Breathless

by Weiss, Allen S.

• ISBN13: 9780819565921
• ISBN10: 081956592X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-11-15
• Publisher: Wesleyan Univ Pr

Summary

Breathless explores early sound recording and the literature that both foreshadowed its invention and was contemporaneous with its early years, revealing the broad influence of this new technology at the very origins of Modernism. Through close readings of works by Edgar Allan Poe, Stephane Mallarme, Charles Cros, Paul Valery, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Jules Verne, and Antonin Artaud, Allen S. Weiss shows how sound recording's uncanny confluence of human and machine would transform our expectations of mourning and melancholia, transfiguring our intimate relation to death. Interdisciplinary, the book bridges poetry and literature, theology and metaphysics. As Breathless shows, the symbolic and practical roles of poetry and technology were transformed as new forms of nostalgia and eroticism arose.

Author Biography

Allen S. Weiss teaches in the Departments of Performance Studies and Cinema Studies at New York University, and is author and editor of over twenty books including Phantasmic Radio (1995).

Table of Contents

Preface	xi
Acknowledgments	xv
Purity of Essence	1	(28)
Death's Murmur	29	(38)
Erotic Nostalgia and the Inscription of Desire	67	(20)
Narcissistic Machines and Erotic Prostheses	87	(28)
Libidinous Mannerisms and Profligate Abominations	115	(24)
Notes	139	(26)
Selected Bibliography	165	(10)
Index	175