The Future of the Literary Past

PMLA ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 125 (4) ◽  
pp. 959-967 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith L. McGill ◽  
Andrew Parker
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Media History ◽  
Paper Machine ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Little Magazines ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Serial Publication ◽  
Technology Grant

[B]y carrying us beyond paper, the adventures of technology grant us a sort of future anterior: they liberate our reading for a retrospective exploration of the past resources of paper, for its previously multimedia vectors.—Jacques Derrida, Paper MachineThis essay explores some of the ways that the contemporary mediascape has begun to transform the questions we can ask of our students and ourselves. Our subject derives from an undergraduate English course, Literary History and/as Media History, that we designed to address the lack of critical attention paid in the curriculum to the media of literary works. The course, whose catalog description follows, was intended to cover a lot of historical ground while highlighting theoretical questions that generally remain unasked in Norton Anthology–style surveys:Living in an era of rapid technological innovation, we tend to forget that print itself was once a new medium. The history of English and American literature since the Renaissance has been as much a response to the development of new material formats (scribal copying, printed playtexts, newspaper and serial publication, “little magazines,” radio, film, television, the internet) as it has been a succession of ideal literary forms (poems, plays, and novels). This course will survey literary works from the sixteenth to the twentieth century in relation to the history of media. What can these histories say to each other? Are they, indeed, one history?

“Picture it all, Darley”

2015 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sari Altschuler
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Media History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Two Stage ◽  
Race Politics ◽  
Current Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Representational Limits ◽  
History Of Race

Sari Altschuler “‘Picture it all, Darley’: Race Politics and the Media History of George Lippard’s The Quaker City” (pp. 65–101) This essay adresses two related questions. First, how did George Lippard’s The Quaker City develop from a multimedia story told through newspaper conventions, illustration, and two plays into the novel that appeared in May 1845? And second, how did Lippard’s white-seduction narrative come to pivot around the nightmare of an ambiguously raced Devil-Bug? Joining these questions of form and content, I argue that the media history of The Quaker City is inextricable from its history of race. In the wake of the almost riot around the mid-serialization of his Philadelphia play, Lippard moved away from fictionalizing current events toward the “grotesque-sublime” through a broader critique of Philadelphia less open to charges of libel. This shift took place through the transformation of Devil-Bug, a character Lippard rapidly developed in the middle installments until he was complex enough to carry the new story. Turning the once-black Devil-Bug into his protagonist, however, required character developments that necessarily complicated the story’s representation of race, a process that occurred concurrently with events related to the work that highlighted the systemic oppression of African Americans. In winter 1844, troubles with two stage productions and his illustrator highlighted the problems of representing race. After a several-month hiatus, Lippard published new installments vituperously condemning the representational limits of these nonprose forms and turned to prose to develop his antislavery position through Devil-Bug. As a result of these confluent developments, The Quaker City became an antislavery text through the process of opening Devil-Bug’s character up to its own hybridity and interiority.

Literary History on the Road: Transatlantic Crossings and Transpacific Crossovers

PMLA ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 119 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takayuki Tatsumi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jazz Age ◽  
The Road ◽  
History Of ◽  
On The Road

Literary history has always mirrored discursive revolutions in world history. In the United States, the Jazz Age would not have seen the Herman Melville revival and the completion of Carl Van Doren's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917–21) without the rise of post–World War I nativism. If it had not been for Pearl Harbor, F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) could not have fully aroused the democratic spirit embedded in the heritage of New Criticism. Likewise, the postcolonial and New Americanist climate around 1990, that critical transition at the end of the cold war, brought about the publication of Emory Elliott's The Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988) and Sacvan Bercovitch's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1994–). I would like to question, however, the discourse that narrates American literary history in the globalist age of the twenty-first century.

Writing American Literary History Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.), The Cambridge History of American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994–2005, £495.00). Volume One: 1590–1820 (1994, £70.00). Pp. xiii+829. ISBN 0 521 30105 [squf ]. Volume Two: Prose Writing, 1820–1865 (1995, £75.00). Pp. xviii+887. ISBN 0 521 30106 8. Volume Three: Prose Writing, 1860–1920 (2005, £80.00). Pp. xi+813. ISBN 0 521 30107 6. Volume Four: Nineteenth-Century Poetry, 1800–1910 (2004, £75.00). Pp. x+562. ISBN 0 521 30108 4. Volume Five: Poetry and Criticism, 1900–1950 (2003, £75.00). Pp. xi+624. ISBN 0 521 30109 2. Volume Six: Prose Writing, 1910–1950 (2002, £70.00). Pp. xx+620. ISBN 0 521 49731 0. Volume Seven: Prose Writing, 1940–1990 (1999, £75.00). Pp. xxiii+795. ISBN 0 521 49732 9. Volume Eight: Poetry and Criticism, 1940–1995 (1996, £75.00). Pp. viii+545. ISBN 0 521 49733 7.

