The Assault on Progress: Technology and Time in American Literature - Hardcover

Johns, J. Adam

 
9780817316259: The Assault on Progress: Technology and Time in American Literature
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0817316256 ISBN 13: 9780817316259
Verlag: UNIV OF ALABAMA PR, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

A belief in progress is a fundamental ethos in American history and culture. “The Assault on Progress” probes American literary works that challenge the prevailing notion of technology as a manifestation of progress. J. Adam Johns argues that the idea of technology-as-destiny has long been explored—and undercut—in American literary works and that literature remains a crucial site for ongoing debates in this area.

 

Johns studies the phenomenon by which each generation comes to regard itself as the hinge upon which history turns. He explores several works by historians of technology, focusing in detail on the works of literary critic Lewis Mumford, whose examinations of Herman Melville’s novels provide an early example of critical interest in the abandonment of progress as a value.

 

He goes on to study the works of William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison, focusing on the convergence of technology and race—machines and slavery, and highlights the ways that these writers have portrayed humans as reduced to machines, evidence that technological “progress” is not always progressive, or liberating to humanity. 

 

The conclusion argues for a shift in our understanding of the relationship between technology and time. According to Johns, writers like Melville, Faulkner, and Ellison help us to think of technology separate from notions of progress, and therefore help us to escape from a perilous ideological bind that forever situates humankind at the end of history.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

J. Adam Johns is Visiting Lecturer in English at the University of Pittsburgh.

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Verlag
UNIV OF ALABAMA PR
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0817316256
ISBN 13 
9780817316259
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
280
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