Modernist Informatics: Literature, Information, and the State (Modernist Literature and Culture)

Between steam and cybernetics lies a missing phase in the history of information culture. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, national governments and writers of fiction alike began to take an interest in information not simply as fact, nor yet as effortlessly transmissible data, but as an unusual and destabilizing new phenomenon. __Modernist Informatics__ mines this burgeoning bureaucracy and marshals an array of archival evidence to detail the varied reactions of writers struggling in their lives and works to make sense of this strange new age of information. As James Purdon recounts in this fascinating study, many people, including Joseph Conrad and Walter Benjamin, felt the presence of information as an interruption rather than an enhancement of meaningful communication. Its intrusion provoked strong reactions from novelists such as Arnold Bennett, Ford Madox Ford, and Graham Greene. Each regarded the prying eyes of information society with increasing unease, as they struggled to overcome the division of daily existence between a fixed entity on a ledger and the imaginative possibility of everyday life. For others, such as Elizabeth Bowen, the nascent information age offered new opportunities for transforming experience into prose. Relating these varied, complex reactions and how they found their way into fiction, Purdon shows how historical changes shaped the narratives at his study's core and gave birth to a range of new informatic phenomena: passports and identity papers; the dossiers of the Mass-Observation movement; the literal and figurative blackout procedures of the Blitz; and the government-sponsored "information films" of John Grierson. __Modernist Informatics__ ingeniously traces how information culture seeped into everyday lives, forging a relationship of entanglement as well as antagonism-a tension that was central to the shaping of modernity. Between steam and cybernetics lies a missing phase in the history of information culture. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, national governments and writers of fiction alike began to take an interest in information not simply as fact, nor yet as effortlessly transmissible data, but as an unusual and destabilizing new phenomenon. Modernist Informatics mines this burgeoning bureaucracy and marshals an array of archival evidence to detail the varied reactions of writers struggling in their lives and works to make sense of this strange new age of information.As James Purdon recounts in this fascinating study, many people, including Joseph Conrad and Walter Benjamin, felt the presence of information as an interruption rather than an enhancement of meaningful communication. Its intrusion provoked strong reactions from novelists such as Arnold Bennett, Ford Madox Ford, and Graham Greene. Each regarded the prying eyes of information society with increasing unease, as they struggled to overcome the division of daily existence between a fixed entity on a ledger and the imaginative possibility of everyday life. For others, such as Elizabeth Bowen, the nascent information age offered new opportunities for transforming experience into prose. Relating these varied, complex reactions and how they found their way into fiction, Purdon shows how historical changes shaped the narratives at his study's core and gave birth to a range of new informatic phenomena: passports and identity papers; the dossiers of the Mass-Observation movement; the literal and figurative blackout procedures of the Blitz; and the government-sponsored "information films" of John Grierson.Modernist Informatics ingeniously traces how information culture seeped into everyday lives, forging a relationship of entanglement as well as antagonism-a tension that was central to the shaping of modernity. Between steam and cybernetics lies a missing phase in the history of information culture. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, national governments and writers of fiction alike began to take an interest in information not simply as fact, nor yet as effortlessly transmissible data, but as an unusual and destabilizing new phenomenon. For some writers, such as Joseph Conrad and Walter Benjamin, 'information' came to represent not effortless transmissibility, but rather an interruption of meaningful communication. For others - such as Elizabeth Bowen - such interruptions were themselves ways of making new kinds of meaning. The attempt to reimagine and redefine information produced a range of new informatic phenomena dedicated to its control: passports, files, and identity papers; the files of Mass-Observation movement; the literal and figurative blackout procedures of the Blitz; and the government-backed 'information film'.0'Modernist informatics' traces the effects of these new phenomena in early twentieth-century culture, where experimental approaches to narrative and to subjectivity began to compete with government archives for the right to represent the citizens of the modern security state. It argues that information and literary narrative have a history of entanglement as well as antagonism, and that this double relation was central to the cultural shaping of modernity 'Modernist Informatics' traces the effects of an information culture in the early 20th-century, where experimental approaches to narrative and to subjectivity began to compete with government archives for the right to represent the citizens of the modern security state