The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945

Review | The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology

The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology. Edited by Alex Goody and Ian Whittington. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 472 pp. $195.00 (cloth).

Reviewed by Michael McCluskey, Northeastern University

E.M. Forster seemingly predicted the isolated yet interconnected lives of our own networked world in his prescient 1909 novella, “The Machine Stops.” Vashti, the story’s protagonist, lives alone in her small cell in which she can get whatever she needs and interact with others across the world by pressing a few buttons. Her son Kuno, by contrast, is the enlightened Luddite who recognizes the pitfalls of this mediated existence and looks beyond machine orthodoxy for like-minded travelers: those who want to live outside this choreography of complete control. Alex Goody and Ian Whittington open their introduction to The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology with Forster’s tale to set the scene both for the relationship between modernism and technology that the book explores and for, perhaps, the more vexed relationship between modernist scholars and the orthodox machinery of enforced academic disciplines that this volume attempts to disrupt. Like Kuno, Goody and Whittington find fellow travelers eager to investigate what might be beyond uncontested assumptions about modernism and technology and about modernist studies and our own techno-society today.

In particular, Goody and Whittington—and their 28 contributors—interrogate assumptions about the impact of technology on space and the body. “This is perhaps the most salient conclusion of Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’ today: that the apparent spatial annihilation and userly disembodiment associated with modernist technologies are false flags by which those technologies mask their pronounced material effects on the world shared by human and non-human actors” (4). In other words, rather than look narrowly at the compression of space and time and the technology-as-prosthesis thesis, chapters in this collection examine how “technologies of production, consumption, distribution, and representation” reconfigured spaces and places and created new ways to control, comfort, document, and distort the human body (2). Bodily metaphors about technology appear throughout to show how tech became both implant and almost-sentient entity itself—a precursor to “our current Internet of Things” (12). In this Edinburgh Companion, the authors demonstrate how telephones, television, radios, radar, X-rays, electricity, cars, airplanes, etc. became “embodied” and “metastasised” into our familiar “global system of linked technologies” (1). A persistent strand throughout the collection is “strangeness”, that is, how these technologies were first interpreted and represented as strange themselves and how they rendered strange familiar places, people, and practices, through their manipulation of time, space, and the body’s relationship to both (3). The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology offers several case studies of how the strange became commonplace and how the historically distant world of Forster and the other writers and artists covered in this collection can be seen as familiar to life today, connected by our common machinery.

The “Introduction: Modernist Technology Studies” usefully surveys the field with a detailed genealogy of existing studies of modernism and technology that includes both the familiar—Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964) and Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 (1983)—and the perhaps unfamiliar, such as Martha Banta’s Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen and Ford (1993). The introduction also maps theories of technology with all the technology/media/cultural studies stars aligned, including Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, Lisa Gitelman, and Bruno Latour, among others. The succeeding chapters are organized into four sections—“Machines,” “Media,” “Bodies,” and “Systems”—which provide a framework for highlighting specific technologies while also stressing interconnectedness with human agents/subjects and with systems like politics, economics, and information.

“Machines” looks at the more obvious examples that come to mind when one thinks of technology. Here are chapters on electricity, clocks, printing machines, subways, cars, planes, and even robots. The chapters, like the collection as a whole, theorize about these machines through studies of the literary output and processes of writers (although mostly European and North American) across genres and countries. While some, like Laura Ludkte’s chapter on “Electricity” and Charles Tung’s on “Clocks,” offer a range of examples to explore technological aesthetics (Ludtke) and technology-as-organizing principle (Tung), others pursue specific arguments. Enda Duffy articulates what he calls the “speed gaze” and its relationship to cinema in “Automobiles” (78), and in “Robots,” Katherine Shingler reveals that “fictional representations tend overwhelmingly to identify such figures as female” to present new technologies as both “alluring” and “threatening” (106).

“Media” puts these machines into practice with chapters on advertising, photography, X-rays, cinema, radio, theater, music, and somewhat oddly, but intriguingly, amplification (Damien Keane’s chapter about the production of Marlene Dietrich Overseas, a 1951 album of “American songs in German for the O.S.S.”[257]). These chapters move beyond familiar accounts of modernist media (early cinema and trains; Ezra Pound on the radio; Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring) to pursue fascinating case studies. Alix Beeston argues that the “reproductive gaze of the mother-photographer” Gertrude Käsebier is crucial for an understanding of photography and modernism (171), and Tom Slevin tells us about X-ray mania. By showing us how the X-ray moved beyond its original medical use and inspired writers and artists interested in exploring modernist subjectivity, Slevin answers the question posed in an 1896 poem:

What is the craze?
The town’s ablaze
With the new phase
Of X-ray’s ways. (qtd. in Slevin 176)


In “Bodies,” chapters look at sex, race, technics, germs, and noise to consider birth control and sexual scientific studies, the “technological reproduction of whiteness” (293), germ theory and bacteriology, and “interwar factory fiction” (328). “Systems” continues this wider consideration of “technological assemblages” and covers the nation, infrastructure, paperwork, information, computation, networks, and war (15). These sections contain some rich, interesting essays that demonstrate the connections between the early twentieth century and today. Jana Funke discusses “rejuvenation treatments and gender-affirming surgeries in the interwar period” (279) in her chapter on “Sex,” Maebh Long in “Germs” makes “microbial modernism” (325) relevant to our current COVID era, and Andrew Pilsch insists on the importance of the algorithm in “Computation.”

The aim of The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology is, as Goody and Whittington claim, “to see ourselves clearly in relation to the technologies that shape us as we shape them” (12). The chapters in this collection help us to see what modernist writers and artists can teach us about our own mediated world and to understand how our research, teaching, and understanding of technology today can provide new readings of the cultural and technological output of the early twentieth century.
 
 

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