In our digital age, Associate Professor of English Mark Goble writes, "we must imaginatively project ourselves ahead in time to have any chance of keeping up with innovations that are outdated as they are produced” (306). This month's Berkeley Books selection, Goble's Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life, understands this contemporary moment in the context of an American modernism rooted in fantasies of connection inspired by technologies like the telephone, telegraph, phonograph, and cinema. Considering texts by Henry James, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, and others alongside film, painting, music, photography, and popular culture, Beautiful Circuits explores the ways in which American modernism was shaped by its response to technology. Goble writes:

"It is not just that many forms of desire were in communication with technology in the first decades of the twentieth century, but that technology itself gives shape and character to experiences of sexuality, racial identity, class, and history" (19).

In the first of the book's two parts, "Communications,” which is dedicated primarily to Henry James's late novels and to Gertrude Stein's autobiographical writings, Goble traces how an everyday reliance on "old" media technologies contributed to the development of an eroticized formalism that came to be a signature aesthetic of the modern. The second part, "Records," instead, addresses the politics of medium specificity by focusing on projects that aim to restore more direct forms of contact between writers and readers, past and present, African Americans and Anglo-Americans.  

Mark McGurl, Professor of English at UCLA calls the book: “Critical reading, thinking, and writing of the highest order,” and names it “A major achievement of scholarship on American literary modernism.” But the implications of Goble's theoretically rigorous, intricately woven readings extend beyond American modernism, as he offers compelling reflections on contemporary art and new media. Concluding with an examination of Chris Jordan's photographs of high-tech detritus--discarded cell phones, circuit boards, and other e-waste--Goble finds a powerful testament to the degree to which "our own media culture will leave behind a record that will survive long after we have fall in love with other, newer forms of technology" (23). Challenging contemporary assumptions about the incompatibility of materiality and information, Goble isolates a surprising overlap between modernism and digital culture to conclude: “Modernism as we knew it is not going to return. But the digital technologies that are the future also look a lot like history” (318).

In this week’s Biblio-file, Goble recommends nine titles that shaped his thinking while working on Beautiful Circuits. His selections include recent works on new media and the history of communication by Alan Liu and John Durham Peters, as well as the classics like The World Viewed by Stanley Cavell, and Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan, who was, Goble writes: "perhaps more famous for being famous than for his media criticism." Other suggestions, such as Hugh Kenner's The Counterfeiters, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and In the Cage, and William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, speak to the range of texts analyzed in Beautiful Circuits.