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The introduction traces how, through the comparison to Egyptian hieroglyphs, twentieth-century writers, directors, and theorists incessantly invoked other media as well as other nations as they sought to define the most essential qualities and capabilities of their own. Rather than attempting to combine media, the modernists defined the uniqueness of any medium by its hybridity, its ability to enclose or embody the sonic, visual, or semantic characteristics of other media forms. At the same time, by situating conceptions of hieroglyphics within the historical context of Egypt in the 1920s and in relation to the novels of Tawfiq al-Hakim and Naguib Mahfouz, the book insists on the fundamental connection between theories of new technologies on the one hand and colonialism, nationalism, and the universalist desire to bridge linguistic and cultural boundaries on the other.

The first chapter of Hieroglyphic Modernisms exposes the complex history of Western misconceptions of Egyptian writing from antiquity to the present. Hieroglyphs bridge the gap between modern technologies and the ancient past, looking forward to the rise of new media and backward to the dispersal of languages in the mythical moment of the Tower of Babel. The contradictory ways in which hieroglyphs were interpreted in the West come to shape the differing ways that modernist writers and filmmakers understood the relationship between writing, film, and other new media. On the one hand, poets like Ezra Pound and film theorists like Vachel Lindsay and Sergei Eisenstein use the visual languages of China and of Egypt as a more primal or direct alternative to written words. But Freud, Proust, and the later Eisenstein conversely emphasize the phonetic qualities of Egyptian writing, its similarity to alphabetical scripts. The chapter concludes by arguing that even avant-garde invocations of hieroglyphics depend on narrative form through an examination of Hollis Frampton’s experimental film Zorns Lemma.

This chapter examines how hybrid conceptions of language and media come to challenge representations of literary character and narrative in the modernist period. Understanding Virginia Woolf as a film theorist situated within the ferment of avant-garde film culture in London in the mid-1920s—a period which saw the formation of the journal Close-Up and the London Film Society—the chapter argues that Woolf’s engagement with film and its ‘hieroglyphs’ in her essay ‘The Cinema’ transforms her understanding of language and character in To the Lighthouse. Throughout the late 1920s, Woolf imagines writing as emulating the material and visual form of hieroglyphs, revealing the inscriptions graven upon the ‘sacred tablets’ of the minds and hearts of her characters.

The final chapter examines post-War American fiction and the imaginative connection forged, in theory and in fiction, between hieroglyphs and code, computers, and electronic writing. It contends that the association of hieroglyphs with universal languages and mixtures of media gets passed down to the newest of new media, digital code. From the postmodern novels of Thomas Pynchon through the literary-inflected sci-fi of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, from the Afro-Futurist works of Ishmael Reed to the mass market novels of Dan Brown, this pairing of hieroglyphs and digital code recurs across genre and style. By linking code with Egyptian writing, these writers emphasize the performativity of their language; just as code can create a simulation of reality, so words can call characters and settings into being.