The fact that images and media allow knowledge about their historical, social and discursive context to be reconstructed has long since become a commonplace of research. It is also undisputed that this knowledge is subject to a diachronic process of change and that it is aesthetically formed. Based on these observations, it seems worthwhile to examine socially important fields of discourse (economy, politics, theology) within the framework of multimodal discourse analyses with regard to established knowledge stocks, discursive dynamics and strategies of staging relevant to aesthetics.
However, what are the perspectives of visual, linguistic, media and literary studies in the representation and investigation of economic contexts? The hypothesis that will serve as the starting point for the conference is that visual media reveal three different perspectives with regard to the thematization of economic contexts. From this perspective it follows that image, media and literary studies – in addition to studies on socio-economic production conditions and marketing strategies of visual media – also have three different perspectives for researching the economic content of visual media.