Serviss's jingoistic footnote to literary history foregrounds what Henry Adams deemed a fundamental opposition between the dynamo and the virgin, between utilitarian science and the moral and spiritual values identified with an uncorrupted past. Each term of this opposition, however, is always unstable, wracked by tensions that American writers have explored to reassess the costs and consequences of material progress. The dark underside of American industrialism manifests itself in nightmare visions of a machine culture that threatens to overwhelm terrified or powerless human beings, as it does in Frank Norris's The Octopus (1901). The desire to light out for an unspoiled territory ahead of the rest, evident at the end of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), reveals Mark Twain's sense that a "virgin" wilderness will succumb inevitably to a corrupt and corrupting civilization. If a (white, male) American identity often has been measured by scientific breakthroughs and engineering successes, then American literature has been characterized by efforts to redefine the terms of the opposition between the dynamo and the virgin, either by recapturing a "lost" metaphysical unity of knowledge or by finding new metaphors to register the complex relationships among science, technology, and literature. In the process, writers from the physician-poet Edward Taylor in the seventeenth century to the engineer-novelist Thomas Pynchon at the end of the twentieth have registered both the resistance among these domains and their interanimating connections.
Within American studies, efforts to explore these connections have both historical and theoretical dimensions, if one understands "theory" not as a rigid model for interpreting general experience but as a means to reassess the parameters that allow one to make sense of texts and technologies. Historically, writers have both exploited and redefined the constitutive metaphors of the sciences of their times to represent human experience, and their responses to technological innovations�the steamship, railroad, camera, telegraph, telephone, film, radio, television, spaceship, and computer�reveal a profound ambivalence to the very technologies that define their readers' existence. Theoretically, American writers from Edward Bellamy to Octavia Butler have crossed and recrossed the boundary between realistic and speculative fiction; their work demonstrates that one of the characteristic forms of American political and cultural discourse is to imagine a future that would be proud to have us as its ancestors. American literature, then, can be seen as a complex of syncretic forms; as Katherine Hayles suggests, its interactions with technoscience must be understood not in terms of mechanistic models of influence but as regions of turbulent complexity. In this regard, constitutive metaphors (the brain as a computer, for example) are neither objectively descriptive nor rigidly deterministic. They suggest instead a symbiotic relationship between literary forms and the scientific and technological practices that have played significant roles in the shaping of American literature: naturalism, gear and girder engineering, evolutionary biology, hydraulics, relativity theory, cybernetics, quantum physics, information theory, chaos theory, genetic engineering, and deep ecology.
Rather than a straightforward evolution in American literature that reflects technoscientific progress, then, authors have borrowed, incorporated, and transformed the key scientific theories of their times. Until the mid-nineteenth century, writers from Thomas Jefferson to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau participated, in different ways, in the quest to unify humanistic and scientific knowledge. Jefferson, like Benjamin Franklin, was an eighteenth-century natural philosopher who refused to countenance atomistic specialization in the study of the natural world; along with meteorological observations, practical inventions, and agricultural experiments, he exhibited a profound suspicion of the dehumanizing aspects of an incipient industrialism. Between 1830 and 1860, as science became increasingly specialized, Emerson and Thoreau had to contend with challenges to their faith in the unity of natural knowledge and moral truth. Although many critics and historians emphasize the sea-change brought about by Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, evolutionary thought was itself accommodated in the late nineteenth century to a narrative that placed rational (that is, white, Anglo-American) "man" at the apex of a great chain of command. In popular and scientific literature, Darwinianism was domesticated by making it conform to notions of a divinely "guided" evolution and pressed into the service of racist pseudosciences. In this regard, rather than a "triumph" of science over superstition, of secular objectivity over Christian faith or deist optimism, the nineteenth century witnessed both slack-jawed marveling at scientific and technological progress and a questioning of whether such advances could compensate for the moral costs and consequences of dynamo worship. In Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) Yankee industrialism reaches an apocalyptic end in Arthurian England, a dream vision that registers the ambivalence that progress provokes.
Although since the time of Frederick Jackson Turner Americans have debated the consequences of having had a frontier, writers in the second half of the nineteenth century were fascinated by the promise and the threat of large-scale industrialization. The second industrial revolution (roughly 1880 to 1920) introduced or popularized technologies of transport (the bicycle, the automobile, street cars), communication (the typewriter, the telephone), and domestic efficiency (electrical appliances, streetlights) that revolutionized daily activities from cooking to reading. Bellamy's Looking Backward (1887) reveals the ways in which campaigns against waste in the factory and household could be transmuted into the moral values that guide the development of a utopian socialism in America's future. Frederick Taylor's efficiency movement and Fordist production techniques that mass-produced vehicles for personal as well as commercial transport changed perceptions of time, travel, and space; the dictates of an efficiency that rendered language itself a machine exerted a profound influence on the verse and criticism of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, among others. The technological imagination in the poetry of Hart Crane, for example, offers a field where art and science, human desire and objective order meet, but as technology becomes subject to aesthetic as well as scientific standards of evaluation, the machine challenges organicism as a model of literary form. Pound self-consciously derives his poetic values of verbal economy and efficiency from machine technology rather than from organic forms. His polemic blasts in ABC of Reading (1934) celebrate the virtues of concision and decry wasteful verbiage, and his editing of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) demonstrates his zeal in elevating efficiency to a social as well as poetic virtue.
