The Cryptographic Imagination

Originally published in 1996. In The Cryptographic Imagination, Shawn Rosenheim uses the writings of Edgar Allan Poe to pose a set of questions pertaining to literary genre, cultural modernity, and technology. Rosenheim argues that Poe's cryptographic writing—his essays on cryptography and the short stories that grew out of them—requires that we rethink the relation of poststructural criticism to Poe's texts and, more generally, reconsider the relation of literature to communication. Cryptography serves not only as a template for the language, character, and themes of much of Poe's late fiction (including his creation, the detective story) but also as a "secret history" of literary modernity itself. "Both postwar fiction and literary criticism," the author writes, "are deeply indebted to the rise of cryptography in World War II." Still more surprising, in Rosenheim's view, Poe is not merely a source for such literary instances of cryptography as the codes in Conan Doyle's "The Dancing-Men" or in Jules Verne, but, through his effect on real cryptographers, Poe's writing influenced the outcome of World War II and the development of the Cold War. However unlikely such ideas sound, The Cryptographic Imagination offers compelling evidence that Poe's cryptographic writing clarifies one important avenue by which the twentieth century called itself into being. "The strength of Rosenheim's work extends to a revisionistic understanding of the entirety of literary history (as a repression of cryptography) and then, in a breathtaking shift of register, interlinks Poe's exercises in cryptography with the hyperreality of the CIA, the Cold War, and the Internet. What enables this extensive range of applications is the stipulated tension Rosenheim discerns in the relationship between the forms of the literary imagination and the condition of its mode of production. Cryptography, in this account, names the technology of literary production—the diacritical relationship between decoding and encoding—that the literary imagination dissimulates as hieroglyphics—the hermeneutic relationship between a sign and its content."—Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth Colleg

Die Abenteuer von Alice im Wissenschaftsland

Lewis Carroll based much of his nonsense humour and curious themes in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass on his expertise in logic and mathematics. Years after the books were written, Alice, under the guidance of new authors, is experiencing new adventures in different regions of Scienceland, from Quantumland to Computerland. Situations, characters and concepts from Carroll’s books on Alice are often reused in different scientific fields to illustrate scientific phenomena. Alice has become an archetype placeholder name for experimentalists in physics and cryptology. Carroll’s books on Alice have been adopted by the scientific community and it seems that, although it is characteristic for science to keep changing, Alice’s adventures in Scienceland are here to stay.Velik dio nonsensnoga humora i začudnih tema u djelima Aličine pustolovine u Zemlji Čudesa i S onu stranu zrcala nadahnut je Carrollovim vrsnim poznavanjem logike i matematike. Godinama nakon nastanka spomenutih romana, u rukama novih autora, Alica doživljava nove pustolovine u raznim dijelovima Znanstvozemske: od Kvantozemske do Računalozemske. Situacije, likovi i pojmovi iz Carrollovih knjiga o Alici često se iznova rabe u raznim znanstvenim područjima u svrhu ilustriranja znanstvenih pojava. Sama Alica postala je arhetipskim imenom za ispitanike u fizici i kriptologiji. Iako su neprestane mijene jedna od odlika znanosti, jedna se stvar zacijelo neće promijeniti: junakinja Carrollovih romana, koje je znanstvena zajednica dobro prihvatila, i dalje će doživljavati pustolovine u Znanstvozemskoj.Zahlreiche Bespiele des Nonsens-Humors sowie eine Unmenge an sonderbaren Ereignissen aus den Werken Alice in Wunderland und Alice hinter den Spiegeln scheinen auf Carrolls ausgezeichneten Kenntnissen aus dem Bereich der Logik und der Mathematik zu beruhen. Noch jahrelang nach der Romanentstehung erlebt Alice unter den Händen anderer Autoren in unterschiedlichen Teilen des Wissenschaftslandes − von dem Quantenland bis hin zum Computerland − neuartige Abenteuer. Situationen, Gestalten und Begriffe aus Carrolls AliceBüchern werden in zahlreichen wissenschaftlichen Bereichen immer wieder verwendet, um dadurch wissenschaftliche Begriffe zu illustrieren. Alice wurde sogar zum archetypischen Namen für Experimentatoren im Bereich der Physik und Kryptologie. Ist auch der stete Wandel eines der Merkmale der Wissenschaft, eines wird sich gewiss nie ändern: Einmal in der wissenschaftlichen Gemeinschaft gut aufgenommen, wird Carrolls Romanheldin in Wissenschaftsland auch weiterhin zahlreiche Abenteuer erleben

