ENG 400: Literature, Media, Modernity

Welcome to the class tumblr for ENG 400, a senior seminar that investigates historical connections between literature, technology, and media history.

[eng400]

Evolution Door (by Klemens Torggler)

[t-willo-deactivated20131215]

I don’t know if I could even incorporate ideas in this video into my paper, but I sure hope so!

[eng400]

This video has new relevance in the wake of reading Bierce's "A Wireless Message."  What does that story have to do with color?  Food for thought until Tuesday.   Think about the passage featuring white and red, and why those colors are being produced.  

[spowelleng400]

…we crowded together in the three rooms of a traditional thatched farmstead and lived a kind of den-life which was more or less emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world. It was an intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds of the horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other. We took in everything that was going on, of course - rain in the trees, mice on the ceiling, a steam train rumbling along the railway line one field back from the house - but we took it in as if we were in the doze of hibernation… But it was not only the earth that shook for us: the air around and above us was alive and signalling too. When a wind stirred in the beeches, it also stirred an aerial wire attached to the topmost branch of the chestnut tree. Down it swept, in through a hole bored in the corner of the kitchen window, right on into the innards of our wireless set where a little pandemonium of burbles and squeaks would suddenly give way to the voice of a BBC newsreader speaking out of the unexpected like a deus ex machina. And that voice too we could hear in our bedroom, transmitting from beyond and behind the voices of the adults in the kitchen; just as we could often hear, behind and beyond every voice, the frantic, piercing signalling of morse code.

-Nobel Lecture 1995-Seamus Heaney

I thought his description of the railroad, the telegraph, and the radio is very impressive.  It obviously made an impression on him as a child that he could still recall years later as a poet.  Luckily for my paper, he talks about these inventions and the impact they had on his childhood in depth.  While I wasn’t expecting to find so much from him personally on the subject, I am very happy that I did find something.  Hopefully it will be helpful when I actually start the writing process. Just thought I would share this breif part of his speech because it seems very fitting.  

(via spowelleng400)

[sumwalker9]

[eng400]

On page 98, Hopkins uses the Professor to tell the story of ancient Ethiopia. I believe that Hopkins uses this story to demonstrate the significance of Ethiopia as the genesis of civilization. She even uses Biblical genealogies, as well as scientific evidence(whether it is real or factual, I don’t know) to propel the story. Hopkins suggests that canals (traffic, defense, irrigation), lakes (water storage, land fertilization), astronomy, philosophy, and chronology can be traced back to the Ethiopians. A listener states that the race has fallen from this magnificence; however, the Professor suggests that the race hasn’t fallen from that glory, but that history only shows the rise of the Anglo-Saxons as the first people or civilization. So, it is not a matter of making a new place in history for the race, but rather a restoration or return to the magnificence that is already there—a reclamation of history. 

Beautifully said, especially the last sentence about the "restoration" that motivates Hopkins's view of race and history.  

[cpassons]

I realize why Hopkins might have employed The Holy Trinity into her story. The obvious is that Reuel is a symbolization of the son of God, but beyond that is the Last Supper when Jesus’ own blood and body, The Eucharist, was offered as a sacrifice amongst the Apostles, before the crucifixion. Blood is a unifying element in the backdrops of the conversation. Ergamenes (Reuel) will make in favor of the people of Telassar. Is there more meaning within the title?

[spowelleng400]

In the end, I walk away from this novel with only a slight understanding.  That is why I am definitely considering working on my paper with this novel.  I had previously decided to work with the telegraph and found some fairly interesting research that deals with this. I also originally found a poem I wanted to focus on but I’ve decided it may not give enough flesh for a paper.  I’ve been thinking about a working thesis but I’m not ready to put it down in print just yet.  More on that later.  In the meantime, Henry James has clouded my mind.  And I’m excited about the opportunity to play with his work a little more.

[eng400]

What poem did you find?  I'm curious.  We'll be talking a bit more about the telegraph on Tuesday, so stay tuned.

