Wtrettien: Created page with "Menke, Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 (2019) Introduction: Inventing Media and Their Meanings - The Phonautograph and Nineteenth-Century Media The phonautograph and its successors were a landmark in the study of sound. But their inventor Léon Scott was no scientist or engineer. Rather, he came to imagine a machine for capturing sound because of his desire to optimize and automate the great medium of writing. As a printer and typesetter..."

2025-08-20T19:00:50Z

Created page with "Menke, Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 (2019) Introduction: Inventing Media and Their Meanings - The Phonautograph and Nineteenth-Century Media The phonautograph and its successors were a landmark in the study of sound. But their inventor Léon Scott was no scientist or engineer. Rather, he came to imagine a machine for capturing sound because of his desire to optimize and automate the great medium of writing. As a printer and typesetter..."

New page

Menke, Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 (2019)

Introduction: Inventing Media and Their Meanings - The Phonautograph and Nineteenth-Century Media

The phonautograph and its successors were a landmark in the study of sound. But their inventor Léon Scott was no scientist or engineer. Rather, he came to imagine a machine for capturing sound because of his desire to optimize and automate the great medium of writing. As a printer and typesetter in an age of industrial acceleration, Scott became obsessed with the problem of setting down words and speech as rapidly and accurately as possible.

2

In the next decade, he developed the phonautograph to explore the possibilities of a mechan- ized stenography.

2

As its name suggests, Scott hoped the phonautograph would let sound write itself. A machine for listening, his device was supposed to mimic the human ear (its collecting chamber and artiﬁcial tympanic membrane were modeled on anatomical diagrams) and then to act as an automatized hand, turning sound into sight.

4

Imagining a better stenography, Scott created the phonautograph as a form of mechanized writing that could instantly, faithfully, and durably render the contours of sound on paper.

4

Unspooled from the machine’s cylinder, ﬂattened into the shape of other docu- ments, a phonautogram could enter nineteenth-century archives oriented around the storage of paper media. Scott even set up the phonautograph to produce its output “by analogy with the familiar conventions of [European] alphabetic writing,” usually arranging the machine so that as a sheet of paper rotated on its cylinder, the stylus inscribed it from top to bottom, left to right.

4

From its technical speciﬁcations to a signiﬁcant part of its content, then, the phonautograph epitomized the assumption that even new, experimental inscription devices

4

would function as forms of writing – a testament to writing’s conceptual preeminence in an age when every new inscription technology seemed to claim a status as a something-graph that made something-grams, as the newest -graphy. But by the ﬁnal decades of the century, this assumption no longer held sway. The development of new media technologies beyond telegraphy or photography, and the prospect of continued invention and change, helped dislodge writing as the inevitable reference point and printed literature as the test case for every new medium.

5

Scott imagined a machine that could listen and write. In contrast, Edison’s great insight was to realize that patterns produced by a machine might also be read by one.

5

The First Sound group’s digital image-scans rendered a phonautogram as a set of numbers, making it available for algorithmic manipulation. Spatial marks on archived paper could now

6

become cues for the mathematical generation of sound. Place a digital ﬁle in the proper format, and an obliging computer can be made to render it as audio.

7

…this book will argue that the late nineteenth century was also a period in which developments in media and culture drove widespread discussion of technologies of communication and inscription – about how they aligned with one another and about how they mediated human experience. New inventions didn’t make print and writing obsolete. Rather, they prompted new ways of understanding various modes of writing in relation to other media.

7
Introduction: Inventing Media and Their Meanings - Media beyond Writing

As this book will argue, late nineteenth-century writers were less likely to treat new media as writing than to view print and writing in terms of newer media. Furthermore, by the s and s, authors concerned with the status and the future of print often treated some forms of writing and print as more like new media technologies than others.

