Abstract: If the modernist model has dominated the field of literary theory at least since the second half of the 19^th Century, does this mean that it also provided a conceptual and discursive framework which was to be adopted and adapted by the field of Media Studies in the 20^th Century? The present study gives a tentative answer to this question by shedding light on some of the correlations between concepts found in the modernist aesthetics and in a number of canonical texts in the fields of Media and Communication. More precisely, we propose to conduct a quantitative investigation. Its purpose is twofold. The first objective is to map the implicit, imaginary place of the literary medium in a large corpus of books in Media Studies (1950-2011) foregrounding similarities and discrepancies between the poetics of modernism and the field of Communication. Secondly, the study aims to compare aesthetics and media from the standpoint of a general theory of pragmatic effects. The present investigation allows us to see that the poetic approach inspired by the modernist tradition is extremely productive in the corpus. These results are only preliminary: a proper quantitative analysis of the recurring aesthetic turns would require a more detailed, multivariate analysis of the recent discursive landscape of Media research. This new study would also allow us to integrate the analysis of argumentative markers related to the digital turn.

Key words: Modernist Poetics, Media Studies, Computational Semantic Analysis, Applied Media Aesthetics