Professor Eva-Lynn Jagoe

COL5065H: The Forms of Literature in the Age of Electricity

Mondays 11-1

Office NF 204

Office hours: Mon 3:30-5

This course will examine electricity as a new technology that shaped the ways that people conceptualize the body, communication, work, spectacle, and control. Our approach to the literary and cultural texts studied will move away from an analysis of thematic concerns towards an analysis of the forms that arise out of the experience of electricity. Electricity’s presence and its ramifications led to new mediatic technologies. Narrative forms in England, France, the United States, and Latin America were necessarily reconfigured because of innovations in communication, movement, perceptions of time, and daily living. Readings will include literature that deals with topics such as spiritualism and mesmerism, approaches to the body and mind, invention, the politics and control of electricity, light, sound, and communication.

60% final paper

40% class participation, 2 critical responses (1-2 pages max. single-spaced), annotated bibliography

Calendar of Readings

(Readings marked with * indicates inclusion in coursepack)

Spiritualism and Energy

Week 2 Electric Energies

• Balzac, Louis Lambert (1832) Either in bookstore or online: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1943.
• Edgar Allen Poe, “Mesmeric Revelation (1844) http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Poe/mesmeric.htm
• Christopher Turner, “Mesmeromania, or The Tale of the Tub.” In Cabinet, issue 21 “Electricity”.*
• Jeffrey Sconce, “Mediums and Media” in Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television.*

Week 3 Sep 24: Invisible Connections

• Glendinning, Victoria. Electricity (1995)
• Sara Danius, Introduction, The Senses of Modernism*
• John Durham Peters, Introduction, Speaking into the Air*
• (Annotated biblio: Law on connections)

Week 4 Oct 1: Inventors

• Arlt Mad Toy (1926)
• Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. “The Force” 57-61. In Cabinet.*
• Janet Ward, “Electric Stimulations,” Weimar Surfaces*

• (Annotated biblio: Kathleen on utopias)

Week 5 Oct 8: Thanksgiving

Inventions

Week 6 Oct 15: Electrifying the Body

• Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
• Tim Armstrong, “Electrifying the Body,” in Modernism, Technology, and the Body*
• Carolyn Marvin, “Locating the Body in Electrical Space and Time” in When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communications in the Late Nineteenth Century http://simplelink.library.utoronto.ca/url.cfm/23597

• (Annotated biblio: Sarah on bodies, Nelson on electrifying bodies)

Utopias and Dystopias of Electricity

Week 7 Oct 22: Discipline and Punish

• Ricardo Piglia Money to Burn (1997)
• The Electric Chair. Linda Simon, “Live Wires,” Dark Light.*
• (Annotated biblio: Catherine on electroshock)

Week 8 Oct 29: Revolution and Control

• Eugene O’Neill “Dynamo” (1929)
• Vladimir Lenin, Selections from Collected Works
• Mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros, Mexican Electricians’ Union (1940).
• Jeffrey Kastner, “Absolute Power” in Cabinet
• (Annotated biblio: Agnes on revolution)

Light

Week 9 Nov 5: Light Shows

• Schivelbusch, 50-78, 114-134. Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century.*
• Marvin, “Dazzling the Multitude,” When Old Technologies Were New
• Light Art: Jorge Macchi’s Light Music (2006) and Peter Weibel, Light Art from Artificial Light: Light as a Medium in 20^th and 21^st-century Art
• Akira Mizuta Lippit, “Modes of Avisuality: Psychoanalysis—X-Ray—Cinema,” Atomic Light (Shadow Optics)*
• (Annotated biblio: Victoria?)

Week 10 Nov 12: Silent Film

• Segundo de Chomón, El hotel eléctrico (1908)
• Fritz Lang Metropolis (1927)
• Selections from Ether
• (Annotated biblio: Ramiro on silent film)

Sound

Week 11 Nov 19: Sound Film

• Alan Crosland, The Jazz Singer (1926),
• Gene Kelly, Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
• Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time “Silence vs. Noise,” 320-328*
• Jules Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth
• (Annotated biblio: Pilar on film)

Week 12 Nov 26: Phonograph and Radio

• Sound Reproduction: selections from Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction and Steve Wurtzler, Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media.
• Rubén Gallo, “Radio” in Mexican Modernities: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution.*
• Sconce 59-91.
• (Annotated biblio: Illa on radio)

Week 13 Dec 3: Telephone and Telegraph

• Avital Ronell, Selections from The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech.
• Gumbrecht “Telephones” 225-232, “Wireless Communication” 241-252*
• (Annotated biblio: Ingrid on schizophrenia)