1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910458948003321

Autore

Goble Mark

Titolo

Beautiful circuits [[electronic resource] ] : modernism and the mediated life / / Mark Goble

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, : Columbia University Press, 2010

ISBN

1-280-65729-4

9786613634221

0-231-51840-4

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (391 p.)

Disciplina

302.230973

Soggetti

Mass media and literature - United States

American literature - 20th century - History and criticism

Mass media and culture - United States

Interpersonal communication - Technological innovations - Social aspects - United States

Social interaction - Technological innovations - United States

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: "Communications Now Are Love" -- Part One: Communications -- 1. Pleasure at a Distance in Henry James and Others -- 2. Love and Noise -- Part Two: Records -- 3. Soundtracks: Modernism, Fidelity, Race -- 4. The New Permanent Record -- Epilogue: Looking Back at Mediums -- Notes -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Considering texts by Henry James, Gertrude Stein, James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Agee, and William Carlos Williams, alongside film, painting, music, and popular culture, Mark Goble explores the development of American modernism as it was shaped by its response to technology and an attempt to change how literature itself could communicate.Goble's original readings reinterpret the aesthetics of modernism in the early twentieth century, when new modes of communication made the experience of technology an occasion for profound experimentation



and reflection. He follows the assimilation of such "old" media technologies as the telegraph, telephone, and phonograph and their role in inspiring fantasies of connection, which informed a commitment to the materiality of artistic mediums. Describing how relationships made possible by technology became more powerfully experienced with technology, Goble explores a modernist fetish for media that shows no signs of abating. The "mediated life" puts technology into communication with a series of shifts in how Americans conceive the mechanics and meanings of their connections to one another, and therefore to the world and to their own modernity.