Technologies of Writing
EN 5312
Tutor: Tim Armstrong t.armstrong@rhul.ac.uk
This course aims to be an advanced introduction to the consideration of two interrelated fields of research: the relations between literature and technology; and literature considered as technology or media.
Students will examine and critically appraise the work of a number of media theorists (Adorno, Kittler, Kahn and others), and apply those ideas to selected literary texts in the periods of literary modernity and postmodernism (1880-2000). They will investigate the way in which ideas about modern technology influence conceptualizations of the mind, subjectivity and communication. They will investigate the literary impact of technologies which carry human perception across distances (telegraphy, telephony, television); which capture and archive the materials of perception (the phonograph, tape, cinema, video); or which reorder human knowledge and communication (as well as the above, computing, digitalization and the internet). The way in which these technologies refigure the public which the writer enters sphere will also be investigated.
By the end of the course, students should:
· have specific knowledge about a range of key texts and contexts relating to literature and technology;
·
have a knowledge of,
and a critical understanding of, the theoretical debates involving writing,
technology and media.
Teaching and Assessment Teaching is by weekly-two hour seminar, in which there will be student papers some weeks. The course is assessed by a term papers totaling 7-9,000 words, final versions to be handed in at the beginning of term 3. Drafts of the paper must be handed in by the first day of term 2 in order to receive feedback. Advice will be offered on choice of topics during the teaching term. For further details about assessment criteria and regulations, consult the Programme Document for the MA.
Required reading The reading
for each week’s seminar, which may comprise a novel, essay, poetry or other
kinds of writing, is detailed in the Course Description below.
Additional
Feedback If there are any issues you
need to discuss during the course, please see Tim Armstrong, Room 203 or your
assigned academic advisor. At the end of
the course, the usual anonymous questionnaire will be distributed to collect
your feedback on the course. Issues can also be raised via the MA’s
representative on the Postgraduate Staff-Student Committee.
In this booklet you will find:
·
a week-by-week Course
Description.
·
a list of topics
which you might consider each week.
·
a list of Secondary
Souces, both general and specific to each week.
In writing essays, you are encouraged to find other materials as well, and especially
to use the resources of the Senate House (
Course Outline
Week 1 Introductory
lecture: theories of media and
technology;
Modern technologies of the text: Emily Dickinson and hypertext; Marinetti, Words in freedom; Bob Brown, 1450-1950
(handouts)
Week 2
Typing, recording, and
collating in the wild:
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Week 3 Notions
of tele-technology
Twain, ‘Mental Radio’; Kipling, ‘Mrs
Week 4 The
Novel and the Media
Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts: newspaper, gramophone
Week 5 The
Novel as Media
John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel (Part I of
Week 6
Week 7 Archive
Cultures and the everyday:
The Mass Observation Project (handout of materials; internet)
Materials relating to the Federal Writer’s Project (internet)
The
Truman Show (film)
Week 8 Surveillance
and Paranoid Systems
Thomas Pynchon, The
Crying of
Francis Ford Coppola, The Conversation (film)
Week 9 Feedback
and the self:
Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape (play);
Burroughs, Nova Express
Week 10 Hyperspace
and hypermedia:
William Gibson, Neuromancer and Kathy Acker, Empire
of the Senseless (which incorporates material from Gibson)
Week 11 Rumour
and Knowledge in the age of the Internet:
Don De Lillo, Underworld (we will concentrate
on the opening and final sections); conspiracy websites (Ru Mills and others)
Secondary Reading
Theodor Adorno, Essays on Music,
ed. Richard Leppert.(2002).
Daniel Albright Beckett and Aesthetics (2003)
Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography:
The Legacy of British Realism (1999)
Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body:
A Cultural Study (1998)
-----------. ‘Player Piano: Poetry and Sonic
Modernism’, Modernism-Modernity (2007).
Gillian Beer, ‘”Wireless”: Popular Physics, Radio and
Modernism’, in Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention, ed.
Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow
(1996)
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. (1973)
George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics
of the Page (2001)
Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (1993)
Timothy C. Campbell, Wireless Writing in the Age of
Marconi (2006)
James Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on
Media and Society (1989)
Pamela L. Caughie, ed. Virginia
Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
(2000)
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan, eds.
