Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic

Eric White is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Oxford Brookes University. Originally from Vancouver, Canada, he has taught at the University of Cambridge, Anglia Ruskin University and the University of Edinburgh, and has held fellowships at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Oxford. Eric is PI and co-founder of the Avant-Gardes and Speculative Technology Project, which re-imagines modernists’ inventions using Augmented Reality.

Just when we might think we’ve got the twentieth-century figured out, along comes a book like Reading Machines to reveal a lost continent of esoterica just below the surface. Eric White plunges intrepidly into a swirl of technical manuals, legal documents and all manner of memorabilia in this lavish exposition of the material substrate of high-flying ideas like Bob Brown’s Readies, Mina Loy’s "verrovoile," and the "dazzle ship" camouflages of the Great War. Altogether an astonishing spectrum, at once scholarly study and funhouse mirror reordering the visage of modernism.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsAbbreviationsIntroduction1. Dazzling Technologies: Avant-Gardes and Sensory Augmentation in the First World War2. Re-Reading the Machine Age: the ‘Audacious Modernity’ of the Techno-Bathetic Avant-Gardes3. Excavating the ‘Readies’: The Revolution of the Word, Revised4. Ghosts in the Machine Age: Rose and Bob Brown’s Reading Machines and the Socio-Technics of Social Change5. ‘Our Technology Was Vernacular’: Radical Technicities in African American Experimental Writing6. Afterword: The Robot Does (Not) Exist