Regina Schober Livres

Spider Web, Labyrinth, Tightrope Walk explores the shifting functions of the network as a metaphor, model, and as an epistemological framework in US American literature and culture from the 19 th century until today. The book critically inquires into the literary, cultural, philosophical, and scientific rhetoric, values, and ideological underpinnings that have given rise to the network concept. Literature and culture play a major role in the ways in which networks have been imagined and how they have evolved as conceptual models. This study regards networks as historically emergent and culturally constructed formations closely tied with the development of knowledge technologies in the process of modernization as well as with an increasingly critical awareness of network technologies and infrastructures. While the rise of the network in scientific, philosophical, political and sociological discourses has received wide attention, this book contributes an important cultural and historical perspective to network theory by demonstrating how US American literature and culture have been key sites for thinking in and about networks in the past two centuries.

One of the central figures of the Imagist movement, American poet Amy Lowell (1874-1925) experimented with poetic language and form by turning to the musical medium. This book examines the various ways in which the concept of music relates to and shapes Lowell's poetical and critical work. In Lowell's poems, music functions not only as sonic and rhythmic material or structural model, but also as a theme, reflecting cultural and aesthetic debates of an emerging modernity, such as gender, effects of urbanization, the First World War, primitivism, and cultural validity. In her critical writings, the idea of music fosters Lowell's development of free verse, polyphonic prose, and her performative poetics. In considering Lowell's poetry and poetics through its 'medial other', this study aims at re-positioning Lowell within a Literary and Cultural Studies discourse which accounts for the intermedial nature of her Modernist aesthetics.