Discourse Networks, 1800/1900

"A new and encyclopedic vision of modern German literary, intellectual and social history, achieved through the optic of discourse analysis, psychoanalysis, and semiotic theory, analyzed in a spirit of playfulness and impudent precision."-Stanley Corngold, Princeton University "Kittler is the true heir to McLuhan's legacy. Where the latter relied on prophecy and striking formulas, Kittler provides thorough yet insightful analysis, drawing upon all the reurces of a well-informed theoretical imagination. In this book, he retraces the contours of one of modernity's foundational configurations: that if the inscription systems that determine the positions of subjects in relation to the materialities of the means of communication and to the changing patterns of human conviviality that are derived from them. The book proves compelling not only because of the power of its analyses but also because it provides a model or rigor for this type of endeavor in cticital studies."-Wlad Godzich, University of Montreal