Spring 2006; Monday 4-6:30; Ridgley Hall 107

Instructors:

David Snyder - dsnyder@artsci.wustl.edu
Office: Prince 102 (x9076)
Hours: Monday, 2-4 or by appointment

Leila Wice - wice@wustl.edu
Office: Prince 234 (x8653)
Hours: Tuesday, 2-3:30 or by appointment

Matt Wisnioski - mwisnios@artsci.wustl.edu
Office: Prince 209 (x5920)
Hours: Monday, 2-3; Tuesday, 11-12 or by appointment

Steven Zwicker - szwicker@artsci.wustl.edu
Office: Duncker 206
Hours: Monday and Wednesday, 3-4 or by appointment

Course Description: "The Agency of Things" will be a semester-long engagement with the ways in which the study of material culture contributes to our understanding of history, aesthetics, and social practice. We will explore problems in fields such as art, architecture, film, science, technology, the theater, and the history of the book. The workshop will consist of two components: the discussion of a set of core texts in material culture and the presentation of works in progress by Mellon postdoctoral fellows and faculty. The workshop can be taken as a course for credit by advanced undergraduates and graduate students, or it may be audited.

Requirements: In addition to completing the reading and actively participating in seminar, students will be responsible for brief, ungraded reaction papers (one typed page). Over the course of the semester each participant will write four reactions, picking and choosing which weeks are most convenient. Reaction papers are a means of initiating conversation: after writing you will come to seminar with something to offer the discussion and you will better understand other members’ comments.

The major written product of the course will be a research project on a “thing” of the student’s choice (a rare book, a piece of technology, an artwork, a building, etc.). You may write about anything as long as you can gain access to that artifact. At various moments over the course of the semester, students while have the opportunity to present to the class and gain feedback on their work-in-progress. The project is to be submitted to the main office of the Department English Department, 116 Dunker Hall, in four copies by Monday, May 8 at noon.

Readings: All required readings will be available on reserve in Olin library, for purchase at the campus bookstore, or on the Telesis course website. The following texts can be purchased at the bookstore:

Bruno Latour, Aramis, or Love of Technology. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

Mikael Hård and Andrew Jamison, eds., The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).

Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).

Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

Robert Darnton, Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996).

Peter Kornicki, The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001).

Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light, Theses on the Photography of History. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Course Schedule

Week One Introduction / January 23

Alison J. Clarke, ”Tupperware: Product as Social Relation,” in Ann Smart Martin and J. Richie Garrison, eds., American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field (Winterthur, DE: Henry Francis Du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1997), 225-251. (.pdf file available via telesis course website)

Part I—Do Artifacts Have Politics? / Matt Wisnioski

This section addresses the history of modern technology and the material and intellectual culture of engineering. Its primary aim is to investigate the connections between the workings of technology and the beliefs of those who design technology. In the first session we will examine scholarly work on complex technological projects as they are conceived, developed, and implemented. The central case study for this session is a “failed” mass transportation system and the attempt to determine who, if anyone, was responsible for its demise. In the second session we will shift our gaze to the construction of discursive meanings of “technology” in order to ask how scholars, professionals, politicians, and nations imagined the agency of technology in the process of social change. We will interrogate the usefulness of keyword analyses and other tools of intellectual history in discerning conceptions of technology’s agency. In the final session, we will explore the connections between ideological beliefs about technology and the design of technologies themselves. In addition to readings that address this conjunction of things and beliefs, I will present a case study of collaborations between avant-garde artists and engineers in the 1960s that attempted to restore progressive value to technology by drawing upon the arts and social theory to create “human” spaces for the creation of new technologies.

Week Two Designing Technology / January 30

• Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts have Politics,” Daedalus 109 (1980): 121-136.
• Bruno Latour, Aramis, or Love of Technology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

Week Three Finding Meaning in Technology / February 6

• Mikael Hård and Andrew Jamison, eds. The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology: Discourses on Modernity, 1900-1939 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), Chapters 1, 4, 8, 9.
• Ruth Oldenziel, “Unsettled Discourses,” in Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), 19-50.
• Michael Thad Allen, “Modernity, the Holocaust, and Machines without History,” in Technologies of Power, Michael Thad Allen and Gabrielle Hecht, eds., (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 175-214.
• William F. Ogburn, You and Machines (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1934).

Week Four Engineers and Technological Politics / February 13

• Everett Mendelsohn, “The Politics of Pessimism: Science and Technology Circa 1968,” in Technology, Pessimism, and Postmodernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 151-173.
• Lewis Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” Technology and Culture Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter, 1964), 1-8.
• K.G. Pontus Hultén, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 6-13, 168-171, 198-207.
• Matthew Wisnioski, “Existential Pleasures: Engineers, Artists, and the Human Value of Technology”

Part II—Texts and Books, Ideas and Events / Steven Zwicker

This section introduces some of the scholarly practices known as the History of the Book and the History of Reading. For a long time now students of literature have tried to understand literature's importance and influence by asking--more and less naively--after literature's position in social and imaginative life. Such questions had once been addressed by Marxist literary criticism, which theorized relations between economic and social life and the production of literature. But few critics, Marxist or otherwise, have addressed the consumption of literature or asked how literature influences not only the production of other literature but the production of the passions and ideas and acts of its consumers. This set of difficult and fascinating questions has come to define the aims of the History of the Book and the History of Reading as these disciplines (or perhaps 'inter-disciplines') have recently been practiced. We will sample some of these histories' broad schemes and some of its detailed case studies in the work of Roger Chartier, Carlo Ginzburg and Robert Darnton. All three are concerned with the ways in which texts create ideas, but they work from the materialist premise that before we can understand how texts create ideas we must understand how such texts become books, how such books are circulated and acquired, and, most importantly, how such books are read. 'The agency of things' might then been seen as perfectly articulated by the study of texts as books and the consideration of ideas as events.

