Bruce Clarke

Bruce Clarke ist seit 1996 Professur für Literature and Science am Department of English der Texas Tech University. Er forscht dort hautpsächlich zur Koevolution von Literatur und Technikwissenschaften im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Nach seinem Englisch-Studium an der Columbia University, das er 1974 abschloss, promovierte er 1980 an der State University of New York, Buffalo zum PhD mit einer Arbeit unter dem Titel: The Ragged Rose: D. H. Lawrence’s Phenomenology of the Soul. Nachdem er zwei Jahre lang als Teaching and Research Assistant an der Louisiana State University tätig war, wurde er 1982 Assistant Professor an der Texas Tech University und dort 1988 Associate Professor. Von 1997 bis 2003 war Bruce Clarke Direktor des Center for the Interaction of the Arts and Sciences an der Texas Tech University und von 2006 bis 2008 außerdem Präsident der Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts.

Forschungsprojekt am IKKM

Narrative – Media – Systems
My current work centers on a general consideration of narrative form derived from my immediate area of scholarly expertise—literary criticism and theory. A narrative text in any medium is already and necessarily a semiotic object. The project I will pursue at IKKM, “Narrative – Media – Systems,” further develops my treatment of narrative theory in relation to systems theory in _Posthuman Metamorphosis_ (Fordham 2008) by incorporating insights from media studies, media theory, and medium theory.

One of my aims is to contribute to the dialogue between literary and cinematic narratology. One can start from the important differences as well as the structural parallels between the verbal medium of literary narrative and the visual and auditory mediums of the fiction film. The literary medium allows for fluctuations in the mood and voice of the narrating agent, while the medium of cinematic narration draws instead on its own prodigious register of shots, cuts, and ocular attributions, over and above its auditory components. However, both provide a transmedial reservoir for the play of narrative anachrony, discursive modulations in the order of narrative time, and comparable modes of spatial extension for the play of narrative levels. I am particularly concerned to investigate the extent of this correspondence in textual forms despite the radical differences of mediatic elements.

Bringing systems theory in the discussion, I will continue my research into how the forms of self-reference and reentry play basic structural roles for the operations of narrative observation. The observers of narratives may reconstruct the different forms of semiotic distinction made available by specific narrative mediums to produce comparable diegetic intuitions of systemic productions: sights and sounds, affective states, memories, anticipations, and meanings. This mode of approach to narrative mediation aligns the reception and experience of narratives with the wider epistemological constructivism that continues to renovate our general understanding of observation as a creative act.

My overall aim is to develop a detailed synthesis of narratology, media studies, and systems theory, using the form/medium distinction to renegotiate the topics of time and memory. While in residence at the IKKM I will work on a book manuscript, elaborated through close readings of literary and cinematic texts, centered on a form-theoretical approach to the psychical, technological, and social couplings of narrative, media, and systems.