Faculty at the EMC
William Beatty Warner
(Ph.D., Johns Hopkins, 1977)
Professor, English Department
U. California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170
fax: (805) 893-4622
email: warner@english.ucsb.edu
(Ph.D., Johns Hopkins, 1977)
Professor, English Department
U. California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170
fax: (805) 893-4622
email: warner@english.ucsb.edu
"Rather than setting media technology up against the human, and gratifying ourselves, Faust-like, with the heady fantasies of the unrivaled powers of modern media, or scaring ourselves with these supposed powers, as if we were a victim in the opening scenes of a s/f movie, why not accept the mobius-like co-implication of the human and the media? Because it is difficult to imagine media apart from the human subjects who use/read-write/consume/inhabit all the forms of media we know; and, because it is difficult to imagine human subjects (individually or collectively, socially or politically) without the media that mediate so many human exchanges and communications, it may be most useful to see both media and humans within a common history, which Clifford Siskin and I have called the 'history of mediation."
Areas of Interest
- Eighteenth-century British and American literature and cultural studies
- History and theory of Media
- Digital Culture
Books |
- Protocols of Liberty: Communication Innovation and the American Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming in 2013. 400pp.
- This is Enlightenment. Ed. & Intro with Clifford Siskin. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2010. 568pp.
- Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684-1750. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998
- Chance and the Text of Experience: Freud, Nietzsche, and Shakespeare's
Hamlet. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1986
- Reading Clarissa: The Struggles of Interpretation. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1979
Selected recent articles and contributions to books:
- “If This Is Enlightenment Then What Is Romanticism?” With Clifford Siskin. European Romantic Review. July 2011. 12pp.
- “Transmitting Liberty: The Boston Committee of Correspondence’s Revolutionary Experiments in Enlightenment Mediation.” 17pp. In Siskin and Warner, 2010.
- “Resistance on the Circuit: the Novel in the Age of the Post” NOVEL: A FORUM IN FICTION. Special Issue, ed. Nancy Armstrong. 2009.
- “The Invention of a Public Machine for Revolutionary Sentiment: The Boston Committee of Correspondence.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. Summer/Fall 2009. Ed. Laura Mandell. 19pp.
- “Stopping Cultural Studies,” MLA PROFESSIONS 2008. 13pp.
- “Networking and Broadcasting in Crisis: Or, How Do We Own Computable Culture?” Media Ownership: Research and Regulation (Hampton Press), 2007. Ed. By Ronald E. Rice.
- “Communicating Liberty: the Newspapers of the British Empire as a Matrix for the American Revolution,” ELH, 72:2, Summer 2005, 339-362.
- “The ‘Woman Writer’ and feminist literary theory; or, how the success of feminist literary history has compromised the conceptual coherence of its lead character, the ‘woman writer’,” JEMCS: Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. 4:1, Spring/Summer, 2004, 187-196
- “Computable Culture and the Closure of the Media Paradigm,” Post-Modern Culture, 12:3, May, 2002. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v012/12.3warner.html
- “Recent Studies in Restoration and Eighteenth Century,” SEL, 2000, 40pp.
Recent Talks
- "The Contest for Jane Austen": the Society for the Novel Inaugural Conference at Duke University, April 2012
- "English Studies for Advanced Literacy": November, 2011
- "Misunderstanding Media": Bloomington Seminar, U. of Indiana, 2009
Current Projects
Recent Courses Taught
- The History and Theory of 20th century Media, Fall 2012
- The Jane Austen Collective, Fall 2011
- The Novel in the History of Mediation, Spring 2011
- Studies in the Enlightenment: the American Revolution, Spring 2010