Search results for ""Author Clifford Siskin""
Johns Hopkins University Press The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830
As today's new technologies challenge the reign of writing, Clifford Siskin puts our current concerns about such change into history. In the 18th and early 19th centuries in Britain, he argues, the "new" technology was writing itself. How did its proliferation-in print and through silent reading-coalesce into the dominant forms of literary modernity, and with what consequences? What changed, strikingly and fundamentally, were ways of knowing and of working. Admonitions against young women reading novels were not merely matters of Augustan conservatism but signals of those shifts: they warned against the capacity of the technology to change those who used it. Despite such caution, Britain saw, between 1700 and 1830, the advent of both modern disciplinarity and modern professionalism. These new divisions of knowledge and of labor were the work of writing, as was the engendering, at their intersection, of the discipline that took writing itself as its professional work-Literature.
£28.22
The University of Chicago Press This Is Enlightenment
Debates about the nature of the Enlightenment date to the eighteenth century, when Immanuel Kant himself addressed the question, 'What is Enlightenment'? The contributors to this ambitious book offer a paradigm-shifting answer to that now-famous query: Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation. Enlightenment, they argue, needs to be engaged within the newly broad sense of mediation introduced here - not only oral, visual, written, and printed media, but everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in between. With essays addressing infrastructure and genres, associational practices and protocols, this volume establishes mediation as the condition of possibility for enlightenment. In so doing, it not only answers Kant's query; it also poses its own broader question: how would foregrounding mediation change the kinds and areas of inquiry in our own epoch? "This Is Enlightenment" is a landmark volume with the polemical force and archival depth to start a conversation that extends across the disciplines that the Enlightenment itself first configured.
£81.00