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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
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Leah Price
Girton College
Cambridge CB3 0JG
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Leslie Sanders
Humanities/Writing Programmes
706 Atkinson College
York University
(416)736-2100 x66604
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