Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life
Mark Goble
Columbia University Press (November 9, 2010)
Narrative & the Novel20th- and 21st-Century American
20th- and 21st-Century British
This is critical reading, thinking, and writing of the highest order. It is a book of many pleasures, in which an earlier and more self-serious period in literary history is read with a foreknowledge of the phantasmagoria of contemporary media culture. The authors treated emerge as even more interesting figures than we knew them to be. A major achievement of scholarship on American literary modernism. (Mark McGurl, University of California, Los Angeles, author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing )
Beautiful Circuits is a fascinating account of modernist literary aesthetics, one that follows the modernist preoccupation with form to an inventive conclusion: a preoccupation with media. Beautifully written and subtly argued, Mark Goble succeeds in showing works by Gertrude Stein, James Agee, and others as so many different nodes within a modernist obsession with communication, mediation, and its intimacies. (Lisa Gitelman, New York University, author of Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture )
