Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000

Writing for scholars of modernism, literature, and film, Nicholas Daly considers the way human/machine encounters have been imagined from the 1860s on, arguing that such scenes dramatize the modernization of subjectivity. Although modernity assumes that there is a difference between people and machines, a consequence of this belief has been a recurring fantasy about the erasure of that difference. The central scenario in this fantasy is the "crash", or collision, sometimes literal, sometimes metaphorical.