Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic provides a new account of aesthetic and technological innovation, from the Machine Age to the Information Age. Drawing on a wealth of archival discoveries, it argues that modernist avant-gardes used technology not only as a means of analysing culture, but as a way of feeding back into it. As well as uncovering a new invention by Mina Loy, the untold story of Bob Brown’s ‘reading machine’ and the radical technicities of African American experimentalists including Gwendolyn Bennett, Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes, the book places avant-gardes at the centre of innovation across a variety of fields. From dazzle camouflage to microfilm, and from rail networks to broadcast systems, White explores how vanguardists harnessed socio-technics to provoke social change. Reading Machines argues that transatlantic avant-gardes deployed ‘techno-bathetic’ strategies to contest the dominance of the technological sublime. This major but hidden cultural narrative engaged with the messy particulars and unintended consequences of technology’s transduction in society. Techno-bathetic vanguardists including Futurists, Vorticists, Dadaists, post-Harlem Renaissance radicals and American Super-realists proposed new, non-servile ways of reading and doing technology. The books reveals how these formations contested the entrenched hierarchies of both the transatlantic Machine Age and technological sublime.
