The main theme for my comprehensive exam could be labelled as the (im)mediacy of writing ranging from the idea of language and thus writing as directly expressing thoughts to the alleged discrepancy between embodied handwriting and various forms of disembodied typewriting.
I have now organized the books around three areas:

1. the (gendered) body and technology
   bodies and their interrelations with technologies, acknowledging their fundamental involvement with and significance to each other
2. corporeality and its communication through media and society
   how we come to interact the way we do: media technologies, social and physical forms of interactions, their roots and trajectories over time; this also includes, as an important focus, literature on ‘education’ in a broad sense (training of the body and mind - Elias, Foucault, Mauss, Lakoff/Johnson) as well as in a more narrow sense (training of the hand - Goldberg, Kittler, Thornton).
3. the mediality of (hand)writing
   handwriting in the context of other historical and technical practices and forms of writing; or – in a different terminology – the pre-/re-/mediation of writing

I should probably use the term intermediality for that last section, but it seems like such a pleonasm. Waiting to hear back from my supervisor and second reader with comments.

On human language, Nietzsche wrote:

"Welche willkürlichen Übertragungen! Wie weit hinausgeflogen über den Kanon der Gewissheit! [...] Welche willkürlichen Abgrenzungen, welche einseitigen Bevorzugungen bald der bald jener Eigenschaft eines Dinges! Die verschiedenen Sprachen, nebeneinander gestellt, zeigen, dass es bei den Worten nie auf die Wahrheit, nie auf den adäquaten Ausdruck ankommt: denn sonst gäbe es nicht so viele Sprachen. Das 'Ding an sich' (das würde eben die reine folgenlose Wahrheit sein) ist auch dem Sprachbildner ganz unfasslich und ganz und gar nicht erstrebenswert". (Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne, 1873)

Whereas Peirce said on 'the appeal of a sign to the mind:'

"It produces a certain idea in the mind which is the idea that it is a sign of the thing it signifies and an idea is itself a sign, for an idea is an object and it represents an object." (On the Nature of Signs, hey, 1873 as well!)

It is November 1st, 2006, and this is the reading list I am working on for my comprehensive exam sometime early next year (see below). Currently, I am trying to organize it into three or four usefull sections which ideally will reflect the main themes I am interested in:
- the body and its interrelations with technology
- writing as a primary technology (re)structuring embodiment and vice versa
- sources that give ‘body’ and ‘writing’ more historical and theoretical depth

I am also trying to finish reading everything on the list...

