Paul Benzon

ISEA2015

Paul Benzon. I teach contemporary literature, media studies, and critical writing at Temple University, USA. In my research, I explore how the material and formal extremities of textual artifacts reveal the cultural history of modern and contemporary media technology. My work has appeared in PMLA, electronic book review, and Narrative. I am currently at work on two projects: in Archival Fictions: Materiality, Form, and Media History in Contemporary Literature, I explore the relations between formal experimentation and media history in a series of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century literary texts, including work by Don DeLillo, Andy Warhol, Kevin Young, Hari Kunzru, and Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. I have also begun work on a second project, Deletions: Absence, Obsolescence, and the Ends of Media. In Deletions, I trace a history of textual disappearance across a range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century media, from book burning, redaction, and the combustion of celluloid film to the global circulation of electronic waste.