Modernism, Science, and Technology

Modernism, Science, and Technology
Author: Mark S. Morrisson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2016-11-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1474233430

From quantum physics and genetics to psychology and the social sciences, from the development of atomic weapons to the growing mass media of film and radio, the early 20th century was a period of intense scientific and technological change. Modernism, Science, and Technology surveys the scientific contexts of writers from H.G. Wells and Gertrude Stein to James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and the ways in modernist writers responded to these paradigm shifts. Introducing key concepts from science studies and their implications for the study of modernist literature, the book includes chapters covering the physical sciences, mathematics, life sciences, social sciences and 'pseudosciences'. Including a timeline of key developments and guides to further reading, this is an essential guide to students and researchers studying the topic at all levels.

Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism

Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism
Author: Kathryn Conrad
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 419
Release: 2019-09-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0815654480

Since W. B. Yeats wrote in 1890 that “the man of science is too often a person who has exchanged his soul for a formula,” the anti-scientific bent of Irish literature has often been taken as a given. Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism brings together leading and emerging scholars of Irish modernism to challenge the stereotype that Irish literature has been unconcerned with scientific and technological change. The collection spotlights authors ranging from James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O’Brien, and Samuel Beckett to less-studied writers like Emily Lawless, John Eglinton, Denis Johnston, and Lennox Robinson. With chapters on naturalism, futurism, dynamite, gramophones, uncertainty, astronomy, automobiles, and more, this book showcases the far-reaching scope and complexity of Irish writers’ engagement with innovations in science and technology. Taken together, the fifteen original essays in Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism map a new literary landscape of Ireland in the twentieth century. By focusing on writers’ often-ignored interest in science and technology, this book uncovers shared concerns between revivalists, modernists, and late modernists that challenge us to rethink how we categorize and periodize Irish literature.

Science, Technology and Modernity

Science, Technology and Modernity
Author: Kavita S. Jerath
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2021-10-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030804658

This book provides a full scale description and discussion of science, technology, society, cross-cultural communication and modernity and is presented at a level that makes it accessible to the interested academic. Starting with the historical overview, the text outlines the relevance of technology today and in the future. Then follows an introduction to the discovery and invention by agricultural, feudal, capitalist and socialist systems, and conversely the ways in which science and technology has altered economic, social, and political beliefs and practices during industrial revolutions and have transformed the whole nature of human society. Tracing the relationship between science and technology from dawn to civilization to the twenty first century, the book argues that technology is applied science and vice versa and this phenomenon emerged relatively recently, as industry and governments began funding scientific research that would lead to new technologies. The book goes beyond technology by also describing the path from modernity to post modernity and discussing the theories of modernity. Further the internet and social media receive increased attention as well. Finally, the discussion turns to the future structure of society and gender equality, expected to have a more distributed future generation, thereby addressing the synergies between education system, globalization and cross-cultural communication. This book is designed as the primary general textbook for Engineers at the undergraduate level in any university. This course is a multidisciplinary elective course from emerging areas in the 4- year institution and is a required course in most universities.

Being Modern

Being Modern
Author: Robert Bud
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2018-10-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1787353931

In the early decades of the twentieth century, engagement with science was commonly used as an emblem of modernity. This phenomenon is now attracting increasing attention in different historical specialties. Being Modern builds on this recent scholarly interest to explore engagement with science across culture from the end of the nineteenth century to approximately 1940. Addressing the breadth of cultural forms in Britain and the western world from the architecture of Le Corbusier to working class British science fiction, Being Modern paints a rich picture. Seventeen distinguished contributors from a range of fields including the cultural study of science and technology, art and architecture, English culture and literature examine the issues involved. The book will be a valuable resource for students, and a spur to scholars to further examination of culture as an interconnected web of which science is a critical part, and to supersede such tired formulations as 'Science and culture'.

