Death of Gustavus Adolphus
Since newspapers entered the communication landscape of early modern Europe around 1600, questions about the nature, transfer, reception, and employment of news have emerged as important elements in our thinking about the evolution of communication and its effect on the writing of history and fiction. Most recently, media science has developed as a field that investigates varieties of news media and their relationship to history and literature. Media science probes the interactions of history, memory, and the construction of meaning in human communication. Then, as now, the temporality of events and their method of observation and means of reporting affect how we understand, record, and make use of news. Trends in the use of media offer insights into processes of identity formation fostering the understanding of cultural developments and cultural transfer.
Our symposium will highlight the pioneering role of early modern print media (words and images) by investigating what was considered news and how it was used. As early modern Europe and Germany, in particular, sought to respond to the turmoil of war, religious strife, and the emergence of the modern sciences, widely and regularly distributed news reports kept readers abreast of events. In turn, local, national, and international events passed from factual reporting to fictional entertainment in novels and plays. The former strove for truth and reliability, the latter highlighted the amazing, the strange, the wondrous, and the curious. Many texts employed news reports and sophisticated images to entertain and inform the reader in an effort to guide and interpret the reader's understanding of contemporary and historical events. Writers combined facts and fiction in textual strategies that went beyond the straight and accurate reporting of the daily news to what one might call the fictionalizing of news. At the very moment when the medium "newspaper" was born, it gave birth to a new intermediality constructed of texts and images, thereby becoming a new text.
The proposed symposium on the uses and the evolution of news reports in periodical and fictional literature, Flugblätter and Flugschriften, will shed light on how such reports changed forms, venues, and audiences; how cultures constructed as well as interpreted historical events with the help of print media; and how history, memory, and public discourse work together to affect the Medialität of history and the historicity of media. As the topic suggests, we envision this meeting to be interdisciplinary in the media explored and the methods employed.