Week Five What is the History of Books and the History of Reading / February 20

• Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. (Stanford, 1994).
• Robert Darnton, “What is the History of Books?” from The Kiss of Lamourette. (New York, 1990).
• Michel de Certeau, “Reading as Poaching,” from The Practice of Everyday Life. (Berkeley, 1988).

Week Six Reading With and Against the Grain / February 27

• Hans Robert Jauss, from Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. (Minneapolis, 1982).
• Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms. (Baltimore, 1980).

Week Seven Ideas as Events / March 3

• Robert Darnton, Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. (New York, 1996).
• Steven Zwicker: “Was there such a thing as Restoration Literature?” with response from Derek Hirst.

Part III—Word, Image, Object / Leila Wice

In this section we will continue to build on considerations of the history of the book in early-modern Europe by looking to East Asia, bearing in mind not only the materiality of text, but also the textuality of the material world, given the multiple possibilities for reading objects. We will begin by surveying some of the particularities that arise from differences in writing systems and dominant media, in particular the tendency in China and Japan for images and words to be read together and in relation to each other. During week nine we will consider an example of ways of reading affecting and being affected by changing physical realities of texts, the transformations of multi-colored woodblock printing in nineteenth-century Japan. We will focus on a particular case of the political consequences of overlapping genres of multicolor woodblock prints and newspapers. Next we will turn to twentieth-century appropriations of East Asian print culture by literary and visual artists, including Ezra Pound, Roland Barthes, Laurie Anderson and Xu Bing. We will conclude with meditations on the aftermath East Asian print culture resulting from the impact of computers on publishing.

Week Eight The History of the Book in East Asia / March 20

• Peter Kornicki. The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century. (Boston: Brill, 1998). Selections.
• Robert E. Hegel. Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China. (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998). Selections.
• John De Francis. “Demythifying Chinese Characters,” In The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1984). 133-159.

Week Nine Reading Material in Japan’s Long Nineteenth Century / March 27

• Susanne Formanek and Sepp Linhart. “Written Texts - Visual Texts: Woodblock-printed Media in Early Modern Japan." In Formanek and Linhart, Eds. Written Texts - Visual Texts: Woodblock-printed Media in Early Modern Japan. (Amsterdam: Hotei Publishing, 2005). 9-24.
• Meiroku Zasshi: Journal of the Japanese Enlightenment. William Reynolds Braisted trans. and ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976 [1874-1875]). 3-20, 96-101.
• Ekkehard May. "Modes of Reading Written and Visual Texts." Books and Book Illustrations in Early Modern Japan." In Formanek and Linhart, Eds. Written Texts - Visual Texts. 25-45.
• Leila Wice. “Acting out of Gender in 1870s Japan: Newspaper Prints’ Depictions of Cross-Dressing as Crime.” Response from Robert E. Hegel.

Week Ten Twentieth-Century Appropriations and Transformations / April 3

• Eric Hayot. “Pound.” In Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 1-53.
• Britta Erickson. The Art of Xu Bing: Words without Meaning, Meaning without Words. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001). 13-19, 33-57.
• Stanley K. Abe. “No Questions, No Answers: China and A Book from the Sky.” In Rey Chow, ed. Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 227-251.
• Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd. The Book & The Computer. http://www.honco.net/
• Hanzi Smatter. http://www.hanzismatter.com.

Part IV—Visual Technologies / David Snyder

One of the primary aims of this section is to investigate a feature of material culture peculiar to the modern period: the altered role of the visual artifact in the construction of meaning. By probing some of the theoretical underpinnings, operational tactics, medium-specific, and technologically engendered attributes of photography, cinema, and new media, we will shed light on the shift in the relation between space, visuality, and the modern subject. At the same time, we shall explore the competing and often contradictory representational regimes imposed by the producer, the audience, and the medium itself. In other words, drawing on examples from visual culture we will begin interrogating the relation between the “thing” and its multiple layers of signification. Central to this line of inquiry is a skepticism that raises important questions about the authenticity and presumed neutrality of the visual artifact epitomized in the notion that “seeing is believing.” Starting with an examination of photographic displays in postwar Poland that used images of wartime destruction of monuments and their postwar reconstructed forms to legitimize the socialist government as the rightful custodian of the nation, we will test some of the ways that technology (photography) and the methods of dissemination (mass publicity and museum exhibitions) influenced the Polish collective consciousness. Turning then to cinema and ‘New Media’, we will consider some of the implications that virtual visual technologies have on contemporary assessments of truth, meaning, and reality.

Week Eleven Photography / April 10

• Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” (1931).
• Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (1936).
• Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light, Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) Selections.

Week Twelve Cinema, Publicity, and New Media / April 17

• Thomas Y. Levin, "Iconology at the Movies: Panofsky's Film Theory." Yale Journal of Criticism 9.1 (1996): 27-55.
• Thomas Y. Levin, “Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of ‘Real Time’,” in CTRL-[SPACE], Thomas Y. Levin, Peter Weibel, and Ursula Frohne Editors (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002) 578-593.
• Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001) Selections.
• Joachim Sauter, “Experiencing Virtual Reality,” in Cinema and Architecture, François Penz and Maureen Thomas Editors (London: British Film Institute, 1997) 144-148.

Week Thirteen Thomas Levin lecture / April 24