Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell
Ashgate
Hardback
176
2005
Secretaries are the hidden technicians of much literary (and non-literary) writing they also figure startlingly often as characters in modern literature film and even literary criticism. Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture brings together secretaries' role in the production (and more surprisingly consumption) of modern culture with interpretations of their function in literature and film from Chaucer to Heidegger by way of Defoe Dickens and Erle Stanley Gardner. These essays probe the relation of office practice to literary theory asking what changes when literary texts represent address or acknowledge the human copyist or the mechanical writing machine. Topics range from copyright law to voice recognition software from screwball comedies to secretarial spies from the history of technology to the future of information management. Together the essays will provide literary critics with a new angle on current debates about gender labour and the material text as well as a window into the prehistory of our information age.
Ashgate
Hardback
176
2005
Secretaries are the hidden technicians of much literary (and non-literary) writing they also figure startlingly often as characters in modern literature film and even literary criticism. Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture brings together secretaries' role in the production (and more surprisingly consumption) of modern culture with interpretations of their function in literature and film from Chaucer to Heidegger by way of Defoe Dickens and Erle Stanley Gardner. These essays probe the relation of office practice to literary theory asking what changes when literary texts represent address or acknowledge the human copyist or the mechanical writing machine. Topics range from copyright law to voice recognition software from screwball comedies to secretarial spies from the history of technology to the future of information management. Together the essays will provide literary critics with a new angle on current debates about gender labour and the material text as well as a window into the prehistory of our information age.