Romantic Cyborgs

[Dave Monroe]

>From Klaus Benesch, Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and
Technology in the American Renaissance (Amherst: U of
Massachusetts P, 2002), "Introduction: Authorship,
Technology, and the Cybernetic Body," pp. 1-34 ...

   "What I offer as a new angle on the interfaces of
technology and authorship in antebellum American
literature has little in common with the time-honored
idea that Romantic writers, while continuously probing
the shifting boundaries between the animate and the
inanimate, devloped a concept that emphasized the
former and denigrated the latter.  Rather, my argument
runs counter to earlier evaluations of this period
that discern a strong technophobic undercurrent in
American Romanticism and tend to define its major
stance as ambivalent, if not anti-machinist, and
tehrefore, by extension, essentially antimodernist. 
In contrast to this traditional view of Romanticism,
my own discussion centers on the belief that in
antebellum literary discourse there is as much
admiration for the technological as there are strains
of resentment and cultural anxiety about its
deplorable negative effects.  As in the case of Poe,
for example, the mechanist rhetoric of Jacksonian
democracy which he formally espoused and, at the same
time, condemned as alien to his poetic purposes
informed the composition of his poems and narratives
to such a degree that the resulting indeterminacy can
hardly be dismissed with tautological references to
the incommensurability of Romantic idealizations of
nature and the emergence of modern technological
society.  That antebellum American authors became
increasingly obsessed, as we will see, with
representations of the body encroached on by
technology I take as a sign of the centripetal forces
that marked the encompassing technologucal system and
that held in thrall even those writers who, according
to more traditional readings, seemed strikingly free
of the tainted materiality of bookmaking--or, for that
matter, of modern industrial production in general.
   "To explore fully the implications of what it meant
to write under conditions of modernity, American
authors of the nineteenth century often had recourse
to an imagined other or double, a hybrid figure that
comprised the human as well as the machine, and thus
reflected the skein of interpellated realtions between
authorship and technology....  'Romantic cyborgs.'
...." (pp. 3-4)

http://www.umass.edu/umpress/FW01/benesch.html

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0205&msg=66746&sort=date

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