Technology, Literature and Culture

by Goody, Alex

• ISBN13: 9780745639543
• ISBN10: 0745639542
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-06-13
• Publisher: Polity

Summary

Technology, Literature and Culture provides a detailed and accessible exploration of the ways in which literature across the twentieth century has represented the inescapable presence and progress of technology. As this study argues, from the Fordist revolution in manufacturing to computers and the internet, technology has reconfigured our relationship to ourselves, each other, and to the tools and material we use.The book considers such key topics as the legacy of late-nineteenth century technology, the literary engagement with cinema and radio, the place of typewriters and computers in formal and thematic literary innovations, the representations of technology in spy fiction and the figures of the robot and the cyborg. It considers the importance of broadcast technology and the internet in literature and covers major literary movements including modernism, cold war writing, postmodernism and the emergence of new textualities at the end of the century.An insightful and wide-ranging study, Technology, Literature and Culture offers close readings of writers such as Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Ian Fleming, Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo, Jeanette Winterson and Shelley Jackson. It is an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike in literary and cultural studies, and also introduces the topic to a general reader interested in the role of technology in the twentieth century.

Author Biography

Alex Goody is Reader in Twentieth-Century Literature at Oxford Brookes University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. vii
Introduction: The Twentieth-Century Technological Imaginary	p. 1
Victorian technoculture	p. 2
Uncanny technology	p. 7
Victorian Science Fiction	p. 11
Technology in the twentieth century	p. 14
Writing Technology: Literature and Theory	p. 22
Mechanical reproduction	p. 23
The question concerning technology	p. 30
The medium is the message	p. 34
Technology and postmodernism	p. 37
Desiring machines	p. 41
Media technologies, theory and the human	p. 43
Media Technologies and Modern Culture	p. 48
Modernism and the cinema eye	p. 50
Talking across distances: radio modernism	p. 60
Beckett and broadcast media	p. 73
Cold War Technologies	p. 78
Electric death	p. 79
Machine-war and poetry	p. 82
Total War, information and the spy	p. 86
Nuclear culture and counterculture	p. 96
Postmodernism, media and the death of the real	p. 101
Technological Texts: From Typewriters to Hypermedia	p. 109
Type-writers and texts	p. 110
Typing, poetry and spontaneity	p. 114
Digital writing and hypertext	p. 119
Robots, Cyborgs and the Technological Body	p. 136
'I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess'	p. 137
Machine-age man	p. 140
Robots, automation and the future of the human	p. 146
Technology, identity and the cyborg subject	p. 152
Screens, bodies and late twentieth-century culture	p. 160
Notes	p. 168
Select Bibliography	p. 171
Index	p. 186
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