Rereading the Machine in the Garden, Volume 34: Nature and Technology in American Culture

ISBN-13: 9783593501918 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 246 str.

Eric C. Erbacher; Nicole Maruo-Schroder; Florian Sedlmeier

Opis

This book reexamines the trope of the machine in the garden first laid out in one of the founding texts of American studies by Leo Marx fifty years ago. The contributors to this volume explore the lasting influence of this concept on American culture and the arts, rereading it as a dialectic wherein nature is as much technologized as technology is naturalized. Extending the relevance of Marx s theory from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, they examine filmic and literary representations of industrial, bureaucratic, and digital gardens; explore its role in the aftermath of the Civil War and of rural electrification during the New Deal; its significance in landscape art as well as in ethnic literatures; and discuss the historical premises and continued impact of Leo Marx s groundbreaking study."

Spis treści

Contents

Introduction: Rereading The Machine in the Garden

Eric Erbacher, Nicole Maruo-Schröder, Florian Sedlmeier7

The Politics of Imaging the Machine in the Garden in Antebellum Factory Literature

Katja Kanzler42

Eden Refound(ed): Post Civil War Literary Gardening

Kirsten Twelbeck58

The Dinosaur in the Garden: From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park

Susanne Hamscha77

Rural Electrification plus Government Power: Leo Marx, the Materialist Dialectic, and Power and the Land

Marlon Lieber101

Putting Machines into Gardens: Walter De Maria's Lighning Fields, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and the Pastoral Imagination

Laura Bieger121

The Machine in the Indigenous Garden: Leslie Marmon Silko's Garden in the Dunes

Christa Grewe-Volpp148

Small Town Love on the Big Screen: The Trope of the Machine in the Garden in Hollywood Romantic Comedies

Klara Stephanie Szlezák167

The Garden in the Machine: Myth and Symbol in the Digital Age

Dietmar Meinel190

The Neoliberal Machine in the Bureaucratic Garden: Pastoral States of Mind in David Foster Wallace's The Pale King

James Dorson211

Epilogue: Politics and Culture in The Machine in the Garden

Alan Trachtenberg231

Notes on Contributors235

Index240

O autorze

Eric Erbacher ist wiss. Mitarbeiter am Lehrstuhl für Amerikastudien an der Universität Münster. Nicole Maruo-Schröder ist Professorin für Cultural Studies an der Universität Koblenz-Landau, Florian Sedlmeier ist Juniorprofessor für Nordamerikanische Literatur an der FU Berlin.