Technical difficulties: Modernism and the machine

This dissertation explores the boundaries between technology and the ideology of the human in the twentieth- and twenty-first-centuries. As a movement that motivates theoretical interventions such as Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Theodor W. Adorno's The Culture Industry, and Mark Seltzer's Bodies and Machines , modernism exhibits a pervasive anxiety about the status of the human in relation to technology. Examining this relationship through multiple theoretical frameworks, I argue that modernism is marked by technical difficulties: moments of rupture and dissonance that disrupt and fragment narratives, produce interference over communications lines, and reconfigure time and space. Casting my reading across generic, temporal, and geographical boundaries, I read the Professor in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907) as a figure that troubles the man/machine binary by operating on the brink of what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call "becoming machine"; put Samuel Beckett's play Krapp's Last Tape (1958) into conversation with Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go (2005) as they challenge the modernist ideology of the human through narratives that privilege the recorded voice or copy; examine the telephone in Muriel Spark's Memento Mori (1959) and The Girls of Slender Means (1963) as an insecure and antagonistic medium of communication that articulates a global tension around the threat of surveillance in the postwar era; bring Samuel Beckett's experimental short, Film (1959), to bear on Michael Haneke's Cache (2005) as they construct a theory of perception as always already paranoid; and consider modernism's role in the shaping of postmodern network culture through James Joyce, whose literary and critical oeuvre anticipates the generative effects of technology in the digital age.;Together, the texts in this dissertation reveal modernism's preoccupation with media that are inherently unstable, that breed discomfort through disembodiment, and that produce institutionalized methods of control. Through their investment in the technical difficulties that expose the fantasy of security, closure, and connection and that reveal the cracks in our humanist frameworks, these texts consider the effects of the human engagement with the machine and call for a reexamination of assumptions about how technology functions as a producer of knowledge and a recorder of individual and collective histories.