Small Wonders: Media, Modernity, and the Moment: Experiments in Time

Readings

WEEK #	READINGS
Introduction: Starting from this Moment
1	Augustine. “Time and Eternity.” In Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford University Press, 1991. ISBN: 9780192817792. [Preview with Google Books]
The Digital Present
2	Mayer-Schonberger, Victor. “Of Power and Time - Consequences of the Demise of Forgetting.” In Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Princeton University Press, 2009, pp. 92-127. ISBN: 9780691138619. Bell, Gordon, and Jim Gemmell. “Vision” and “MyLifeBits.” In Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything. Dutton Adult, 2009, pp. 1-25, 27-50. ISBN: 9780525951346. Optional Jameson, Fredric. “The End of Temporality.” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 695-718.
The Lyric Present
3	Swift, Jonathan. “A Description of the Morning”, “A Description of a City Shower”, “The Progress of Beauty”, “The Lady’s Dressing Room”, “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed”, and “Strephon and Chloe.” In Complete Poems. Penguin Classics, 1989. ISBN: 9780140422610. Hunter, Paul J. “Journalism: The Commitment to Contemporaneity.” In Before Novels: Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction. W. W. Norton & Co., 1990, pp. 167-94. ISBN: 9780393028010.
4	Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Effusion XXXV”, “Frost at Midnight”, “The Nightingale”, “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”, and “Dejection: An Ode.” Wordsworth, William. “Lines, Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.”
5	Wordsworth, William. “Residence In London.” In The Prelude. Oxford University Press, 1970. ISBN: 9780192810748. Keats, John. “Ode to Melancholy”, “Ode to a Nightingale”, and “To Autumn.”
The Pictographic Present
6	Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life.” In Selected Writings on Art and Literature. Translated by P. E. Charvet. Penguin Classics, 1993, pp. 390-435. ISBN: 9780140446067. ———. “To a Passer-by” (À Une Passante). Optional Kern, Stephen. “The Present.” In The Culture of Space and Time: 1880-1918. Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 65-88. ISBN: 9780674021693.
The Photographic Present
7	Braun, Marta. “The Expanded Present: Photographic Movement.” In Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science. Edited by Ann Thomas. Yale University Press, 1997, pp. 150-84. ISBN: 9780300073409 Optional Canales, Jimena. “Introduction” and “Conclusion.” In A Tenth of a Second: A History. University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 1-19, 205-22. ISBN: 9780226093185.
8	Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Hill and Wang, 2010, pp. 22-59, 94-7. ISBN: 9780374532338.
The Cinematic Present
9	Edison, Thomas, and Lumiere Bros. Landmarks of Early Film, Vol. 1., selected short films. DVD. Image Entertainment, 1997. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.” In Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, et al. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jenning. Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 101-33. ISBN: 9780674008960. (Second Version - ca. 1936). Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” In The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded. Amsterdam University Press, 2007. ISBN: 9789053569443. [Preview with Google Books] Optional ———. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator.” In Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (Depth of Field). Edited by Linda Williams. Rutgers University Press, 1995, pp. 114-33. ISBN: 9780813521336.
10	Vertov, Dziga. The Man with the Movie Camera (1929). DVD. Image Entertainment, 2002. Charney, Leo. “In a Moment: Film and the Philosophy of Modernity.” In Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Edited by Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz. University of California Press, 1996, pp. 279-94. ISBN: 9780520201125.