| Kommentar |
In The Machine in the Garden. Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964) Leo Marx, one of the foundational scholars of American Studies as a discipline, once remarked that “the ominous sounds of machines … reverberate endlessly in our literature” (15-16). From this perception of the machine as a disturbing feature in an otherwise rural landscape Marx continued to argue very carefully that neither the machine age, nor industrialization, nor urbanization had been able to seriously challenge a continued identification of the United States with a landscape and a society shaped by conjunctions of wilderness and agriculture, by clearings and gardening – Marx’s pastoral ideal. Whereas Marx still assumed that the pastoral ideal affected the way people looked at machines and at a life spent in an industrial environment, we want to approach the topic of the machine in the garden from a contemporary perspective which finds that cities, industries and their lives and deaths shape U.S. American literature and popular culture from Philip Roth’s American Pastoral to HBO’s fascinating TV series The Wire. Prospective participants are expected to have purchased and read the Norton Critical editions of Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets; Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. |
