ENGLISH 364

Writing Technologies

Please note: this is archived course information from 2016 for ENGLISH 364.

Description

Writing Technologies examines writing studies in technologised contexts of imaginative art, everyday life and literate communications. The course examines writing environments in which multiple tools and technologies are being added for understanding, negotiating and fashioning self and world. Within a larger history of literacy that encompasses the origins of writing, the social imprint of the alphabet, the rise of "literature", the politics of aesthetics and encoding of design, the course considers the materiality of writing in widely different cultural contexts. The premise of the course is that reading and writing practices cannot be understood without attending to the technologies and history of these same practices, and to the secondary or stored cultural knowledge that they mobilise.

A three-hour interactive lecture and tutorial in one addresses technological modalities, writing materials and cultural contexts, intermixing course materials, writing-related objects brought into class and in-class discussion. Readings include texts on the history, theory and variety of writing technologies and literate systems, the colonialism of cartography and cross-cultural encounter with the alphabet, the development of the page and the modern "form", the scriptwork of intelligent buildings and public space, the programming of the workplace and organisational life and the role that technical artefacts play in social and work worlds (cars, photocopiers, iphones, e-cigarettes etc).

The course course aims to develop

critical awareness of technical artefacts at work in writing environments and the social practices and consciousness they inscribe
the ability to reflect upon the situation of writing (concepts, technology, politics) in an informed and analytical way
a theoretically informed sense of communicative technologies and codes that constitute lifeworlds, or, altogether, a communicology
the ability to manipulate the environment as a matter of design − to pose questions, pursue projects, and to construct criteria for their value

Coursework involves a critical response to course materials, lectures and discussion, a creative assignment that illustrates social scripts and a longer discursive essay. There is no exam.

Availability 2016

Not taught in 2016

Lecturer(s)

Coordinator(s) Dr Stephen Turner

Points

ENGLISH 364: 15 points

Prerequisites

60 points from BA courses