
Literature and the Telephone
Conversations on Poetics, Politics and Place
Sarah Jackson(Author)
Bloomsbury Academic (Publisher)
Published on 19. October 2023
Book
Hardback
248 pages
978-1-350-25960-7 (ISBN)
Description
Literature and the Telephone explores the ways that the telephone taps into the operations of reading and writing, opening up our understanding of how, where and why literary communication takes place.
Addressing the telephone's complex, multiple and mutating functions, and drawing on recent work by writers and thinkers including Sara Ahmed, Stacy Alaimo, Judith Butler, Nicholas Royle and Eyal Weizman, this open access book considers the linguistic, technical and conceptual disruptions of the literary telephone as well as the poetic and political possibilities of the exchange.
Focusing on the telephonic effects of post-war writing by authors such as Mourid Barghouti, Caroline Bergvall, Tom Raworth, Muriel Spark, Ali Smith and Rita Wong, Sarah Jackson proposes that the uncanny logic of the telephone, and its capacity for ordering and disordering the text, speaks to some of the most urgent concerns of our era.
Examining topics ranging from surveillance and migration to warfare and electronic waste, Jackson argues that the literary telephone offers new ways of conceiving ethical and creative technological futures, as well as different modes of reading, writing and listening across cultures.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Nottingham Trent University.
Addressing the telephone's complex, multiple and mutating functions, and drawing on recent work by writers and thinkers including Sara Ahmed, Stacy Alaimo, Judith Butler, Nicholas Royle and Eyal Weizman, this open access book considers the linguistic, technical and conceptual disruptions of the literary telephone as well as the poetic and political possibilities of the exchange.
Focusing on the telephonic effects of post-war writing by authors such as Mourid Barghouti, Caroline Bergvall, Tom Raworth, Muriel Spark, Ali Smith and Rita Wong, Sarah Jackson proposes that the uncanny logic of the telephone, and its capacity for ordering and disordering the text, speaks to some of the most urgent concerns of our era.
Examining topics ranging from surveillance and migration to warfare and electronic waste, Jackson argues that the literary telephone offers new ways of conceiving ethical and creative technological futures, as well as different modes of reading, writing and listening across cultures.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Nottingham Trent University.
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 *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
10 bw illus
Dimensions
Height: 236 mm
Width: 164 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
520 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-350-25960-7 (9781350259607)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Sarah Jackson is Associate Professor in Modern and Contemporary Writing at Nottingham Trent University, UK. She is a BBC New Generation Thinker (2016), AHRC Leadership Fellow (2018---2020) and NTU VC Outstanding Researcher (2017). Her publications include Tactile Poetics (2015), Pelt (2012), and a special issue of parallax on the 'unidentifiable literary object' (2019).
Content
Preface: Hello, yes? Introduction - Switchboard
Chapter 1 - Queer Lines: Voice and Desire in E. M. Forster, Dana Spiotta and Haruki Murakami
Chapter 2 - Scrambled Messages: Networks of Signification in Patrick Hamilton and Jon McGregor
Chapter 3 - Telepoetics: Interference and Errancy in Frank O'Hara, Tom Raworth and Fady Joudah
Chapter 4 - Secrets: Call and Response in Muriel Spark
Chapter 5 - Listening---In: Reading Surveillance in Graham Greene, Anna Burns and Will Self
Chapter 6 - Calling without Calling: Mourid Barghouti, Jacques Derrida and 'The International Day of Telephones'
Chapter 7 - Distress Calls: New (Im)mobilities in Behrouz Boochani and Asiya Wadud
Conclusion - Telefutures: Electronic Waste in Emily St John Mandel and Ling Ma
Afterword - The Long Goodbye
Bibliography
Chapter 1 - Queer Lines: Voice and Desire in E. M. Forster, Dana Spiotta and Haruki Murakami
Chapter 2 - Scrambled Messages: Networks of Signification in Patrick Hamilton and Jon McGregor
Chapter 3 - Telepoetics: Interference and Errancy in Frank O'Hara, Tom Raworth and Fady Joudah
Chapter 4 - Secrets: Call and Response in Muriel Spark
Chapter 5 - Listening---In: Reading Surveillance in Graham Greene, Anna Burns and Will Self
Chapter 6 - Calling without Calling: Mourid Barghouti, Jacques Derrida and 'The International Day of Telephones'
Chapter 7 - Distress Calls: New (Im)mobilities in Behrouz Boochani and Asiya Wadud
Conclusion - Telefutures: Electronic Waste in Emily St John Mandel and Ling Ma
Afterword - The Long Goodbye
Bibliography