LFU:online

Skills for critical examination and presentation of essential methods and strategies in Media Studies applied to a concrete example.

The meaning of texts in illustrated periodicals is generated not least by their verbal-visual contextualization on the page or on the double page spread—this is the case already in the first illustrated magazines which emerge in the 1830s. We will examine the ‘syntax’ of typeset matter and pictures, internationally current in British, French and German penny magazines and periodicals of the Illustrated London News genre until around 1870. Structural analogies of letterpress and picture composition will be ‘read’ as means of communication; the verbal-visual design of cover pages will become understandable as a political message; seemingly disparate accumulations of wood engravings and typeset articles will turn out to be deliberate media reflections; and we will see that pictures, being republished in another periodical, might become completely different images.

Lecture, discussion, reading of (scientific) texts

Active participation and presentation in the seminar

1 - 2 page exposé on the sessions of the block phase 

approx. 10-page elaboration of one of the exposés as project work

Will be discussed in the first lesson.