Literature in the First Media Age

Britain between the Wars

David Trotter

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780674073159
• eBook ISBN: 9780674728264
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Literature

The period between the World Wars was one of the richest and most inventive in the long history of British literature. Interwar literature, David Trotter argues, stood apart by virtue of the sheer intelligence of the enquiries it undertook into the technological mediation of experience. After around 1925, literary works began to portray communication by telephone, television, radio, and sound cinema—and to examine the sorts of behavior made possible for the first time by virtual interaction. And they filled up, too, with the look, sound, smell, taste, and feel of the new synthetic and semi-synthetic materials that were reshaping everyday modern life.

New media and new materials gave writers a fresh opportunity to reimagine both how lives might be lived and how literature might be written. Today, Trotter observes, such material and immaterial mediations have become even more decisive. Communications technology is an attitude before it is a machine or a set of codes. It is an idea about the prosthetic enhancement of our capacity to communicate. The writers who first woke up to this fact were not postwar, postmodern, or post-anything else: some of the best of them lived and wrote in the British Isles in the period between the World Wars. In defining what they achieved, this book creates a new literary canon of works distinguished formally and thematically by their alertness to the implications of new media and new materials.

Notes

Introduction

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude, Collected Works, vol. 7, ed. Douglas Emory Wilson and Ronald A. Bosco (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 81.

2. William Uricchio, “Historicizing Media in Transition,” in Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, ed. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 23–38, p. 24.

3. Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 7. I am also indebted to Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late 19th Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

4. Uricchio, “Historicizing Media,” 26.

5. Ann L. Ardis and Patrick Collier, eds., Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

6. Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); David Trotter, Cinema and Modernism (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007); Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Andrew Shail, Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism (London: Routledge, 2012).

7. Todd Avery, Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle, and Jane Lewty, eds., Broadcasting Modernism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009).

8. Tim Armstrong, Modernism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 109–14; Melba Cuddy-Keane, “Virginia Woolf, Sound Technologies, and the New Aurality,” in Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. Pamela L. Caughie (New York: Garland, 2000), 69–96; Ivan Kreilkamp, “A Voice without a Body: The Phonographic Logic of Heart of Darkness,” Victorian Studies 40, no. 2 (1997): 211–43; John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 110–45; Juan A. Suárez, Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of Everyday Life (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 119–40.

9. John Brooks, Telephone: The First Hundred Years (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); Ithiel de Sola Pool, ed., The Social Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977); Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). For a cogent revisionist approach, see Robert MacDougall, “Long Lines: AT&T’s Long-Distance Network as an Organizational and Political Strategy,” Business History Review 80 (2006): 297–327; and Richard R. John, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

10. Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926–1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 34. See also Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004), ch. 6.

11. Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Strategy in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), ch. 3.

12. Facts from “A History of the British Post Office,” http://web.online.co.uk/freshwater/bpo.htm.

13. F. G. C. Baldwin, The History of the Telephone in the United Kingdom (London: Chapman & Hall, 1925), 615–18.

14. Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 152.

15. Raymond Williams, Television: Ideology and Cultural Form, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1990), 26.

16. Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology—Schizophrenia—Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); Jacques Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear say yes in Joyce,” in Acts of Literature, trans. Tina Kendall, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 253–309, pp. 266, 269; Laurence A. Rickels, Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 279–93.

17. Eileen Bowser, “Le coup de téléphone dans le primitif du cinéma,” in Les premiers ans du cinéma français, ed. Pierre Guibbert (Perpignan: Institute Jean Vigo, 1985), 218–24; Tom Gunning, “Heard over the Phone: The Lonely Villa and the de Lorde Tradition of the Terrors of Technology,” Screen 32, no. 2 (1991): 184–96; Jan Olsson, “Framing Silent Calls: Coming to Cinematographic Terms with Telephony,” in Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digital, ed. John Fullerton and Jan Olsson (Rome: John Libbey Publishing, 2004), 157–92.

18. Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 10–11, 3. Mark Goble, starting where Menke leaves off, with Henry James, has taken this story up in compelling fashion. For Goble, American literary Modernism’s desire for communication provoked an avid interest in, precisely, photography, cinema, the telephone, and the gramophone. The writers he investigates, from James through Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Weldon Johnson to George Oppen and James Agee, “manifest a sha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• One: Telephony
• Two: Techno-Primitivism
• Three: Thermoplastic
• Four: Talkativeness
• Five: Transit Writing
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index