Reading machines in the modernist transatlantic : avant-gardes, technology and the everyday / Eric White.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

White, Eric B., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature, Experimental--History and criticism.

Literature, Experimental.

American literature--History and criticism.

American literature.

European literature--History and criticism.

European literature.

Literature and technology--History--20th century.

Literature and technology.

Reading machines--History.

Reading machines.

History.

Physical Description:

xiv, 289 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, [2020]

Summary:

Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic provides a new account of aesthetic and technological innovation, from the Machine Age to the Information Age. Drawing on a wealth of archival discoveries, it argues that modernist vanguardists used technology not only as a means of analysing and critiquing culture, but as a way of feeding back into it. As well as uncovering a new invention by the poet Mina Loy, and revealing the untold story of Bob and Rose Brown?s infamous reading machines, the book places avant-gardes at the centre of innovation across a variety of fields. From Dazzle Camouflage to?Reading Machines, and from rail networks to broadcast technology, White explores how avant-gardes combined technicity and aesthetics to provoke socio-political change and to explore new modes of being modern.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 1. Dazzling Technologies: Avant-Gardes and Sensory Augmentation in the First World War

2. Re-Reading the Machine Age: The `Audacious Modernity' of the Techno-Bathetic Avant-Gardes

3. Excavating the `Readies': The Revolution of the Word, Revised

4. Ghosts in the Machine Age: Rose and Bob Brown's Reading Machines and the Socio-Technics of Social Change

5. `Our Technology Was Vernacular': Radical Technicities in African American Experimental Writing

6. Afterword: The Robot Does (Not) Exist.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781474441490

1474441491

OCLC:

1180212964