Jimmy Butts teaches writing to university students, but he likes to do it in strange, new ways. He has worked with students in Charleston, at Winthrop University, at Clemson University, and most recently at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. He received his PhD from the transdisciplinary program known as Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design at Clemson University. His research interests include modern and postmodern composition strategies, new media, rhetorical criticism, defamiliarization, and writing pedagogy. He has begun exploring in the kinds of writing that we will inevitably compose in various apocalyptic futures. He has published multimodal work in
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A review of Marke Goble’s
A review of Marke Goble’s
In his book
nobody has much championed for years
The Barthean erotic pleasure of reading different media is a major expediency for Goble’s book. The content emphasizes connection, love, romance, communication, intimacy, and social connections that are available through media as humans use them. I only offer this last qualifier because of the strong movement in media studies of late to return to sheer materiality, to media as a privileged object. Goble’s book resists this reduction of the field of media studies and raises up the influence on the aesthetics and culture developed through the use of particular media during the particular period of the early 1900s.
Goble directs us as readers: This is a
book about relationships made possible
The very notion of the
though I am wary of the nostalgia for bygone avant-gardes
of the McLuhanist devotion to whatever once was new, I would hope this book pays
tribute to some of the better forms of thinking about — and thinking in —
mediums from the first decades of the twentieth century
mediated life, which this book explores as a
historical phenomenon, as central to the early twentieth century as to a later
culture of new media
The first chapter of Goble’s work opens with Henry James sending a telegraph. Goble
focuses on James’s later novels to emphasize the influence of technologies like the
telegraph on James’s writing. Goble seems to expose a secret influence upon James’s
quintessential indirect style, and how he communicated passion and emotion
exquisitely. The connection between James’s perfect unwillingness to come out and
say the matter of his writing plainly and the telegram’s inability to do say
everything as well is a brilliant theoretical connection between medium and writing
process. The telegram necessarily condenses the message, and, of course, many
telegrams perfectly and directly say what they need to say, but the conceptual
framework is what grounds this text and reifies the modernist literary sensibility.
Goble asks, How does James incorporate
the telegram — short, direct, and shockingly imperative — into a world where
communication is imagined as prodigious, convoluted, and decidedly
circuitous?
The title of Goble’s book, he tells us in the deft introduction, comes from James who had something to say about circuits — to one’s surprise — in his preface to
Goble then shifts into the second chapter with a second medium, the telephone, and a second key modernist: Gertrude Stein. Here, again, the artifacts and connections that Goble makes from the period are impressive. While setting up the telephone as the medium for the chapter, Goble then moves into a comparison of telephonic appearance in Stein’s
constellated in turn around the telegraph and the telephone
In the second half of the book,
The second half of Goble’s book then takes up photography and questions of the
archive from the beginning of the twentieth century and different fetishes with
materiality and physical mementos. The modernist works that Goble explores manifest a shared commitment to the more
sensuous and visceral experiences of other mediums that communicate somehow
outside the competence of verbal expression, or, in more contemporary terms, in
excess of its narrow bandwidth
The choices for both the media and the personalities that comprise the subject here
are very particular, and seem to represent Goble’s own interests and strengths.
Still, this kind of book offers an approach to thinking through media scholarship
that might be expanded to still others working within the field. The logic is
focused by a kind of close reading of both subject matter and form itself, and
offers this analysis to artifacts that might be otherwise ignored, such as old
phonograph print advertisements. In this way, Goble manages to analyze media within
other media, contexts on contexts — nicely layering his thesis as it may be situated
within several different places. One version of the thesis may be that Modernism encouraged a unique structure of
feeling toward the technologies of art and literature — in all the specificity
of their material aesthetics
If media now are love, we should know why
The book is also a testament to the willingness of Berkeley’s English department — where Goble may be found — to become more interdisciplinary. After all, connecting Henry James to Friedrich Kittler is no small feat. However, I expect we’ll find this kind of methodology increasingly prominent as English scholars learn to think within the context of media themselves. The containers of meaning, alongside content, offer an area of study which a select few — notably Katherine Hayles — have been helping to lead the charge on for some years now.
Goble closes by prophesying, Modernism as
we know it is not going to return. But the digital technologies that are the
future also look a lot like history, and maybe there is still modernism enough
to hunt us back to mediums that we have left behind. What we do with them next
is another matter