New
Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (2006)
Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple
Henderson, eds., From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and
Technology, Art, and Literature (2002)
Jonathan Crary, Techniques
of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1993)
----------. Suspensions of Perception: Attention,
Spectacle and Modern Culture (1999)
Jonathan Crary and Stanford Kwinter, eds., Incorporations [Zone 6] (1992)
Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology, and
Modernity, 1860–2000 (2004)
Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception
and Aesthetics (2002)
Jacques Derrida, Archive
Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric
Prenowitz (1996)
-----------. Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (2005)
Mary Ann Doane,. ‘Temporality, Storage, Legibility:
Freud, Marey and the Cinema’, Critical Inquiry
22 (1996): 313-43.
Joanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and
Modern Art, 1909-1923 (1994)
Thomas H. Eriksen, Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in
the Information Age (2001)
Nicholas Garnham, Emancipation,
the Media and Modernity (2000)
Lisa Gitelman, Scripts,
Grooves and Writing machines: Representing Technology in the
------------, and Geoffrey B. Pingree
eds., New Media, 1740-1915 (2003)
------------. Always
Already New : media, history and the data of
culture (2006) BEDFORD 301.1411 Git
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and
Ludwig K. Pfeiffer, eds. Materialities of
Communication (1994)
Sam Halliday, Science and Technology in the Age of
Hawthorne, Melville, Twain and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity
(2007)
Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’
(1949)
Susan Howe, My
Emily Dickinson (1985)
813 DIC/H
Frederic Jameson, A
Singular Modernity (2002)
Jenkins, Henry, Convergence
Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006)
Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of
Sound in the Arts (1999)
-----------------, ed. Wireless Imagination: Sound,
Radio, and the Avant-Garde (1992)
Hugh Kenner, The
Mechanic Muse (1983)
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time
and Space, 1880-1918 (1983)
Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900.
Trans. Michael Metteer (1990)
-------------. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,
trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz
(1999)
Peter Knight, ed. Conspiracy Nation: The Politics
of Paranoia in Postwar
George P. Landow, Hypertext:
The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (1992) [see also Landow’s extensive website]
----------, ed. Hyper/Text/Theory
(1994)
B. Loader, ed., The
Governance of Cyberspace (1997)
David
Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life (1980)
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic
Man (1962)
Jerome McGann, Black
Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (1993)
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (2001)
Michael North, Camera Works: Photography and the
Twentieth-Century Word (2005)
Patrick O’Donnell, ed., New Essays on The Crying of
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing
of the Word (1982)
Nicholas Royle. Telepathy
and Literature (1990)
Avitel Ronell, The
Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (1989)
Shawn James Rosenheim, The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from
Edgar Poe to the Internet (1997)
Nicholas Royle, Telepathy
and Literature: Essays on the
Hillel Schwartz, The
Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (1996)
Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, eds. Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention (1996)
William Stott, Documentary
Expression and Thirties
Neil Strauss, ed., Radiotext(e) [Semiotexte 16]
(1993)
Helen
Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism (2002)
Joseph Tabbi & Michael Wutz, eds., Reading
Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology (1997)
Pamela Thurschwell, Literature,
Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 (2001)
Cecelia Tichi, Shifting
Gears: Technology, Literature & Culture in Modernist
Daniel Tiffany, Radio
Corpse: Imagism & the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra
Pound (1995)
----------. Toy
Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (2000)
David Thorburn, Henry
Jenkins, Brad Seawell, eds. Rethinking Media Change: The
Aesthetics of Transition (2003)
Noah Wardrop-Fruin and Nick Montfort, ed., The new media reader
(2003)
Allen S. Weiss, Breathless: Sound Recording,
Disembodiment and the Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia (2002)
Martha L. Werner, Emily
Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of
Westman, Karen E., “‘For her generation the newspaper was the book’:
Media, Mediation, and Oscillation in Virginia Woolf’s
Between the Acts”, Journal of
Modern Literature 29.2 (2006): 1-18.
Jennifer Wicke, ‘Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula
and its Media’, ELH 59 (1992):
467-93.
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, ‘Undead
Networks: Information Processing and Media Boundary Conflicts in Dracula,’
in Literature and Science, ed. Donald Bruce and Anthony Purdy (1994)
Brian Winston, Media, Technology and Society, a
History: from the Telegraph to the Internet (1998)
NB
Some more specific secondary
reading relating to individual
texts is to be added.