This course will focus on a large critical question, the contemporary status of literature in relation to other media, primarily digital or new media forms but also visual media more generally. The critical practice or mode of analysis associated with this question is sometimes referred to as intermediation, the study of exchanges and dialogues across media (how do new media forms reproduce, redefine, or reject features of printed books, such as the “page”; alternately, how do novels try to incorporate or mimic aspects of Internet communication?). A focus on this kind of question is intended to promote self-reflection on our assumptions about literature, print, and the relation between them. The course will also bring to bear on this question a specific body of historical and theoretical work on the emergence and institutional development of print culture, literary studies, and the book as cultural form. We will turn to the history of the book to try to understand the possible futures of the book.
What does the history of the emergence of print text as the dominant communicational medium within Western modernity have to teach us about the current emergence of the Internet and computer-mediated communication? There are three general answers to this question. Some commentators insist that print culture is obsolete, while others argue that books as a medium for the written word perform certain kinds of privileged cultural work (such as the establishment of critical distance or deep attention) that cannot be duplicated by other media and will therefore remain indispensable. The practice of intermediation tends to assume a third position – that is, that we increasingly inhabit a diverse media ecology, within which printed text will continue to exist, but in a relativized or decentered form, without the normative authority that print has had (or seemed to have had) in the past. What are the effects of this change, if they cannot be reduced to either the most utopian or the most dystopian and apocalyptic possibilities?

When I refer to the “book as cultural form,” I mean the ideals or cultural values that have come to be associated with the specific technology of the printed book – for instance, the way the book is taken as a model or embodiment of specific forms of thought, rationality, and critique. What continuities and discontinuities are there between the forms and practices of new media and print culture as it has traditionally been understood? For instance, do new media simply extend the processes of democratization and greater access (as well as the rise of vernacular literatures) that seem to follow from the invention of the printing press (as might be suggested by the explosion of self-publishing online), or do they disrupt and even preempt such processes? If print forms like the newspaper and the novel are crucial in the development of the idea of the modern nation-state or “imagined community” of readers, as Benedict Anderson argues, does the emergence of new media pose a challenge to nationalist ideologies and imaginaries? What new models of the public sphere and of citizenship do these new technologies demand, if any?

We will read work on earlier print culture and the transition to new media by critics who might include Benedict Anderson, Jurgen Habermas, Michael Warner, Lauren Berlant, Nancy Fraser, Rita Felski, Richard Lanham, and Lev Manovich. We will compare and contrast Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to its hypertextual revision in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (written using Storyspace software, a pre-HTML lexia/link format). N. Katherine Hayles’s book Electronic Literature (along with the primary works on the book’s CD-ROM and website) will provide examples and analyses of new media forms (we will especially focus on interactive fiction and the addition of Flash animation to written text: what happens when texts are to be watched or played, not just read?). In relation to cultural studies arguments about the nature of visual culture, from Adorno and Horkheimer on the culture industry to Henry Jenkins on fan cultures and practices of textual poaching, we will consider the relation of word and image, in part by reading a graphic novel, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which reworks a set of literary sources (as does Patchwork Girl; like new media generally, these works raise questions about changing ideas of intellectual property, originality, and creativity). Patchwork Girl in part focuses on the relevance to new media of feminist traditions for the analysis of gender and sexuality, and we will end the course by turning more directly to a focus on the relevance of U.S. racial histories and critical traditions, by reading DJ Spooky’s Rhythm Science, a book on electronic music and the practice of the mash-up, in relation to a science fiction novel by African American writer Samuel R. Delany that represents a cosmopolitan network society, a new form of imagined community.

Assignments for the course will most likely include three essays and some more informal, ungraded writing assignments.

Along with a set of shorter essays, texts for the course will probably include:
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism
N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl (CD-ROM)
Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, Rhythm Science (book and CD)