Machine and Metaphor: The Ethics of Language in American RealismTaylor & Francis, 2007 - 161 pages American literary realism burgeoned during a period of tremendous technological innovation. Because the realists evinced not only a fascination with this new technology but also an ethos that seems to align itself with science, many have paired the two fields rather unproblematically. But this book demonstrates that many realist writers, from Mark Twain to Stephen Crane, Charles W. Chesnutt to Edith Wharton, felt a great deal of anxiety about the advent of new technologies - precisely at the crucial intersection of ethics and language. For these writers, the communication revolution was a troubling phenomenon, not only because of the ways in which the new machines had changed and increased the circulation of language but, more pointedly, because of the ways in which language itself had effectively become a machine: a vehicle perpetuating some of society's most pernicious clichés and stereotypes - particularly stereotypes of race - in unthinking iteration. This work takes a close look at how the realists tried to forge an ethical position between the two poles of science and sentimentality, attempting to create an alternative mode of speech that, avoiding the trap of codifying iteration, could enable ethical action. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Rhetoric Ethics Mechanics in Adventures of | 15 |
Iteration Ethics and the Engine of Convention | 45 |
The Rhetoric of Reason and the Call to Metaphor in | 63 |
Circulation Silence and The Fitting Word in The House of Mirth and | 85 |
Reclaiming Repetition in Winesburg Ohio and Death in the Woods | 111 |
Conclusion | 135 |
Notes | 137 |
149 | |
157 | |
Back cover | 163 |
Other editions - View all
Machine and Metaphor: The Ethics of Language in American Realism Jennifer C. Cook Limited preview - 2006 |
Machine and Metaphor: The Ethics of Language in American Realism Jennifer C. Cook Limited preview - 2006 |