{"title":"After Electromagnetism","authors":"David Trotter","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198850472.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198850472.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"The topic of this chapter is a quickening in the pace of change, in both technology and literature, brought about from the 1880s onwards by the harnessing of electricity’s alliance with magnetism to transform methods of telecommunication. The consequent opening up of the ‘Olympian frequency domain’ (Friedrich Kittler) fundamentally undermined the sovereignty of human consciousness. The chapter explores two uses of the metaphor of lightning in literature, philosophy, anthropology, and folklore: first, to mark the limit of unaided human perception; secondly, to indicate, by an emphasis on the return stroke, that two-way communication between earth and heaven is at least conceivable. The focus is on D. H. Lawrence’s fiction, essays, and poetry (especially the extraordinary ‘Bare Almond Trees’); and on Hope Mirrlees’s encoding of her relationship with the eminent classicist Jane Harrison into Paris (1920), a modernist long poem worthy of comparison with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922).","PeriodicalId":106767,"journal":{"name":"The Literature of Connection","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116448502","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conclusion","authors":"D. Trotter","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198850472.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198850472.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter offers a brief recapitulation of what has been learnt by approaching British and other literatures of the period 1850 to 1950 from the perspective of the ideas of signal and interface. It concludes that, while the pressure these ideas exerted did indeed remain constant throughout the period, it took an eccentric emphasis on aspects of form to reconfigure the text itself as a manipulation of signal-to-noise ratio. The ‘modernism’ which took shape in works by Lewis, Loy, and Mirrlees was a specialist affair. The chapter concludes with two further case studies. The first has to do with the function of a particular architectural feature—the corridor—in nineteenth-century British poetry and fiction; the second with the hugely influential theory and practice of the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein, who thought that political solidarity was best expressed by means of what we would now term ‘social media’.","PeriodicalId":106767,"journal":{"name":"The Literature of Connection","volume":"3 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114132645","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Starry Sky","authors":"D. Trotter","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198850472.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198850472.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"The aim of this chapter is to ‘showcase’ two stellar (in more than one sense) modernist texts which met with relish the challenge presented by the pace of technological and literary change, and which remain to this day essentially uncategorizable: Wyndham Lewis’s ‘Enemy of the Stars’ (1914) and Mina Loy’s ‘Songs to Joannes’ (1915). These texts put a cosmological understanding of the universe as medium in dialectical tension with the generation of exclusive closed circuits and loops (an exclusiveness that might be thought to amount to madness). Lewis and Loy aimed not simply to represent, but to reproduce, the idea of communication as an adjustment of signal-to-noise ratio. The chapter concludes with a discussion of cryptographic modernism, and of the poems of Harriet Monroe.","PeriodicalId":106767,"journal":{"name":"The Literature of Connection","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126130315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Women Spies","authors":"David Trotter","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198850472.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198850472.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"If ever anyone had an incentive to establish a channel of communication by rigorously excluding third parties, it is surely the spy with hard-earned intelligence to transmit from behind enemy lines. This chapter examines how the thriller as a genre adapted to the increasing range and sophistication of telecommunications technologies. Examples discussed include John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), and the film Hitchcock made of it, The 39 Steps (1935); Sax Rohmer’s The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu (1913); and Jose Luis Borges’s ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ (1941). But the main focus is on espionage as an extension of the ‘feminization of channelling’ (Jill Galvan) which had long seen women act as go-betweens under a variety of circumstances. Examples discussed include Marthe Cnockaert McKenna’s neglected memoir, I Was a Spy! (1932), and British spy films from Victor Saville’s Dark Journey (1937) to Charles Crichton’s Against the Wind (1948).","PeriodicalId":106767,"journal":{"name":"The Literature of Connection","volume":"95 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127514375","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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