IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB289863249

The Passing Hour: 1930s Real-Time, Vile Bodies, and the Ethics of Reading (2021)

Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology
Volume: 29
Issue: 2
Pages: 119-154
Publication date: 2021
Language: English

URI: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/795271

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Ethics Reading Literature Information technology Photographs 20th century, early Great Britain

Understanding real-time as an orientation toward the present and its documentation as opposed to a concrete (digitally determined) technological affordance, this article locates real-time in the burgeoning photographic tabloid culture of 1930s Britain. It traces how technical innovations in information transmission and circulation during the interwar years impacted the circuits between readers and their "real life" environment. Moreover, by engaging with Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies (1930), a text strung between novel and tabloid supplement, it suggests how real-time's newly habituated, melancholic modes of reading might push individuals to stand by in the face of individual pain and mass violence.

...More

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB289863249

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Book Markus Krajewski; (2018)
The Server: a media history from the present to the Baroque (/p/isis/citation/CBB861867778/)

Essay Review Mark Vardy; (October 2017)
Reading for Precarious Times (/p/isis/citation/CBB294266225/)

Article Campbell-Kelly, Martin; (2014)
The History of Computing in Colour: A Picture Essay (/p/isis/citation/CBB001421788/)

Article Edwards, Elizabeth; (2014)
Photographic Uncertainties: Between Evidence and Reassurance (/p/isis/citation/CBB001201583/)

Article Cara Murray; (2022)
Cultivating Chaos: Entropy, Information, and the Making of the Dictionary of National Biography (/p/isis/citation/CBB200451751/)

Book Andreas-Holger Maehle; (2016)
Contesting Medical Confidentiality: Origins of the Debate in the United States, Britain, and Germany (/p/isis/citation/CBB329661888/)

Article Roderic N. Crooks; (2019)
Times Thirty: Access, Maintenance, and Justice (/p/isis/citation/CBB487672024/)

Article Topham, Jonathan R.; (2000)
Scientific publishing and the reading of science in nineteenth-century Britain: A historiographical survey and guide to sources (/p/isis/citation/CBB000111671/)

Book Dames, Nicholas; (2007)
The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (/p/isis/citation/CBB001030134/)

Chapter Topham, Jonathan R.; (2004)
Periodicals and the Making of Reading Audiences for Science in Early 19th-century Britain: the Youth's Magazine, 1828--37 (/p/isis/citation/CBB000450152/)

Article Dawson, Gowan; (2010)
“By a Comparison of Incidents and Dialogue”: Richard Owen, Comparative Anatomy and Victorian Serial Fiction (/p/isis/citation/CBB001022442/)

Book Annika Mann; (2018)
Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print (/p/isis/citation/CBB689588967/)

Article Philip Kirby; (2020)
Literacy, Advocacy and Agency: The Campaign for Political Recognition of Dyslexia in Britain (1962–1997) (/p/isis/citation/CBB954591813/)

Book Rose, Jonathan E.; (2021)
The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (/p/isis/citation/CBB516804754/)

Chapter Livingstone, David N.; (2011)
Politics, Culture, and Human Origins: Geographies of Reading and Reputation in Nineteenth-Century Science (/p/isis/citation/CBB001231560/)

Book Price, Leah; (2014)
How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (/p/isis/citation/CBB001550103/)

Article Lightman, Bernard; (2000)
Marketing knowledge for the general reader: Victorian popularizers of science (/p/isis/citation/CBB000111660/)

Article Orrje, Jacob; (2009)
Reading Art, Reading Nature. How Microscopic Literature Formed Seventeenth-Century Readers (/p/isis/citation/CBB001220325/)

Thesis Dawn Kaczmar; (2021)
Disability and Race in British Literature, 1580-1833 (/p/isis/citation/CBB068831065/)

Article Christiana Payne; (2021)
Ancient Trees and Aged Peasants (/p/isis/citation/CBB603351035/)