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Paper preparation: James' and Thayer's Telegraphs

Paper Preparation:  Telegraph: ‘on the line’ vs. ‘in the mind’

  Key Terms: Jamesian, telegraph form, telegraphic romance, virtual experience

  Structure: Historical/contextual information about the telegraph

                  Compare/contrast the form and content of the two texts

                  Close reading of a passage from each text that demonstrates the different effect of

                  each.

Sources: Pollard, Tomas. "Telegraphing The Sentence And The Story: Iconicity In In Thecage By Henry James." European Journal Of English Studies 5.1 (2001): 81. Academic Search Premier. Web. 17 Nov. 2013. 

--Discusses the use of telegraphed messages in the book `In the Cage,' by Henry James. Conditions of structural diagrammatic iconicity; Use of iconicity to imitate the transmission of the telegraph in plot and syntax; Central role of the telegraph in the book.

  Shelangoskie, Susan. "Anthony Trollope And The Social Discourse Of Telegraphy After Nationalisation1." Journal Of Victorian Culture (Edinburgh University Press) 14.1 (2009): 72-92. Academic Search Premier. Web. 7 Nov. 2013.

Orienting: What form does the telegraph take in each novel?  How does the telegraph influence each telegraphist/protagonist?

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Wired Love and In the Cage

For my final paper, I would like to investigate not only the role/function of the telegraph, but also its implications in two texts: Henry James’s In the Cage and Ella Cheever Thayer’s Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes.  Both of these texts were published in the late 1800s; both detail a female protagonist who works as a ‘telegraph girl’ and explore the new possibilities made possible with the telegraph.  However, the two texts are distinctly different.  Thayer’s novel is a much more traditionally narrated 19th century work of literature in which the reader gets every piece of the puzzle through either dialogue or narration; James’s novella (as we all know) is the opposite of traditionally narrated—it’s Jamesian—filled with nothing and everything.  Overall, I want to explore the notion of deception through telecommunications, both of the self and of other parties.  I want to argue that if Wired Love is a manifestation of the narrative possibilities brought about by telegraphic communications, then In the Cage is a manifestation of the mediated experience.

  In order to really investigate deceptive qualities brought about by telecommunications, I will first need to know more about the telegraph itself: What were the social and moral benefits of the telegraph system?  Since so many telegraph office employees—or at least the people in charge of actually sending and receiving the messages—were women, what are the implications?  Were ‘telegraphist’ just more suited to women?  Also, in order to more fully understand James’s work, I would like to find any correlation between James and Freudian ideas.  It seems no accident that James’s novella was published at almost the exact time that Freudian ideas infiltrated society and literature. 

  I have already found several helpful resources, but I need to find more about connections Freud and James.  Whether or not there is a significant connection, it will hopefully lead me to a more concrete idea of how to approach James’s writing. 

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The Train Crash at Crush

The story of two steam locomotives that were crashed in a staged stunt in the 19th century. It was supposed to be a fun day out, but ended in flying metal an...

Disclaimer: This video is not the best ever--several of the images it depicts are not the actual objects being referenced.  Also, the narration is kind of annoying.  But the video details one of the most significant benchmarks in railway history--the carefully planned head-on collision of two locomotives.  The disaster began as a publicity stunt but went horribly awry when the boilers on the trains combusted. 

As we have discussed trains/railway transportation in class, we have concluded that this mode of transportation was very dangerous, evidenced by the frequent crashes.  We have talked about the impact that the telegraph had on the safety  of railway travel.  Having read the railway crash article for class, it is even more evident that people on the whole were afraid for their lives when railways became a major source of transportation.  Why then would someone choose to crash two trains for a publicity gain?  Why would that many thousands of people willingly ho see the thing they feared so strongly?

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How Not to Read Mark Twain's 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court'

I completed my study in distant reading on Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.  Before I began the word analysis, I read a brief description of the novel so that I would have some elementary knowledge of its framework.  The book is about an engineer from Connecticut who is accidentally transported back in time to the era of King Arthur; the engineer, thought to be a magician, uses modern technology to fool the people from that time period into thinking he is a magician (wiki).  Knowing a little about the plot, and even reading the title, prepared me to expect certain words in my findings.  So, it was no surprise that the second most common word in the entire novel—sir—is used three hundred fifty-three times.  Not far behind are words like king and knight(s).  The most commonly used word (apart from stop words) is said.  This is a word I would expect to be common, but not the most common.  Significant finding number one: because said is used four hundred times, I can only assume that this novel is significantly heavy with dialogue. 

            Another one of the top five most common words in Twain’s novel is time.  It is used three hundred-nine times.  At first, this did not seem particularly significant since the book is about a man who goes back in time.  No matter how general the word, though, some significance lies in the use of that word in over three hundred instances.  I wanted to know more about how time is used in the novel.  Is Twain referring mostly to specific time—in measurements of seconds, minutes, and hours?  Is Twain referring mostly to a more general time—in terms of an “era” or “period”?  In order to find out more about the use of time, I searched for related terms: year(s), month(s), day(s), night(s), young, old, new, etc. First, I will note that time is used three hundred-nine times; times is used thirty-nine times.  “Times” has a different connotation than “time.”  Specifically, “times” bears the implication of a broad scope of time and is not typically associated with units of measurement (such as seconds, minutes, etc.). Rather, it is usually conceptually synonymous with terms like “zeitgeist” (the spirit of an age).  There is a big difference between “What time is it?” and “The times, they are a’changin’.”  Because times is used significantly less than time, I figured most of the references to time in the novel are specific and measured.  Sure enough, century occurs thirty times; year(s) is used one hundred twenty times; month(s)—23; day(s)—205; night(s)—69; minute(s)—45.  Significant finding number two: The book is very concerned with specific measurements of time.

            Another observation that really interested me is the number of words that were related to religion.  Words like “church” (55 times) and “priest(s)” (39 times) appear very frequently.  However, words that refer to other supernatural concepts are just as prevalent: “magic” (16 times); “magician” (22 times); “miracle” (41 times).  Because of the high frequency of both religious words and magic words, it is possible that the novel investigates a conflict of ideas between loyalty to church and magic.  Significant finding number three: The novel seems to be very invested in exploring a higher power through religion and magic.   

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Identity and the Telegraph in In the Cage

The telegraph changed the way people identified with themselves and with the world.  This is evident in In the Cage, specifically in the way James’ narrative voice investigates the characters’ sense of self.  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.  When the telegraph was born, communication was no longer limited to physical delivery of messages or face-to-face interaction; previous methods of communication were reincarnated as fast-paced snippets and coded transmissions—“whiffs and glimpses.”  Because of this, the human experience changed greatly.  We can see this in James’ narrator’s description of Everard: “He was, somehow, at once very bright and very grave, very young and immensely complete; and whatever he was at any moment, it was always as much as all the rest the mere bloom of his beatitude.”  The unnamed clerk observes these shifts in identity as she spends her days reading, evaluating, and even investing in other people’s messages.  Not only does she observe them, but they are “neither more nor less than the queer extension of her experience, the double life that, in the cage, she grew at last to lead.”  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. 

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Hawthorne Haunts the Realism with Fantasy

Of all the characters in the novel, Judge Pyncheon is most intriguing to me.  Within the character relationships, Judge Pyncheon seems to instantly adopt the role of the antagonist.  But unlike most antagonists, it is not overtly clear that he is playing this role. Just like there is a divide between the house and the rest of the town—the narrator instantly tells us that he rarely goes down the road that the house is on—there is a divide between the picture of Judge Pyncheon inside and outside the house. To the public, the Judge is an upstanding, righteous man.  But inside the walls of the house, the Judge’s smile does not dazzle those who see it.  The two major recurring facial features—Judge Pyncheon’s smile and Hepzibah’s scowl—serve to reiterate this notion of deceptive appearance.  The Judge's smile even seems to have a persuasive element. This story as a whole subscribes to this notion.  It seems to be a logical progression of events and character development, but while still retaining the elements of realism, lends itself to some fantastical element.  In much the same way that the wrongdoings of one generation ‘haunts’ the next generations, Hawthorne ‘haunts’ the realism with fantasy.  In the preface, he even tells us he is going to do this:  “…and  to mingle the marvellous rather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavor, than as any portion of the actual substance of the dish offered to the public.”

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Project Reflection: The Mind is a Metaphor

I'll be honest.  When we were first assigned the project in which we had to create a screen cast that investigated the details of an online database, I thought, "Great, another technological obstacle I have to hurdle."  But after Michelle and I figured out how to download Java, the rest was really easy and enjoyable.  Though I have been using scholarly online databases as research tools for years now, this experience is probably the first I have had where I focused so intently on the organization and functionality of an online database.  It was definitely the first time I have really considered things like: what is on the 'About' page, how and not just what information is organized, and what the implications are of digitizing and categorizing literature.  

As Michelle and I mentioned in class, it was difficult to stray from the tendencies of a traditional oral presentation.  We kept pointing at the screen with our fingers instead of moving the mouse to the area we were discussing; instead of recovering when I stumbled over my words, I just hit the 'delete' button and started over; and instead of having to incorporate a visual aid to help tell my audience what I was talking about, I could literally walk them through the database itself and show them what I was talking about.  It seemed to be a much more effective way to communicate than simply reading a conference paper or presenting a group project traditionally in front of the class.  Just like Brad Pasanek--the creator of the database--says, this is "how we read now, online."  

