Old “New Media” and Literary Studies before 1960

Abstract

New media played an important but largely understudied role in the formation of literary studies as a discipline. The dominant tradition of literary criticism has implied that literature was superior to and fully distinct from competing media and that the methods and concepts of literary scholarship were untouched by the emergence of new technological media. This introduction surveys some of the ways in which modern literary scholarship was in fact entangled with new media: from the revolutionary effect of the photostat on textual studies, to the rise of the concept of “orality” in tandem with new techniques for transcribing sound, to twentieth-century literary scholars’ extensive experiments with film and video as novel pedagogical aids. Along with the contributions to this special issue, this introduction shows that revisiting the false starts and dead ends of media-attuned literary scholarship during this formative period can help us defamiliarize our own convictions and open up alternative visions for the place of literary studies in a media-saturated world.