ENG 5801 - Spring 2026 - 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 specific 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 Renaissance drama (but not duplicating the plays studied in other early modern grad courses this academic year): skin (the earliest matrix for symbolic inscription, including make-up, whiteface, and blackface), semiotic fashions (clothes, accessories, wigs), many forms of manuscript (scenarios, playbooks, actors’ parts, backstage “plats,” musical notation), hand-press printing (advertising flyers, books), built acoustic amplifiers and multimedia systems (musical instruments, churches, commercial performance spaces, palaces). We will also spend a few weeks examining the re-transmission and re-reception of Renaissance drama via later text technologies (machine printing, modern technologized theaters, sound recording, radio, film, digital streaming). 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 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 period.

Requirements: This course satisfies the gateway requirement for the History of Text Technologies concentration. This course satisfies the general literature requirement for one course pre-1660 or for one course pre-1800. It also satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Medieval and Early Modern British Literary and Cultural Studies (through 1660); History of Text Technologies; or a Literary Genre (Drama).