Thinking about Melville, Religion, and Machines That Think

Modern, John Lardas

doi:10.2307/j.ctt13x095h.13

Deus in Machina 2012

DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt13x095h.13

|View full text |Cite

Thinking about Melville, Religion, and Machines That Think

John Lardas Modern¹

Help me understand this report

Search citation statements

Order By: Relevance

Paper Sections

Select...

Citation Types

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Year Published

2020

Publication Types

Select...

Article2

Relationship

Self Cite0

Independent2

Authors

Journals

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

Introduction: the entanglement of technology and religion

Alexander

2020

History and Technology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Four vignettes, a preview of coming attractions. Note holy things, visions of God and community, and scaffolding, counterweights, and shoe leather: Wardiman Djojonegoro, trained engineer and Minister of Education and Culture under Indonesia's New Order, in Sumatra in 1994: articulating publicly a Muslim vision of the potentialities of technology for revealing the greatness of God, furthering God's divine order, and ameliorating human lives-and potentially world-significant. Rabbi Yitzchak Weisz, in Israel in the 1960s: analyzing elevator design and motions of car and counterweight to see how elevators fit into the vision of the Jewish Sabbath, as a holy respite and a shelter, a space in time free from work. Filippo Brunelleschi, Italian renaissance architect: building an ascension machine for Christian celebrations, using pulleys, cords, and scaffolding to bring God to earth and create a vision of God's immediate presence, in a spectacle of the resurrection of Christ. Jack Keiser, mechanical engineer and company education officer in Stocksbridge, England, early in 1950: wearing out his shoe leather hiking back and forth daily along Fox and Company's mile-long steel works, enacting his vision of how Christian industry should work, face-to-face with the apprentices under his care.

show abstract

Introduction: the entanglement of technology and religion

Alexander

2020

History and Technology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“Furnace-smoke ... wrapt him round”: Industrial Hinduism and Global Empire in The Curse of Kehama and Sir Thomas More

Lamperez

2020

ronbrit

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

My essay claims that Robert Southey uses Hinduism to fashion a poetics of Romantic-era technology in The Curse of Kehama (1810). In his neglected Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829), Southey compares the manufacturing system to Indian theology and ritual, a metaphor that relativizes religion and technology while implying that the Industrial Revolution amounts to a new breed of religious network. Southey next likens the emergent world order made possible by such technologies to the cosmic ambitions of Kehama, his own Indian tyrant-cum-demigod. The Colloquies thus suggests an allegorical reading of The Curse of Kehama, whereby this tale of a king bent on cosmic rule simultaneously explores how technological and imperial networks intertwine. Accordingly, I draw from metaphor theory to read the earlier Kehama as a repository of veiled comparisons and displacements through which Southey glimpses the magnitude of the Industrial Revolution. Just as Indian wealth propels the techno-imperial enterprise described in the Colloquies, Kehama's paganism supplies the raw discursive material through which Southey fashions a poetics of manufacturing. Read alongside the Colloquies, Kehama aestheticizes the connection between imperial and technological systems, expresses the imaginative significance of twinned manufacturing novelties-the steam engine and coke smelting-and concretizes the opaque moral and poetic properties attaching to industrial power by depicting it in reference to the minutiae of Hindu religion so far as Southey understood it.

show abstract

scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.

Contact Info

customersupport@researchsolutions.com

10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614

Henderson, NV 89052, USA

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Blog Terms and Conditions API Terms Privacy Policy Contact Cookie Preferences Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information

Made with 💙 for researchers

Part of the Research Solutions Family.

Thinking about Melville, Religion, and Machines That Think

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Introduction: the entanglement of technology and religion

Introduction: the entanglement of technology and religion

“Furnace-smoke ... wrapt him round”: Industrial Hinduism and Global Empire in The Curse of Kehama and Sir Thomas More

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About