Romantic Cyborgs

by Benesch, Klaus

• ISBN13: 9781558493230
• ISBN10: 1558493239
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-01-01
• Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Pr

Summary

Literary critics have long regarded the rejection of technology as a distinguishing feature of American Romanticism. Yet as Klaus Benesch shows in this insightful study, the attitude of antebellum writers toward the advent of the machine age was far more complicated than often supposed. Although fraught with tension, the relationship between professional authorship and evolving technology reflected a pattern of adjustment rather than opposition, as writers sought to redefine their place within a culture that increasingly valued the engineer and the scientist.

According to Benesch, major writers such as Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Whitman, and Rebecca Harding Davis recognized technology as a powerful engine of social change -- a driving force that threatened to subordinate their creative faculties to the inexorable dictates of industrial production. In response, they conjured up "cybernetic" self-representations that attempted to preserve the autonomy of the individual author in the face of ongoing technological encroachment. These biomechanical images

Author Biography

Klaus Benesch is professor of English at the University of Bayreuth, Germany

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction
Authorship, Technology, and the Cybernetic Body	1	(34)
From Franklin to Whitman
Contested Ideologies of Authorship and Technology	35	(28)
Machine Art Revisited
Hawthorne's Artist(s) of the Beautiful	63	(34)
Do Machines Make History?
Edgar Allan Poe and the Technologizing of Discourse	97	(32)
Figuring Modern Authorship
Melville's Narratives of Technological Encroachment	129	(28)
The Author in Pain
Technology and Fragmentation in Rebecca Harding Davis and Walt Whitman	157	(26)
Notes	183	(36)
Bibliography	219	(20)
Index	239