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Textuality and New Media Ecologies, 1600-2000
ENGL 236 - Winter 2006,  Alan Liu

Tue, 1/10
Class 1 (January 10): Introduction

Readings Due:

 
Part I. The Early Media Ecology: Voice, Image, Writing, Book, Print
Tue, 1/17
Class 2: From Voice to Writing

Readings Due:

  • Paul Zumthor, "The Text and the Voice" (1984) Reader
  • M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307 (2nd ed., 1993): "Technology of Writing," 114-44; "The Literate Mentality," 185-96; "Hearing and Seeing," 253-93Reader (see Clanchy's plates online; course login required Online)
  • Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (1996), pp. 41-53, 94-107 Reader
  • Theoretical and other readings to establish conceptual context
    • Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Message" (1964) Reader
    • Claude E. Shannon, "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" (1948), pp. 3-6 Online
    • Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (2005), pp. 1-16
    • Ronald J. Deibert, "Medium Theory, Ecological Holism, and the Study of World Order Transformation," in his Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation (1997), pp. 17-44Reader
    • Paula McDowall, "Popular Culture and the Idea of 'Oral Tradition' in Eighteenth-Century Britain" (2005; manuscript of talk) Reader
    • W.J.T. Mitchell, "Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture" (1998) Reader

Tue, 1/24
Class 3: Writing to Print

Readings Due:

  • James J. O'Donnell, Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (1998), pp. 50-63 Reader
  • Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh's "Didascalion" (1993), pp. 93-114 Reader
  • Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer (1995), pp. 6-24 Reader
  • Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (1996), pp. 125-47 Reader
  • Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (1983), pp. 34-41 Reader
  • Theoretical and other readings to establish conceptual context

Tue, 1/31
Class 4: Print Culture & the History of Reading

Readings Due:

  • Roger Chartier, "General Introduction: Print Culture," in The Culture of Print: Power and Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, ed. Roger Chartier (1989), pp. 1-10Reader
  • Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (1983), pp. 42-91Reader
  • Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (1998), pp. 1-40 Reader
  • Roger Chartier, "Publishing Strategies and What the People Read, 1530-1660," in The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France (1987), pp. 145-82 Reader
  • Theoretical and other readings to establish conceptual context
    • D. F. McKenzie, "The Book as an Expressive Form" (1984) and excerpt from of "The Sociology of a Text: Orality, Literacy and Print in Early New Zealand" (1986), in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (1999) Reader

 
Part II: Historical Case Studies: (Re)Mixing Text and Media
Tue, 2/7
Class 5: Renaissance Case Study: Emblems and Ballads

Readings Due:

Tue, 2/14
Class 6: Eighteenth-Century Case Study: Poetic Personification, Visual/Verbal Narrative

Readings Due:

  • The Idea of Personification
  • Picturing Stories, Storying Pictures
  • Secondary Readings
    • Alvin Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson (1987), pp. 3-23 Reader
    • Chester F. Chapin, Personification in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (1955), pp. 52-80 Reader
    • W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986), pp. 95-115 Reader

Tue, 2/21
Class 7: Romanticism Case Study: From Voice, Manuscripts, and Print to "Imagination"

Readings Due:

  • William Wordsworth
    • "The Ruined Cottage" Reader
      • MS. D version (Feb.-Nov. 1799)
      • MS. B version (selections), plus superadded revisions (March 1798): reading text, facsimiles, and transcriptions (pp. 42-48, 256-81 in Cornell Wordsworth edition of poem) Reader
    • "Tintern Abbey" (July 1798) Reader
    • from The Prelude (1805/1850): Gibbet-Mast and Blasted-Hawthorn "spots of time" Reader
  • J.M.W. Turner, view selected paintings in online image gallery (including where possible paintings discussed in the Ronald Paulson essay) Online (requires course login)
  • Secondary Readings
    • Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800-1900 (1957), pp. 81-98 Reader
    • William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004), frontmatter and pp. 1-42, 158-85, 235-67, 394-412, 433-51 Reader
    • Ronald Paulson, "Turner's Graffiti: The Sun and Its Glosses" (1978) Reader

Tue, 2/28
Class 8: Modernism Case Study: Poetry and Graphic Design

Readings Due:

  • Futurism/Constructivism
  • Graphic Design
    • Jan Tschichold, The New Typography (1928), pp. 52-99 Reader
  • Imagism (all online selections below except for T.S. Eliot require course login)
    • Ezra Pound, "In a Station of the Metro," "L'Art, 1910," "Alba," "Gentildonna," "April," "Heather," "The Jewel Stairs' Grievance," "Fan-Piece, For Her Imperial Lord," "Liu Ch'e," "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter" (online Online)
    • T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land Online
    • William Carlos Williams, "The Red Wheelbarrow," "Nantucket," "Poem," "Queen-Ann's-Lace," "A Sort of a Song" (online Online)
    • H. D., "Oread," "Epigram (After the Greek)," "The Pool," "Orchard," "Heat," "Storm," "Sea Rose" (online Online)
    • F. S. Flint, "Beggar," "Fragment" (online Online)
    • Richard Aldington, "Lesbia," "Epigrams," "Images," "Evening" (online Online)
    • Amy Lowell, "Wind and Silver," "The Pond," "A Lover," "A Year Passes," Irradiations VII" (online Online)
  • The New Criticism
    • Archibald MacLeish, "Ars Poetica" (1926) Online
    • John Crowe Ransom, "Wanted: An Ontological Critic," from New Criticism (1941), pp. 279-316 Reader
    • Cleanth Brooks, "The Heresy of Paraphrase," from The Well Wrought Urn (1947) Reader
  • Secondary Readings
    • Barry Seldes, "Sensibilities for the New Man: Politics, Poetics, and Graphics" Reader
    • William Pratt, "Introduction" to The Imagist Poem, pp. 19-44 Reader
    • Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923 (1994), pp. 91-104, 238-47 Reader
    • Jerome J. McGann,"How to Read a Book," in The Textual Condition (1991), pp. 101-28 Reader
    • Friedrich A. Kittler, "Introduction" to Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999) (orig. pub. in German in 1986), pp. 1-19 Reader

 
Part III: The New "New Media"
Tue, 3/7
Class 9: Digital Literature and Arts: From Hypertext to New Media

Readings Due:

Tue, 3/14
Class 10: Reading Practices for a New Media Age

Readings Due:



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