• Altman, Janet Gurkin. 1982. Epistolarity: approaches to a form. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
• Armstrong, Tim. 1998. Modernism, technology, and the body: a cultural history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bolter, Jay David. 1991. Writing space: the computer, hypertext, and the history of writing. 1st ed. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum.
• Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Borck, Cornelius, and Armin Schaefer, eds. 2005. Psychographien. Zuerich: diaphanes.
• Burkitt, Ian. 1999. Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity and Modernity. London: Sage Publications.
• Carey, James W. 1989. Communication as Culture: essays on media and society, Media and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge.
• Decker, William Merrill. 1998. Epistolary practices: letter writing in America before telecommunications. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
• Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. The Logic of Sense [Logique du sens]. Translated by M. Lester. New York: Columbia University Press. Original edition, 1969.
• Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Signature Event Context. In Margins of philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Original edition, Marges de la philosophie.
• ———. 1997. Of Grammatology. Translated by G. C. Spivak. corrected ed. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Original edition, 1967.
• Elias, Norbert. 1978. The civilizing process. Translated by E. Jephcott. 2 vols. New York: Urizen Books. Original edition, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation.
• ———. 1991. The society of individuals. Translated by E. Jephcott. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Original edition, Gesellschaft der Individuen.
• Feenberg, Andrew. 1991. Critical Theory of Technology. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Foucault, Michel. 1988. Technologies of the Self; The Political Technology of Individuals. In Technologies of the Self: a seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by L. H. Martin, Huck Gutman, Patrick H. Hutton. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press.
• ———. 2006. The hermeneutics of the subject: lectures at the Collège de France, 1981-82. Translated by G. Burchell: Picador. Original edition, Herméneutique du sujet.
• Fraenkel, Béatrice. 1992. La signature, genèse d’un signe. Paris: Gallimard.
• Freud, Sigmund. 1958. A Note upon the 'Mystic Writing-Pad'. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press. Original edition, 1925.
• Ginzburg, Carlo. 1983. Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes. In The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, edited by U. Eco and T. A. Sebeok. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Gitelman, Lisa. 1999. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
• Goldberg, Jonathan. 1990. Writing matter: from the hands of the English Renaissance. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Grusin, Richard. 2004. Premediation. Criticism: a quarterly for literature and the arts 46 (1):17-39.
• Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds. 1994. Materialities of Communication, Writing Science. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
• Hansen, Mark. 2000. Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing, Studies in Literature and Science. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
• ———. 2006. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media. London: Routledge.
• Hayles, N. Katherine. 2002. Writing Machines. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Ihde, Don. 2002. Bodies in Technology. Edited by N. K. Hayles, M. Poster and S. Weber. Vol. 5, Electronic Mediations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Katz, James Everett, and Mark A. Aarhus, eds. 2002. Perpetual contact: mobile communication, private talk, public performance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Kittler, Friedrich A. 1990. Discourse networks 1800/1900. Translated by M. Metteer, with Chris Cullens. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Original edition, Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900.
• ———. 1999. Gramophone, film, typewriter. Translated by G. Winthrop-Young and M. Wutz, Writing Science. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Lenoir, Timothy, ed. 1998. Inscribing science: scientific texts and the materiality of communication, Writing Science. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
• Leroi-Gourhan, André. 1993. Gesture and Speech. Translated by A. Bostock Berger. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Original edition, Le geste et la parole, 1964.
• Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: movement, affect, sensation. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Mauss, Marcel. 1973. Techniques of the body. Economy & Society 2 (1):70-88.
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2003. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by C. Smith. London: Routledge. Original edition, 1945.
• Meyer-Drawe, Kaete. 1996. Menschen im Spiegel ihrer Maschinen, Uebergaenge. Muenchen: Wilhelm Fink Verlag.
• Neef, Sonja, and Jose Van Dijck, eds. 2005. Sign here! handwriting in the age of new media. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1988. Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne. In Sämtliche Werke - kritische Studienausgabe, edited by G. Colli and M. Monitari. Muenchen: DTV. Original edition, 1873.
• Ong, Walter J. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World. London: Routledge.
• Otis, Laura. 2001. Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
• Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1991. Peirce on signs: writings on semiotic. Edited by J. Hoopes. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
• Peters, John Durham. 1999. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Reeves, Byron, Clifford Nass. 1996. The media equation: how people treat computers, television, and new media like real people and places. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Rotman, Brian. 2002. The Alphabetic Body. parallax 8 (1):92-104.
• ———. 2002. Corporeal or Gesturo-haptic Writing. Configurations 10 (3):423-438.
• Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2001. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media, Parallax: re-visions of culture and society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Sconce, Jeffrey. 2000. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Edited by L. Spigel, Console-ing Passions. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Shilling, Chris. 2005. The Body in Culture, Technology and Society. Edited by M. Featherstone, Theory, Culture & Society. London: Sage Publications.
• Siegert, Bernhard. 1999. Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System. Translated by K. Repp. Edited by T. Lenoir and H. U. Gumbrecht, Writing Science. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Original edition, Relais: Geschicke der Literatur als Epoche der Post, 1751-1913.
• Thornton, Tamara Plakins. 1996. Handwriting in America: a cultural history. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Turner, Bryan S. 2001. The Body and Society: explorations in social theory. 2nd ed. London: Sage Publications.
• Vallega-Neu, Daniela. 2005. The Bodily Dimension in Thinking. Edited by D. J. Schmidt, SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press.