Beautiful circuits : modernism and the mediated life / Mark Goble.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Goble, Mark.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Mass media and literature--United States.

Mass media and literature.

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

Mass media and culture--United States.

Mass media and culture.

Interpersonal communication--Technological innovations--Social aspects--United States.

Interpersonal communication.

Social interaction--Technological innovations--United States.

Social interaction.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (391 p.)

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Considering texts by Henry James, Gertrude Stein, James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Agee, and William Carlos Williams, alongside film, painting, music, and popular culture, Mark Goble explores the development of American modernism as it was shaped by its response to technology and an attempt to change how literature itself could communicate. Goble's original readings reinterpret the aesthetics of modernism in the early twentieth century, when new modes of communication made the experience of technology an occasion for profound experimentation and reflection. He follows the assimilation of such "old" media technologies as the telegraph, telephone, and phonograph and their role in inspiring fantasies of connection, which informed a commitment to the materiality of artistic mediums. Describing how relationships made possible by technology became more powerfully experienced with technology, Goble explores a modernist fetish for media that shows no signs of abating. The "mediated life" puts technology into communication with a series of shifts in how Americans conceive the mechanics and meanings of their connections to one another, and therefore to the world and to their own modernity.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: "Communications Now Are Love"

Part One: Communications

1. Pleasure at a Distance in Henry James and Others

2. Love and Noise

Part Two: Records

3. Soundtracks: Modernism, Fidelity, Race

4. The New Permanent Record

Epilogue: Looking Back at Mediums

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786613634221

9781280657290

1280657294

9780231518406

0231518404

OCLC:

826476338