8

As if following out the idea that the photograph was essentially a mode of writing, Wil- liam Henry Fox Talbot strove to become its Gutenberg, working to make photography into a technology for reproducing copies of an image on paper, as opposed to the daguerreotype’s one-of-a-kind pictures on metal. Taking this eﬀort to its logical conclusion, as early as the s, Constance Talbot worked with her husband to “print” texts via photography, chemically transferring letter-images onto paper without a press.

8

Some nineteenth-century new media seemed to arrogate certain func- tions of writing, while others seemed to create hybrids between writing and something else: the “telautograph” transmitted the movements of a writer’s pen to a stylus across the electric wi…

9

Storage, communication, reproduction: in the ﬁnal decades of the nineteenth century, new technologies broke up the functions united in writing or print. They encouraged new ways of understanding nontextual media, beyond their promises to extend, improve upon, or incorporate writing.

9

The so-called second industrial revolution of the late nineteenth cen- tury – with its systematic application of science to industrial production, its emphasis on transport and communication technologies, and its new uses for electricity – made the development, marketing, and adoption of new media almost routine. Earlier in the century, it had taken decades for media technologies such as photography or telegraphy to become familiar. But now the cycle of production, commercialization, and reﬁnement became part of the cultural understanding of new technologies. Media that had existed largely as industrial prototypes (mechanized typesetting) or scientiﬁc toys (stereoscopes) began to be more aggressively exploited, marketed, and reﬁned.

10

…ion and spread of new technologies became part of modern life; Walt Whitman and other nineteenth-century writers could “mark the spirit of invention everywhere.” Rapid innovation made it easier to think of emerging media in terms of other new technologies.

10

What’s modern about media in the late nineteenth century isn’t simply the arrival of particular new technologies but the fact that all forms of media, old and new, now enter a world in which they will converge, contrast, ally with, or distinguish themselves from others.

11

By the ﬁnal decades of the nineteenth century, media technologies appeared as part of larger systems of aﬃliation and alignment, spontaneous or lasting conﬁgurations that included forms of print.

11

…the pianola or player piano, which scrolled through a perforated paper roll to press down the piano’s keys and play music, technically resembled a Jacquard loom more closely than it did a phonograph or gramophone. Yet at the turn of the century, it came together with those quite diﬀerent audio technologies in discussions – and in United States legislation – about musical reproduction, performances, and audiences.

12
Introduction: Inventing Media and Their Meanings - Thinking about Media in the Late Nineteenth Century

But it will also focus on the things in ideas, on how material objects become scaﬀolds for human imagination and understanding.

13

The invention of new media helps account for the dynamics of late nineteenth-century literary history, but literature in turn helped to invent meanings for these media. Print literature responds to a culture mediated by multiple new technologies, sometimes presenting itself as the alternative to a world of media, sometimes identi- fying itself with that world.

14

…the late nineteenth century’s rapid invention and commercialization of new media technologies encouraged a kind of informal, heuristic sense that some print forms were more like the new nonprint media than others. For one thing, the production of periodicals tended to drive innovations in printing, with printers and publishers of books adopting new technologies more slowly. But even books could seem more medium-like when they constituted components of a workaday media system. Newspapers, serial ﬁction, and ultimately even the sturdy British three-volume novel: in the s and s, these print-forms seemed to go over to the media.

15
Introduction: Inventing Media and Their Meanings - Toward an Archaeology of Media Systems

The invention of media in the late nineteenth century supported the tendency to link them in diverse ways, to align media into systems.

17

By media systems, I mean the ways that media could be aligned in consistent relationships to one another, and the eﬀects that seemed to follow from these alignments.

17

…g references to technology or journalism in literary texts, I have approached the nexus of literature and media more broadly, seeing print and nonprint media as linked by ideas about media that were deeply bound up with changing technologies and practices.

17

What does a media system look like or sound like at the end of the nineteenth century, an era recognized for its general “fascination with systems”? How do you represent one? A system might sound abstract and general, but I’ve found that media systems are often represented in terms of highly speciﬁc images or events.

