Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study
Cambridge University Press
Edition: First Paperback Edition., 8/21/2008
EAN 9780521599979, ISBN10: 0521599970
Paperback, 320 pages, 23.4 x 15.8 x 1.6 cm
Language: English
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.
Introduction
Part I. The Regulation of Energies
1. Electrifying the body
2. Waste products
Part II. Reshaping the Body
3. Prosthetic modernism
4. Auto-facial construction
Part III. Technologies of Gender
5. Seminal Economies
6. Making a woman
Part IV. Interruption and Suture
7. Distracted writing
8. Film finds a tongue.