Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life

by Mark Goble

Mark Goble revisits the aesthetics of modernism in the early twentieth century, when new modes of communication made the experience of technology an occasion for profound experimentation and reflection. Goble shows how the assimilation of such old media technologies as the telegraph, telephone, and phonograph inspired fantasies of connection that informed a commitment to the materiality of artistic mediums. Describing how relationships made possible "by" technology became more powerfully experienced "with" technology, Goble explores a modernist fetish for media that shows no signs of abating. The mediated life puts technology into communication with a series of shifts in how Americans conceived the mechanics and meanings of their connections to one another, to the world, and to their own modernity. Considering texts by Henry James, Gertrude Stein, James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Agee, and William Carlos Williams, alongside film, painting, music, and popular culture, "Beautiful Circuits" explores American modernism as it was shaped by a response to high technology and an attempt to change how literature itself could communicate.

391 pages, ebook

First published August 20, 2010