Rereading The Machine In The Garden

The volume reexamines the trope of the intrusive machine and the regenerative pastoral garden, laid out fifty years ago by Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden, one of the founding texts of American Studies. Contributions explore the lasting influence of the trope in American culture and the arts, rereading it as a dialectics where nature is as much technologized as technology is naturalized. They trace this dialectic trope in filmic and literary representations of industrial, bureaucratic, and digital gardens; they explore its function in the aftermath of the civil war, the rural electrification during the New Deal, in landscape art, and in ethnic literatures; and they discuss the historical premises and lasting influence of Leo Marx's seminal study.

By examining the difference between pastoral and progressive ideals that characterised early 20th century American culture, the author shows how American thinkers have considered the relationship between technology and culture in their writings.

The Culture of Nature in the History of Design confronts the dilemma caused by design’s pertinent yet precarious position in environmental discourse through interdisciplinary conversations about the design of nature and the nature of design. Demonstrating that the deep entanglements of design and nature have a deeper and broader history than contemporary discourse on sustainable design and ecological design might imply, this book presents case studies ranging from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century and from Singapore to Mexico. It gathers scholarship on a broad range of fields/practices, from urban planning, landscape architecture, and architecture, to engineering design, industrial design, furniture design and graphic design. From adobe architecture to the atomic bomb, from the bonsai tree to Biosphere 2, from pesticides to photovoltaics, from rust to recycling – the culture of nature permeates the history of design. As an activity and a profession always operating in the borderlands between human and non-human environments, design has always been part of the environmental problem, whilst also being an indispensable part of the solution. The book ventures into domains as diverse as design theory, research, pedagogy, politics, activism, organizations, exhibitions, and fiction and trade literature to explore how design is constantly making and unmaking the environment and, conversely, how the environment is both making and unmaking design. This book will be of great interest to a range of scholarly fields, from design education and design history to environmental policy and environmental history.

While video games have blossomed into the foremost expression of contemporary popular culture over the past decades, their critical study occupies a fringe position in American Studies. In its engagement with video games, this book contributes to their study but with a thematic focus on a particularly important subject matter in American Studies: spatiality. The volume explores the production, representation, and experience of places in video games from the perspective of American Studies. Contributions critically interrogate the use of spatial myths ("wilderness," "frontier," or "city upon a hill"), explore games as digital borderlands and contact zones, and offer novel approaches to geographical literacy. Eventually, Playing the Field II brings the rich theoretical repertoire of the study of space in American Studies into conversation with questions about the production, representation, and experience of space in video games.

David Foster Wallace is regarded as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book introduces readers to the literary, philosophical and political contexts of Wallace's work. An accessible and useable resource, this volume conceptualizes his work within long-standing critical traditions and with a new awareness of his importance for American literary studies. It shows the range of issues and contexts that inform the work and reading of David Foster Wallace, connecting his writing to diverse ideas, periods and themes. Essays cover topics on gender, sex, violence, race, philosophy, poetry and geography, among many others, guiding new and long-standing readers in understanding the work and influence of this important writer.

Like all fundamental categories, work becomes ever more complex as we examine it more closely. The terms "work," "labor," "job," "employment," "occupation," "profession," "vocation," "task," "toil," "effort," "pursuit," and "calling" form a dense web of overlapping and contrasting meanings. Moreover, the analysis of work must contend with how histories of class struggle, gendered and sexual divisions of labor, racial hierarchies, and citizenship regimes have determined who counts as a worker and qualifies for the rights, protections, and social respect thereof. And yet waged work is only the tip of an enormous iceberg that feminist theorists call "socially reproductive labor"—the gendered, mostly unpaid, and hidden work of caring for, feeding, nursing, and teaching the next generation of workers. This collection of essays explores the richness of work as a linguistic, cultural, and historical concept and the conjunctures that are changing work and its worlds.

How to do cultural studies in the twenty-first century? This essay collection is not a handbook, encyclopedia, or a »state of the field« compendium. Instead, it is a reflexive exercise in cultural studies, featuring fifteen accessible essays on a selection of critical key works published since 2000. The contributors aim to provide readers with a fresh and engaging look at recent criticism, exploring the interdisciplinary traffic of theories, methods, and ideas within the field of cultural and literary studies. This book shows how the work of Lauren Berlant, Rita Felski, Fred Moten, Anna Tsing, and others can inspire new thinking and theorizing for the twenty-first century.

Miriam Thaggert illuminates the stories of African American women as passengers and as workers on the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century railroad. As Jim Crow laws became more prevalent and forced Black Americans to "ride Jim Crow" on the rails, the train compartment became a contested space of leisure and work. Riding Jane Crow examines four instances of Black female railroad travel: the travel narratives of Black female intellectuals such as Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell; Black middle-class women who sued to ride in first class "ladies’ cars"; Black women railroad food vendors; and Black maids on Pullman trains. Thaggert argues that the railroad represented a technological advancement that was entwined with African American attempts to secure social progress. Black women's experiences on or near the railroad illustrate how American technological progress has often meant their ejection or displacement; thus, it is the Black woman who most fully measures the success of American freedom and privilege, or "progress," through her travel experiences.