Power Lines: Electricity in American Life and Letters, 1882--1952 (Inside Technology)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.57 (591 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0262036371 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 288 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-04-04 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Power Lines conducts us through an ambitious retelling of the cultural and technological development of electricity, enlightening readers about how electricity's symbolic potential both obscured and revealed its imbrication in socioeconomic networks of power and revealing the undeveloped, alternative paths still possibly available for imagining and using technology in more progressive ways. (David E. Nye, author of Electrifying America)In this innovative, insightful, and lucid new book, Jennifer Lieberman reframes our understanding of electricity's symbolic and cultural meanings at the end of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twe
Lieberman is Assistant Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of North Florida. Jennifer L.
While discussing the social construction of electrical systems,she offers a new interpretation of Twain's use of electricity as an organizing metaphor in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, describes the rhetoric surrounding the invention of electric execution, analyzes Charlotte Perkins Gilman's call for human connection in her utopian writing and in her little-known Human Work, considers the theme of electrical interconnection in Jack London's work, and shows how Ralph Ellison and Louis Mumford continued the literary tradition of electrical metaphor. The idea that electrification created exclusively modern experiences took hold of Americans' imaginations, whether they welcomed or feared its adoption. Writers from Mark Twain to Ralph Ellison grappled with the idea of electricity as both life force (illumination) and death spark (electrocution). Bridging the realistic and the romantic, the historical and the fantastic, these stories guide us to ask new questions about our enduring fascination with electricity and all it came to represent.. For this reason, narratives about electricity were particularly evocative. Electrical power was a distinctive concept in American literary, cultural, and technological