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Item Details
| Title:
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RELAYS
LITERATURE AS AN EPOCH OF THE POSTAL SYSTEM |
| By: |
Bernhard Siegert, Kevin Repp (Trans) |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| List price:
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£29.99 |
| Our price: |
£25.49 |
| Discount: |
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| You save:
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£4.50 |
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| ISBN 10: |
0804732388 |
| ISBN 13: |
9780804732383 |
| Availability: |
Usually dispatched within 1-3 weeks.
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| Stock: |
Currently 0 available |
| Publisher: |
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS |
| Pub. date: |
1 June, 1999 |
| Series: |
Writing Science |
| Pages: |
340 |
| Translated from: |
German |
| Description: |
This book examines how one aspect of the social and technological situation of literature-namely, the postal system as a mode of transmission-determined how literature was produced and what was produced within literature. |
| Synopsis: |
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-fiancee, 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. |
| Publication: |
US |
| Imprint: |
Stanford University Press |
| Returns: |
Returnable |
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