Vous voulez être sûr que vos cadeaux seront sous le sapin de Noël à temps? Nos magasins vous accueillent à bras ouverts. La plupart de nos magasins sont ouverts également les dimanches, vous pouvez vérifier les heures d'ouvertures sur notre site.
- Retrait gratuit dans votre magasin Club
- 7.000.000 titres dans notre catalogue
- Payer en toute sécurité
- Toujours un magasin près de chez vous
Vous voulez être sûr que vos cadeaux seront sous le sapin de Noël à temps? Nos magasins vous accueillent à bras ouverts. La plupart de nos magasins sont ouverts également les dimanches, vous pouvez vérifier les heures d'ouvertures sur notre site.
- Retrait gratuit dans votre magasin Club
- 7.000.0000 titres dans notre catalogue
- Payer en toute sécurité
- Toujours un magasin près de chez vous
Description
This book examines how one aspect of the social and technological situation of literature--namely, the postal system--determined how literature was produced and what was produced within literature. Language itself has the structure of a relay, where what is transmitted depends on a prior withholding. The social arrangements and technologies for achieving this transmission thus have had a particularly powerful impact on the imagination of literature as a medium.
The book has three parts. The first part reconstructs the postal conditions of classic and Romantic literature: the invention of postage in the seventeenth century, which transformed the postal system into a service meant to be used by the population (instead of by the prince alone); the sexualization of letter writing, which was introduced in the middle of the eighteenth century and changed the reading of a letter into an interpretation of intimate confessions of the soul; and Goethe's turning of this new ontology of the letter into a logistics of literature whereby literary authorship was constructed by means of postal logistics, with the precision of engineering.
The second part analyzes nineteenth-century postal innovations that facilitated communication through letters and examines how literary works were able to live off such communication. These innovations included the reform of the post office; the invention of the postage stamp; the Universal Postal Union, which subjected letter writing to an economy of materials and uniform standards; and the telegraph and the telephone, which surpassed literature in terms of speed, economy, and analog-signal processing.
In the third part, on the basis of a close reading of Franz Kafka's letters to his typist-fiancée, the author demonstrates how postal logistics of love and authorship have worked in the era of modern postal systems and technical media. Kafka's correspondence is deciphered as a "war of nerves" waged by means of all available techniques and conditions of transmission.
Spécifications
Parties prenantes
- Auteur(s) :
- Editeur:
Contenu
- Nombre de pages :
- 340
- Langue:
- Anglais
- Collection :
Caractéristiques
- EAN:
- 9780804732383
- Date de parution :
- 01-06-99
- Format:
- Livre broché
- Format numérique:
- Trade paperback (VS)
- Dimensions :
- 152 mm x 228 mm
- Poids :
- 476 g
