AustLit

'MediaTropes is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary eJournal devoted to the study of media and mediation. Responding to the challenges of our changing and increasingly interconnected world, this eJournal addresses questions, problems, and issues at the intersection of culture and technology, broadly construed.

'Taking inspiration from the legacy of Marshall McLuhan, MediaTropes provides a forum for interdisciplinary approaches to media as communication. McLuhan’s adage, “the medium is the message,” suggests that media communicate messages. Studies of media therefore concentrate on the medium itself as a kind of language with its own conventions for generating meaning, a language that draws on fields of reference that extend outward into many different dimensions of culture.

'The trope captures this cultural life of media and meaning. Tropes are rhetorical figures, turns of phrase, or manners of speaking. All media are tropic; they are communicative practices that indicate movement and transformation. The metaphor, for instance, is literally a “carrying across,” and this figure encourages us to examine not just what metaphors and media say, literally, but above all, what they do.

'MediaTropes invites the submission of scholarly articles, new critical approaches, multimedia works, and book reviews, in English or French, addressing the wide range of work that the study of media has inspired.' (Publication summary)