Jammed Machines: The Novel in the Longue Durée of Cybernetics

This dissertation attempts to trace the effects of media on literary production and literary critical discourse; in particular, on the novel. It does so not on the grounds that the novel absorbs forms from, responds to, or reacts against the proliferation of media, but takes a rather different approach. I argue instead that the encounter between literature and media is the defining constraint of the novel; the entanglement of the cultural practices of reading and writing and media technologies accounts for the adjudication of what can count as literature during the high period of the (predominantly Anglophone) novel in the second half of the nineteenth century through its modernist instantiation in the early twentieth. This account, then, vehemently rejects the language of “reaction” or “reflection” so often appended to accounts of (predominantly) modernist literary dispositions toward the late nineteenth and early twentieth century media and technological milieu. Instead I argue, drawing heavily on a combination of methodological approaches –– from what is sometimes called “media philosophy” or Kulturtechniken to deconstruction to Marxism –– that the development of the novel passes through the cultural techniques associated with alphabetic literacy which are also the discursive and technical conditions of not just possibility but indeed necessity of the development of media. I trace this history episodically, focusing on critical moments of transformation in both the practices and technologies of writing (broadly understood) and their reflection in exemplary literary texts.