Call for papers Invisible Hands: Secretarial Mediation in Literature and Culture, 1750-2000 This collection of essays will focus on the representation (and non-representation) of the secretary. Although the figure who writes in the place of another is not a recent invention, the nature of secretarial agency has changed with the development of the modern office, new technologies from the dictaphone to the computer, women's entrance into the workforce, automatic writing, etc. In the wake of recent work such as Friedrich Kittler's, deconstructive explorations of the relation between speech and writing have begun to engage with historical investigations of the material technologies of communication. Less attention, however, has been given to the experience of inhabiting the position of a human writing implement. Possible questions include but are not limited to: --How do literary writers represent literal writers (secretaries, scriveners, copyists, typists)? --How do technologies for transposing the aural to the written or the singular to the multiple change the status of the text? What difference does it make whether those operations are credited to a person or a thing? --What happens when the secretary speaks in her (or his) own voice or writes in her (or his) own name -- and what difference does the secretary's gender make? --What role should the material production, transmission, and retrieval of texts play in literary theory? --What is at stake in cyberculture's fascination with mechanical reproduction? What power (if any) do new technologies have to transform divisions of textual labor? Completed articles of approximately 8,000-10,000 words preferred, but 2-page proposals will also be accepted. Deadline: 30 November 1999. Informal inquiries welcome to: Pam Thurschwell Queens' College Cambridge CB3 9ET [log in to unmask] Leah Price Girton College Cambridge CB3 0JG [log in to unmask] Leslie Sanders Humanities/Writing Programmes 706 Atkinson College York University (416)736-2100 x66604 [log in to unmask]