| Margaret Linley 2000-2 English 803:
Literary Movements and Historical Periods Not the external and physical alone is managed by
machinery, Carlyle, "Signs of the Times" As any good technology does, hypertext "realizes" its subjects and objects. Haraway, Modest_Witness In 1829, Carlyle located the crisis of his age in machinery, and especially in the mechanics of print; that same year marks the publication date of the second and most well-known volume of The Keepsake, the English "aristocrat of annuals" that existed from 1828 to 1857. A connection between the Carlylean crisis in mechanics and the illustrated literary annuals and gift books that emerged in England in the 1820s (a connection underlined by Carlyle's own publication in The Keepsake for 1852) is curiously illuminated by our own computer age. This course studies the application of computer technology to the study of the literary annual in order to consider the broader function and significance of mediation in print culture. Annuals are infamous for self-consciously flaunting the materiality and commodity status of the book. Technically innovative and ideologically conflicted in their own time, the annuals have a tendency toward ostentatious self-display that clearly reveals how much they revel in the book as medium-from cover to paper to engraving to type. In so doing, they also transgress high art book production codes and design, which ostensibly subordinate the material to the textual. This combined with other markers of middle brow taste, such as a feminine disposition and high moral tone, has ensured that the annuals have been regarded, when regarded at all, as an aesthetic failure and have all but disappeared from standard literary histories. This course explores some of the ways one medium can help us read another. To that end, we will consider how some forms of digital technology help us understand, and indeed themselves replicate, the self-simulating literary annual. And we will think about how technology, print and digital alike, produces and saturates culture, bodies and selves, while engendering expressions of utopian desire. Seminar discussion will focus on The Keepsake for 1829 in the context of historical and theoretical readings on mediation, concentrating especially on influential perspectives that have emerged on embodiment, performance, simulacra, virtuality, and hypertextuality. Seminar discussion will also be generated by students' hands-on exploration of and reports on electronic resources and environments that will help us understand print media, such as electronic discussion groups and conferences, on-line databases, hyper-linked web sites, virtual worlds (MUDS and MOOS), and computer games. Course Requirements 20% Two brief presentations (approx. 15 mins. each); typed outline
must be distributed in class
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