ENGL 2710

Novel Technologies

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2025-2026 Catalog.

The history of communication technology is marked by momentous births and brutal deaths: “Television kills telephony,” James Joyce wrote in Finnegan’s Wake, fifty years before “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Novelists have participated in and documented this history, exploring the media of human communication and competing over the representation of reality. This course considers the novel as a new technology in the 18th and 19th-centuries and examines the techniques that 20th and 21st-century authors have adopted to represent and assimilate newer media forms, including telegraphy, cinema, the tape recorder, television, and the internet. Reading works by Adolfo Bioy Casares, DG Compton, Linda Rosenkrantz, and Patricia Lockwood, among others, we will consider how the novel retains its “novelty” today. Does it still merit its name?

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