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