The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature

A bold new theoretical analysis of literary modernism and its conception of and relation to nature. Even after the end of modernism and postmodernism, grandiose fantasies of artifice and self-reference still resonate in the "social constructivism" of current literary and cultural theory: in the idea that we can perform or construct "identities" or social roles without external constraint, as if we had consumer choice of self. Larson Powell's book posits nature as a limit to such fantasies, redef