BOOK NEWS: Examining the literary telephone

Literature and the Telephone: Conversations on Poetics, Politics and Place

BY SARAH JACKSON 

Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

ISBN: 9781350259607

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/literature-and-the-telephone-9781350259607/

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.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

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.

"Not just a book about telephony and literature, but a book about how the telephone has active contributed to the deconstruction of literature and culture, while steadily working to deconstruction our own lives. Jackson acts as a deft operator of a complex interational switchboard, taking us through the developments of this process of deconstruction, by way of an exciting range of texts by twentieth-century and twenty-first-century novelists, poets, and theorists." --Nicoletta Asciuto, University of York

"Jackson's elegant study reconceptualizes the relationship between reading, writing, listening, and calling, with an awareness of the wider ethical, political, and spatial possibilities of the exchange, In the true spiring of pioneering work like Nicholas Royle's Telepathy and Literature and Avital Ronell's Telephone Book, it is a must-read for anyone fascinated by the uncanny ramifications between the literary and the tele-technological." --Laurent Milesi, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Sarah Jackson is associate professor in modern and contemporary writing at Nottingham Trent University, UK. She is a BBC New Generation Thinker (2016), AHRC Leadership Fellow (2018-­2020) and NTU VC Outstanding Researcher (2017). Her publications include Tactile Poetics (2015), Pelt (2012), and a special issue of parallax on the ‘unidentifiable literary object’ (2019).