Literature and the Telephone

Constituting the first major study of the relationship between literature and telephony from 1945 to the present day, this book examines the impact of the telephone’s complex, multiple and mutating functions on transcultural communication systems. 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.