ENG 5801 Spring 2022 Taylor

This course introduces the complex interactions between literary culture and the changing, overlapping media ecologies that have shaped the way we produce, transmit, transform, receive and interpret creative representations of human experience. It provides an accelerated history and theory of “platformalism”: the affordances of forms through which particular technological platforms enable or disable, encourage or discourage aural, textual and visual articulation and communications across spatial, temporal, and social boundaries (class, race, nation, gender). We will sample platforms and the works made for and by them, ranging from tattoo (skin being the earliest matrix for symbolic inscription) to stone, clay, many forms of manuscript (from Sappho’s papyri to Chaucer’s parchments), paper and the many evolutions of print, built acoustic amplifiers (instruments, eunuchs, churches, concert halls, sound recording, radio, audiobooks), and multimedia systems (theatre, cinema, broadcast, digital, streaming). This iteration of the course highlights tipping points, when an emergent and evolving text technology significantly alters an existing literary system (e.g. scroll/codex; script/print; communal/commercial theatre; silent/sound film; print/digital). Technical hybrids are examined for their literary implications (e.g. theatre, marginalia in printed books, the Burroughs archive). More than 51% of the taught course material is taken from the 40,000 years before 1800; but these past revolutions are designed to help us conceptualize the multimedia turmoil of our own time. Topics are explored through case studies and hands-on encounters, accompanied by at least one historical and one theoretical reading per week (with “guest star” appearances by other specialist faculty). Major assessment is of your individual projects, which may concern any time period or technology—though, if you want credit for a pre-1800 course, your major project must focus on pre-1800 textual media.