Rereading the Machine in the Garden: Nature and Technology in American Culture (Nordamerikastudien, 34, Band 34) - Softcover

Buch 9 von 20: Nordamerikastudien
 
9783593501918: Rereading the Machine in the Garden: Nature and Technology in American Culture (Nordamerikastudien, 34, Band 34)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 3593501910 ISBN 13: 9783593501918
Verlag: Campus Verlag, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Nordamerikastudien

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Eric Erbacher ist wiss. Mitarbeiter am Lehrstuhl für Amerikastudien an der Universität Münster. Nicole Maruo-Schröder ist Professorin für Cultural Studies an der Universität Koblenz-Landau, Florian Sedlmeier ist Juniorprofessor für Nordamerikanische Literatur an der FU Berlin.

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Introduction: Rereading The Machine in the Garden

Eric Erbacher, Nicole Maruo-Schröder, Florian Sedlmeier

Marking an anniversary, such as the fiftieth of the publication of Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964), one creates and singles out an event, suggesting a need to return to this event and to reassess its implications for past, present, and future conditions. In this sense, the notion of an anniversary carries the connotations of both a celebration and a re-envisioning. In and of itself, however, the marking of an anniversary does not necessitate a critical reexamination. After all, one could leave the respectful tone of the anniversary and easily dismiss Marx's study as a relic of bygone times, guilty of a range of inadequacies that subsequent critics have exposed in a plethora of articles and books. Similar to other representatives of what Bruce Kuklick (1972) labeled the "Myth and Symbol School," Marx has been charged with participating in the tale of American exceptionalism that continues to haunt American Studies, a tale grounded in the sermons of John Winthrop, the political rhetoric of Thomas Jefferson, and others; with rearticulating the belief in a holistic national ideal; with glossing over discourses of difference and with not systematically accounting for their effects on the societal fabric; and with foreclosing the possibilities of the recently fashionable and reactivated transnational approaches. These political objections are sometimes complemented by a critique of the philosophical underpinnings of Marx's argument, most notably of what Kuklick identified as its pervasive humanism and its supposed indebtedness to Cartesian thought, i.e. its marked separation of thought and the material. And they find their aesthetic equivalent in the critique of an understanding of the arts and literature that is regarded as suspicious because it positions the declared masterpieces of the American Renaissance and modernism as privileged objects of study and because it conceives of these texts as being structured according to a single master trope: the machine in the garden. In order to substantiate his claim, critics have argued, Marx not simply ignores a large number of texts (both popular and 'high literary' ones); John Lark Bryant criticizes him for deploying "extravagant argumentation" (1975, 68) in his readings of Renaissance masterpieces to position the machine in the garden as the one tropology that best describes America. The validity of many of these arguments depends, of course, on the degree and mode of historicizing them, i.e. on examining them for the ideologies they necessarily contain. And if we seek to legitimize this volume by marking not just The Machine in the Garden's anniversary but also its continuing significance, we inevitably engage in modes of historicizing as well.

The well-known charges just sketched are indicative of the narrative of a generational shift from Americanists to New Americanists, a term coined by Frederick Crews. This shift manifests itself, among others, in a changing understanding of the political function of scholarship, in a different conception of scholarly argumentation and writing, and in the emergence of theory. Against this backdrop, the present collection of essays reexamines The Machine in the Garden on two basic grounds. First, the volume, and this introductory essay in particular, aim at historicizing the study by redirecting the well-known and necessary critiques of the New Americanists, informed by cultural studies, gender studies, new historicism, ethnic studies, and poststructuralist theory. Such a task of historicizing is not least suggested by Marx himself, who, challenged by other scholars, reevaluated his own and his generation's positions in the changing field of American Studies, defending, expanding, and refining his initial argument in a series of articles, some of which are included in his collection of essays The Pilot and the Passenger (1988). At stake in this project are shifting codifications of the arts and literature as well as culture, nature, and technology. Second, the contributions to this collection seek to retrieve the trope of the machine and its intrusion into the pastoral landscape as a vital configuration for a broad range of artistic, filmic, and literary texts, spanning from the early nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. While the trope, for various reasons, can certainly not account for the grand cultural and literary history Leo Marx had in mind, its significance in artistic productions from a U.S. context has to be acknowledged and construed. The present volume probes the unabated relevance of this cultural tropology for the analysis of representations of nature and technology in artistic, filmic, and literary texts. And in doing so, this introduction and the contributions also assess the lasting impact of Marx's method and rhetoric for the present condition of the field of inquiry named American Studies, looking for points of entry that The Machine in the Garden might retrospectively offer for current debates.

Institutional Concerns: American Studies as a Field of Inquiry

In a sense, the poles of Marx's dialectical trope are inscribed in three insti-tutions: Marx is a Harvard graduate, who received his PhD in History of American Civilization in 1950, and he held academic positions at the Uni-versity of Minnesota-hence in the upper part of the Midwest, that geo-graphical and cultural region most commonly associated with notions of the middle landscape and the heartland-and at the Massachusetts Insti-tute of Technology in Cambridge, where he was appointed Kenan Profes-sor of American Cultural History in 1976. The denominations and trajectories of these institutional appointments should make us aware of a key aspect of the project of American Studies: it was initially conceived as a field of inquiry geared toward identifying the possibilities and the struc-tures of a cultural history. As such, American Studies, in its inception, is not a discipline but a specific method; it is positioned against the empiri-cism and scientific rigor of the natural and social sciences, and it is devoid of the philological tradition that continues to inform European languages and literatures and its academic institutions. In effect, Marx, his teacher Henry Nash Smith and others repeatedly insisted on this peculiarity of the emerging field, not the least in order to legitimize its specific position in the departmental organization.

Smith poses the central institutional and methodological question that concerned early Americanists in the title of his influential essay: "Can American Studies Develop a Method?" (1957). Reading Mark Twain for his various prose styles and the social positions they represent, Smith calls for "a method of analysis that is at once literary […] and sociological" (201). Partly drawing on Matthew Arnold, he positions the conceptual metaphor of culture "to embrace 'society' and 'art'" (ibid., 206). Culture is presented as a third alternative that avoids the pitfalls of the social sciences, which hold that "all value is implicit in social experience, in group behavior, in institutions, in man as an average member of society," and which questions the assumption of New Criticism "that value lies outside society, in works of art which exist on a plane remote from […] our actual experience" (ibid., 206). The construction of culture as a third conceptual metaphor between these notions of the social sciences and 'purely' literary criticism allows Smith "to conceive of American Studies as a collaboration among men working from within existing academic disciplines but attempting to widen the boundaries imposed by conventional methods of inquiry" (ibid., 207). Anchoring the field in "practice" rather than method, he means "to resolve the...

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Verlag
Campus Verlag
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
3593501910
ISBN 13 
9783593501918
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
246
Herausgeber
Erbacher Eric, Maruo-Schröder Nicole, Sedlmeier Florian
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Beltz Verlagsgruppe GmbH & Co. KG
info@campus.de

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