culture, mass culture and elite culture, high culture and low culture, humanistic culture and technical culture, symbolic culture and popular culture, traditional, as well as modern and postmodern culture. All these distinctions co-create our present day. This integrative approach has been chosen deliberately to let us avoid early assessment and selection of particular components/texts of culture. It allows to incorporate into culture anything that is meaningful for a given segment of society, what is considered valuable; only in such a constructed entity particular elements can become a subject of evaluation. Assessments and choices resulting from them establish hierarchies of values and decide on styles of culture, yet not on what can be considered a culture.

This integrative concept of culture refers to the tradition of classical anthropology that I have long been interested in: the classical European and American anthropology, in particular works of Franz Boas, James Frazer, Bronistaw Malinowski, Edward Sapir, and Ruth Benedict. Anthropology, born of the desire to knowand understand different cultures, became an important source of knowledge, but also of self-knowledge. In his essay Looking for the Barbarians, Leszek Kotakowski identified a specific feature of the European culture which was conducive to the rise of anthropology, namely the ability to self-challenge, to look at oneself through the eyes of others, to be interested in the others, and to be able to suspend one’s own perspective of understanding the world while observing them’. In the twentieth century, anthropology turned the researchers’ attention to foreign cultures and differently organized societies. It opened Europe to other continents, other social worlds, other repertoires, and hierarchies of values. It learned to overcome ethnocentric approaches, attitudes, and conventions of its own societies. As much as possible, it intentionally suspended its own perceptive, mental, moral, and aesthetic habits. It strived for a description and analysis based on a view free from normative, evaluating assumptions; it aspired to understanding deprived (if possible) of its own projections. Anthropologists, going beyond the circle of their own culture, were able to see patterns of the foreign culture and consciously reflect on its foundations and mechanisms of its functioning. At the same time, they realized the need to distance themselves from their own culture, and justified the adoption of an observer’s attitude in their own society. It supported meta-reflection*.

At the same time, classical anthropological reflection emphasized the integral character of particular cultures, and consequently diagnosed their peculiar distinctiveness. It exposed cultural differences, and combined them with the concept of national societies. After two decades of opening our culture to the world, such an attitude, narrowing rather than broadening the view, seems absolutely insufficient. Problems and tensions caused by multiculturalism are becoming

3 Leszek Kolakowski, Looking for the Barbarians: The Illusions of Cultural Universalism, in: idem, Modernity on Endless Trial, transl. Stefan Czerniawski, Wolfgang Freis, Agnieszka Kolakowska, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1990.

4 The importance of efforts of classical anthropologists seems to us more clearly when we remember about territorial conquests, and missions to “introduce civilization” and “evangelize pagans”. After all, the European expansion was founded not only on the prospects of real material benefits but also on the conviction of the undisputed superiority of own culture. On the consequences of colonialism see: Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory. A Critical Introduction, New York: Columbia University Press 1998.

ours. Profound modification of the role of space, distance, and time; intensification of flows of information, patterns, and images; increasing human mobility; and real local consequences of global events — positive and negative alike: all these aspects have brought us closer to other cultures, and have transformed our aspirations and experiences. Opening to the world does not cancel differences and diversities, yet it extends and transforms cognitive horizons, and introduces new components and values. With them, new areas of conflict and tensions, new opportunities, and new threats invade our world. Elements of distant cultures now are mixed up like never before’.

Theoretical issues of classic anthropology have become real practical dilemmas for people living today. Various hierarchies of values turn out to be difficult to adjust, differences may be impossible to overcome, and they lead to fundamental conflicts. Sometimes it seems that instead of approximation of cultures we face their collision - especially if we recall images of the events of September 11, 2001, which in contemporary imagination became a symbol of a particularly extreme manifestation of the conflict of different hierarchies of values in today’s globalized world‘. For all these reasons, I think that the gained experiences and the lost illusions of classical anthropology turn out to be an indispensable reference system in thinking about the cultural contemporariness of the late twentieth and early twentieth century.

They also help in the problematization of situation of our own culture in the aftermath of the breakthrough events of 1989. The transformation of the political system made possible to articulate deep differences, and to establish pluralism as a permanent, though not easy, feature of this time. For over two decades after the breakthrough, in the period of building democracy, various options — followed by various repertoires and various hierarchies of values - would come to the fore and clash. The breakthrough disclosed many inner social diversities; experiences of classical anthropology allow us to see them not only as an obvious

5 See, e.g.: Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1996; Gordon Mathews, Global Culture/ Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the Cultural Supermarket, London and New York: Routledge 2000; Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity, Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell 2009.