The Senses of Modernism

The Senses of Modernism
Author: Sara Danius
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2019-01-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 150172116X

In The Senses of Modernism, Sara Danius develops a radically new theoretical and historical understanding of high modernism. The author closely analyzes Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and James Joyce's Ulysses as narratives of the sweeping changes that affected high and low culture in the age of technological reproduction. In her discussion of the years from 1880 to 1930, Danius proposes that the high-modernist aesthetic is inseparable from a technologically mediated crisis of the senses. She reveals the ways in which categories of perceiving and knowing are realigned when technological devices are capable of reproducing sense data. Sparked by innovations such as chronophotography, phonography, radiography, cinematography, and technologies of speed, this sudden shift in perceptual abilities had an effect on all arts of the time.Danius explores how perception, notably sight and hearing, is staged in the three most significant modern novels in German, French, and British literature. The Senses of Modernism connects technological change and formal innovation to transform the study of modernist aesthetics. Danius questions the longstanding acceptance of a binary relationship between high and low culture and describes the complicated relationship between modernism and technology, challenging the conceptual divide between a technological culture and a more properly aesthetic one.

The Pulse of Modernism

The Pulse of Modernism
Author: Robert Michael Brain
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2015-03-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0295805781

Robert Brain traces the origins of artistic modernism to specific technologies of perception developed in late-nineteenth-century laboratories. Brain argues that the thriving fin-de-siècle field of “physiological aesthetics,” which sought physiological explanations for the capacity to appreciate beauty and art, changed the way poets, artists, and musicians worked and brought a dramatic transformation to the idea of art itself.

Modernism and the Machinery of Madness

Modernism and the Machinery of Madness
Author: Andrew Gaedtke
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2017-10-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108418007

This book shows that a distinct form of technological madness emerged within modernist culture, transforming much of the period's experimental fiction.

The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism

The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism
Author: Steven Connor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2004-07-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521648400

The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism offers a comprehensive introduction to postmodernism. The Companion examines the different aspects of postmodernist thought and culture that have had a significant impact on contemporary cultural production and thinking. Topics discussed by experts in the field include postmodernism's relation to modernity, and its significance and relevance to literature, film, law, philosophy, architecture, religion and modern cultural studies. The volume also includes a useful guide to further reading and a chronology. This is an essential aid for students and teachers from a range of disciplines interested in postmodernism in all its incarnations. Accessible and comprehensive, this Companion addresses the many issues surrounding this elusive, enigmatic and often controversial topic.

Dreamscapes of Modernity

Dreamscapes of Modernity
Author: Sheila Jasanoff
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2015-09-02
Genre: Science
ISBN: 022627666X

Dreamscapes of Modernity offers the first book-length treatment of sociotechnical imaginaries, a concept originated by Sheila Jasanoff and developed in close collaboration with Sang-Hyun Kim to describe how visions of scientific and technological progress carry with them implicit ideas about public purposes, collective futures, and the common good. The book presents a mix of case studies—including nuclear power in Austria, Chinese rice biotechnology, Korean stem cell research, the Indonesian Internet, US bioethics, global health, and more—to illustrate how the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries can lead to more sophisticated understandings of the national and transnational politics of science and technology. A theoretical introduction sets the stage for the contributors’ wide-ranging analyses, and a conclusion gathers and synthesizes their collective findings. The book marks a major theoretical advance for a concept that has been rapidly taken up across the social sciences and promises to become central to scholarship in science and technology studies.

Modernist Soundscapes

Modernist Soundscapes
Author: Angela Frattarola
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2018-11-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813052432

At the turn of the twentieth century, new technologies such as the phonograph, telephone, and radio changed how sound was transmitted and perceived. In Modernist Soundscapes, Angela Frattarola analyzes the influence of “the age of noise” on writers of the time, showing how modernist novelists used sound to bridge the distance between characters and to connect with the reader on a more intimate level. Frattarola tunes in to representations of voices, noise, and music in works by Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Jean Rhys, and Samuel Beckett. She argues that the common use of headphones, which piped sounds from afar into a listener’s headspace, inspired modernists to record the interior monologues of their characters in a stream-of-consciousness style. Woolf’s onomatopoeia stemmed from a desire to render the sounds of the world without mediation, similar to how some contemporaries hoped that recording technology would eliminate the need for musicians. Frattarola also explains how Beckett’s linguistic repetition mirrors the mechanical reproduction of the tape recorder. These writers challenged ocularcentrism, the traditional emphasis on vision in art and philosophy, and instead characterized the eye as distancing and analytical and the act of listening as immediate and unifying. Contending that the experimentation typically associated with modernist writing is partly due to this new attentiveness to sound, this book introduces a fresh perspective on texts that set the course of contemporary literature.