Modernist Roots of Computation: A Prehistory of the Literary Device

What looks like a book takes on the functions of other devices. Electronic books distributed on mobile phones, tablets, and personal computers comprise a part of the same digital infrastructure that powers drones and aircraft carriers. Today, computers in the service of the world's largest purveyors of literature are also used by air traffic control and covert intelligence agencies. The small computer in your pocket can also be used both to read books and to detonate explosives. These conditions compel us---historians, philologists, et al.---to reconsider the cozy relationship we have had with books since the advent of the Gutenberg press. *Simulated text*, as I prefer to call instead of "digital" or "electronic," no longer plays by the same rules as print. The bibliographic illusion veils machine internals. My task in this presentation will be to illuminate the blueprint of computation within the electronic book. In a reciprocal movement, I aim also to place the modern computer itself within the long history of the book, as a piece of literary (and not just mathematical) technology. To achieve these tasks, I will construct a short prehistory of the literary device, based on materials roughly from the first half of the twentieth century. I am interested in the simultaneous emergence of the literary device as formal technique, a series of thought experiments, and finally as an instrument that lies at the modernist foundations of contemporary computational culture.  These material and intellectual genealogies will help reveal the electronic book as a device, and to bring it back under the purview of interpretation.