18

Writers in this era come to terms with new media and media systems by building on the critical and ideological tools at hand, so media also become matters of class, nation, gender, race, citizenship, and cultural values. As with scientiﬁc invention itself, or the work of imaginative writing, the eﬀort to understand a mediated world reveals creativity and improvisation rather than suggesting any simple techno- logical determinism.

18
Introduction: Inventing Media and Their Meanings - From Intermediality to Vernacular Media Theory

The era’s theories will most often revolve around three broad, related dialectical possibilities that emerge from its ferment of media: the development of new mass and technological media increases the distinctions between media or erodes them; it highlights the material properties of media or points to ways of transcending them; it drives a culture toward unity and convergence, or promotes conﬂict, fragmentation, or supersession.

21

Countries could be united via intercontinental telegraph cables but still divided by diﬀerent approaches to media. For that reason, this study juxtaposes the literary imaginations of media systems in Great Britain and the United States, taking advantage of the comparatist energies of a transatlantic analysis.

22
Chapter 1 A Message on All Channels: The Unification of Humanity

The discourses initiated by the Garﬁeld assassination suggest an informatic feedback loop that turned a set of events into something more: in the discourse networks of , the assassination of President Garﬁeld became an unwitting cultural reﬂection upon the logic and the psychodynamics of the late nineteenth-century media ecology.

26

Reading the Garﬁeld murder in its media ecology suggests the new power of saturation across media to evoke feelings of vicarious involvement and social unity while making a sensa- tional event seem to exceed history – to have a global and even cosmic signiﬁcance.

26
Chapter 1 A Message on All Channels: The Unification of Humanity - Sobbing Bells

Within  minutes of Garﬁeld’s death, telegraphic word had reached not only Boston but also San Fran- cisco and the small town of Seattle in the distant Washington Territory, where the bells also rang.

44

At midnight, between September  and , , Whitman’s sobbing bells have formed a bell system, a national network that not only conveys information but also conﬁrms or constitutes the unity of a “Nation” whose public discourses had been celebrating its uniﬁed response since July . The nation, like the President who was trans- formed into dots and dashes and data points, has become a public body electric.

44

For Whitman, the mediated but immediate experience of hearing the “death-news” has rendered the poet’s memorializing func- tion obsolete.

45

…was the death of Garﬁeld the ﬁrst American media event? It monopolized the media; it called forth reverent proclamations of unity; it revealed the full potential of “the wires that form a sympathetic cord uniting the continents,” the everyday miracle of the discourse networks of . And, thanks perhaps to telegraphers’ advance preparations, it came as close as then possible to live stat…

45

Every live media event may demand to be the ﬁrst, may translate syn- chronic coverage on every channel into diachronic singularity, may claim a psychic monopoly that coopts attempts at historical thinking into a perverse corroboration of the predominance of the present day.

46

With every transfer of information about the event, each translation from electrical impulse to printer’s stereotype, this unwitting metacom- mentary seemed to make itself more apparent. Under the strain of the two- and-a-half-month-long Garﬁeld assassination, a media system that linked dissemination, technology, and social discourse began to register its own properties ever more emphatically, its feedback overwhelming the melan- choly signal.

47
Chapter 2 Fictions of the Victorian Telephone: The Medium Is the Media

By the s, telephone service had been available in Great Britain for more than a decade. But the British telephone industry still struck its many critics as “backward and exclusive.” Other countries had cheaper services and many more telephone subscribers, which in turn made having a telephone more useful.

51

Rather, in each of these stories – despite their diﬀerent thematic interests – the telephone becomes a device for representing an entire daily complex of print and other communication modes. The medium represents the media.

52

But in the s, because it was neither a common domestic item nor an important mass-cultural medium, the telephone could oﬀer British authors something of a blank slate – or an open circuit – for imaging the logic of an emerging media system.