[sumwalker9]

What is interesting is that Mr. Drake seems to have receive a more factual and real account of the inner workings, while the telegraph girl only receives information through the telegrams. To take it a step further, she only sees a quick and abbreviated part of their lives—just like the telegram is a quick and abbreviated form of communication. She must piece together those small selections of information to form her view or opinion of what is actually going on. She imagines the rest of the story, while Mr. Drake seems to be able to live the story along with those people—he does not have to imagine; he is there with them. This is cheesy, but to relate it to the distant reading exercise: The telegraph girl is using Wordle or Voyant and Mr. Drake is actually reading the novel.

[eng400]

I don't think it's cheesy at all.  You're basically saying that the telegraph girl and Mr. Drake have different ways of "reading" social class.  And that those different methods of "reading" are reflections of their perspective: one sees things from afar, the other from a position that is more physically intimate.  

[cooljustinafan]

I think James is allowing the reader to function as a medium to present order but disorderly. Perhaps out of disorder, the reader can make order. This process makes me think of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative Of Arthur Prym. Poe was trying allow the reader to discover truth and while that novel was difficult as well. In reading James, the reader is attempting to answer the question of meaning and function.

[abeeson400-deactivated20140117]

On pages 151 and 152, the telegraphist is standing outside Everard’s apartment, looking at his nameplate, and she figures that as face to face. This novella felt like watching facebook drama unfolding online. People get into tiffs with other people online because they think that they’re face to face, but what they’re actually facing is as cold and lifeless as Captain Everard’s name plate. 

[zcjoneseng400]

Those quotes are why I asked if Henry James read over his work after his transcribers wrote them. It’s like they take liberties when they can’t remember exactly what was said to them.

He is reported to have wished for “a typist without a mind” so that the transcriptionist would “be part of the machinery.”…

Bosanquet wrote in her diary about James’s attachment to the typewriter’ssound: “Indeed, at the time when I began to work for him, he had reached a stage at which the click of the Remington machine acted as a positive spur. He found it more difficult to compose to the music of any other make. During a fortnight when the Remington was out of order he dictated to an Oliver typewriter with evident discomfort, and he found it almost disconcerting to speak to something that made no responsive sound at all.”

James responded to the technology—it was strange for him to no longer hear the click. But he also responded to the transcriptionist. Bosanquet remembered that after complimenting her work, James once said, “among the faults of my previous amanuenses—not by any means the only fault—was their apparent lack of comprehension of what I was driving at.”

-Amy Rowland, Dictating a Masterpiece

[shellieanne92]

"She was so absurdly constructed that these were literally the moments that made up…even for the most haunting of her worries, the rage at moments of not knowing how her mother did "get it" (James 121).

[zcjoneseng400]

“…while I grasp desperately at any opportunity to comprehend what in the world is going on. All of my friends get it, but I don’t. … I KNOW there is NO WAY it is this difficult to understand. Everyone else certainly seems to get it!!! I am hoping that, by the time I finish reading it and I have seen the “big picture” so to speak, I will be able to intelligently contribute to the class’s conversation.”

—

You know you sound exactly like the lady in the story, right?! She hopes that by the time she puts together her little puzzle she’ll be able to “intelligently contribute” to the “class’s conversation”…Remember how this whole book is basically her eavesdropping on conversation and trying to figure out a way to let people know that she knows, but in a clever way? And how most of the conversations are associated with “class” for her? 

[spowelleng400]

All the ideas James had about the telegraph could be used to discuss our relationships with each other via facebook and other sites.  

[eng400]

Great synthesis of what seems to be the common agreement among all these posts.  And, of course, a part of me agrees - how could I not?  This is largely the reason why we're reading this novel.  But with that said we should also consider the differences.  How are telegraphic networks, that is, different in architecture and effect than social networks?  I think there are some important differences that we should discuss in class; and that final word, "class," might be among the most important.

[h-archer]

It seems that each character’s function is wholly dependent on their current and precise relationship with others—or at least the current and precise perception of these relationships....The characters show the nature of the telegraph’s effect on human relationships: people are simultaneously more connected to each other and more distanced from their inner selves.  They are operating, at least in part, according to those individuals with whom they interact. 

[zcjoneseng400]

From “The Figure of Consciousness: William James, Henry James, and Edith Wharton (review)” by Kristin Boudreau

“‘The experiments with language that scientists, philosophers and novelists perform repeatedly reinvent consciousness’ (Kress 25). Kress begins with the nineteenth-century scientists Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, George Henry Lewes, and Herbert Spencer, unable to understand or describe consciousness without resorting to metaphorical language, felt ‘a deep ambivalence regarding the multiplying tendency of words’ (xi) and, worse, ‘uncertain[ty] about whether they [were] naming an entity or explicitly creating it’ with their figurative language (xii).”

