Last Chapters of Erewhon

Professor Eva-Lynn Jagoe

COL5065H: The Forms of Literature in the Age of Electricity

Tues 1-3

Office Bader 315. Office hours Tues 3-5 or by appt.

This course examines the impact of new technologies on forms of communication, representation, power, and imagination. Focusing on modernist aesthetics, we will examine the shifts that occur as electricity makes possible different modes of hearing and seeing. These changes are constitutive of new artistic forms. Thus technology, sound, and image will be our broadest rubrics of investigation, and it will be through these that we will devote the semester to the reading of two major modernist novels: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Special attention will be given to sound reproduction, the voice, the body, and cinematic production.

40% term paper

30% 4 critical responses (1-2 pages max. single-spaced)

30% participation

Course calendar

Week 1 (Sep 15): Introduction

Week 2 (Sep 22)

• Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924) Books 1-3
• Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

Week 3 (Sep 29)

• The Magic Mountain Books 4
• Sara Danius, “The Antitechnological Bias and Other Modernist Myths: Literature and the Question of Technology,” in The Senses of Modernism

Week 4 (Oct 6)

• The Magic Mountain Book 5
• Akira Mizuta Lippit, “Modes of Avisuality: Psychoanalysis—X-ray—Cinema,” in Atomic Light (Shadow Optics)

Week 5 (Oct 13)

• The Magic Mountain Book 6
• Sara Danius, “Novel Visions and the Crisis of Culture: The Cultivation of the Interior in The Magic Mountain,” in The Senses of Modernism
• Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “Magic Media Mountain” in Reading Matters

Week 6 (Oct 20)

• The Magic Mountain Book 7
• Kittler, “Gramophone”
• Alex Ross, excerpt from The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
• John M. Picker, “The Recorded Voice,” in Victorian Soundscapes

Week 7 (Oct 27)

• James Joyce, Ulysses (1922), chs 1-8
• Stephen Kern, “The Nature of Time,” “The Present.”
• Sara Danius, “The Aesthetics of Immediacy: Ulysses and The Autonomy of the Eye and the Ear” in The Senses of Modernism

Week 8 (Nov 3)

• Ulysses, chs 8-12
• Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
• Jonathan Beller, “Circulation, Dziga Vertov and the Film of Money”, in The Cinematic Mode of Production

Week 9 (Nov 10) READING WEEK

Week 10 (Nov 17)

• Ulysses, chs 12-14
• Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times
• Tim Armstrong,“ Prosthetic Modernism,” in Modernism, Technology and the body

Week 11 (Nov 24)

• Ulysses, chs 15
• Douglas Kahn, “Ubiquitous Recording,” in Noise Water Meat
• Tim Armstrong, “Film Finds a Tongue” in Modernism, Technology and the body

Week 12 (Dec 1)

• Ulysses, chs 16-18
• Juliet Flower MacCannell, “The Real Imaginary: Lacan’s Joyce”

Moving through this traffic involves the individual in a series of shocks and collisions. At dangerous intersections, nervous impulses flow through him in rapid succession, like the energy from a battery. Baudelaire speaks of a man who plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of electric energy. Circumscribing the experience of the shock, he calls this man "a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness." . . . Thus, technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training. There came a day when a new and urgent need for stimuli was met by the film. In a film, perception in the form of shocks was established as a formal principle. What determines the rhythm of production on a conveyor belt is the same thing that underlies the rhythm of reception in the film.