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From: Leah Price <[log in to unmask]>
Call for papers
Invisible Hands:
Secretarial Mediation in Literature and Culture,
1750-2000
This collection of essays will focus on the representation (and
non-representation) of the secretary. Although the figure who
writes in the place of another is not a recent invention, the nature
of secretarial agency has changed with the development of the modern
office, new technologies from the dictaphone to the computer, women's
entrance into the workforce, automatic writing, etc. In the wake of
recent work such as Friedrich Kittler's, deconstructive explorations
of the relation between speech and writing have begun to engage with
historical investigations of the material technologies of
communication. Less attention, however, has been given to the
experience of inhabiting the position of a human writing implement.
Possible questions include but are not limited to:
--How do literary writers represent literal writers (secretaries,
scriveners, copyists, typists)?
--How do technologies for transposing the aural to the written or
the singular to the multiple change the status of the text? What
difference does it make whether those operations are credited to a
person or a thing?
--What happens when the secretary speaks in her (or his) own voice
or writes in her (or his) own name -- and what difference does the
secretary's gender make?
--What role should the material production, transmission, and
retrieval of texts play in literary theory?
--What is at stake in cyberculture's fascination with mechanical
reproduction? What power (if any) do new technologies have to
transform divisions of textual labor?
Completed articles of approximately 8,000-10,000 words preferred, but
2-page proposals will also be accepted. Deadline: 30 November 1999.
Informal inquiries welcome to:
Leah Price
Girton College
Cambridge CB3 0JG
[log in to unmask]
Pam Thurschwell
Queens' College
Cambridge CB3 9ET
[log in to unmask]
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