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The UCSB English
Department's Public Humanities Initiative plans to ask prominent
scholars, businessmen, politicians, journalists, scientists,
economists, and others to recommend works in a variety of
media that contribute to an understanding of the relation
between the humanities and contemporary society. Recommendations
will include brief annotations, descriptions, or mini-reviews
by the recommenders.
The Bookshelf
is kept in a database that allows users to browse or search.
The "Details" link in a search result leads to additional
citation information plus Comments (annotations or mini-reviews).
[While under construction, the database will
include only example entries.]
(Developers: edit by searching for records
and then clicking on Details)
Some Recent Recommendations:
| Author |
Title
of Work |
Format |
Suggested By |
| Jay David Bolter, Richard Grusin |
Remediation: Understanding New Media |
Book |
Alan Liu |
| Comments |
(Mini-review by Alan Liu)
Bolter and Grusin understand contemporary media to be
shaped by a dialectical wrestle between the ideals of
"immediacy" (the goal of making media completely transparent
in presenting reality) and "hypermediacy" (an awareness
of media qua media often expressed in exaggerated attention
to surfaces, multiple forms, media framed within media,
etc.) Bolter and Grusin's summary name for this dialectic
is the "logic of remediation," a concept that also includes
an argument about the historical evolution of media in
relation to other media (e.g., media reacting against
the hypermediacy of previous media) that takes a page
from Marshall McLuhan's doctrine that the content of any
medium is always another medium.
The historical argument of the book, indeed (though developed
unsystematically), is one of its most interesting features.
Bolter and Grusin concentrate on such new media as the
World Wide Web, computer games, digital photography, etc.,
but they take care to root contemporary phenomena in a
long history of media forms that follow the logic of remediation--e.g.,
Early Modern painting, cabinetry, manuscripts, and architecture.
These historical examples are introduced partly in the
theoretically unambitious mode of illustrations and partly
under the sanction of Michel Foucault's theory of historical
"genealogies." (But an interesting question for Bolter
and Grusin: might "historical understanding" be just another
media form? See a Public Humanities colloquium
on this topic.) In general Bolter and Grusin's book participates
in one of the most important recent trends in academic
scholarship about information culture: the attempt to
give "information" historical depth extending back not
just to the mid-twentieth-century epoch of cybernetics,
information theory, and cryptography (from which era the
notion of information is usually dated) but to early literate
and pre-literate times. (See, for example, Albert Borgmann.) |
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| Author |
Title of Work |
Format |
Suggested By |
| William Gibson |
Agrippa
(A Book of the Dead) |
Poem |
Alan Liu |
| Comments |
(Mini-review by Alan Liu)
Evocative, unique poem of 305 lines by the author who
invented the term "cyberspace" and who stands at the head
of the cyperpunk
tradition of science fiction (Gibson is the author of
Neuromancer).
The poem is a meditation on memory and "the mechanism"--the
latter appearing in the poem both as an abstract universal
principle and as particular mechanisms. The themes of
memory and mechanism converge in Gibson's rendering of
his family's history by means of the camera(s) that produced
a photo album owned by his father. Flipping through the
pages of the album, Gibson interleaves among family snapshots
the mental images of his own boyhood, his genesis as a
writer, and his journey to Toronto to dodge the draft.
A comparison may be made to William Wordsworth's autobiographical
"Tintern
Abbey" (which I have taught in conjunction with "Agrippa").
Just as "Tintern Abbey" rises at strategic moments above
any particular "picture of the mind" to offer universal
insight, so "Agrippa" frames its particular snapshots
within an intuition of the universal. But the difference
is that universality for Wordsworth was the organic harmony
of nature--"A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking
things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through
all things"--whereas for the poet of the cyberage it is
"the mechanism."
In the background of "Agrippa" stands the mechanism of
"Papa's Mill 1919." (Compare John
Constable, the English Romantic painter, whose best
work was set in the landscape of the Stour River valley
dominated by his father's mills.) And in the foreground--like
highlights or lens flares over a picture--are the mechanisms
of the camera and the gun. The camera appears in the poem
as
The mechanism: stamped black tin,
Leatherette over cardboard, bits of boxwood,
A lens
The shutter falls
Forever
Dividing that from this.
And the gun, which stands to Gibson as the Stolen Boat
in The Prelude to Wordsworth, brings Gibson into
absolute communion with mechanism:
The gun lay on the dusty carpet.
Returning in utter awe I took it so carefully up
That the second shot, equally unintended,
notched the hardwood
bannister and brought
a strange bright smell
of ancient sap to life
in a beam of dusty
sunlight.
Absolutely alone
in awareness of the
mechanism.
(The setting of Gibson's boy-and-gun romance in the U.S.
South makes the gun episodes of the poem an interesting
teaching companion to William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses,
where Ike McCaslin--another late Romantic--must lay down
his gun and other technology in order to see the bear
and deer of nature direct.)
Perhaps even more compelling than Gibson's meditation
on "mechanism," however, is his poem's practice
of mechanism. The poem was published in electronic form
on a diskette embedded within an avant-garde, limited-run
artist's "book" with etchings by Dennis Ashbaugh. The
file on the diskette was self-encrypting so that it could
only be read once on the screen, after which it disappeared.
"Agrippa," in short, may be thematically about
mechanisms that memorize (like the camera), but it is
mechanically about the ephemerality of mechanical
memory (and, by extension, of frail human memory as itself
the predecessor mechanism).
The poem's conditions of publication, however, mean that
it is difficult if not impossible to verify its authoritative
text or, for that matter, even the fact that the full
book with engravings ever appeared. There are myriad copies
of the poem on the Internet, but none are legitimate or
authoritative. All are by definition illegitimate offspring
of the read-once-only original.
For fuller discussion of the publication of the poem,
see Peter Schwenger, "Agrippa, or, The Apocalyptic Book,"
South Atlantic Quarterly 92 (1994): 617-26. See
also this online note.
In addition, there are resources on Gibson
and Cyperpunk.
Considered purely as a text poem, "Agrippa" is on balance
powerful and successful, though it has some faults (especially
the spectacularly jejune and jarring lines, "Like the
first time you put your mouth / on a woman," at the climax
of the gun episode). For a curricular project like Early
Modern Center, however, which makes the case that both
the tools and themes (or media and content) of literature
are more splendid when aware of each other, "Agrippa"
is the perfect pedagogical mechanism. |
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