Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American RenaissanceUniv of Massachusetts Press, 2009 - 256 pages 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 helped writers construct a hybrid identity that reconciled new modes of technological production with older, more organic models of professional writing. In the end, Benesch argues, Romantic literary discourse is marked as much by admiration for the technological as by strains of resentment and cultural anxiety about its negative effects. As such, it prefigures in important and previously unacknowledged ways the modernist and postmodernist sensibilities that would follow. |
Contents
From Franklin to Whitman Contested Ideologies of Authorship and Technology | 33 |
Machine Art Revisited Hawthornes Artists of the Beautiful | 61 |
Do Machines Make History? Edgar allan Poe and the Technological Enchroachment | 95 |
Figuring Modern Authorship Melvilles Narratives of Technological Encrouchment | 127 |
The Author in Pain Technology and Fragmentation in Rebecca Garding Davis and Walt Whitman | 155 |
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aesthetic American Renaissance Aminadab anastatic printing antebellum antebellum America appears artist automata automaton Aylmer's Bannadonna Bartleby Birth-mark body century chess concept contemporary creative critical cultural cybernetic cyborg cyborg figure cyborgean daguerreotype Davis's discourse Drowne's economic Emerson engineer essay famous fiction Franklin Further references gender Hawthorne Hawthorne's historical human hunger artist Ibid idea identity ideology imagination important industrial invention Iron Mills labor Leaves of Grass Leo Marx literary texts literature machine machinery Maelzel's man-machine material means mechanical mechanical philosophy Melville Melville's ment metaphor mirror image modern authorship modern society modern technology modes narrative narrator nature notion ongoing organic original paradigms physical Piazza Tales Poe's poem poet poetic political postmodern production professional Purloined Letter railroad Rebecca Harding Davis references are cited representation represented reproduction rhetoric Romanticism seems social story symbolic synecdochic Tartarus tech technical technological progress Thoreau tion Walt Whitman White-Jacket Whitman writing