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Screenr | Instant screencasts: Just click record. Screenr’s web-based screen recorder makes it a breeze to create and share your screencasts around the web. Just click the record button, capture your screen & voice, and share the link. Some people even call it fun!

This is Part 1 of the project.  Part 2 is published in a second blog.  I'm sorry--my less than savvy techno-knowledge only allowed me this option. 

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Screenr | Instant screencasts: Just click record. Screenr’s web-based screen recorder makes it a breeze to create and share your screencasts around the web. Just click the record button, capture your screen & voice, and share the link. Some people even call it fun!

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A Beautiful Video of the Daguerreotype Process

The way film photographers feel about digital photographers may be the way daguerreotype photographers feel about the film guys. Working with dangerous che

Dan Carrillo, the artist showcased in the video, immediately separates daguerreotypes from any other type of photograph.  He calls them "polished jewel[s]...with somebody's image on [them]."  He also comments that "it feels good crafting a photograph as opposed to just snapping away."  Maybe this is why daguerreotypes have a more "haunting" sensibility--the subject must be posed/still for hours while the artist must craft a unique and precious (like a jewel) template.  The image of the subject is slowly etched into the metal template where it stays far longer than an image on a paper photograph.  You should all watch this short video if you are interested.  It's very cool and helps reiterate points from discussions we have had in class. 

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The Infinite Potential of Glass

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Lewis Mumford’s article “Glass and the Ego.”  I’ll admit I even read the excerpts from the preceding and following articles that made it onto my paper.  I enjoyed the chronological timeline of glass footprints on the world.  Most interesting was the process in which glass changed the outside world and subsequently the inside world.  First, it had a profound effect on the development of the sciences: windows, eyeglasses, the telescope, the microscope.  These inventions help define the modern sensibility of science.  Second, with the invention and widespread accessibility of the mirror, glass had “a profound effect upon the development of the personality: indeed, it helped to alter the very concept of the self.”  This notion is easy to understand but incredibly difficult to truly grasp.  What does it mean to view yourself?  What does it mean to view yourself as other people view you?  What happened to the wholeness of the human condition/experience when aesthetic awareness became a prominent variable in defining a person/oneself? 

  The very physical makeup of glass deserves examination.  The physical components of glass allowed scientific and technological advances that humanity did not see coming.  Very basically, glass changed the way humans experience anything, everything; yet, somehow its physical makeup—“transparent and for most chemical compounds, resistant to chemical change”—is seemingly insignificant.  How does something transparent change the way we look at the world?  At ourselves?  Where would the sciences be without these “products of glass technics?” 

  I think the fundamental value of glass lies in the picture it creates.  According to the article, glass helped “put the world in a frame.”  It “made it possible to see certain elements of reality more clearly and focused attention on a sharply defined field: that which was in the frame.”  So if glass “framed” the focus on particular aspects of the outside world and our own selves in recent centuries, what is it doing now?  Not only does it compose the “self” image in a mirror, but glass is the medium through which we interact in social networking.  What would Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr be without the glass interface through which messages are sent and received?  A huge part of our society—social networking—is built on the assumption that everyone has in their possession, or at least has access to, a variation of glass: a computer monitor, cell phone, tablet, etc. Each of these is the result of putting the world into a “frame.”  

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According to the critical piece from the Emily Dickinson Archives, the poet was a bit of a cartoonist--not in the traditional sense of the word--but rather she used to include cutouts and 'doodles' in her letters/correspondence to/with her peers. The cutouts usually came from contemporary literary sources such as Harper's New Monthly Magazine and Dickens novels.  This is interesting simply because it furthers our understanding of Dickinson's connection to the outside world.  With this information, we not only see a side of her concerned with social commentary, but it (along with the new daguerreotype that depicts Dickinson with her arm around another woman) suggests a more connected, involved poet and member of both social and literary societies than we knew before.  

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I must not dwell upon the fearful repast which immediately ensued. Such things may be imagined, but words have no power to impress the mind with the exquisite horror of their reality.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Chapter 12 (via t-willo)

This is very strange--eerie even.  I was just finishing up my reading for class tomorrow and going back through the scribbles in my book to extract some sort of significance cohesive enough for a blog post.  As I finished underlining this exact passage, I logged in to Tumblr to begin my post only to find that the most recent entry on my dashboard was the exact quote I had just underlined.  Whoa....

Anyway, I wanted to bring attention to this passage and a few like-minded others:

* "I must not dwell upon the fearful repast which immediately ensued.  Such things may be imagined, but words have no power to impress the mind with the exquisite horror of their reality" (Poe 94).

