Phone Booth

by Ariana Kelly, Ian Bogost (Editor), Christopher Schaberg (Editor)

Overview

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

The phone booth exists as a fond but distant memory for some people, and as a strange and dysfunctional waste of space for many more. Ariana Kelly approaches the phone booth as an entity that embodies diverse attitudes about privacy, freedom, power, sanctuary, and communication in its various forms all around the world. Through portrayals of phone booths in literature, film, personal narrative, philosophy, and religion, Phone Booth offers a definitive account of an object on the cusp of obsolescence.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628924091
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	09/24/2015
Series:	Object Lessons
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	4.70(w) x 6.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Ariana Kelly is a freelance writer and educator and teaches English Literature and Comparative Religion at the Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, California. She has written for The L.A. Review of Books and Salon, among others.

Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Director of Film & Media Studies, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. Bogost is author or co-author of ten books, including Alien Phenomenology (2012)and Play Anything (2016).

Christopher Schaberg is Director of the Program in Public Scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, and the author of The Textual Life of Airports (2012), The End of Airports (2015), Airportness (2017), The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (2018), Searching for the Anthropocene (2019), Pedagogy of the Depressed (2021), and Adventure: An Argument for Limits (2023), all published by Bloomsbury. He is also the founding co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons book series.

Table of Contents

1. Disconnected
2. Hermit's Hut
3. Our Speed
4. The Phantom Phone Booth
5. Say Anything
6. Fortress of Solitude
7. Significant Portals
8. A Fine and Private Place
9. Glass Case of Emotion
10. The God Booth
11. Only Connect

Acknowledgements
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

An entertaining and enlightening exploration of the cultural history of the phone booth and a lament for the loss of these spaces.” —WPR: BETA

“In this delightful set of mini-essays, Ariana Kelly has created a paen, rather than an elegy, in celebration of the many dimensions of the vanishing phone booth. Her text gleans images and sensations from our collective memory of the once (if briefly) ubiquitous structure. Site of superhero transformations, crimes, communications, quick changes, and other coins of the social realm, the phone booth and the kiosk served as small theaters of intimate activity in full view of the public eye, a curious combination of enclosed and exposed space. She shifts scale from the minutiae of physical observation-hanging wires and scratched glass-to the larger cultural issues of communication and longing, mixing personal experience with historical, literary, and film references throughout.” —Johanna Drucker, Professor of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

“Fascinated and attuned, I was cabled into Phone Booth. Ariana Kelly replenishes the work on speculative telephony in an altogether compelling way.” —Avital Ronell, University Professor in the Humanities, New York University, USA, and author of The Telephone Book

“[Phone Booth] inclines us towards nostalgia, toward urgent questions of what remains when objects disappear, of re-use, and shelter. If phone booths today have receded into the interstices of our built worlds… then that freeing of the object from its use enables Arianna Kelly to tell a different story, a story about what these telephonic leftovers might become, what they now are and what they anchor.” —Julian Yates, Los Angeles Review of Books

From the Publisher

Fascinated and attuned, I was cabled into Phone Booth. Ariana Kelly replenishes the work on speculative telephony in an altogether compelling way.

Avital Ronell

In this delightful set of mini-essays, Ariana Kelly has created a paen, rather than an elegy, in celebration of the many dimensions of the vanishing phone booth. Her text gleans images and sensations from our collective memory of the once (if briefly) ubiquitous structure. Site of superhero transformations, crimes, communications, quick changes, and other coins of the social realm, the phone booth and the kiosk served as small theaters of intimate activity in full view of the public eye, a curious combination of enclosed and exposed space. She shifts scale from the minutiae of physical observation-hanging wires and scratched glass-to the larger cultural issues of communication and longing, mixing personal experience with historical, literary, and film references throughout.

Johanna Drucker