Literature and the Telephone explores the ways that the telephone taps
into the operations of reading and writing, opening up our understanding
of how, where and why literary communication takes place.
Addressing the telephone's complex, multiple and mutating functions, and
drawing on recent work by writers and thinkers including Sara Ahmed,
Stacy Alaimo, Judith Butler, Nicholas Royle and Eyal Weizman, this open
access book considers the linguistic, technical and conceptual
disruptions of the literary telephone as well as the poetic and
political possibilities of the exchange.
Focusing on the telephonic effects of post-war writing by authors such
as Mourid Barghouti, Caroline Bergvall, Tom Raworth, Muriel Spark, Ali
Smith and Rita Wong, Sarah Jackson proposes that the uncanny logic of
the telephone, and its capacity for ordering and disordering the text,
speaks to some of the most urgent concerns of our era.
Examining topics ranging from surveillance and migration to warfare and
electronic waste, Jackson argues that the literary telephone offers new
ways of conceiving ethical and creative technological futures, as well
as different modes of reading, writing and listening across cultures.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC
BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was
funded by Nottingham Trent University.
