Media Fictions

Catalog description

This course explores modern fiction from throughout the Americas that reflects on and imagines media technologies. We will consider the influence of electric media on late nineteenth-century print culture through readings of Jose Marti's "The Glossograph" and Henry James's "In the Cage." We will see fiction engage with the potentiality of still and moving images in Maria Cristina Mena's "The Gold Vanity Set" and Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. We will grapple with varying dreams and nightmares of sound and inscription envisioned in texts by T.S Eliot, Langston Hughes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Felisberto Hernandez, and Jorge Luis Borges. Considering these and other texts as sites in which writers imagined the possibilities of modern media, we wilt contemplate the diversity and complexity of modernism in the Americas and situate literature in relation to media history. Texts originally written in Spanish with be available in translation.