2006 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-411
Author(s):  
RICHARD GRAY
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
And Gender ◽  
A Site

Each generation needs to rewrite literary history. And it may be that this generation needs to do it more than most, if only because the proliferation of schools and theories has turned what was once common critical ground into a battlefield. American books, among others, have become a site of struggle, and American writers have been among those caught in the criss-crossing searchlights of ethnic and gender studies, interdisciplinary investigations and studies of popular culture, language and communication. Just how far things have gone can be measured by the fact that every term in the phrase “history of American literature,” is now open to debate. The textuality of history and the historicity of the text have become the most contentious issues in contemporary criticism, while the question of nationhood, in particular, is under scrutiny. In a famous phrase, Walt Whitman described his work as a language experiment, an attempt to summon a nation into being through words. The slippery, plural nature of American identity and the bewildering contingencies of American history that drove Whitman to say this feed into the more challenging of the recent accounts of American writing.

scholarly journals Editorial

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 5-7
Author(s):  
Jakob Lien ◽  
Solveig Daugaard ◽  
Ragnild Lome
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Doctoral Student ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Media Archaeology ◽  
Double Blind ◽  
Honorary Doctor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Media Philosophy ◽  
The Media ◽  
And Gender

”Since Sputnik, the planet has become a global theatre under the proscenium arch of man-made satellites. Our psyches acquire thereby a totally new rim-spin.” (Marshall McLuhan, Culture is our business, 1970) With these words by Marshall McLuhan, you are hereby welcomed to the second issue of Sensorium Journal. This issue includes papers from the Geomedia conference in Karlstad 2017, about skywriting, singing birds, satellites and airplanes. In a media archeological vein, works on (artifical) flatness are featured, the sympoiesis of comic books is discussed and a section is reserveed for reviews of challenging new theoretical titles by Tung-Hui Hu, Anna Tsing and Mark Seltzer. The essay “Notational Iconicity” by professor of language and media philosophy at Freie Universität, Sybille Krämer, is translated into Danish by our editor Solveig Daugaard. Krämer, who is an honorary doctor at Linköping University, visited Östergötland in 2017 to discuss a series of texts related to her concept of “artifical flatness”, one of which we are proud to present in this issue. Krämer’s strikingly cogent take on some of the foundational questions of media philosophy regarding the intricate relations between thinking, speech and systems of written notation provide an interesting antipole to the somewhat wordier approach of many leading media theorists today. As an artistic spin to the theoretical ideas of Krämer, we confront it with an excerpt from the 1884-novel Flatland by British author and theologian Edwin A. Abbott, originally published under the witty alias “A Square” along with the visual reinterpretation of the novel by Canadian poet Derek Beaulieu from 2007, introduced by Jakob Lien. The featured image in this editorial (above) is from Beaulieus book. One of the theoretical interests of the editors of this journal is media archaeology.  We therefore approached a number of scholars in Scandinavia for this issue, who have worked with the concept, and asked them three questions we ourselves have struggled with. What is media archaeology in their view? How, more concretely have they used the media archaeological framework in their research? And how do they understand the relation between artefact and structure within media archaeology? In addition, we also asked our colleagues in the network to contribute and openly reflect on the same questions. The resultant survey gives the impression of a theoretical framework that – at least in the past decade – has played an intriguing role for media oriented aesthetic thinking in Scandinavia, and still has wide potential for exploration and further development for research in the field. * Since the last issue, Sensorium Network has organized two workshops. One on non-human languages in Umeå in 2016, and one on autopoiesis in Linköping in 2017. In addition, preparations have started, for transforming part of Sensorium Journal into a peer reviewed publication in 2018. The journal will still be a place for collective writing and artistic contributions but will in addition feature a section of articles that have gone through a double blind referee process. Make no mistake! The idea behind the journal is still the same; the mixture of peer reviewed articles and the more open main section of the journal is meant to mirror the collaborative idea behind Sensorium. The change in the structure of the journal also bear with it some very intriguing news: From the next issue on, Sensorium Journal will be equipped with a scientific board, whose members will be announced later this fall, as well as three new editors: Jenny Jarlsdotter Wikström is a doctoral student in comparative literature and gender studies at Umeå University, Johan Fredrikzon is a doctoral student in history of ideas at Stockholm University, and Per Isreaelson recently defended his thesis on the media ecologies of fantastic in literary history. We expect lots of fun, sharp and lively discussion as well as new initiatives to spring from their involvement as editors of the journal. Enjoy Sensorium Journal 2!

