Mode Manuscripts and the Pre-History of Digital Humanities:Paper Processors (Material Modeisms)

by: Alex Christie (Author)

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Edition: 2024th

Publication Date: 2024/6/2

Language: English

Print Length: 208 pages

ISBN-10: 3031559991

ISBN-13: 9783031559990

Book Description

While text processing is often associated with the digital humanities, it is still seen as worlds apart from literary modeism and its aesthetic preoccupations. This book upsets that narrative. Examining literary manuscripts from some of the twentieth century's best-known and lesser-known novelists, from Marcel Proust to Mina Loy, Alex Christie reveals where authors experimented with proto-digital writing methods by hand. Instead of looking to computers as sources of inspiration, the authors discussed tued to twentieth-century media for their ability to reveal new layers of the material world. From analog fantasies of contacting the dead to digital anxieties of invisible information, the aesthetic ambitions of these novels can be traced back to their author's interest in emerging media devices and their technical operation. To capture the magic of such devices through writing, these authors devised radical methods for generating literary text, anticipating today's digital humanities.

About the Author

While text processing is often associated with the digital humanities, it is still seen as worlds apart from literary modeism and its aesthetic preoccupations. This book upsets that narrative. Examining literary manuscripts from some of the twentieth century's best-known and lesser-known novelists, from Marcel Proust to Mina Loy, Alex Christie reveals where authors experimented with proto-digital writing methods by hand. Instead of looking to computers as sources of inspiration, the authors discussed tued to twentieth-century media for their ability to reveal new layers of the material world. From analog fantasies of contacting the dead to digital anxieties of invisible information, the aesthetic ambitions of these novels can be traced back to their author's interest in emerging media devices and their technical operation. To capture the magic of such devices through writing, these authors devised radical methods for generating literary text, anticipating today's digital humanities.