Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies

E-Book Overview

Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies is a collection of thirteen essays by leading scholars which explores the mutual determination of forms of writing and forms of technology in modern literature. The essays unfold from a variety of historical and theoretical perspectives the proposition that literature is not less but more mechanical than other forms of writing: a transfigurative ideal machine. The collection breaks new ground archaeologically, unearthing representations in literature and film of a whole range of decisive technologies from the stereopticon through census-and slot-machines to the stock ticker, and from the Telex to the manipulation of genetic code and the screens which increasingly mediate our access to the world and to each other. It also contributes significantly to critical and cultural theory by investigating key concepts which articulate the relation between writing and technology: number, measure, encoding, encryption, the archive, the interface. Technography is not just a modern matter, a feature of texts that happen to arise in a world full of machinery and pay attention to that machinery in various ways. But the mediation of other machines has beyond doubt assisted literature to imagine and start to become the ideal machine it is always aspiring to be.

E-Book Content

W R I T I N G, M E D I U M , M A C H I N E MODERN TECHNOGRAPHIES E D I T E D B Y S E A N P R Y O R A N D D AV I D T R O T T E R Writing, Medium, Machine Modern Technographies Technographies Series Editors: Steven Connor, David Trotter and James Purdon How was it that technology and writing came to inform each other so extensively that today there is only information? Technographies seeks to answer that question by putting the emphasis on writing as an answer to the large question of ‘through what?’. Writing about technographies in history, our contributors will themselves write technographically. Writing, Medium, Machine Modern Technographies Sean Pryor and David Trotter OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS London 2016 First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2016 Copyright © 2016 Sean Pryor and David Trotter, chapters by respective authors This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 Freely available onlne at: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/ writing-medium-machine/ Cover Art, figures, and other media included with this book may be under different copyright restrictions. Cover Illustration: Writin, Machin, Cod (2016) gouache on paper Copyright © 2016 Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND Print ISBN  978-1-78542-006-1 PDF ISBN  978-1-78542-018-4 OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. More at http://openhumanitiespress.org Contents Introduction Sean Pryor and David Trotter7 1. How to Do Things with Writing Machines 18 Steven Connor 2. Stereopticon35 Kristen Treen 3. The Great American Novel and the Census 52 Kasia Boddy 4. The Milieu Is the Message: Henry James and Mediation 67 John Attridge 5. D.W. Griffith, Victorian Poetry, and the Sound of Silent Film
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