Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Tyson, Charlie

Titel

Technology

Ist Teil von

• Victorian literature and culture, 2018-01, Vol.46 (3-4), p.900-905

Ort / Verlag

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry (1757) identifies the sublime strongly with objects in the natural world: the “gloomy forest,” the “howling wilderness,” and the “starry heaven”; the lion, panther, and rhinoceros; the cries of animals.5 In the industrial age and after, a new site of sublimity emerged. The technological systems that altered patterns of economic and daily life for wealthy nations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—such systems as railroads, electric power, and aviation—frequently achieved, in their scale, power, and strangeness, a form of the sublime.6 Yet, how can technological instruments designed by human beings and under human command stir the feelings of terror and lack of control Burke holds as requisite for sublimity? F. S. Williams, a railway booster and author of the popular railway history Our Iron Roads, recorded his awe at the “immense number of passengers and enormous bulk of goods … drawn by engines of the most complicated mechanism, held together with millions of rivets, each engine containing an intricate network of tubes, numerous cranks, and other delicate pieces of workmanship … The Victorian metaphor of the telegraph as human body is revealing, because representations of technology aimed at stirring a sense of sublimity often do so by abandoning reference to the human body and human labor. [...]marketing materials for the nineteenth-century American transcontinentals routinely omitted mention of workers and machine operators, instead depicting the enormous locomotives as self-propelled beings, steely gleams streaking west across the continent.17) The technological sublime frequently accompanies human erasure.