Untitled

Paper Preparation:  Telegraph: ‘on the line’ vs. ‘in the mind’

  Key Terms: Jamesian, telegraph form, telegraphic romance, virtual experience

  Structure: Historical/contextual information about the telegraph

                  Compare/contrast the form and content of the two texts

                  Close reading of a passage from each text that demonstrates the different effect of

                  each.

Sources: Pollard, Tomas. "Telegraphing The Sentence And The Story: Iconicity In In Thecage By Henry James." European Journal Of English Studies 5.1 (2001): 81. Academic Search Premier. Web. 17 Nov. 2013. 

--Discusses the use of telegraphed messages in the book `In the Cage,' by Henry James. Conditions of structural diagrammatic iconicity; Use of iconicity to imitate the transmission of the telegraph in plot and syntax; Central role of the telegraph in the book.

  Shelangoskie, Susan. "Anthony Trollope And The Social Discourse Of Telegraphy After Nationalisation1." Journal Of Victorian Culture (Edinburgh University Press) 14.1 (2009): 72-92. Academic Search Premier. Web. 7 Nov. 2013.

For my final paper, I would like to investigate not only the role/function of the telegraph, but also its implications in two texts: Henry James’s In the Cage and Ella Cheever Thayer’s Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes.  Both of these texts were published in the late 1800s; both detail a female protagonist who works as a ‘telegraph girl’ and explore the new possibilities made possible with the telegraph.  However, the two texts are distinctly different.  Thayer’s novel is a much more traditionally narrated 19th century work of literature in which the reader gets every piece of the puzzle through either dialogue or narration; James’s novella (as we all know) is the opposite of traditionally narrated—it’s Jamesian—filled with nothing and everything.  Overall, I want to explore the notion of deception through telecommunications, both of the self and of other parties.  I want to argue that if Wired Love is a manifestation of the narrative possibilities brought about by telegraphic communications, then In the Cage is a manifestation of the mediated experience.

  In order to really investigate deceptive qualities brought about by telecommunications, I will first need to know more about the telegraph itself: What were the social and moral benefits of the telegraph system?  Since so many telegraph office employees—or at least the people in charge of actually sending and receiving the messages—were women, what are the implications?  Were ‘telegraphist’ just more suited to women?  Also, in order to more fully understand James’s work, I would like to find any correlation between James and Freudian ideas.  It seems no accident that James’s novella was published at almost the exact time that Freudian ideas infiltrated society and literature. 

The story of two steam locomotives that were crashed in a staged stunt in the 19th century. It was supposed to be a fun day out, but ended in flying metal an...

Disclaimer: This video is not the best ever--several of the images it depicts are not the actual objects being referenced.  Also, the narration is kind of annoying.  But the video details one of the most significant benchmarks in railway history--the carefully planned head-on collision of two locomotives.  The disaster began as a publicity stunt but went horribly awry when the boilers on the trains combusted. 

I completed my study in distant reading on Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.  Before I began the word analysis, I read a brief description of the novel so that I would have some elementary knowledge of its framework.  The book is about an engineer from Connecticut who is accidentally transported back in time to the era of King Arthur; the engineer, thought to be a magician, uses modern technology to fool the people from that time period into thinking he is a magician (wiki).  Knowing a little about the plot, and even reading the title, prepared me to expect certain words in my findings.  So, it was no surprise that the second most common word in the entire novel—sir—is used three hundred fifty-three times.  Not far behind are words like king and knight(s).  The most commonly used word (apart from stop words) is said.  This is a word I would expect to be common, but not the most common.  Significant finding number one: because said is used four hundred times, I can only assume that this novel is significantly heavy with dialogue. 

            Another one of the top five most common words in Twain’s novel is time.  It is used three hundred-nine times.  At first, this did not seem particularly significant since the book is about a man who goes back in time.  No matter how general the word, though, some significance lies in the use of that word in over three hundred instances.  I wanted to know more about how time is used in the novel.  Is Twain referring mostly to specific time—in measurements of seconds, minutes, and hours?  Is Twain referring mostly to a more general time—in terms of an “era” or “period”?  In order to find out more about the use of time, I searched for related terms: year(s), month(s), day(s), night(s), young, old, new, etc. First, I will note that time is used three hundred-nine times; times is used thirty-nine times.  “Times” has a different connotation than “time.”  Specifically, “times” bears the implication of a broad scope of time and is not typically associated with units of measurement (such as seconds, minutes, etc.). Rather, it is usually conceptually synonymous with terms like “zeitgeist” (the spirit of an age).  There is a big difference between “What time is it?” and “The times, they are a’changin’.”  Because times is used significantly less than time, I figured most of the references to time in the novel are specific and measured.  Sure enough, century occurs thirty times; year(s) is used one hundred twenty times; month(s)—23; day(s)—205; night(s)—69; minute(s)—45.  Significant finding number two: The book is very concerned with specific measurements of time.

