Modernism - Literary Movements, Science & Technology in Literature, 20th Century American Literature - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism, Technology - General & Miscellaneous, Literary Criticism - U.S. Fiction & Prose Literature - General & Mis

Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study

Name: Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study
Author: Tim Armstrong
ISBN: 9780521599979

by Tim Armstrong

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Overview

This book is a study of the relations between the body and its technologies in modernism. Tim Armstrong traces the links among modernist literary texts and medical, psychological and social theory across a range of writers. Armstrong shows how modernists subjected the body to new modes of production, representation and commodification as they attempted to render it part of modernity. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, Armstrong challenges the received oppositions between technology and literature by demonstrating the complex interconnections between these domains.

Synopsis

This book is a study of the relations between the body and its technologies in modernism. Tim Armstrong traces the links between modernist literary texts and medical, psychological and social theory across a range of writers, including Yeats, Henry James, Eliot, Stein, and Pound. Armstrong shows how modernist texts enact experimental procedures which have their origins in nineteenth-century psychophysics, biology, and bodily reform techniques, but within a context in which the body is reconceived and subjected to new modes of production, representation and commodification. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, Armstrong challenges the received oppositions between technology and literature, the instrumental and the aesthetic, by demonstrating the leaky boundaries and complex interconnections between these domains. This book offers a cultural history of modernism as it negotiated the enduring fact of the human body in a period of rapid technological change.