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Modernism and the Machinery of Madness Andrew Gaedtke (University of Illinois)

Modernism and the Machinery of Madness By Andrew Gaedtke (University of Illinois)

Modernism and the Machinery of Madness by Andrew Gaedtke (University of Illinois)


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Summary

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'.

Modernism and the Machinery of Madness Summary

Modernism and the Machinery of Madness: Psychosis, Technology, and Narrative Worlds by Andrew Gaedtke (University of Illinois)

Modernism and the Machinery of Madness demonstrates the emergence of a technological form of paranoia within modernist culture which transformed much of the period's experimental fiction. Gaedtke argues that the works of writers such as Samuel Beckett, Anna Kavan, Wyndham Lewis, Mina Loy, Evelyn Waugh, and others respond to the collapse of categorical distinctions between human and machine. Modern British and Irish novels represent a convergence between technological models of the mind and new media that were often regarded as 'thought-influencing machines'. Gaedtke shows that this literary paranoia comes into new focus when read in light of twentieth-century memoirs of mental illness. By thinking across the discourses of experimental fiction, mental illness, psychiatry, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind, this book shows the historical and conceptual sources of this confusion as well as the narrative responses. This book contributes to the fields of modernist studies, disability studies, and medical humanities.

Modernism and the Machinery of Madness Reviews

'Modernism and the Machinery of Madness is an ambitious phenomenological project that very successfully informs whilst also providing a myriad of innovative arguments and observations. Gaedtke's incisive and thorough account of the relationship between the discourses of technology and mental disorder is underscored throughout by precision, originality, and enlightening close textual analysis.' Emily Chester, The British Society for Literature and Science (bsls.ac.uk)

About Andrew Gaedtke (University of Illinois)

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

Table of Contents

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.

Additional information

NGR9781108418003
9781108418003
1108418007
Modernism and the Machinery of Madness: Psychosis, Technology, and Narrative Worlds by Andrew Gaedtke (University of Illinois)
New
Hardback
Cambridge University Press
2017-10-26
254
N/A
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