Literature in English II: 1750 to the Present

Catalog description

Since the Industrial Revolution, new technologies have continuously — sometimes explosively — transformed our senses of selfhood and identity, privacy and community, imagination and the real. From the telephone to the LLM, these technologies have both transmuted and fed upon our speech, writing, and language. But, as this survey of modern literatures in English will explore, writing has also itself been a powerful and enduring technology — one through which we shape thought, retrieve it from the past, send it to the future, and travel in space. Surveying 250 years of writing in English, we will ask how writing both caused and responded to radical changes in the meaning of the human, and how it represented, contested, or collaborated with the long-burning explosion of new media — from the telegraph to the television, from notebooks to typewriters, radio to computers. (ENGL-PST)