CRITICAL ENGAGEMENTS IN THE HISTORY OF MEDIATION,
from the Enlightenment to the Present

By: William B. Warner

Overview

EVEN while I was in the midst of them, my critical wanderings have often seemed itinerant. I have sought to understand the absorptive power of the novel throughout its long modern history. The theoretical framing of my studies has moved from philosophically grounded Continental theory to British cultural studies to media theory from Benjamin and McLuhan to Bruno Latour. I have speculated on the epoch called Enlightenment as well as exploring the difference made for our epoch by the digital mutation. From a critical vantage point only gained recently (and developed in collaboration with Clifford Siskin), I now see my own intellectual tourism, and the articles and books that resulted from it, as deriving what coherence they have through their critical engagement with the long history of mediation. Through a distributed understanding of agency as developed by Latour, I understand mediation as action supported by more or less material media (the varouis forms of writing, the aural, the visual, the algorithmic). Mediation results form any thing that comes between and mediates: like infrastructure (e.g. the postal system, roads, the internet), like formats and genres (from newspaper to novel, from encyclopedia to blog), like associational practices (clubs, societies, committees of correspondence, etc), as well as the protocols (from copyright to open access; from reading to TCP/IP) that enable by constraining these mediators. Of course, this project--a history of mediation--produces its own mediating effects.
THIS collections imprint is organized in two levels. The overview level, located on this page, offers a simple list of pubications arranged under five topic headings, starting with "The Novel and Media" and ending with "Broadsides and Polemics." Beside each of the five headings you will find a link for a "detailed view" of each heading. If you click through to the second layer of this webiste you will find brief commentary and a selected quotation from each of the items in this collection. I end this headnote with a brief note on access to .pdf of publications: most are open access, but 10 of the 32 are password protected. These publications can usually be accessed through the Project Muse or Jstor subscriptions that most colleges and universities possess. However, if you don't have access to these on-line repositories, and if you have a legitimate fair use need for a text, you may write the author, William Warner, at warner@english.ucsb.edu, for password access.

The Novel and Media from the Eighteenth Century to the Present	[detailed view]
The Play of Fictions and Succession of Styles in Ulysses		1977
Proposal and Habitation: the Temporality and Authority of Interpretation in and about a Scene of Richardson’s Clarissa		1979
Reading Clarissa: The Struggles of Interpretation		1979
Reading Rape: Marxist-Feminist Figurations of the Literal		1983
Redeeming Interpretation (on Castle’s reading of Clarissa)		1985
Realist Literary History: McKeon’s New Origins of the Novel		1989
Taking Dialectic with a Grain of Salt: A Reply to McKeon		1990
Social Power and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Foucault and Transparent Literary History		1991
The Elevation of the Novel in England: Hegemony and Literary History		1992
The Transport of the Novel, with Deidre Lynch		1996
Cultural Institutions of the Novel, edited with Deidre Lynch		1996
Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain (1684-1750)		1998
Staging Readers Reading		2000
Will the Subject of Literary History Please Stand Up!		2003
The ‘Woman Writer’ and feminist literary history; or, how the success of feminist literary history has compromised the conceptual coherence of its lead character, the ‘woman writer’		2004
Henry Fielding		2008
Resistance on the Circuit: The Novel in the Age of the Post		2009

Modern Media and Cultural Studies	[detailed view]
Dior's Designs		1985
'Love in a Life': The Case of Nietzsche and Lou Salome		1985
Nuclear Coincidence and the Korean Airline Disaster		1986
Chance and the Text of Experience: Freud, Nietzsche, and Shakespeare's Hamlet		1986
Spectacular Seduction: The Case of Freud, Masson & Malcolm		1987
Treating Me Like an Object: Reading Catharine Anne MacKinnon		1989
The Resistance to Popular Culture: on Lawrence Levine and Andrew Ross		1990
Spectacular Action: Rambo, Reaganism, and the Cultural Articulations of the Hero		1992
Censorship and Free Speech in Media (A Web Essay)		1999
Stopping Cultural Studies, with Clifford Siskin		2008

*Enlightenment Mediations*	[detailed view]
This is Enlightenment, edited with Clifford Siskin		2010
If this is Enlightenment Then What is Romanticism?, with Clifford Siskin		2011
Resistance on the Circuit: The Novel in the Age of the Post		2009
Protocols of Liberty: Communication Innovation and the American Revolution (Forthcoming Fall 2013)		2013
"The Thing that Invented Norway", with Eirik Holmøyvik and Mona Ringvej in Textualizing Democracy (Forthcoming Spring 2014)		2014

New Media	[detailed view]
Breaking the Code of The Matrix; or, Hacking Hollywood to Liberate Film		2001
Computable Culture and the Closure of the Media Paradigm (Review of Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media)		2002
Institutionalizing E-Literature: Choices for the Author and the Editor		2003
In the Beginning Was the Word: a Visualization of the Page as Interface (Flash animation)		2006
Networking and Broadcasting in Crisis; Or, How Do We Own Computable Culture?		2007

Broadsides and Polemics	[detailed view]
Pax Judaica		1984
The Geopolitics of Napster; or, New Media North and South		1999
After 9/11: Wiring Networks for Security and Liberty		2001
Studying English as a Pathway to Advanced Literacy		2011
Zero Dark Thirty		2013
The Internet: a Dystopian Fantasy		2013

Acknowledgments: This site is part of a new academic publishing effort within UC Santa Barbara's Early Modern Center, a research center within the English Department. The site is part of what we are calling the EMC Imprint. My deepest debet goes to Christopher Foley, who has been the architect, designer and coder for this website. Also thanks to Brian Reynolds for vital tech support.