Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary Representations of Communication and Transportation Technologies (Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination)

This book examines temporal and formal disruptions found in American autobiographical narratives produced during the end of the nineteenth century. It argues that disruptions were primarily the result of encounters with new communication and transportation technologies. Through readings of major autobiographical works of the period, James E. Dobson argues that the range of affective responses to writing, communicating, and traveling at increasing speed and distance were registered in this literature’s formal innovation. These autobiographical works, Dobson claims, complicate our understanding of the lived experience of time, temporality, and existing accounts of periodization. This study first examines the competing views of space and time in the nineteenth century and then moves to examine how high-speed train travel altered American literary regionalism, the region, and history. Later chapters examine two narratives of failed homecoming that are deeply ambivalent about modernity and technology, Henry James’s __The American Scene__ andTheodore Dreiser’s __A Hoosier Holiday,__ before a reading of the telephone network as a metaphor for historiography and autobiography in Henry Adams’s __The Education of Henry Adams.__ This book examines temporal and formal disruptions found in American autobiographical narratives produced during the end of the nineteenth century. It argues that disruptions were primarily the result of encounters with new communication and transportation technologies. Through readings of major autobiographical works of the period, James E. Dobson argues that the range of affective responses to writing, communicating, and traveling at increasing speed and distance were registered in this literature's formal innovation. These autobiographical works, Dobson claims, complicate our understanding of the lived experience of time, temporality, and existing accounts of periodization. This study first examines the competing views of space and time in the nineteenth century and then moves to examine how high-speed train travel altered American literary regionalism, the region, and history. Later chapters examine two narratives of failed homecoming that are deeply ambivalent about modernity and technology, Henry James's The American Scene and Theodore Dreiser's A Hoosier Holiday, before a reading of the telephone network as a metaphor for historiography and autobiography in Henry Adams's The Education of Henry Adams. Acknowledgements 6 Contents 8 Chapter 1 The American Modernity Crisis and Disruptive Technologies 9 Abstract 9 Chapter 2 Modernity and the Dialectic of Detachment 24 Abstract 24 Ambivalent Homecomings 30 A Joyless Homecoming 39 Chapter 3 “An Alien at Home”: Henry James’s Failed Homecoming 48 Abstract 48 Chapter 4 Theodore Dreiser, Temporary Homes, and the Compensatory Commemorative State 69 Abstract 69 Chapter 5 The Telephonic Self: Non-Systemic Systems and Autobiographical Self-Representation 86 Abstract 86 A Dynamic Systems Theory 96 The Telephonic Self 101 Bibliography 113 Index 118 Front Matter ....Pages i-vii The American Modernity Crisis and Disruptive Technologies (James E. Dobson)....Pages 1-15 Modernity and the Dialectic of Detachment (James E. Dobson)....Pages 17-40 “An Alien at Home”: Henry James’s Failed Homecoming (James E. Dobson)....Pages 41-61 Theodore Dreiser, Temporary Homes, and the Compensatory Commemorative State (James E. Dobson)....Pages 63-79 The Telephonic Self: Non-Systemic Systems and Autobiographical Self-Representation (James E. Dobson)....Pages 81-107 Back Matter ....Pages 109-117 James E. Dobson. Includes Bibliographical References (pages 109-113) And Index.