Operating at the intersection where new technology meets literature, this collection discovers the relationship among image, sound, and touch in the long nineteenth century. The chapters speak to the ...special mixed-media properties of literature, while exploring the important interconnections of science, technology, and art at the historical moment when media was being theorized, debated, and scrutinized. Each chapter focuses on a specific visual, acoustic, or haptic dimension of media, while also calling attention to the relationships among the three. Famous works such as Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud" and Shelley's Frankenstein are discussed alongside a range of lesser-known literary, scientific, and pornographic writings. Topics include the development of a print culture for the visually impaired; the relationship between photography and narrative; the kaleidoscope and modern urban experience; Christmas gift books; poetry, painting and music as remediated forms; the interface among the piano, telegraph, and typewriter; Ernst Heinrich Weber's model of rationalized tactility; and how the shift from visual to auditory telegraphic instruments amplified anxieties about the place of women in nineteenth-century information networks. Full of surprising insights and connections, the collection offers new impetus for stimulating historical conversations and debates about nineteenth-century media, while also contributing fresh perspectives on new media and (re)mediation today.
Histories of the book often move straight from the codex to the digital screen. Left out is nearly 150 years of audio recordings. Matthew Rubery uncovers this story, from Edison to today's ...billion-dollar audiobook industry, and breaks from convention by treating audiobooks as a distinctive art form that has profoundly influenced the way we read.
A revisionist account of technology's role in the aesthetics, spaces and politics of transatlantic avant-gardesExplores of a range of key avant-garde formations in the modernist transatlantic period, ...from the Italian futurists and English Vorticists to the Dada-surrealist and post-Harlem Renaissance African American experimentalistsExplores writers' and artists' inventions as well as their texts, and involves them directly in the messy transductions of technology in cultureDraws on previously unknown photos, manuscripts and other evidence that reveals the untold story of Bob and Rose Brown's 'reading machine' - a cross-disciplinary, meta-formational, and transnational project that proposed to transform the everyday act of readingReading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic provides a new account of aesthetic and technological innovation, from the Machine Age to the Information Age. Drawing on a wealth of archival discoveries, it argues that modernist avant-gardes used technology not only as a means of analysing culture, but as a way of feeding back into it. As well as uncovering a new invention by Mina Loy, the untold story of Bob Brown's 'reading machine' and the radical technicities of African American experimentalists including Gwendolyn Bennett and Ralph Ellison, the book places avant-gardes at the centre of innovation across a variety of fields. From dazzle camouflage to microfilm, and from rail networks to broadcast systems, White explores how vanguardists harnessed socio-technics to provoke social change.
In this 2001 book Pamela Thurschwell examines the intersection of literary culture, the occult and new technology at the fin-de-siècle. Thurschwell argues that technologies began suffusing the public ...imagination from the mid-nineteenth century on: they seemed to support the claims of spiritualist mediums. Talking to the dead and talking on the phone both held out the promise of previously unimaginable contact between people: both seemed to involve 'magical thinking'. Thurschwell looks at the ways in which psychical research, the scientific study of the occult, is reflected in the writings of such authors as Henry James, George du Maurier and Oscar Wilde, and in the foundations of psychoanalysis. This study offers provocative interpretations of fin-de-siècle literary and scientific culture in relation to psychoanalysis, queer theory and cultural history.
Flat-World Fiction analyzes representations of digital technology and the social and ethical concerns it creates in mainstream literary American fiction and fiction written about the United States in ...the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In this period, authors such as Don DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Joshua Ferris, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mohsin Hamid, Thomas Pynchon, Kristen Roupenian, Gary Shteyngart, and Zadie Smith found themselves not only implicated in the developing digital world of flat screens but also threatened by it, while simultaneously attempting to critique it. As a result, their texts explore how human relationships with digital devices and media transform human identity and human relationships with one another, history, divinity, capitalism, and nationality.Liliana M. Naydan walks us through these complex relationships, revealing how authors show through their fiction that technology is political. In the process, these authors complement and expand on work by historians, philosophers, and social scientists, creating accessible, literary road maps to our digital future.
The field of electronic literature has a familiar catchphrase, "You
can't do it on paper." But the field has in fact never gone
paperless. Reaching back to early experiments with digital writing
in ...the mainframe era and then moving through the personal computer
and Internet revolutions, this book traces the changing forms of
paper on which e-lit artists have drawn, including continuous
paper, documentation, disk sleeves, packaging, and even artists'
books. Paper Electronic Literature attests that digital
literature's old media elements have much to teach us about the
cultural and physical conditions in which we compute; the
creativity that new media artists have shown in their dealings with
old media; and the distinctively electronic issues that confront
digital artists. Moving between avant-garde works and popular ones,
fiction writing and poetry generation, Richard Hughes Gibson
reveals the diverse ways in which paper has served as a component
within electronic literature, particularly in facilitating
interactive experiences for users. This important study develops a
new critical paradigm for appreciating the multifaceted
material innovation that has long marked digital
literature.
