The nineteenth century was a period of unprecedented media revolution and technological change. Railroads, steam, photography, telegraphy, sound-recording, the post office, the typewriter, advances in print technology, infrastructural expansion, new geological instruments, electricity, and early motion pictures were just a few of the ways that “media” and “technology”—words that originated in response to these apparatuses—transformed the world in shocking and often distressing ways. New affects, accidents, shocks, and gestures; new intervals in space-time perception; new flows and forces in capitalist machines; and other subtle and seismic shifts began to register across minds and bodies—with literature (a medium in its own right) always there to record, remix and register these shifts in novel and eccentric ways. As an experimental agent and archive of media history, literature plugged into these currents and flipped the switch, inventing new forms of thought and perception that began to distinguish sense from nonsense, signal from noise, reality from hallucination.
In this course, we’ll approach nineteenth-century American literature in experimental terms as a media apparatus that not only registers historical change but invents new channels and circuits in response, remixing literature and media in ways that defamiliarize our relationship with language, subjectivity, aesthetics, and epistemology. To track these changes, we’ll veer our attention away from the novel and scale down to more compressed literary forms like short stories, magazine sketches, lyric poems, metaphysical sketches, prose poems, novellas, and other literary genres that anticipate contemporary experiments in short fiction, flash fiction, and poetics. Readings will include short literary texts by Emerson, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Bierce, Twain, Chopin, James, Chesnutt, Crane, and DuBois, along with poetic works by Dickinson, Melville, and Whitman. We’ll pair these texts with historical and theoretical criticism by Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, Walter Benjamin, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Vilém Flusser, Jacques Rancière, Michel Serres, John Guillory, Andrew Piper, and Meredith McGill, among other significant media and literary critics.