Propaganda, Patriotism, and News: Printing Discovered and Intercepted Letters In England, 1571–1600

In this article I propose that the relatively few intercepted and discovered letters printed during the reign of Elizabeth I fall chiefly into three categories: they were published as propaganda, as patriotic statement, and as news reportage. Although Elizabeth and her ministers published intercepted and discovered letters on a strictly ad hoc and contingent basis, the pamphlets and books in which these letters appear, along with associated ideo-logical and polemical material, reveals determined uses of intercepted and discovered letters in print. Catholics likewise printed intercepted letters as propaganda to confront Elizabeth’s anti-Catholic policies through their own propaganda apparatus on the continent. Intercepted letters were also printed less frequently to encourage religious and state patriotism, while other intercepted letters were printed solely as new reportage with no overt ideological intent. Because intercepted and discovered letters, as bearers of secret information, were understood to reveal sincere intention and genuine motivation, all of the publications assessed here demonstrate that such letters not only could be used as effective tools to shape cultural perceptions, but could also be cast as persuasive written testimony, as legal proof and as documentary authentication

Holland City News, Volume 104, Number 45: November 6, 1975

Newspaper published in Holland, Michigan, from 1872-1977, to serve the English-speaking people in Holland, Michigan. Purchased by local Dutch language newspaper, De Grondwet, owner in 1888.https://digitalcommons.hope.edu/hcn_1975/1044/thumbnail.jp

"Both diligent and secret": the intelligence letters of William Herle

PhDThe unpublished letters of William Herle, diplomat and intelligencer to the court of Elizabeth I reveal startling insights into the role of such agents in political affairs. As well as their more obvious content of sensitive information, Herle's letters expose his primary impetus behind the pursuit of intelligence; of the construction and maintenance of a patronage alliance based upon the judicious exchange and release of knowledge at politically sensitive moments. This epistolary aspect of intelligence letters - overlooked by much scholarship - reveals the complex strategies Herle implements to circumvent the disruption of social hierarchy at the moment of counsel, the private transfer of knowledge in a medium often subject to broadcast, and the uncomfortable union of potent intelligence and familiar affect. This dissertation investigates the world of Elizabethan intelligence operations as experienced by William Herle, focusing on the topics of religion, early modern diplomacy, imprisonment, secret communication and patronage relationships based upon intelligence-exchange. The letters are an invaluable resource for scholars of early modern history and sixteenth-century letter writing, documenting the lengths to which a client would go to secure and maintain patronage in this period, encompassing the giving of gifts, the transmitting of books, and the strategic deployment of potent information. Scrutinizing intelligence operations from a social and textual standpoint offers the scholar a wider picture of the agent's position and relation to the political landscape. This dissertation examines Herle's evolving status of common informant, prison spy, diplomatic envoy, and special ambassador, surmounting obstacles of social hierarchy whilst maintaining a marginal, secret status. By identifying the epistolary and social minutiae of Herle's letters, this study relocates the position of the Elizabethan intelligencer, departing from the typical notion of skulking spy and instead positioning the agent directly in contact, both textual and physical, with the political power-base

Undead children : reconsidering death and the child figure in late nineteenth-century fiction