In different ways, then, American literary modernists, whether expatriates in Europe or stalwarts of the Harlem Renaissance, recognize that efficiency finally translates into a fascination with power: propulsion, combustion, explosion. Even as Williams in his poems after 1917 turned toward a worldview that considered organic and inorganic structures as integrated parts of complex, interdependent systems, other writers registered the percussive instability of the interactions between human beings and machine technologies. In his trilogy U.S.A. (1937), John Dos Passos both exploits and disrupts the distinctions among technology, communication, and human experience so that his rapid narrative transitions redefine conceptions of social, or technosocial, existence. The effect of the second industrial revolution in his work underscores the realization that to hold the mirror up to nature in the twentieth century is to confront the tangled affiliations of self and science, society and its gadgets. As a mechanistic worldview in science gave way to the complexities of quantum physics, literary works offered both mimetic efforts to reflect the disorientation of a relativistic universe and a nostalgia for an objectivity that seemed to have been conceded to the hard sciences. While Dos Passos, Pound, and Williams all compare their craft to science's objective discovery or production of knowledge, poets such as Charles Olson draw explicitly on quantum physics to redefine this modernist poetics for a self-consciously postmodern world.
But the explosions of technoscientific knowledge were far more than metaphoric, and modernism was shaped radically by the experience of two world wars and by the ultimate symbol of apocalyptic visions of technology run amuck�the atomic bomb. In one respect, the bomb and its delivery systems constituted the dark underside of the visionary optimism that in countless pulp magazines and science fiction novels from the 1930s on had sent Americans into the new conceptual frontier of outer space. The cold war of the 1950s and 1960s channeled the American technological romance toward both a fear of annihilation and a fascination with the benefits of a consumer existence. In Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Thomas Pynchon registers the collapse of binary oppositions between art and science, eros and destruction, freedom (or mathematical probability) and determinism. As much as any work of the late twentieth century, this novel reveals the ways in which the technologies of mass destruction are inscribed within the psyches and bodies of human beings. Tyrone Slothrop is himself a product of the Rocket State rather than a character who embodies the philosophical assumptions of classic liberalism. Yet the very fear of a foreordained destruction paradoxically offers the possibility for redemption of and through the rocket.
As Pynchon's concern with the Puritan strain in American thought suggests, the threat of apocalyptic destruction and the hope of realizing the dream of the "city on the hill" have produced complex literary responses to the nation's technoscientific heritage. In the 1950s and 1960s, a radical subculture emerged within popular culture that insisted that science fiction was the last bastion of sociopolitical nonconformity and literary experimentation: in different ways, the works of Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delany, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Kim Stanley Robinson register the complexities of late-twentieth-century perceptions of the American obsession with technologies that cannot be controlled. In his California trilogy, Robinson offers three near-futuristic speculations that make explicit the tensions within American visions of technology: The Wild Shore, a postapocalyptic vision of Orange County in which the survivors of a nuclear attack try to reconstruct rail links to San Diego; The Gold Coast (1988), a dystopian future of multilevel highways, smog, overcrowding, and underemployment; and Pacific Edge (1995), a utopian vision of a collectivist society that has transcended the alienating effects of household and industrial technology. Drawing on a tradition of American naturalist writing, these novels explore the ways in which the traditional metaphors that supposedly shape the opposition of an amoral technology and an ethics of environmental stewardship are themselves in the processes of revaluation and transmutation.
If technology in the 1950s is both worshipped (household appliances) and demonized (the bomb), its threatening and salvific aspects are internalized as invasions of the physical body (alien mind control in science fiction) and as imperfect replications (computers run wild) of human desires. By the last decades of the century, technology and human identity become interanimating metaphors in the figure of the cyborg. The cyborg represents an alternative to conceptions of American identity rooted in a romanticized vision of taming or conquering nature, a hybrid that both incorporates and breaks down the distinctions between the human and the technological. If the cyborg heralds the advent of the "posthuman" body, it also defines a privileged subject position that excludes those who resist or lack sufficient technological sophistication. Writers from outside the largely white and male bastions of scitech thus contest the premises of a self-consciously technocratic society. Works by African American novelists such as Butler, Delany, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Charles Johnson, and Toni Morrison explore both the racist apologetics of science and the vexed relationships within a society that excludes women and people of color from the structures of technoscientific power. In The Invisible Man (1963) Ellison's hero ultimately chooses to remain invisible to a political world that reinforces the ideological identification between scientific mastery and skin color. In a different vein, Native American writers such as Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, Craig Leslie, and Gerald Vizenor, among many others, call into question the dominant metaphors of technoscientific progress that divorce humankind from the natural world and posit technological sophistication, from farming techniques to Western medicine, as the measure of human worth. Ultimately, the relationships among science, technology, and American literature can be traced through a complex genealogy of metaphors and affiliations but never definitively described.
Making of America (U Michigan)
PAL: Perspectives in American Literature
Encyclopedia of American Studies, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), s.v. "Literature, Science, and Technology" (by Robert Markley), http://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/view?aid=96 (accessed August 23, 2018).
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