By Mark Goble
Considering texts through Henry James, Gertrude Stein, James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Agee, and William Carlos Williams, along movie, portray, song, and pop culture, Mark Goble explores the improvement of yankee modernism because it used to be formed via its reaction to expertise and an try and swap how literature itself may possibly communicate.
Goble's unique readings reinterpret the aesthetics of modernism within the early 20th century, while new modes of conversation made the adventure of expertise an social gathering for profound experimentation and mirrored image. He follows the assimilation of such "old" media applied sciences because the telegraph, mobile, and phonograph and their function in inspiring fantasies of connection, which trained a dedication to the materiality of creative mediums. Describing how relationships made attainable by expertise turned extra powerfully skilled with expertise, Goble explores a modernist fetish for media that exhibits no indicators of abating. The "mediated existence" places know-how into conversation with a sequence of shifts in how american citizens conceive the mechanics and meanings in their connections to each other, and for that reason to the area and to their very own modernity.
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Extra resources for Beautiful circuits : modernism and the mediated life
Sample text
All the same, I take seriously his insistence that the pleasures of “readerly writing” are not simply the product of some ineffable experience of signifiers loosed from history and convention. “This noise is not confused, massive, unnamable,” as Barthes insists; it is a “clear noise” that is capable of registering an occasionally dramatic amount of meaning and information. S. culture in the years from the turn of the twentieth century to World War II as a period when the once new media of the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, and cinema were becoming as pervasive and commonplace as television and computers seem to us today.
17 An earlier letter finds James even less enthused by Howell’s genius for observing and transmitting social fact: “I am surprised some times, at the thing you notice & seem to care about. One should move in a diviner air” (LL, 197). To Mrs. indb 37 8/17/10 10:41 AM Communications immediately, show him its elements, the cards in your hand, too bang off from the first page” (LL, 317). James offers a humbler variation of the same critique to H. G. S. tour were being serialized. His ovation for Wells’s “communicative passion” warms over rhetoric served to Howells some fifteen years before (LL, 441).
This sentence features a kind of metaphor that James shows an increasing fondness for in the latter stages of his career, as he tries harder and harder to capture abstract and—some might say—arcane procedures of consciousness in tropes that are meticulous in their commonplace materiality. I am thinking of several instances in A Small Boy and Others where the arabesque loopings and leaps of James’s memory are figured as if the products of such simple actions as squeezing a sponge or reaching into a bag, but one could as easily find examples in almost any of the New York Edition prefaces, or in almost any of the fiction from What Maisie Knew and later.