Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the hegemony of the printed word was shattered by the arrival of media technologies that offered new ways of communicating and storing data. Previously, writing had operated by way of symbolic mediation, but phonography, photography, and cinematography stored physical effects of the real in the shape of sound waves and light. The entire question of referentiality had to be recast in light of these new media technologies. Part technological history of the emergent new media in the late nineteenth century, part theoretical discussion of the responses to these media - including texts by Rilke, Kafka, and Heidegger - Gramophone, Film, Typewriter analyzes this momentous shift using insights from the work of Foucault, Lacan, and McLuhan. It is a continuation as well as a detailed elaboration of the second part of the author's Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (Stanford, 1990).