Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic : : Avant-Gardes, Technology and the Everyday / / Eric White.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Edinburgh University Press Complete eBook-Package 2020
• VerfasserIn: White, Eric,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (288 p.) :; 28 B/W illustrations

A revisionist account of technology’s role in the aesthetics, spaces and politics of transatlantic avant-gardesExplores of a range of key avant-garde formations in the modernist transatlantic period, from the Italian futurists and English Vorticists to the Dada-surrealist and post-Harlem Renaissance African American experimentalistsExplores writers’ and artists’ inventions as well as their texts, and involves them directly in the messy transductions of technology in cultureDraws on previously unknown photos, manuscripts and other evidence that reveals the untold story of Bob and Rose Brown’s ‘reading machine’ – a cross-disciplinary, meta-formational, and transnational project that proposed to transform the everyday act of readingReading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic provides a new account of aesthetic and technological innovation, from the Machine Age to the Information Age. Drawing on a wealth of archival discoveries, it argues that modernist avant-gardes used technology not only as a means of analysing culture, but as a way of feeding back into it. As well as uncovering a new invention by Mina Loy, the untold story of Bob Brown’s ‘reading machine’ and the radical technicities of African American experimentalists including Gwendolyn Bennett and Ralph Ellison, the book places avant-gardes at the centre of innovation across a variety of fields. From dazzle camouflage to microfilm, and from rail networks to broadcast systems, White explores how vanguardists harnessed socio-technics to provoke social change.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgements -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- 1. Dazzling Technologies: Avant-Gardes and Sensory Augmentation in the First World War -- 2. Re-Reading the Machine Age: The ‘Audacious Modernity’ of the Techno-Bathetic Avant-Gardes -- 3. Excavating the ‘Readies’: The Revolution of the Word, Revised -- 4. Ghosts in the Machine Age: Rose and Bob Brown’s Reading Machines and the Socio-Technics of Social Change -- 5. ‘Our Technology Was Vernacular’: Radical Technicities in African American Experimental Writing -- 6. Afterword: The Robot Does (Not) Exist -- Index