Conversations with W. S. Merwin is the first collection of interviews with former United States Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin (b. 1927). Spanning almost six decades of conversations, the collection touches on such topics as Merwin's early influences (Robert Graves and Ezra Pound), his location within the twin poles of Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, his extraordinary work as a translator, as well as his decades-long interest in environmental conservation. Anticipating the current sustainability movement and the debates surrounding major and minor literatures, Merwin was, and still is, a visionary. At age eighty-eight, he is among the most distinguished poets, translators, and thinkers in the United States. A major link between the period of literary modernism and its contemporary extensions, Merwin has been a force in American letters for many decades, and his translations from the Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, and other languages, have earned him unanimous praise and admiration. Merwin also wrote at the forefront of literature's environmental advocacy and early on articulated concerns about ecology and sustainability. Now, for the first time, Conversations with W. S. Merwin offers insight into the various dimensions of Merwin's thought by treating his interviews as a self-standing category in his oeuvre. More than casual narratives that interpret the occasional poem or relay an occasional experience, they afford literary and cultural historians a view into the larger through-lines of Merwin's thinking.

This book gathers a suite of newly commissioned, original essays on the work of E. L. Doctorow. It reframes our understanding of his oeuvre by engaging it in entirety, including the significant accomplishments of the late period. The book features chapters by prominent fiction writers and friends of Doctorow, such as Don DeLillo, Victor Navasky and Jennifer Egan, and explores Doctorow's novels and his diverse preoccupations: corporate and religious power, cognitive science and media culture.

Operation Valhalla collects eighteen texts by German media theorist Friedrich Kittler on the close connections between war and media technology. In these essays, public lectures, interviews, literary analyses, and autobiographical musings, Kittler outlines how war has been a central driver of media's evolution, from Prussia's wars against Napoleon to the so-called War on Terror. Covering an eclectic array of topics, he charts the intertwined military and theatrical histories of the searchlight and the stage lamp, traces the microprocessor's genealogy back to the tank, shows how rapid-fire guns brought about new standards for optics and acoustics, and reads Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to upset established claims about the relationship between war, technology, and history in the twentieth century. Throughout, Operation Valhalla foregrounds the outsize role of war in media history as well as Kittler's importance as a daring and original thinker.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the hegemony of the printed word was shattered by the arrival of new media technologies that offered novel ways of communicating and storing data. Previously, writing had operated by way of symbolic mediation--all data had to pass through the needle's eye of the written signifier--but phonography, photography, and cinematography stored physical effects of the real in the shape of sound waves and light. The entire question of referentiality had to be recast in light of these new media technologies; in addition, the use of the typewriter changed the perception of writing from that of a unique expression of a literate individual to that of a sequence of naked material signifiers.
Part technological history of the emergent new media in the late nineteenth century, part theoretical discussion of the responses to these media--including texts by Rilke, Kafka, and Heidegger, as well as elaborations by Edison, Bell, Turing, and other innovators--"Gramophone, Film, Typewriter" analyzes this momentous shift using insights from the work of Foucault, Lacan, and McLuhan. Fusing discourse analysis, structuralist psychoanalysis, and media theory, the author adds a vital historical dimension to the current debates over the relationship between electronic literacy and poststructuralism, and the extent to which we are constituted by our technologies. The book ties the establishment of new discursive practices to the introduction of new media technologies, and it shows how both determine the ways in which psychoanalysis conceives of the psychic apparatus in terms of information machines.
"Gramophone, Film, Typewriter" is, among other things, a continuation as well as a detailed elaboration of the second part of the author's "Discourse Networks, 1800/1900" (Stanford, 1990). As such, it bridges the gap between Kittler's discourse analysis of the 1980's and his increasingly computer-oriented work of the 1990's.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the hegemony of the printed word was shattered by the arrival of new media technologies that offered novel ways of communicating and storing data. Previously, writing had operated by way of symbolic mediation--all data had to pass through the needle's eye of the written signifier--but phonography, photography, and cinematography stored physical effects of the real in the shape of sound waves and light. The entire question of referentiality had to be recast in light of these new media technologies; in addition, the use of the typewriter changed the perception of writing from that of a unique expression of a literate individual to that of a sequence of naked material signifiers.
Part technological history of the emergent new media in the late nineteenth century, part theoretical discussion of the responses to these media--including texts by Rilke, Kafka, and Heidegger, as well as elaborations by Edison, Bell, Turing, and other innovators--"Gramophone, Film, Typewriter" analyzes this momentous shift using insights from the work of Foucault, Lacan, and McLuhan. Fusing discourse analysis, structuralist psychoanalysis, and media theory, the author adds a vital historical dimension to the current debates over the relationship between electronic literacy and poststructuralism, and the extent to which we are constituted by our technologies. The book ties the establishment of new discursive practices to the introduction of new media technologies, and it shows how both determine the ways in which psychoanalysis conceives of the psychic apparatus in terms of information machines.
"Gramophone, Film, Typewriter" is, among other things, a continuation as well as a detailed elaboration of the second part of the author's "Discourse Networks, 1800/1900" (Stanford, 1990). As such, it bridges the gap between Kittler's discourse analysis of the 1980's and his increasingly computer-oriented work of the 1990's.

Showcases the life-work of one of America's greatest contemporary novelists Essays written by an international set of scholars Contributions by prominent fiction writers and friends of Doctorow: Don DeLillo, Victor Navasky, and Jennifer Egan Pays particular attention to the extraordinary novels of Doctorow in the last 20 years, including The Waterworks, City of God, and a set of his recent preoccupations: corporate and religious power, cognitive science, and media culture This book gathers a suite of newly commissioned, original essays on the work of E. L. Doctorow. It reframes our understanding of his oeuvre by engaging it in entirety, including the significant accomplishments of the late period. The book features chapters by prominent fiction writers and friends of Doctorow, such as Don DeLillo, Victor Navasky and Jennifer Egan and explores Doctorow's novels and his diverse preoccupations: corporate and religious power, cognitive science and media culture.

The convergence of twentieth-century narrative and technology is one of the most important developments in current literary study. Roughly a decade after the founding of the Society for Literature and Science, and after the appearance of such influential books as Kathleen Woodward's Culture of Information and William Paulson's Noise of Culture, Joseph Tabbi and Michael Wutz have edited a landmark volume that seeks to summarize this still-emerging field. Through the essays and the wide-ranging overview provided by the editors' introduction, Reading Matters shows how these theoretical concerns can contribute to the practical study of narrative, and it helps to make the field far more accessible to students and other serious readers of fiction.

The twelve original essays, published here for the first time, are the work of distinguished scholar-critics on both sides of the Atlantic. They cover the range of contemporary literature, from the canonical novels of high modernism and postmodernism through subjects only recently put on the academic agenda, such as cyberpunk and hypertext fiction.

In an age that has proclaimed the death of the novel many times over, the editors and contributors argue persuasively for the continued vitality of literary narrative. By responding in ingenious ways to the capabilities of other media, they assert, the novel has enlarged and redefined its territory of representation and its range of techniques and play, while maintaining its viability in the new media assemblage.

Conversations with W. S. Merwin is the first collection of interviews with former United States Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin (b. 1927). Spanning almost six decades of conversations, the collection touches on such topics as Merwin's early influences (Robert Graves and Ezra Pound), his location within the twin poles of Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, and his extraordinary work as a translator, as well as his decades-long interest in environmental conservation. Anticipating the current sustainability movement and the debates surrounding major and minor literatures, Merwin was, and still is, a visionary. At age eighty-eight, he is among the most distinguished poets, translators, and thinkers in the United States. A major link between the period of literary modernism and its contemporary extensions, Merwin has been a force in American letters for many decades, and his translations from the Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, and other languages have earned him unanimous praise and admiration. Merwin also wrote at the forefront of literature's environmental advocacy and early on articulated concerns about ecology and sustainability. Conversations with W. S. Merwin offers insight into the various dimensions of Merwin's thought by treating his interviews as a self-standing category in his oeuvre. More than casual narratives that interpret the occasional poem or relay an occasional experience, they afford literary and cultural historians a view into the larger throughlines of Merwin's thinking.

Operation Valhalla collects eighteen texts by German media theorist Friedrich Kittler on the close connections between war and media technology. In these essays, public lectures, interviews, literary analyses, and autobiographical musings, Kittler outlines how war has been a central driver of media's evolution, from Prussia's wars against Napoleon to the so-called War on Terror. Covering an eclectic array of topics, he charts the intertwined military and theatrical histories of the searchlight and the stage lamp, traces the microprocessor's genealogy back to the tank, shows how rapid-fire guns brought about new standards for optics and acoustics, and reads Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to upset established claims about the relationship between war, technology, and history in the twentieth century. Throughout, Operation Valhalla foregrounds the outsize role of war in media history as well as Kittler's importance as a daring and original thinker.