Unwritten Poetry

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott A. Trudell
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Book History ◽  
Media History ◽  
Musical Performance ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Renaissance Poetry ◽  
The Media ◽  
Synthetic Media ◽  
The Impact

Vocal music was at the heart of English Renaissance poetry and drama. Virtuosic actor-singers redefined the theatrical culture of William Shakespeare and his peers. Composers including William Byrd and Henry Lawes shaped the transmission of Renaissance lyric verse. Poets from Philip Sidney to John Milton were fascinated by the disorienting influx of musical performance into their works. Musical performance was a driving force behind the period’s theatrical and poetic movements, yet its importance to literary history has long been ignored or effaced. Unwritten Poetry reveals the impact of vocalists and composers upon the poetic culture of early modern England by studying the media through which—and by whom—its songs were made. In a literary field that was never confined to writing, media were not limited to material texts. Scott Trudell argues that the media of Renaissance poetry can be conceived as any node of transmission from singer’s larynx to actor’s body. Through his study of song, Trudell outlines a new approach to the Renaissance poetry and drama that is grounded not simply in performance history or book history but in a more synthetic media history.

“It Is Difficult to Disengage a Single Thread from the Living Web of a Nation’s Literature”

2018 ◽  
pp. 27-55
Author(s):  
Karin L. Hooks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Women Writers ◽  
Literary Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Anthologies ◽  
Literary Histories

Arguing that the changing and more consolidated literary politics of the century’s turn helped make possible the canon wars of the twentieth century, this paper investigates the history of literary histories. Twentieth-century constructs of the field overlook an awareness that late-nineteenth century female literary historians envisioned in terms of a more inclusive and democratic American literary canon. Recovering a literary history largely erased by the turn into the twentieth century through a case study of Sarah Piatt’s career, this chapter focuses on two female literary historians of the 1890s: Ellen Mackay Hutchinson and Jeanette Gilder, whose literary anthologies include Piatt’s writing, unlike those of the following century. Hutchinson, who (with Edmund Clarence Stedman) edited a sizeable collection of American texts, the eleven-volume Library of American Literature, and Jeanette Gilder, co-editor of The Critic, who hosted a popular election to identify the top 125 American women writers of 1890, made arguments for the inclusion of Piatt in the canon that are worth revisiting in light of turn-of-the-century mechanisms for erasing the literary history of which Piatt was a part.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Florian Hoof
Keyword(s):  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Media History ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Business Consulting ◽  
Independent Form ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Visualization Techniques ◽  
Global Growth

This introductory chapter establishes the book’s goal of recovering the media history of consulting and determining what the global growth of consulting knowledge can tell us about the modern world. The time span of the investigation, from 1880 to 1930, covers three parallel developments, which lead to a fundamental transformation of industrial knowledge structures. First, there is the constitution of an independent form of managerial activity in industry. Second, there is the establishment of the field of corporate consulting. Third, there is the emergence of a series of visualization techniques after 1880, which are at the disposal of the first two spheres, management and corporate consulting. These three tropes lead to a new form of visual management that follows from oral and written forms of management. The introduction describes the interdisciplinary approach the author adopts to trace the visual culture and historical epistemology of business consulting and consulting knowledge between media and business history and theory.

Digital Art and Experimental Color Systems at Bell Laboratories, 1965–1984: Restoring Interdisciplinary Innovations to Media History

Leonardo ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn L. Kane
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Media History ◽  
Digital Art ◽  
Computing Technology ◽  
Media Arts ◽  
The Public ◽  
Experimental Art ◽  
Time Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

AT&T's Bell Laboratories produced a prolific number of innovative digital art and experimental color systems between 1965 and 1984. However, due to repressive regulation, this work was hidden from the public. Almost two decades later, when Bell lifted its restrictions on creative work not related to telephone technologies, the atmosphere had changed so dramatically that despite a relaxation of regulation, cutting-edge projects were abandoned. This paper discusses the struggles encountered in interdisciplinary collaborations and the challenge to use new media computing technology to make experimental art at Bell Labs during this unique time period, now largely lost to the history of the media arts.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document