ENG 3803 Spring 2024 - Hand

Proceeding both chronologically and thematically, this course introduces some of the history of the various technologies that have been used to record and transmit cultural memory and experience across time and space. Our focus will be on past modes of textual creation. This course will give you a better foundation on which to evaluate the tools you use to communicate, to assess the relationship between form and content, to understand concerns of context and context collapse, to recognize how given tools negotiate permanence, ephemerality, materiality, functionality, and intentionality—in short, to become familiar with the way material form shapes rhetoric.

Cave painting, tattoo, graffiti, scroll, handmade books, machine-made books, the photograph, radio, film, television, digital media: these technologies emerge from certain cultural conditions and shape culture in turn. We will examine such technologies through a number of case studies, accompanied by foundational theoretical writings and, on occasion, major literary examples.