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

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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 telephones 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.

Reviews

Not just a book about telephony and literature, but a book about how the telephone has actively contributed to the deconstruction of literature and culture, while steadily working to deconstruct our own lives. Jackson acts as the deft operator of a complex international 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, Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature, University of York, UK *
Jackson connects literature and the telephone in powerful and invigorating ways. Through lucid readings of Frank OHara, Tom Raworth, Fady Joudah, Muriel Spark, Ali Smith, Mourid Barghouti and others, we come to see how phones are not just thematically important but how they pervade all of our thinking about the nature of modern literature. Literature and the Telephone is also a special kind of listening book, with a particular ear for questions of responding and responsibility. Jackson never loses sight of the inextricably entangled everyday dimensions of her topic from the nuclear hotline to the Israeli treatment of Palestinians, from refugee boat deaths to the ecological damage and toxic afterlives of the objects so many of us carry around, mostly without thinking, practically everywhere we go. * Nicholas Royle, Professor Emeritus of English, University of Sussex, UK *
Jacksons 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 spirit 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, Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China *

Author Bio

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).