Transmission Writing: Electronic Literary Aesthetics in the Late 1960s

Maric-Cleaver, Adam (2024) Transmission Writing: Electronic Literary Aesthetics in the Late 1960s. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

In Transmission Writing: Electronic Literary Aesthetics in the Late 1960s I examine the interplay between 1960s developments in telecommunications and British and American fiction of the same period. To do so, I bring together a cluster of American and British texts by Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Anna Kavan, Thomas Pynchon and Brigid Brophy written between 1965-1969. Engaging representations of telephones, pagers, television, radio, satellites, and stereo, the texts in this study reconfigured transmission as an aesthetic to create new textual strategies − what I propose we call ‘transmission writing’. Reading these texts as transmission writing allows us to uncover a submerged relationship between technology and literary aesthetics, and enables us to understand how this relationship forms socio-political critique. My analysis of the telephone and pager in Coover and Barthelme, for instance, ties together questions of subjectivity under patriarchy and aesthetics of metafiction, whilst glitches of television and radio in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) become zones of resistance to nascent Californian neoliberalism. Alongside these ‘canonical’ texts of 1960s postmodernism, this study includes two comparatively neglected British writers, positioning communications satellites and noise in relation to the ecological concerns of Kavan’s Ice, and exploring how the bumpy adoption of stereo in the 1960s becomes a genderqueer aesthetic in Brophy’s In Transit. Thus, reading these works as transmission writing not only to links the techno-historical context of their production to their textual strategies but also comments on our present moment of late capitalism.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	19 Jun 2025 08:02
Last Modified:	19 Jun 2025 08:02
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/99645
DOI:

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