Literature and technology

Lance Schachterle

This collection of essays uses recent work on literature and science to establish new ways of relating literature and language theory to writings about technology (as distinguished from science). The interdisciplinary character of these essays is further enriched by drawing upon contemporary studies of the philosophy and history of technology, which provide the context for the first essay (Mitcham and Casey). Subsequent essays examine technology from many points of view - how technology shapes texts and contexts, as well as how writers shape perspectives on technology. The essays examine texts as diverse as seventeenth-century science and twentieth-century children's literature and spy fiction. Major authors investigated include Chaucer, Blake, Romains, Pynchon, and Prigogine. Individual essays consider: Chaucer's use of mapmaking as a coercive technology (Tomasch), the Renaissance fascination with mechanical contrivances and their depiction (Knoespel), the contexts within which Boyle and his successors described the air pump (Markley), Blake's manifold interests in the technology of printing (Greenberg), Romains's development of a philosophy of poetry appropriate to early twentieth-century technology in Paris (Williams), gender issues in children's literature about machines (Lee), technology in the modern spy novel (Slade), Thomas Pynchon's mixed feelings about technology and its value (Schachterle), and the relations between postmodern fiction and the technology of thermodynamics, as developed by Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine (Porush). The editors of Literature and Technology have been active in the formation and direction of the Society for Literature and Science. In their introduction to this collection, they consider what characterizes literature and technology as a new and fertile field for interdisciplinary study. This volume concludes with selected bibliographies of basic references in the philosophy of technology and of works devoted to the examination of the relationships between literature and technology.