53

Other writers and journalists speculated on the telephone’s future use for sound broadcast, and journalists reported every experiment to transmit live events on the device, such the plans of the London Electrophone Company (founded in ) to bring “music, religious sermons, and news to paying subscribers.”

53

In each of these texts about would-be writers, the telephone forms part of a modern media system that presents obstacles to modern literary production. It does so not primarily through its technical proper- ties but by epitomizing an idea that will be called the media a generation

53

later: a system composed of nonprint technologies as well as print-forms created for a mass audience. Fictionalizing the late Victorian telephone means aligning it with a complex that includes not only new media technologies but also print media seeking new audiences and new ubi- quity, a complex that these ﬁctional works polemically oppose to literary production.

54
Chapter 3 New Media, New Journalism, New Grub Street: Unsanctified Typography - Media Material

For all its powers of dissemination, the electric telegraph is not a mechanism for literary publication. But it provides the vehicle for a metaphor that helps introduce an entire discursive nexus about writing and other media. Once again, a modern medium is the media.

75
Chapter 4 The Sinking of the Triple-Decker: Format Wars

The three-volume format for novels didn’t come to an end because novelists felt aesthetically constrained by it, or because they complained about it in public, or because dissatisﬁed readers rejected it.

94

Building upon the work of the book historians who have told the story of the three-volume format and its fall, this chapter examines the three-volume novel in a diﬀerent way: as part of a media system that linked private libraries to publishers, tied the distribution of ﬁction to its material form, and aligned novels with other print genres.

95
Chapter 4 The Sinking of the Triple-Decker: Format Wars - The Three-Volume Standard

For decades, the three-volume format and library borrowing became the Victorian middle-class public’s most prominent mode of access to new secular, adult novels printed as books.

96

…e by the late Victorian era the three-volume novel had come to represent the norms of workaday British ﬁction. As a byword or a target, the “procrustean system” of the three-volume novel conﬂated issues of ﬁction’s aesthetics, economics, and physical form.

96

…se, by the end of its heyday, a variety of writers associate the three-volume novel with what seem like the values of a caricatured mid-Victorian middle class: conventionality, regularity, propri- ety, and dubious pretensions to endurance or monumentality.

96

The most crucial aspect of the Victorian three-volume novel followed from its high cost: it wasn’t priced for sale to general readers at all. Rather, the main buyers of novels in this expensive format were the private circulating libraries that came to dominate the trade in new ﬁction, especially Mudie’s (which began lending books in ) and W. H. Smith’s (which added a subscription service to its railway bookstalls in ).

97

But in its three-volume form, it addressed itself not to a vast, vague readership, but to a small, well-deﬁned one. In fact, the three-volume format functioned to delay or even prevent the circulation of the novel to a mass audience.

98

At least by the system’s ﬁnal decades, three-volume editions regularly lost money for their publishers. But they could still function as a means of testing a novel’s popularity and of promoting the work before a cheaper one- volume edition was produced.

99

The economics of the system also aligned with the speciﬁc, material properties of the three-volume format. Lending out triple-deckers by the volume meant that the libraries could circulate a single “copy” of a novel among three subscribers at once. And, although in practice the format could be quite ﬂexible, the circulating libraries depended on maintaining the norm of long novels that called for slow reading.

99

The form and scale of Victorian ﬁction, then – with its multiple plotlines and rhythms of introduction, compli- cation, and resolution (including the notorious weakness of second volumes) – were intimately tied to the economics of its standardized format for distribution and consumption.

99

As maintained by Mudie’s, Smith, and their smaller counterparts, and by the practices of publishers and authors whose output came within their purview, the system that included the triple-decker and the private circu- lating library proved remarkably durable. Indeed, its comparative stability suggests that we should understand this system as what Tim Wu calls an “information empire.” In such an empire, dominant media ﬁrms create a closed system that maintains their ﬁnancial interests but stiﬂes technical or economic innovation.

