Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

The study of selected works of late seventeenth century and eighteenth century literature. May include some writing from outside Britain, and may be organized by various critical issues or approaches.

COURSE DETAILS:

Wiring The World Before Facebook: Old And New Media In The Eighteenth Century

Presidential tweets. Facebook live. VR films. The media landscape is changing around us, with digital media offering more technical opportunities and serious ethical challenges every day. As we grapple with the implications of these changes, it is useful to consider that we are not the only ones who have struggled to come to terms with the effects of media change on individuals and on society in general. A little over 300 years ago, citizens of Britain also found themselves experiencing a brave new media world as the “new” medium -- in this case, print -- began to play a more dominant and more pervasive role in the mediascape than ever before, "wiring" them, as it were, to life beyond their neighbourhoods and even beyond their nation. In the words of Clifford Siskin and William Warner, “print” came to take “center stage” within an “already existing media ecology of voice, sound, image, and manuscript writing” in the early eighteenth century. In this course, we will go back in time in order to study the effects of media change. We will explore a range of early eighteenth-century works, attempting to understand how “new” (print) media transformed attitudes to traditional (oral and manuscript) media, but also how those traditional media shaped how people comprehended their relationship to the new medium. This course will also include media "labs" as we learn about eighteenth-century media (song, letters and letter-press printing) through engaging in the physical processes of singing, writing with quill pens and printing. 

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

In this course, you will be introduced to a variety of eighteenth-century texts and their contexts. You also will gain an understanding of the affordances of eighteenth-century media. In addition to learning to "close read" eighteenth-century texts, you will learn how to work with primary materials from the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) and the Eighteenth-Century Media Online (EMO) resources as well as reading and analyzing critical articles on the history of media. You will also engage with eighteenth-century media materially through participating in a lab for each of the three modules: listening to and singing ballads for the module on Oral Culture; handwriting with quill pens for the module on Manuscript Culture; and experimenting with letter-press printing for the module on Print Culture. You will come away with a new appreciation for the complexity of mediation in the past – and a deeper perspective on our relationship with media in the present. This class will also develop your critical thinking, oral presentation and writing skills.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

RECOMMENDED READING: