ENG 5801 - Spring 2025 - 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). Because it is impossible to cover the more than 80,000+ years of text technologies in one course, we will focus on the complex interaction of text technologies in English and in the creation, transmission, and reception of the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries: skin (the earliest matrix for symbolic inscription, including make-up, whiteface, and blackface), semiotic fashions (clothes, accessories, wigs), many forms of manuscript (individual sonnets, playbooks, actors’ parts, musical notation), hand-press printing (advertising flyers, books), built acoustic amplifiers and multimedia systems (musical instruments, churches, theaters). Although our focus is the period 1564-1623, we will also spend a few weeks examining the re-transmission and re-reception of those works through later text technologies (machine printing, modern technologized theaters, sound recording, radio, film, digital). Topics are explored through case studies and hands-on encounters, accompanied by historical and theoretical readings. Major assessment is of your individual projects, which may concern any time period or technology—though, if you want credit for a pre-1660 or pre-1800 course, your major project must focus on the technologies of that earlier period.