Literature and the Telephone

Reviews / Votes

Sarah Jackson's Literature and the Telephone: Conversations of Poetics, Politics and Place [is] a timely contribution ... [This book] offers the opportunity to view an everyday object as an enabler and disruptor and to rethink the ways in which technology has shaped and continues to shape human interactions. * Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association * Not just a book about telephony and literature, but a book about how the telephone has actively contributed to the deconstruction of literature and culture, while steadily working to deconstruct our own lives. Jackson acts as the deft operator of a complex international switchboard, taking us through the developments of this process of deconstruction, by way of an exciting range of texts by twentieth-century and twenty first-century novelists, poets, and theorists. * Nicoletta Asciuto, Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature, University of York, UK * Jackson connects literature and the telephone in powerful and invigorating ways. Through lucid readings of Frank O'Hara, Tom Raworth, Fady Joudah, Muriel Spark, Ali Smith, Mourid Barghouti and others, we come to see how phones are not just thematically important but how they pervade all of our thinking about the nature of modern literature. Literature and the Telephone is also a special kind of listening book, with a particular ear for questions of responding and responsibility. Jackson never loses sight of the inextricably entangled everyday dimensions of her topic - from the nuclear hotline to the Israeli treatment of Palestinians, from refugee boat deaths to the ecological damage and toxic afterlives of the objects so many of us carry around, mostly without thinking, practically everywhere we go. * Nicholas Royle, Professor Emeritus of English, University of Sussex, UK * Jackson's elegant study reconceptualizes the relationship between reading, writing, listening and calling, with an awareness of the wider ethical, political and spatial possibilities of the exchange. In the true spirit of pioneering work like Nicholas Royle's Telepathy and Literature and Avital Ronell's Telephone Book, it is a must-read for anyone fascinated by the uncanny ramifications between the literary and the tele-technological. * Laurent Milesi, Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China *