Modernism and the Machinery of Madness

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

Modernism and the Machinery of Madness presents the collapse of categorical distinctions between human and machine in modern fiction and memoirs of mental illness. These works respond to nascent fields of neurology and psychiatry that equated the mind with the brain, reducing mentally patients to 'dysfunctioning neurological machinery'.

Auteur

Andrew Gaedtke is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where he teaches modernist and contemporary literature.

Contenu

Introduction: three black boxes; 1. Fables of regression: Wyndham Lewis and machine psychology; 2. Modernist influencing machines: from Mina Loy to Evelyn Waugh; 3. On worlding and unworlding in fiction and delusion: Muriel Spark and Anna Kavan; 4. Flann O'Brien and authorship as a practice of 'sane madness'; 5. 'Prey to communications': voice hearing, thought transmission, and Samuel Beckett; Conclusion: contemporary mediations of modernist madness.