num_pages: 310
description: Shifting Gears is a richly illustrated exploration of the American era of gear-and-girder technology. From the 1890s to the 1920s, machines and structures shaped by this technology emerged in many forms, from automobiles and harvesting machines to bridges and skyscrapers. The most casual onlooker to American life saw examples of the new technology on Main Street, on the local railway platform, and in the pages of popular magazines. A major consequence of this technology was its effect on the arts, in particular the literary arts. Using images from magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies' Home Journal, as well as material from popular novels, movies, the toy industry, advertising, and the fine arts, Tichi portrays the consequences of technology for American popular culture and the work of the nation's major, enduring writers. She demonstrates how turn-of-the-century technology pervaded every aspect of American culture and how this culture could be defined as a collaborative effort of the engineer, the architect, the fiction writer, and the poet. She demonstrates that a technological revolution is not a revolution only of science but of language as well.Three prominent American writers of the time -- Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and William Carlos Williams -- became designer-engineers of the word. Tichi reveals their use of prefabricated, manufactured components in poems and prose. As designers, they enacted in style and structure the new technological values. The writers, according to Tichi, thought of words themselves as objects for assembly into a design.
language: English
title: Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America
titlecomplete: Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America
ratings_count: 11
publisher: University of North Carolina Press Enduring Editions