[eng400]

I think this passage cuts to the heart of your wonderfully suggestive three part post, richly evocative and enigmatic as it is.  The "deep ambivalence" felt by Darwin, Spencer, and other scientists was certainly felt by James, but the question becomes how to read his late fiction (the third stage of his writing in which his style enters a level of formal abstraction that seems to transcend "reality" all together).  The difference, I think, is that James was operating in the realm of fiction, not science, and thus he fully believed that his "art" and "language" was participating in the act of creating entities, things, and, most importantly, relations between things.  See William James's famous chapter on the "stream of consciousness" in which he talks about the function of the smallest of words, prepositions, and how they literally create the relations in our mind.  That is, one cannot think about the mind but through language; and James is well beyond Darwin and Spencer in this respect.  Spencer lost himself in his own swoon, but still felt like he was piercing to some deeper reality.  James knew better, as did his brother.

Which leads to a second observation in response to your post, which is that patterns are tricky business.  Do the patterns you notice exist prior to your own noticing, or do you, like James, make them present by the connections and relations that you suggest?  A huge metaphysical question.  All of this is the result of the huge spiderweb of consciousness through which James saw and filtered experience.  Remind me to give you the excerpt from his essay "Art of Fiction" on Tuesday.  

[patrecec]

His words were mere numbers, they told her nothing whatever; and after he had gone she was in possession of no name, of no address, of no meaning, of nothing but a vague sweet sound and an immense impression.

In The Cage Ch. 4

In the first four chapters of In the Cage, Henry James seems to places a barrier between the reader and the unnamed “she” whom the novella seems to be centered around. The character has no name, there are no physical descriptions of her, and she has yet to even speak. The fact that the telegrapher’s character is not clearly defined in the narrative almost portrays her as not even human. At this point, she merely serves as the medium between Everard and Lady Bradeen (if those are their real names because I’m actually a bit confused at this point). I found this quote particularly interesting because it reminds me of a discussion that we in class about computers and how they merely process a series of 1’s and 0’s and translate them into what appears on the screen. In that since, the lady behind this glass barrier can be seen as a computer and it’s like these two individuals are carrying on a conversation in a chat room. 

(via patrecec)

Great distinction here between the girl's humanity (or lack thereof) and her mediating position in the midst of networks.  Indeed, she is like an early computer in the sense that she performs many of the computational operations that machines now perform on a daily basis.  Could James be pointing to the beginning of a "posthuman" condition?  Or is he merely trying to salvage the "human" in the midst of the machines?  

[cpassons]

The “cage” may be the internet, or binary domain.

[eng400]

I've never thought of the "cage" in this respect, and I have no idea why.  This is a fantastic observation: that one of the cages in the novella is the fact that all messages, communication, and exchanges are reduced to the binary of on/off.  Words become numbers, but then numbers become reduced even further.  The binary logic of the digital (and it is "digital" insofar as it is either/or) captures language in its glass cage.  

Of course the cage can be read to symbolize many other things as well.  We'll discuss more of them next week.

[cpassons]

The house is a vicinity of boundaries, framed, which is decorated (or even manipulated) to create its own atmosphere. On a more macroscopic level, the actual property of the house is a frame amongst other frames (properties) that build up a town, which is contained within a framed county, which is within a framed state, which makes a framed country. With each frame come different materials and ways to adorn or model the boundaries (for a home there are gardens, a city are parks and infrastructures), which all provide its own definitive atmosphere different from the rest. There are countless things to which paintings and framing can be applied. 

[eng400]

This is beautifully said.  And given how explicitly Hawthorne presents his Romance in terms of real estate (see the Preface), I think it makes perfect sense to think about the novel in terms of frames.  As you say, frames are basically used to mark inside and outside, distinguishing property (stable and fixed) from that which is fluid, uncontainable, and wilderness.  Isn't the central conflict of the novel between the Pyncheons and the Maules basically about two different ways of constructing/deconstructing frames?  Lots to discuss tomorrow.