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.
- ISBN10 128312839X
- ISBN13 9781283128391
- Publish Date 1 January 2011 (first published 15 November 2002)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 17 February 2015
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Wesleyan
- Format eBook
- Pages 199
- Language English