ENGL 6525 - Modernism, Media, and Mediation

Spring. 4 credits. Student option grading.

J. Braddock.

What was the position of literary writing among the new media technologies that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century? How did modernist writers respond to a social and political situation in which access to media and information was at once widely distributed, and consolidated by corporations and the state? This class pursues continuities between past and present, against today’s claims of heroically disruptive innovation and new crises for literature. Reading a range of key media theorists, it examines the way specific means of storage and transmission (radio, wax cylinder and gramophone, photography, film, and several forms of print) were both represented and employed by writers including Pound, Hughes, Dos Passos, Rukeyser, Fearing, N. West, O. Welles, MacLeish, Kay Boyle, and Bob Brown.