101
Chapter 4 The Sinking of the Triple-Decker: Format Wars - A New Order on the Eve of Establishment

A number of factors were making the three-volume format less domin- ant and less proﬁtable: the diﬃculty of disposing of previous years’ crops of triple-deckers; the establishment of free public libraries; the growth of cheaper book formats, and the increasing popularity of genres that didn’t employ the format at all.

104

But in the late Victorian era, portable formats were becoming less and less synonymous with penny dreadfuls and stray reprints of older works, the disreputable novels on display at the station.

104

Matters only became more uncomfort- able for the circulating libraries when publishers pushed their cheaper reprints of novels close to their debuts in three volumes, reducing the term during which the libraries could oﬀer exclusive access.

104

As late Victorian writers frequently noted, modern ﬁction in France and the United States was sold in single volumes and priced for sale to readers; public attention to the anomalous British triple-decker could both reﬂect and exacerbate frustration with the format and the publishing system it embodied.

105

The heft and the stable, standardized format of the three-decker embodied and gratiﬁed a mid-Victorian sense of taste that prized the massive or monumental as a sign of worth, a taste amply conﬁrmed by the era’s furniture, architecture, and industrial design. But later in the century, an interest in lightness or craftedness in aesthetics coincided with an acceptance of the kind of punctuated attention suited to briefer reading, the kind of reading that might be done on public transport or between

105

tasks.

106
Chapter 5 Writers of Books: The Unmediated Novel

For all its social elitism, then, the three-volume novel had also come to stand for pedestrian daily media in thrall to their material format and to the infrastructure of their production, distribution, and use.

112

In their ﬁction about writers in the wake of the triple-decker, Corelli and Paston again present problems of the novel and its audience as problems of the novel’s materiality and its relationship to a powerful complex of media.

113
Chapter 6 Words Fail: Occulting Media into Information

Steadily tapping away behind the novel’s sex, gore, and terror, the typewriter allows Dracula to imagine how media diversity yields that homogeneous and apparently demediated substance, modern information.

139
Chapter 7 A Connecticut Yankee's Media Wars: Orality and Obliteracy - Typesetting 2.0

…bianca.” In the s, W. L. Wardell identiﬁed the typewriter as “a form of printing press” and pre- dicted that it would soon develop into “a ﬁxture or an article of furniture” to be used not for private writing or business documents but for “presswork.”…

171

The Paige Compositor accelerated movable type; the Linotype liquid- ated it. Mergenthaler’s device replaced the old conception of type as something valuable enough to be collected and reused with type-casting on demand. Slug-casting machines like the Linotype treated print not as an assemblage of units with the potential to recombine in meaningful ways but as a disposable gestalt created by the temporary need to place content within the dimensions of a page or column.

177

Linotype prevented not only the correction of individual words or charac- ters but also ﬁne-tuning such as kerning. It was more readily adopted for printing newspapers than for books—basic, disposable type for an age of disposable daily literature. Promotional materials fancifully imagined authors freed from “the drudgery and cramp of writing or revising manuscripts . . . by the entertaining pastime of playing out their thoughts, pianoforte fashion, on the .”

177

Whereas the Paige Compositor runs the assembly and disassembly of type concurrently through a single, uniﬁed machine, the Linotype simply melts down old slugs for new ones, a process that parallels the analog ﬂows of information on electric telegraph cables or telephone wires. The Linotype doesn’t mechanize the Gutenbergian art of

177

Pen

177

type-compositing; it abolishes it. Supplanting movable type with meltable type, slug-casting machines reimagine print itself as an evanescent, stream- lined, ﬂowing medium suited to an emergent understanding of fungible information.

178
After Words: The End of the Book

Rather than picturing the ﬁn of books, placing print-forms in the contexts of our media environments oﬀers us opportunities to consider the ends of books in a diﬀerent sense: their diﬀerent functions within changing media systems.

193

Menke 2019 - Revision history