1995 Publication

Language Machines: Technologies of Literary & Cultural Production

from the 1995 English Institute Conference

click here to see conference information

Language Machines
Routledge 1997

Editors:
Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass & Nancy J. Vickers

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Contributors:

 

Jonathan Goldberg

The Female Pen: Writing as a Woman

Meredith L. McGill

The Duplicity of the Pen

Jeffrey Masten

Pressing Subjects: Or, The Secret Lives of Shakespeare’s Compositors

Vinay Dharwadker

Print Culture and Literary Markets in Colonial India

Mary Ann Doane

Screening Time

Marsha Kinder

Screen Wars: Transmedia Appropriations from Einstein to A TV Dante and Carmen Sandiego

N. Katherine Hayles

The Condition of Virtuality

Jay Clayton

The Voice in the Machine: Hazlitt, Hardy, James

Peggy Phelan

Performing Talking Cures: Artaud’s Voice

Gregory L. Ulmer

Kubla Honky Tonk: Voice in Cyber-Pidgin

Language is now and has always been produced by a variety of machines. But within this proposition lie the histories not only of language, but of the idea of machinery, and of the body as a machine.

In Language Machines, twelve scholars of literature, film, performance, and media explore a range of technologies that have shaped literary and cultural production. Organized around four poles – pens, presses, screens, and voices – the essays pursue, from manuscript to computer and back again, two central claims. First: material forms regulate and structure culture as well as those who are the agents or subjects of culture. And second: new technologies redefine and resituate, rather than replace, earlier technologies.

These provocative and rich essays argue persuasively that language is no disembodied essence (‘In the beginning was the Word’) but instead deeply, resolutely material.

288 pages
Dimensions: 6 x 9 inches; 229 x 153 mm