The Victorian obsession with the child is also often, in the world of literary criticism at least, an obsession with death, whether the death of the child itself or simply the inevitable death of childhood as a seemingly Edenic state of being. This study seeks to consider the way in which the child figure, in texts by four authors published at the end of the nineteenth century, is aligned with an inversion of this relationship. For Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, George MacDonald, and Henry James, the child is bound up instead with un-death, with a construction of death which seeks to remove the finitude, even the mortality, of death itself, or else a death which is expected or anticipated, yet always deferred. While in “The Child in the House” (1878) and “Emerald Uthwart” (1892), Pater places the child at the nexus of his construction of a death which is, rather than a finite ending, a return or a re-beginning, Lee's interest in the child figure's unique access to a world of art, explored in “The Child in the Vatican” (1883) and “Christkindchen” (1897) culminates in a dazzling vision of aesthetic transcendence with “Sister Benvenuta and the Christ Child” (1906). MacDonald, for whom death is already never really death, uses the never-dead child figure in At The Back of the North Wind (1871) and Lilith (1895) as an embodiment of his own distinct engagement with aestheticism, as well as a means by which to express the simultaneous anticipation and depression he experienced in contemplation of death. Finally James, in What Maisie Knew (1897), explores the child's inherent monstrosity as he crafts the possibility of a childhood which consciously refuses to die. This study explores a trajectory in which the child’s place within such reconsiderations of death grows increasingly intense, reaching an apex with MacDonald’s fantastic worlds, before considering James’s problematisation of the concept of the un-dead child in What Maisie Knew

Sir Robert Cecil and Elizabethan Intelligencing, 1590-1603

Much scholarly attention has been given to the development of Sir Francis Walsingham’s intelligence-gathering network and how it played an important role in Elizabethan foreign and domestic politics during the 1580s, but little has been attempted for the 1590s. This thesis will argue that the practices and methods that Walsingham laid down did not completely dissipate after his death but in fact continued to be adhered to, most notably in the person of Sir Robert Cecil. It was Cecil who, more than any other Elizabethan in high authority, looked to create his own intelligence-gathering network as he foresaw the benefits of doing so. However, this transition was by no means straightforward, and in fact it can be seen as disjointed. The thesis will also show that the rise of Cecil’s intelligence-gathering network became intertwined with the rise of his political career. It was not until he became principal secretary in July 1596 that the creation of his own network could really proceed apace. The make-up and construction of his intelligence-gathering network will be discussed, as will the backgrounds of the people who worked for Cecil: his secretaries, his agents and message carriers. In sum, it will be shown that Sir Robert Cecil created by 1603 an effective intelligence-gathering network that was put to good use in the final years of Elizabeth’s reign and continued into that of James I

The Cultural Contradictions of Cryptography

This dissertation examines the origins of political and scientific commitments that currently frame cryptography, the study of secret codes, arguing that these commitments took shape over the course of the twentieth century. Looking back to the nineteenth century, cryptography was rarely practiced systematically, let alone scientifically, nor was it the contentious political subject it has become in the digital age. Beginning with the rise of computational cryptography in the first half of the twentieth century, this history identifies a quarter-century gap beginning in the late 1940s, when cryptography research was classified and tightly controlled in the US. Observing the reemergence of open research in cryptography in the early 1970s, a course of events that was directly opposed by many members of the US intelligence community, a wave of political scandals unrelated to cryptography during the Nixon years also made the secrecy surrounding cryptography appear untenable, weakening the official capacity to enforce this classification. Today, the subject of cryptography remains highly political and adversarial, with many proponents gripped by the conviction that widespread access to strong cryptography is necessary for a free society in the digital age, while opponents contend that strong cryptography in fact presents a danger to society and the rule of law. I argue that cryptography would not have become invested with these deep political commitments if it had not been suppressed in research and the media during the postwar years. The greater the force exerted to dissuade writers and scientists from studying cryptography, the more the subject became wrapped in an aura of civil disobedience and public need. These positive political investments in cryptography have since become widely accepted among many civil libertarians, transparency activists, journalists, and computer scientists who treat cryptography as an essential instrument for maintaining a free and open society in the digital age. Likewise, even as opponents of widespread access to strong cryptography have conceded considerable ground in recent decades, their opposition is grounded in many of the same principles that defined their stance during cryptography’s public reemergence in the 1970s. Studying this critical historical moment reveals not only the origins of cryptography’s current politics, but also the political origins of modern cryptography