ENGL 709 Technologies of Literary Production

This course has two complementary goals. The first is to introduce the history of technologies used to produce and circulate literature, from the parchment upon which Beowulf is written to the social media platforms exploited by netprov artists. This history provides a broad overview of the material conditions of possibility for the emergence of literary form and genre in the Anglophone tradition. The second goal is to examine how digital media are transforming scholarly publishing and communication by reflecting upon our own writing practices and their attendant technologies. By pursuing these two goals in tandem, this course places current trends, like digital humanities, within a much longer history of technological transformation and textual production. To keep things manageable, we are ditching strict chronology in favor of topic clusters. Each week, we’ll explore a new technical threshold or “interface” (in Alex Galloway’s sense of the term — we’ll get to that!) where matter meets meaning. It is my hope that this approach will enable us to engage in comparative, cross-historical analysis without undermining the historicist impulse that motivates the course. Because you really do need to experience many of these technologies for yourself, we’ll also be spending the last hour of most classes in Wilson Library, looking at everything from medieval parchment and hard disk drives to phonographic cylinders and Civil War scrapbooks. This is a unique opportunity, and we are extraordinarily lucky that the awesome staff at Wilson are letting us spend so much time with the materials.