I'll be honest.  When we were first assigned the project in which we had to create a screen cast that investigated the details of an online database, I thought, "Great, another technological obstacle I have to hurdle."  But after Michelle and I figured out how to download Java, the rest was really easy and enjoyable.  Though I have been using scholarly online databases as research tools for years now, this experience is probably the first I have had where I focused so intently on the organization and functionality of an online database.  It was definitely the first time I have really considered things like: what is on the 'About' page, how and not just what information is organized, and what the implications are of digitizing and categorizing literature.  

Screenr | Instant screencasts: Just click record. Screenr’s web-based screen recorder makes it a breeze to create and share your screencasts around the web. Just click the record button, capture your screen & voice, and share the link. Some people even call it fun!

The way film photographers feel about digital photographers may be the way daguerreotype photographers feel about the film guys. Working with dangerous che

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Lewis Mumford’s article “Glass and the Ego.”  I’ll admit I even read the excerpts from the preceding and following articles that made it onto my paper.  I enjoyed the chronological timeline of glass footprints on the world.  Most interesting was the process in which glass changed the outside world and subsequently the inside world.  First, it had a profound effect on the development of the sciences: windows, eyeglasses, the telescope, the microscope.  These inventions help define the modern sensibility of science.  Second, with the invention and widespread accessibility of the mirror, glass had “a profound effect upon the development of the personality: indeed, it helped to alter the very concept of the self.”  This notion is easy to understand but incredibly difficult to truly grasp.  What does it mean to view yourself?  What does it mean to view yourself as other people view you?  What happened to the wholeness of the human condition/experience when aesthetic awareness became a prominent variable in defining a person/oneself? 

  The very physical makeup of glass deserves examination.  The physical components of glass allowed scientific and technological advances that humanity did not see coming.  Very basically, glass changed the way humans experience anything, everything; yet, somehow its physical makeup—“transparent and for most chemical compounds, resistant to chemical change”—is seemingly insignificant.  How does something transparent change the way we look at the world?  At ourselves?  Where would the sciences be without these “products of glass technics?” 

GHOST STORIES

After discussing Ambrose Bierce's "Suitable Surroundings" in class yesterday, I have been thinking about what it means to read a ghost story.  Or watch a scary movie.  Or listen to a horrifying tale while sitting around a campfire in the woods.  First I thought about the fundamental question: what makes these stories scary?  Excluding the environment in which we experience these ghost stories--which I will address shortly--let us loosely define "ghost."  I do not know much about ghosts, but I think it is safe to say that the notion of 'ghosts' is usually tied to an apparition or specter of some human who has died and therefore requires separation between body and spirit.  This is curious because--though I cannot say for certain--I imagine that all people who participate in ghost stories are not otherwise ALL spiritual.  Why, then, choose to believe in something great merely for the purposes of a story? 

This article is fascinating and wholly applicable to our purpose as a capstone seminar class.  Please read it in its entirety--you'll thank me later. For the purposes of this blog entry, however, I will highlight a few passages from the article that I found worth mentioning.  Here goes:

1. techno-primitivism: one which operates throughout within and upon technologically mediated experience by means of a strong awareness of substances which, deriving at once from the laboratory and from the plantation, continually re-open the constitutive, inexhaustible difference between nature and culture.

2. (When the contemporary artist came to the author claiming that the same phenomenon taking place in the techno-primitivism study was connected to her new works of art) "It meant testing an idea put forward to explain what was going on in a novel first published in 1928 against work done yesterday in a different medium altogether."

3. (Of the first image shown in the article--'Hand of a Thief') "Try to focus on the blue checkerboard which occupies the centre of one of the foremost panels, and the diagonals start to bounce about all over the place.  Turn your eyes to left or right, and the mirage will stabilize for a moment as the panel-edge brings into view the four-square solidity tucked away behind it, before that, too, starts to squirm.  There is nothing in the image to take aim at."

4. Techno-primitivism seeks out not only the primitive in technology, but the technological in the primitive.

5. The point of it all is to ask of technology the sorts of questions that only works of art can ask it.

I very much enjoyed reading this article.  I did not intend to find it useful for the class blog--I merely stumbled upon it while reading some other articles from The White Review.  Though David Trotter, who authored the article--my apologies for not saying so sooner--mentions literature briefly in his initial discussion about the early twentieth-century novel Lady Chatterly's Lover, the article is not told from a necessarily literary point of view.  Nor is it a focused commentary on the paintings shown in the article.  Rather, it focuses on the media used to paint them and the effectual difference between slow-handed brush strokes and that of "a metal instrument driven down into [the work of art] at regular intervals in accordance with a pre-determined design."  It's about finding the old in the new and new in the old.  It's a heavy notion to think that humans--subconsciously or otherwise--innately respond to and are affected by various media found in and manipulated out of nature to create culture.