6 See: Jacek Amsterdamski, Na oczach świata. Analiza społecznych wymiarów wybranych wydarzeń medialnych, “Kultura i Społeczeństwo” 2004, nr 4; Maryla Hopfinger, Doświadczenia audiowizualne: latarnia czarnoksięska i obraz wydarzeń z 11 września 2001, in: Nowoczesność jako doświadczenie. Analizy kulturowe, eds. Ryszard Nycz, Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska and Barbara Giza, Warsaw: SWPS Academica 2008.

implementation of the democratic postulate of pluralism, but also as a polarization of options being in a permanent conflict, and hampering the acceptance of a dialogue and a compromise, necessary for social life.

So how to study Polish culture that opened to the world after 1989? In the study of those highly complicated contemporary times, after Stefan Żołkiewski” I distinguish the category of style of culture and the category of type of culture. The category of style culture is a configuration of repertoires and hierarchies of values corresponding to the real system of social forces. It is dynamic, its components are subject to fluctuations, and they are more or less permanent. They can be and they are subject to disputes and arguments. This is how it has happened for two decades since memorable 1989. The category of style, rooted in the sphere of attitudes, views, and behaviours, is one of the basic means of problematization of culture in the Zotkiewski’s concept, which, in my opinion, is extremely important. However, it is not the style of culture that is the main subject of this work.

I am focused mainly on issues related to the other category distinguished by Zotkiewski: the category of type of culture. It refers to technological infrastructure, to material facilities of culture permanently affecting participants of culture and the way they perceive the surrounding world. The types of cultures go through stages of development and transformations; they have their periods of climax, stagnation, and decline. Their cultural impact and results are subject to conflicting opinions and fierce debates. However, they cannot be socially negotiated, and directions of their transformations are caused by the force of cultural coercion: for example, there is little sense in persuading people not to use television or the Internet, although it is necessary to discuss how the media works and how they are used. Critical view on evolution of culture — that may result (and usually does result) from conservative beliefs and hierarchies of values — cannot change a dominant type of culture, albeit it is able to enforce prolonged existence of anachronistic styles. As examples of distant and closer past has proved, a dominant type of culture can be changed by new social practices, by conversions of human societies, and by factors related to technology and communication. In short, such a shift is caused by real transformations, and not by their

7 Stefan Żółkiewski, Wiedza o kulturze literackiej. Główne pojęcia, Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna 1980; Idem, Teksty kultury. Studia, Warsaw: PWN 1988; see also: Maryla Hopfinger, Stefan Żółkiewski — teoretyk kultury, in: Sporne postaci literatury współczesnej. Krytycy, ed. Alina Brodzka- Wald, Tomasz Żukowski, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN 2003.

interpretations, although the latter give meaning to changes, or at least participate in creating and maintaining preferred hierarchies of values. The mutual relations between much more stable types of culture and diverse and volatile styles of culture are complex and complicated, and they need to be analysed separately. It seems certain that the category of type integrates culture in the long run, while the category of style is associated with differentiation and changing preferences of values and their hierarchy.

How to describe the main tensions of contemporary type of culture? How to recognize the direction of changes?

My question refers to the areas selected for this purpose: literature and media. Literature represents a very well established domain of culture. History of media is completely different. Cinema, the oldest of them, celebrated its centenary not far ago, radio has been operating for over eighty years, television began in Poland a little over half a century ago, while PCs, the Internet, and mobile telephones have been in use for about twenty years. During this time, the material dimension of the entire platform of communication has developed and transformed thoroughly. Both “old” and “new” media have been clearly modernized, and social communication has been located in the centre of culture.

The audiovisual type of culture, emerging in the twentieth century in the paradigm of verbal culture, consisted in taking the leading position by social practices based on the joint registration and reproduction of visual and auditory dimensions of reality. In comparison with literature, the new narrative practices, which in the first place show demeanour of people in various life situations and contexts, change the ways of presenting a human being and his/her relationship with others, with the world of objects and with the world of nature. They reveal a complex syntax of behaviours and interactions. They give importance to aspects and areas that were unnoticed or underestimated. They redefine the anthropological situation approaching the fulfilment of human dreams of repeating and stopping reality. The audiovisual type of culture establishes its own criteria and hierarchies, principles, and preferences. It evokes anthropological effects shaping a new way of perception: the audiovisual one. In this type of culture, new techniques are constantly sought. Their task is to connect pictorial matter with verbal one, with sound, and with motion, which evoke and inhere reality. The character of audiovisual signs - including those intrinsically containing spoken or written words — differs fundamentally from the character of abstract, arbitrary linguistic signs present in verbal messages. A special relationship with reality, consolidated by similarity of representations and everyday experience, is the foundation of audiovisual messages, both the analogue (image and sound connected with photography) and the digital (coupled with simulation, but most often, so far, also referring to the principle of similarity). Reading out the similarity merely initiates understanding of audiovisual texts, the sense of which is more complex because of semantic complexity of the present images-sounds, as well as because of various complications of narration.

