The identity and role of writing has evolved in the age of digital
media. But how did writing itself make digital media possible in the
first place? Lydia H. Liu offers here the first rigorous study of the
political history of digital writing and its fateful entanglement with
the Freudian unconscious. Liu’s innovative analysis brings the work
of theorists and writers back into conversation with one another to
document significant meetings of minds and disciplines. She shows how
the earlier avant-garde literary experiments with alphabetical writing
and the word-association games of psychoanalysis contributed to the
mathematical making of digital media. Such intellectual convergence,
she argues, completed the transformation of alphabetical writing into
the postphonetic, ideographic system of digital media, which not only
altered the threshold of sense and nonsense in communication processes
but also compelled a new understanding of human-machine interplay at
the level of the unconscious. Ranging across information theory,
cybernetics, modernism, literary theory, neurotic machines, and
psychoanalysis, The Freudian Robot rewrites the history of digital
media and the literary theory of the twentieth century.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780226486840
Publisert
2018
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Vendor
University of Chicago Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter