STS 200D / ENG 184H TextTechnologies: A History

Autumn Quarter, 2014-15

Professor Elaine Treharnewith Abigail Droge and Dan Kim

Education Building 334, T/Th 3.15-4.30pm

Overview

What technologies have historically been used to record and transmit human experience and cultural memory across time and space?In this class, we’ll study writing, image, sound, and byte, examining all forms of textemployed to communicate and represent thought and ideas. Writers including Walter Benjamin, Walter Ong, Theodore Adorno and Alberto Manguel will cast light on our work on cave painting, inscription, graffiti, tattoo,and manuscript, print, film, recording, and digital technologies.

Course Plan

Beginning with cave painting, carving, cuneiform, hieroglyph, and other early textual innovations, this course will survey the history of writing, image, sound, and byte, all employed to create, communicate and commemorate.

The course will focus on the recording of language, remembrance and ideas explicating significant themes seen throughout history; these include censorship, propaganda, authenticity, apocalypticism, technophobia, reader response, democratization and authority. We shall learn about the production, transmission and reception of tablet technology, the scroll, the manuscript codex and handmade book, the machine-made book, newspapers and ephemera; and we shall investigate the emergence of the phonograph and photograph, film, radio, television and digital multimedia. We’ll examine the impact of these various text technologies on their users, and try to draw out similarities and differences in our cultural and intellectual responses to evolving technologies.

Students will become acquainted with the technologies that made various forms of text possible, but they will also explore the historical, social, and institutional conditions that are both facilitated and reflected by the production of text in its broadest sense. We shall use a number of case studies from each major technology, accompanied by foundational theoretical writings and, on occasion, major textual examples.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the module students will have attained:

  • a knowledge of, and ability to describe and identify, the fundamental processes of textual production over the last three millennia;
  • a sound awareness of the major theoretical features of textual production from the inscribing of stone to the writing of blogs;
  • the ability to provide an overview of the culturally-specific impact of text technologies;
  • a developing sense of the distinctive and shared trends in the emergence of text technologies.

Course Texts:

Most material for this course will be provided in the Text Technologies Coursebook, which will be available for purchase in the first class. Supplementary readings will be available online.

Grading

Letter (ABCD/NP)

Course type

Seminar plus workshops

Assessment

Research paper, quizzes, presentation, small group exercises (necessitating, in some weeks, a group meeting of one hour per week outside class time)

Students with Documented Disabilities

Students who may need an academic accommodation based on the impact of a disability must initiate the request with the Office of AccessibleEducation (OAE). Professional staff will evaluate the request with required documentation, recommend reasonable accommodations, andprepare an Accommodation Letter for faculty dated in the current quarter in which the request is being made. Students should contact the OAE assoon as possible since timely notice is needed to coordinate accommodations. The OAE is located at 563 Salvatierra Walk (phone: 723-1066,URL:

Honor Code

The Honor Code is the University's statement on academic integrity written by students in 1921. It articulates University expectations of studentsand faculty in establishing and maintaining the highest standards in academic work:

The Honor Code is an undertaking of the students, individually and collectively:

1.that they will not give or receive aid in examinations; that they will not give or receive unpermitted aid in class work, in the preparation ofreports, or in any other work that is to be used by the instructor as the basis of grading;

2.that they will do their share and take an active part in seeing to it that others as well as themselves uphold the spirit and letter of the HonorCode.

3.The faculty on its part manifests its confidence in the honor of its students by refraining from proctoring examinations and from takingunusual and unreasonable precautions to prevent the forms of dishonesty mentioned above. The faculty will also avoid, as far as practicable,academic procedures that create temptations to violate the Honor Code.

4. While the faculty alone has the right and obligation to set academic requirements, the students and faculty will work together to establishoptimal conditions for honorable academic work.