The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology by Goody, Alex; Whittington, Ian;

Short description:

The first comprehensive reference book to define and delineate the intersections of modernism and technology.

Long description:

Though modernism’s emergence in an environment of techno-cultural acceleration has long been recognized, recent scholarship has deepened and challenged our understanding of the connections between twentieth-century cultural production and its technological interlocutors. In twenty-eight chapters by leading academics, The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology re-examines the machines and media that functioned as modernism’s contexts and competitors. Grounded in an interdisciplinary approach informed by the theoretical and socio-historical frames of current teaching and research on modernism and technology, this research volume makes a crucial and timely intervention in the field of modernist studies. The scholarly contributions on machines that govern transport, production, and public utilities, on media and communication technologies, on the intersections of technology with the human body, and on the technological systems of the early twentieth century capture the contemporary state of modernist technology studies and chart the future directions of this vibrant area.

Table of Contents:

List of FiguresAcknowledgments

Introduction: Modernist Technology Studies - Alex Goody and Ian Whittington

I. Machines

1. Electricity: Technologies and Aesthetics - Laura Ludtke

2. Clocks: Modernist Heterochrony and the Contemporary Big Clock - Charles Tung

3. Print: Anaïs Nin’s Embodied Encounters with Print Technology - Jennifer Sorensen

4. Subways: Underground Networks Through Modernist Poetry and Prose - Sunny Stalter-Pace

5. Automobiles: The Modernist Gaze and Speed’s Visual Limit-field - Enda Duffy

6. Aeroplanes: Rethinking Aeriality in a Long 1930s - Leo Mellor

7. Robots: Gendered Machines and Anxious Technophilia - Katherine Shingler

II. Media

8. Materials: Glass, Iron and Ghostly Fabric - David Trotter

9. Advertising: Magazine Ads and the Creation of Femininity in Early-Twentieth-century America - Einav Rabinovitch-Fox

10. Photography: Gertrude Käsebier and the Maternal Line of Sight - Alix Beeston

11. X-rays: Technological Revelation and its Cultural Receptions - Tom Slevin

12. Cinema: Notes on Germaine Dulac’s ‘Integral Cinema’, Form and Spirit - Felicity Gee

13. Radio: Blindness, Disability and Technology - Emily Bloom

14. Music: Modernist Remediation and Technologies of Listening - Josh Epstein

15. Performance: Machine Dances and the Avant-garde’s Technological Imaginary - Emilie Morin

16. Amplification: At Home with Marlene Dietrich Overseas - Damien Keane

III. Bodies

17. Sex: Hypnosis, Hormones, Birth Control and the Modernist Body - Jana Funke

18. Race: Fordism, Factories and the Mechanical Reproduction of Racial Identity - Joshua Lam

19. Technics: Education and Pharmakon in Lawrence, Simondon and Stiegler - Jeff Wallace

20. Germs: The Shocks, Politics and Aesthetics of Microbial Modernism - Maebh Long

21. Noise: Labour, Industry and Embodiment in Interwar Factory Fiction - Anna Snaith

IV. Systems

22. Nation: GPO Documentaries and Infrastructures of the Nation-state - Janice Ho

23. Infrastructure: Women Writers Confront Large Technological Systems - Jennifer L. Lieberman

24. Paperwork: Atomic Age Bureaucracy in C. P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers - Caroline Z. Krzakowski

25. Information: Literature and Knowledge in the Age of Bradshaw and Baedeker - James Purdon

26. Computation: The Work of Calculation Between Human and Mechanism - Andrew Pilsch

27. Networks: Modernism in Circulation, 1920–2020 - Shawna Ross

28. War: Modernism in Camouflage, Strategic Fantasy and the Technological Sublime - Patrick Deer