Overview

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.

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9781108406215

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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) 'Gaedtke's book provides a valuable corrective to narrower conceptions of the modernist canon, especially in recovering outliers like Kavan whose inventive works have been unjustly neglected in the academy ... offers a fascinating, learned, and elegant study of the connections between British midcentury fiction and paranoid phantasmagoria.' Maud Ellmann, Modern Philology 'We can turn to Gaedtke's book to help us understand and give credence to the depressions, paranoias, narcissistic psychopathologies, and cultural fantasies of a whole new generation of writers from Sheila Heti to Rachel Kusk and Ottessa Moshfegh.' Omri Moses, Journal of Modern Literature

Author Information

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

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