Martini Paula, Rodrigo
TR 2 :20 PM
Park Hall 0145
ENGL 3410 Literature and Media
The Electric and Electronic Ages
This course will serve both as an introduction to recent media theories in cultural studies and an in-depth look at how literature has co-evolved along other types of media production and technologies, such as cinema, radio, television, and personal computers, to name just a few.
The first part of the semester will focus specifically on literature in the “Electric Age,” when film, radio, and photography threatened the monopoly of print. The second part will focus on how the interconnected systems of the “Electronic Age” (i.e. computers and the web) have “erased differences among individual media” (Kittler 1986).
We will look at novels, stories, poems, film, and art while asking: How has literature changed with the introduction of new media technologies? How do we think of aesthetics in the face of the technological? How do our aesthetic practices reframe the work of media?
This course understands media to mean the series of technological apparatuses that record, store, and reproduce sensible data. We will also investigate the “media-”scapes that encircle each apparatus, such as a the network of practices and discourses surrounding the emergence of cinema, or the popularization of the radio.
To help us navigate the world of media, we will discuss some criticism on:
These strange and complicated terms will be made clear through the writings of Siegfried Zielinski, Lisa Gitelman, Jacqueline Rose, Laura Mulvey, Friedrich Kittler, Marshall McLuhan, Vilém Flusser, Dominic Pettman, and others.
Required novels:
Tom McCarthy, C. New York: Vintage, 2010. ISBN: 978-0307388216
Evelyn Waugh, Scoop (1938). New York: Back Bay Books, 2012. ISBN: 978-0316216371
Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941). Boston: Mariner, 1970. ISBN: 978-0156118705
Shorter works by Herman Melville, Dorothy Parker, Jean Toomer, HG Wells, Elmer Rice, Sanjena Sathian, and others will be made available via eLC.