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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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