* "Let me run over this portion of my narrative with as much haste as the nature of the events to be spoken of will permit" (Poe 92).

* "The bitterest anxiety which I endured at any period of this fearful drama was while I occupied myself in the arrangement of the lots" (Poe 92).

* "Before any one condemn me for this apparent heartlessness, let him be placed in a situation precisely similar to my own" (Poe 93). 

I grouped all these quotes together--and there are plenty of others--because Pym seems to not only separate himself from the assumed audience, but is also separating himself from his own actions.  He acknowledges that he is writing--a "narrative" and a "drama"--and that he has total control of the speed at which his story is told--"run over...with haste"--but, he still feels compelled to include sections of his story for which he hasn't the power or words to "impress" the actual experience on the mind.  He also immediately assumes the audience will judge him for his "apparent heartlessness."  Not only does Pym not know who his audience is (or if he will even have one), he assumes immediate condemnation from them for a piece of the narrative that he did not have to include--a piece that he does not even have powerful enough words to impress the mind with the reality. 

I just found this interesting.  His overt rapport with the audience throughout the novel is very intriguing. 

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GHOST STORIES

After discussing Ambrose Bierce's "Suitable Surroundings" in class yesterday, I have been thinking about what it means to read a ghost story.  Or watch a scary movie.  Or listen to a horrifying tale while sitting around a campfire in the woods.  First I thought about the fundamental question: what makes these stories scary?  Excluding the environment in which we experience these ghost stories--which I will address shortly--let us loosely define "ghost."  I do not know much about ghosts, but I think it is safe to say that the notion of 'ghosts' is usually tied to an apparition or specter of some human who has died and therefore requires separation between body and spirit.  This is curious because--though I cannot say for certain--I imagine that all people who participate in ghost stories are not otherwise ALL spiritual.  Why, then, choose to believe in something great merely for the purposes of a story? 

Second, why do surroundings have to be "suitable?"  Think about the traditional 'conditions' in which we choose to interact with paranormal texts and stories--darkness, candlelight, silence, and (according to Bierce) undivided attention.  When we read another kind of text--that of William Faulkner, for example--the conditions do not require so much particularity.  It is acceptable to read Faulkner's novels in a quiet library, or on a park bench in the afternoon, or pacing back and forth, sighing heavily and holding your eyelids open with Scotch tape (maybe that's just me).  But the point is, before reading Bierce's story, I had not really thought about the way we approach "scary" things--things we would not necessarily go near in a million years in reality but willingly gather in the dark to fictionalize.  But as far as the 'suitable surroundings' I suppose just as the author puts all of himself into a work, so must you put all of yourself into absorbing it. 

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This article is fascinating and wholly applicable to our purpose as a capstone seminar class.  Please read it in its entirety--you'll thank me later. For the purposes of this blog entry, however, I will highlight a few passages from the article that I found worth mentioning.  Here goes:

1. techno-primitivism: one which operates throughout within and upon technologically mediated experience by means of a strong awareness of substances which, deriving at once from the laboratory and from the plantation, continually re-open the constitutive, inexhaustible difference between nature and culture.

2. (When the contemporary artist came to the author claiming that the same phenomenon taking place in the techno-primitivism study was connected to her new works of art) "It meant testing an idea put forward to explain what was going on in a novel first published in 1928 against work done yesterday in a different medium altogether."

3. (Of the first image shown in the article--'Hand of a Thief') "Try to focus on the blue checkerboard which occupies the centre of one of the foremost panels, and the diagonals start to bounce about all over the place.  Turn your eyes to left or right, and the mirage will stabilize for a moment as the panel-edge brings into view the four-square solidity tucked away behind it, before that, too, starts to squirm.  There is nothing in the image to take aim at."

4. Techno-primitivism seeks out not only the primitive in technology, but the technological in the primitive.

5. The point of it all is to ask of technology the sorts of questions that only works of art can ask it.

I very much enjoyed reading this article.  I did not intend to find it useful for the class blog--I merely stumbled upon it while reading some other articles from The White Review.  Though David Trotter, who authored the article--my apologies for not saying so sooner--mentions literature briefly in his initial discussion about the early twentieth-century novel Lady Chatterly's Lover, the article is not told from a necessarily literary point of view.  Nor is it a focused commentary on the paintings shown in the article.  Rather, it focuses on the media used to paint them and the effectual difference between slow-handed brush strokes and that of "a metal instrument driven down into [the work of art] at regular intervals in accordance with a pre-determined design."  It's about finding the old in the new and new in the old.  It's a heavy notion to think that humans--subconsciously or otherwise--innately respond to and are affected by various media found in and manipulated out of nature to create culture.  

Just some food for thought.  I hope you all enjoy!