Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Piper, Andrew

Titel

Of Automatics: Sophie von La Roche and the Life of the Writer's Desk

Ist Teil von

• Women's writing : the Elizabethan to Victorian period, 2014-07, Vol.21 (3), p.405-415

Ort / Verlag

Abingdon: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2014

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Taylor & Francis Journals Auto-Holdings Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This essay explores the desk as an important figure through which to understand the genre of life-writing and the life of writing at the close of the eighteenth century. Through a discussion of Sophie von La Roche's My Writing Desk (1799), the desk and its biography emerge as key instruments for working out the automaticity and the machinality of writing-the way writing and its instruments could produce more writing. In so doing, the biography of the desk rewrites one of the founding tropes of autobiographical narrative-that of conversion. Instead of being understood in the sense of a personal crisis, conversion assumes a new meaning in the nineteenth century as a means of exploring the discursive and technological transformations that allow for writing's movement between different types of material and epistemic spaces.