Approaches to Media History (BMS)
Term 2
TTh, 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
This course offers case studies in the cultural significance of four or five technologies from the last two centuries, choosing from the following: electromagnetic telegraphy, photography, phonography, wireless radio, film, television, and the internet. It investigates these technologies by way of literature. Writing and print (as media) are particularly sensitive to the emergence of powerful new technologies, especially those technologies that pertain to writing (the -graphy technologies). Paying attention to writing and ideas about writing (that is, poetics), we explore the possibilities, consequences, and constraints that accompany new technologies, as well as the discourses by which they are understood at the time of their emergence. What can we discover about historical media and the technologies that underlie them through reading literary works? Can this method be brought into the present moment? Our geographical focus will (mostly) be the United States, since we are interested in the emergence of the spatial and conceptual idea of “America” as it comes to be identified with mass media.
Writers may include some of the following: Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Walter Benjamin, Nathanael West, Gertrude Stein, Henry James, Henry Adams, Andy Warhol, Marshall McLuhan, Daniel Clowes, David Foster Wallace, others.
Note, this is a new course and is curently under construction.
