Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture

by Price,Leah; Thurschwell,Pamela

• ISBN13: 9780754638049
• ISBN10: 0754638049
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-01-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Secretaries are the hidden technicians of much literary (and non-literary) writing; they also figure startlingly often as characters in modern literature, film, and even literary criticism. Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture brings together secretaries' role in the production (and, more surprisingly, consumption) of modern culture with interpretations of their function in literature and film from Chaucer to Heidegger, by way of Defoe, Dickens, and Erle Stanley Gardner. These essays probe the relation of office practice to literary theory, asking what changes when literary texts represent, address, or acknowledge the human copyist or the mechanical writing machine. Topics range from copyright law to voice recognition software, from screwball comedies to secretarial spies, from the history of technology to the future of information management. Together, the essays will provide literary critics with a new angle on current debates about gender, labour, and the material text, as well as a window into the prehistory of our information age.

Table of Contents

Contributors	vi
Acknowledgements	vii
List of Figures	viii
Introduction Invisible Hands
Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell	1	(12)
1 Speech on Paper: Charles Dickens, Victorian Phonography, and the Reform of Writing
Ivan Kreilkamp	13	(19)
2 Stenographic Masculinity
Leah Price	32	(16)
3 The Body Types: Corporeal Documents and Body Politics Circa 1900
Victoria Olwell	48	(15)
4 Dictation Anxiety: The Stenographer's Stake in Dracula
Jennifer L. Fleissner	63	(28)
5 Secretary to the Stars: Mediums and the Agency of Authorship
Bette London	91	(20)
6 The Case of the Capable Fingers: A Della Street Mystery
Daniel Karlin	111	(18)
7 Bodies that Mattered: Technology, Embodiment, and Secretarial Mediation
Douglas A. Brooks	129	(22)
Bibliography	151	(11)
Index	162