While we tend to think of technology as distinctly modern, technology has shaped human culture and consciousness since our very beginnings. Indeed, technology is inseparable from the state of being human, woven into the fabric of our culture and consciousness (“teks-” means “to weave, fabricate, make”). Like the gift of fire from Prometheus, technology gives humans a seemingly god-like power to fashion our environment, each other, and, in some beliefs, the gods themselves. And, as with the story of Adam and Eve contemplating that fruit hanging on the tree of knowledge, technology has the potential for good as well as evil: it can be a weapon or a tool.
Perhaps the earliest and most universal instance of human technology is language; accordingly this seminar will focus on “technologies of the word”: the verbal, gestural, visual, and electronic forms of communication technologies that have shaped human consciousness in different historical periods and cultural formations, from cave paintings and oral epics to print literature and digital texts. Rather than merely survey the development of these technologies, this seminar will examine the historical, psychological, neurobiological, cultural, and ideological ramification of the types of technology used to transmit “the word.” A major goal of this course will be to de-center and critique the ideologies of alphabetic print literacy–termed “logocentrism” by Jacque Derrida, which he declared “nothing but the most original and powerful ethnocentrism, in the process of imposing itself upon the world”–and which still persists in informing our concept of language today. A central focus, therefore, will be on how the printing press and the rise of popular literacy enabled capitalism, colonialism–and the novel. Another, equally important focus, however, will be on alternative concepts of “the word” as performance rather than object, which may be exemplified in indigenous oral traditions, “spoken word” poetry, “cyber-narratives,” etc. This course fulfills the graduate requirement for a “pre-1700” course.
Student Learning Outcomes: In this seminar you will
- Gain an understanding and appreciation for the various ways in which the verbal, gestural, visual, and electronic forms of communication technologies that have shaped human consciousness in different historical periods and cultural formations
- Apply the insights gained to your own area of scholarly interest
- Improve your research skills and strategies for academic writing
- Develop your professional abilities in discussion leading and formal academic presentations
MAJOR TEXT
Walter Ong, The Technologizing of the Word
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe
PRIMARY WORKS
All, or substantial portions of
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Homer, The Iliad
Virgil, The Aeneid
Beowulf
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Mark. Z. Danielweski, Only Revolutions: A Novel
Additional readings (many, many additional readings) will be posted on Laulima
Major Requirements
- One-page responses to readings
- Discussion leading on readings
- Reports and presentations on related topics or texts
- Research project on a topic related to your interests, which might include contemporary spoken word poetry, Pacific and Hawaiian literatures (oral and written); vernacular publications in other languages and locations; analysis/comparison of other systems, such as American Sign Language or logographic scripts; digital media or a specific digital work, etc. The research project will consist of:
- Presenting a selected article or excerpt from book related to research for class to read and respond to.
- Writing a 16-18 page research paper (with related assignments, such as working and annotated bibliography, outline, etc.).
- Formal presentation of the paper to the class in a shorter version in the context of a conference presentation.
Reading list by unit; excerpts will be taken from longer works:
INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS TECHNOLOGY?
Genesis; versions of the Prometheus myth
CAVE ART AND THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech. (Le geste et la parole); J. David Lewis Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art; Nicholas Humphrey, “Cave Art, Autism, and the Evolution of the Human Mind”; Erich Harth, “The Emergence of Art and Language in the Human Brain.”
THEORIES OF ORALITIES AND LITERACIES; Jack Goody and Ian Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy: (1963); Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word; Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
ORAL EPICS AND ANCIENT LITERACIES; The Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer, The Iliad; Plato, Phaedrus and The Republic; Virgil, The Aeneid, Ovid Metamorphoses
Albert Lord, Singer of Tales; Gregory Nagy, Homeric Questions; Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato; Eric Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present; William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy; Rosalind Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece
THE RISE OF POPULAR LITERACY, NOVEL AND CAPITALISM; William Caxton, “Prologue to the Aeneid”; Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales; Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote; Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination; Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel; Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in its Age of Technological Reproducibility”; Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man; Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe; David R. Olsen. The World on Paper; Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800.
RETOUR: DIGITAL TEXT AND SPOKEN WORD: Mark. Z. Danielweski, Only Revolutions: A Novel; John Miles Foley, How to Read an Oral Poem. (from Homer to Slam Poetry); Gil-Scott Heron, “The Revolution Will Not be Televised”; Janet. H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace; Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees; Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. John Miles Foley, Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind