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"All-Electric" Narratives: Time-Saving Appliances and Domesticity in American Literature, 1945–2020

Autor Dr. Rachele Dini
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 28 iun 2023
Winner of the 2023 Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work in Women's Studies"All-Electric" Narratives is the first in-depth study of time-saving electrical appliances in American literature. It examines the literary depiction of refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, oven ranges, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, toasters, blenders, standing and hand-held mixers, and microwave ovens between 1945, when the "all-electric" home came to be associated with the nation's hard-won victory, and 2020, as contemporary writers consider the enduring material and spiritual effects of these objects in the 21st century.The appropriation and subversion of the rhetoric of domestic electrification and time-saving comprises a crucial, but overlooked, element in 20th-century literary forms and genres including Beat literature, Black American literature, second-wave feminist fiction, science fiction, and postmodernist fiction. Through close-readings of dozens of literary texts alongside print and television ads from this period, Dini shows how U.S. writers have unearthed the paradoxes inherent to claims of appliances' capacity to "give back" time to their user, transport them into a technologically-progressive future, or "return" them to some pastoral past. In so doing, she reveals literary appliances' role in raising questions about gender norms and sexuality, racial exclusion and erasure, class anxieties, the ramifications of mechanization, the perils and possibilities of conformity, the limitations of patriotism, and the inevitable fallacy of utopian thinking-while both shaping and radically disrupting the literary forms in which they operated.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9781501383939
ISBN-10: 1501383930
Pagini: 376
Ilustrații: 35 bw illus
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 25 mm
Greutate: 0.5 kg
Editura: Bloomsbury Publishing
Colecția Bloomsbury Academic
Locul publicării:New York, United States

Caracteristici

The first sustained study of the role of domestic electric appliances in American literature, proving how American writers engaged with the politics of domestic electrification and the concept of "time-saving" labour in the home

Notă biografică

Rachele Dini is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Roehampton, UK. She is the author of Consumerism, Waste, and Re-use in Twentieth-century Fiction: Legacies of the Avant-Garde (2016) and founder of the International Literary Waste Studies Network.

Cuprins

AcknowledgmentsList of IllustrationsIntroduction: Time-Saving Appliances & the American Century: A Case for the Significance of a Literary Trope1. "Everything in the Icebox": Domestic Energies in Jack Kerouac and Beat Culture, 1950-76 2. "The Lamentation of a Vacuum Cleaner": Appliance Disappointments in John Cheever & Richard Yates, 1947-813. "'I'm a Toaster with a Cunt'": Time-Saving Appliances & Errant Women in Marge Piercy's Early Fiction4. "I've Never Been Able to Get Another Girl as Efficient or as Reliable": Time-Saving Appliances in Black American Fiction, 1952-20035. "Ever Think About Being Attacked by a . Vacuum Cleaner": Time-Saving Appliances in Sci-Fi, 1950-19786. "The Angel of Death Pushes a Vacuum Cleaner": Retrospective Appliances in Kurt Vonnegut & Don DeLillo, 1950-97 7. "You Can Overdo Remembering Stuff": Anti-Nostalgic Appliances in Postmillennial FictionConclusionBibliographyIndex

Recenzii

A welcome addition to the field of Literary Objects Study. The lavish illustrations, mostly commercial ads, may present the "good life" as a universal right, but the reader finds out that literary representations of electrical appliances tell a different story.
For readers who do not care about the Post45's coherence as a field, which, to be honest, will be most readers, "All-Electric" Narratives provides both a useful history of the American appliance and a wide range of close readings to support scholarship and teaching in any of the subfields it covers.
In this marvelous and magnetic new book, Rachele Dini reshapes our understanding of literature and technology from the mid-20th century through the present day. She weaves together technology studies, literary analysis, and feminist theory to craft crucial readings about the devices that dominate our domestic spaces and, by extension, our lives. Brilliantly written and expertly argued, this is a fascinating new book on the intersection of literature and technology in American culture.
Rachele Dini brings fresh perspectives and insight to the study of American consumer culture. Calling on extensive research in a wide range of mid-20th-century fiction, and reading her literary sources against contemporary magazine advertising and historical studies, she offers an intriguing and eye-opening analysis of electric appliances - and of the very ideas of saving time and labor. A stimulating and important book, "All-Electric" Narratives deepens our understanding of domestic life in contemporary consumer culture.
In this illuminating and often revelatory study of 20th Century literary critiques of the utopian ideology of "all-electric" living, Rachele Dini demonstrates how a wide range of literary forms and practitioners have employed time-saving domestic appliances as literary tropes to contest the normative social roles and behaviors they have spawned and promoted.
Rachele Dini's "All-Electric" Narratives is an original and energetic book that offers a fresh, revealing angle of vision on the work of an impressive array of writers, from Jack Kerouac to Paule Marshall to A.M. Homes. Once you see the poetics of electrification as illuminated by Dini, you won't be able to un-see it.
A tour de force! Using her superb skills as a literary critic, Rachele Dini examines how American creative writers, from the Beat poets to the postmillennial novelists, reacted to the gap between media-induced expectations of all-electric homes and the realities of their (and our) everyday lives within those homes. Pushing beyond literary criticism, Dini also argues that their insightful reflections on how modern appliances have structured domestic work, can help us all imagine other, more liberating and equitable ways to get that necessary work done.
"All-Electric" Narratives crackles with the energy of big ideas and astute observation. With a detective's eye and a cultural historian's range, Rachele Dini illuminates the central role that modern appliances and domestic electrification have in U.S. fiction from 1945 to today. It is fitting that in a book about electric currents and connectivity, Dini moves deftly between print ads and literary genres, between consumer history, new materialist theory, and literary criticism. This is a must-read for anyone interested in American fiction, but also for readers curious about toasters, blenders, microwaves, and the many gadgets that have long shaped the American home. Through its expansive investigation of efficient devices, "All-Electric" Narratives rethinks the very nature of time-saving; it is a book to linger over.