Transmission Writing

Adam Maric-Cleaver examines how American and British writers responded to the shifting landscape of telecommunication in the 1960s and how they rechanneled the aesthetics of transmission to rethink subjectivity, politics, ecology, and gender. Opening new channels between fiction and the tele-technologies of the 1960s, Maric-Cleaver maps how changes in telecommunications changed literary aesthetics in the United States and the United Kingdom. In doing so, this study offers fresh readings of American postmodernists (Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Pynchon) as well as relatively neglected British women writers (Anna Kavan and Brigid Brophy), highlighting the surprising moments of lineage and connection which emerge from placing their texts in dialogue with telecommunications. By drawing links between the contemporary techno-capitalism and the telecommunications culture of the 1960s, Transmission Writing suggests that the textual strategies of these writers provide readers with new ways to theorize and resist the reactionary, hyper-capitalist movements which dominate the current technological and political landscape.