Understanding media : the extensions of man

is thesis considers the portrayal of uncertain or amateur encounters with new technologies in the late twentieth century. Focusing on "ctional responses to the incipient technological and cultural changes wrought by the rise of the personal computer, I demonstrate how authors during this period drew on experiences of empowerment and uncertainty to convey the impact of a period of intense technological transition. From the increasing availability of word processing software in the 1980s to the exponential popularity of the “World Wide Web”, I explore how perceptions of an “information revolution” tended to emphasise the increasing speed, ease and expansiveness of global communications, while more doubtful commentators expressed anxieties about the pace and effects of technological change. Critical approaches to the cultural impact of computing technologies have tended to overlook the role played by perceptions of expertise and familiarity, and my thesis seeks to redress this by identifying a broad range of imagery, language and cultural references used to depict amateur or inexpert encounters with computing technologies. My interest in literary representations of amateur or marginalised users of computing technology reveals how the ease and speed of reading and writing promised by technological expertise can be countered by uncertainty arising from limited understanding of the complex processes involved. In a pre-smartphone age, the computer loomed as an object which was simultaneously baffling and enchanting, "lled with potential but also obscure in its fundamental workings. Examining instances within experimental literary "ction and poetry which portray, imply, or respond to, encounters with personal computing, I demonstrate how individuals’ attempts to understand a technologically-in%ected world can be described and enacted by the use of unusual narrative and poetic devices, where experimental literary strategies work to recreate the complex sensations associated with thrilling, difficult, or incomprehensible aspects of information technologies.

Electric amateurs : literary encounters with computing technologies 1987-2001

One of the finest literary critics of her generation, Maud Ellmann synthesises her work on modernism, psychoanalysis and Irish literature in this important new book. In sinuous readings of Henry James, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, she examines the interconnections between developing technological networks in modernity and the structures of modernist fiction, linking both to Freudian psychoanalysis. The Nets of Modernism examines the significance of images of bodily violation and exchange - scar, bite, wound, and their psychic equivalents - showing how these images correspond to 'vampirism' and related obsessions in early twentieth-century culture. Subtle, original and a pleasure to read, this 2010 book offers a fresh perspective on the inter-implications of Freudian psychoanalysis and Anglophone modernism that will influence the field for years to come.

The Nets of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud

There is a popular conception among many Zeitgeist watchers, especially in places like the US, Western Europe and Australia, of the urbanized East as existing somehow further into the future. As William Gibson once stated: `The future is here; it just isn't equally distributed yet.' This kind of cultural fetishism extends to not only technolust, but the practices that new gadgets and electronics encourage. The specific phenomenon explored in this article is that of virtual girlfriends and boyfriends: whether in the form of avatars or automated SMS text messages. This particularly Japanese `craze', if we can call it that, fascinates and appals people who still hold P2P romance IRL in high-esteem. It seems like an insult to the intrinsically human and humanist discourse of courtship; and indeed it is. How does this perspective change, however, if we consider `love' as a technology? That is, as both a code with its own algorithmic parameters, and a discourse that also challenges the hyper-rational assumption...

Love in the Time of Tamagotchi

Arguably the greatest single work in the history of psychology. James's analyses of habit, the nature of emotion, the phenomenology of attention, the stream of thought, the perception of space, and the multiplicity of the consciousness of self are still widely cited and incorporated into contemporary theoretical accounts of these phenomena.

The Principles of Psychology

List of IllustrationsIntroduction: "Communications Now Are Love"Part I: Communications1. Pleasure at a Distance in Henry James and Others 2. Love and NoisePart II: Records3. Soundtracks: Modernism, Fidelity, Race 4. The New Permanent Record Epilogue: Looking Back at MediumsNotes Index

Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life

"Our country's black and white past": Film and the figures of history in Frank O'Hara

This essay looks at the iconography of the telegraph in Hnery James's major phase, and seeks to understand The Ambassadors as exemplary of his fascination with "the idea of connectibility." The essay also inquires more broadly into the means by which technologies of communication become objects of emotional attachment, affective intensity, and even sensuous engagement. Reading across a range of period represetations of the telegraph, the essay shows how James's stylistic prodigality/-/-his "magnificent and masterly indirectness," as James himself calls it/-/-travesties a telegraphic economy of expression, even as his narratives fixate on the inscrutable pleasures of mediated communication.

Wired Love: Pleasure at a Distance in Henry James and Others

Focusing on James's account of New York in the 1850s from A Small Boy and Others, this essay argues that, despite his clear antipathy toward the "modern" New York he describes in The American Scene, his own memories of an "old" New York involve a much more varied and pleasurable response to the city itself. Indeed, James's nostalgia for the city of his childhood reflects a prior modernity marked everywhere by media (dioramas, panoramas, posters) and spectacle (melodramas, theatrical displays, the Barnum Museum)—a modernity whose "visibility," for James, has been "smothered" but not lost.

Delirious Henry James: A Small Boy and New York

If you plan to watch The Searchers with Douglas Gordon, you’ll want to clear your calendar: in 1995, the Scottish artist proposed an installation version of John Ford’s famous Western that he hoped to realize as a site-specific screening of the film temporally stretched out and distended so that its running time would coincide with the duration of the events it narrates (Figure 1). As Gordon writes in the original proposal for his “5-year drive-by,” which he presented at the Biennale de Lyon in 1995, “the narrative here is pretty straightforward”:

How the West Slows Down

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