The audiovisual type of culture developed and consolidated during the two decades after the breakthrough events of 1989. First of all, television, which [before 1989] used to offer only two channels [and had been a state-owned enterprise], became multi-channelled, and private stations could be established [in result of new legal regulations]. Satellite devices and cable TV networks allow access to the global offer. Program offer of the state-owned Polish Radio is complemented by nationwide, supra-regional, and local commercial stations. Audiovisual messages have become easily available; they can also be viewed individually on a variety of media. Before we became used to it, digital media and devices gradually began to oust analogue ones. First, PCs appeared in our homes and institutions, soon followed by multimedia computers. Internet connections [via telephone lines] are being replaced by broadband access and wireless technology. The use of digital media is constantly expanding, and their role in peoples lives is growing. Not only can we watch audiovisual texts chosen by us, but also — thanks to digitalization - we are able to record and edit audiovisual materials without professional training. For a long time, literary works have also been created in other semantic milieus than writing and printing, namely in the audio milieu, and more recently in the electronic milieu. This is what I will try to take a closer look at.

I am also going to present selected audiovisual phenomena parallel to literature: auteur cinema, TV series, and computer games. In these examples, I am going to show how the type of culture and our experiences have recently changed. Although TV series and computer games are now in the course of ennoblement as texts of culture, I am convinced that the process will be carried out.

The law of continuity and change ruling the way cultures function expresses itself, among others, on the so-called platform of communication. This platform is a meeting point of all previous forms and means of human communication: media as well as old and new practices — face-to-face communication, press and radio, cinema and theatre, painting and music, literature and television, professional and amateur photography, analogue and digital photography, cartoons and postcards, sound records of different generations, stationary and mobile telephony, computers and the Internet. These and other new media and practices join the already existing ones on the platform, while the old ones do not disappear. The dominance of audiovisual messages does not exclude the functioning of formerly developed ways of expression, yet changes their place in the new configuration and the functions they perform today. It is therefore impossible to claim that we are facing the break of communication experiences. The platform of communication is cumulative’.

Moreover, the convergence takes place between various media’.

Transformations of communication affect the situation of literature — the art of word, which gains new carriers, enters new areas, and finds new recipients. However, in the opinion of critics of contemporary changes, the power of its influences and the range of its impact have decreased. What is the current place of literature in culture when using some of the new media and transforming itself thanks to them? What do audiovisual media (first analogue, now digital) bring, how do they change the existing platform of communication, and even the entire contemporary culture?

Shifts on the platform of communication concern, among others, fine arts, which occupied a high and unique position, and at the same time had a strong formative impact on newly emerging practices. For example, photography was initially intended to spread and disseminate reproduced artistic works, and then it imitated painting genres, such as portrait, landscape, and genre scenes; film, which from the beginning was intended to become the Tenth Muse, used the patterns of literary culture to construct and differentiate their statements and to understand the diverse needs of cinema audiences. Today, fine arts occupy a less prominent place, yet sometimes it happens that art is created also in new media and it follows the rules specific to such media — for example, artistic photography, phonographic works, auteur cinema”, radio dramas, and teleplays. The borders between art and non-art have been also shifted in strategies of artists, and in perception of critics and other participants of culture. Art, formerly considered to be particularly important for entire culture, now seems only a segment of culture, though an important one. It is social communication that has become

8 See: Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press 2001.

9 See: Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York and London: New York University Press 2006.

10 Ed. note: The concept of author’s cinema played a special role in Polish culture before 1989. Auteur cinema was synonymous with film art, works reviewed and discussed in a special way, treated — in a sense — as the real cinema, the only one that deserves serious reflection. The cinema of genres, popular films, were treated with reserve as not deserving of serious reflection, or to become the topic of academic research. That is why Maryla Hopfinger in her entire book refers first of all to films from auteur cinema, recognizing them as works deserving to be combined with literature.

the main domain of culture — especially thanks to the development of media in democratic environment. Social communication transcends the sphere of art, and mixes with everyday life, or is a part of it. It is not for the moment a “lower” or “worse” art. Art and communication have different assumptions, different goals, and different audiences, although domains of their activities intersect and can compete with each other for popularity and recognition”.

Transformations in the two-decade period after the breakthrough events of 1989 are conducive to broad access to participation in culture. Thanks to fulfilment of important political, social, economic, and technological conditions, democratization of culture in Poland became a fact. However, this does not mean that the patterns of culture considered to be elitist became broadly accepted. It does not mean either that these patterns had been universally accepted before. Literature and literary culture — so highly valued in Poland -have always been the share of a minority-within-minority: those trained to read literary text, being only a part of those who could read and write. We must remember that both traditional and new artistic practices require special interests and high competence from their participants. Art has always been the domain of few. On the other hand, social communication assumes a different range of participation, and it is directed to a broad audience. Interest in popular issues and average abilities are enough to take part in it. Many people can meet such requirements.