The University of Chicago the Machine
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO THE MACHINE IN THE NOVEL: FICTIONAL HUMAN-MACHINE INTERACTIONS AT THE EUROPEAN PERIPHERY (ca.1870-1914) A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE BY ANA ILIEVSKA CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2020 Copyright Ana Ilievska 2020 To my maternal grandparents Šekerina Janeva and Stojan Iliev нека ви е лесна земјата TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..................................................................................................................... v INTRODUCTION Listening to the South: Machines, Sound, and the Novel during the Second Industrial Revolution ............................................ 1 PROLEGOMENON Vico and the Machine Age: The Word, the Tool, and the Technological Clearing .......................................................................... 25 CHAPTER I OF CREATURES AND CREATORS: Pinocchio or, A Voice in Search of a Body ....................... 42 1. Introduction: Pinocchio and the Audio-Virtual Turn ................................................................ 42 2. “There is not a living soul in this place”: Frankenstein, Pinocchio, and What It Means to Be Human ..................................................... 59 2.1. The Mind-Body Problem ................................................................................................ 61 2.2. The Turing-Turkle Test .................................................................................................. 68 3. On the Eloquence of Monsters: Listening to the Object-Voice ................................................. 73 CHAPTER II MASTERS AND SLAVES: Eça de Queirós’s Technological Twilight Zone ................................. 88 1. Introduction: A Thing About Machines ................................................................................... 88 2. The Acts of Artifacts or, On Disobedience .............................................................................. 94 3. The Voices of Artifacts or, On Noise ..................................................................................... 102 4. In Search of a Middle Ground or, On Technological Literacy ................................................ 107 5. Of Tribulations and Wild and Gloomy Fantasies: Verne-Huysmans-Zola .............................. 112 CHAPTER III CYBORGS: Posthumanism and the Machine in Luigi Pirandello ............................................... 129 1. Introduction: Modernism, Questions, and Luigi Pirandello .................................................... 129 1.1. State of the Field........................................................................................................... 137 1.2. Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (1915, 1925) ................................................... 141 2. Posthuman Metamorphoses ................................................................................................... 148 2.1. Of Puppets, Insects, and Man-Machines ........................................................................ 148 2.2. Serafino Gubbio and the Liberal Humanist Subject ....................................................... 152 3. Posthuman Aurality: The Attentive Cyborg ........................................................................... 163 3.1. Voice, Silence, Noise .................................................................................................... 163 3.2. Aphonia and the Work of Art........................................................................................ 173 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................................. 182 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It takes about thirty years from the time one learns how to read to submit a dissertation in candidacy for the degree of doctor of philosophy. In many ways, a dissertation is the product of all experience, learning, and the support of many individuals and institutions encountered throughout those thirty years. Going backwards in time, at the University of Chicago, I would first like to thank my dissertation advisor, Prof. Armando Maggi, for his invaluable feedback and reliability, and for teaching me the value of cura and misura; as well as my dissertation readers, Prof. Françoise Meltzer, Prof. Victoria Saramago, and Prof. Rebecca West, for their guidance and support throughout the writing process. I thank Prof. Dain Borges for infecting me with the Eça virus, Prof. Jennifer Iverson for her excellen “Sound Studies” seminar, and Prof. Agnes Lugo-Ortiz for teaching me historical awareness. I thank the organizers and participants of the “20th/21st Century” and “Sound and Society” workshops who were the first sounding board for my ideas. Warm thanks to Ingrid Sagor for helping me navigate the intricacies of these last months of being a Ph.D. student. I thank Trevor Tucker, Itamar Ramot, Arieh Ramot, Rose E. Facchini, Caterina Scalvedi, Filippo Petricca, Miguel Llanos de la Guardia, Eric M. Gurevitch, and Patrick Derdall for their friendship, conversation, and writing feedback. At the Università degli Studi di Catania in Sicily, a heartfelt thanks to Prof. Antonio Sichera and his team of researchers and doctoral students, as well as to Prof. Alberto G. Biuso, for giving me a home where I was able to serenely write and conduct research throughout the past two years (you are right, Catania is my Chicago). They provided a much-needed warm support during the last three months while I was writing under full lockdown and coming to terms with a pandemic, alone in a foreign country. Without the generous support of a Fulbright scholarship and a Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship that took me to Sicily, this dissertation would not have been possible. I would also like to thank Francisco de Almeida Dias from the Istituto Portoghese di Sant’Antonio in Rome for kindly supporting me during my research on Eça at the Instituto’s library. The noise reduction in my writing v and excellent comments of editors Prof. Vincent Barletta (Stanford University) and Shirley Vinall (University of Reading) as well as of the anonymous readers, led to the publication of Chapters II and III respectively in the Journal of Lusophone Studies 4-2 (2019) and Pirandello Studies 40 (2020). I thank Prof. Devin P. Singh (Dartmouth University) for helping me attain human dignity and for being the most reliable and noble human being on earth; Randal Joy Thomson for teaching me strength and independence; and Michael J. Thate (Princeton University) for his stubborn belief in me and for our shared love for Simone Weil, baseball, and a few very special hip-hop songs. Special thanks to Gaia Bertoneri (Università degli Studi di Torino) for the beautiful friendship begun in that warm Portuguese summer of 2016 in the Douro Valley; to the late Prof. Benjamin Harshav (Yale University) for his stories in the company of Chagall; and to the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University, especially Prof. Leonor Simas-Almeida, for giving me the chance to delve deeper into Lusophone literature, and for appreciating my bad poetry in Portuguese. At the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, I thank Prof. Dr. Franz Penzenstadler for instilling in me the love for Italian literature, Prof. Dr. Jürgen Wertheimer for his open-mindedness and incredible belief in the Humanities, and Prof. Dr. Max Grosse for hiring me as his student assistant at a time when I was still trying to figure out my way around the German language. Philina Wittke, Karl Buck, Tiziana Cristoforetti, Ida Tschichoflos, the Baden-Württemberg Markelstiftung, the Kožuha family, Margitta Grau and Fritz Hoffmann, Marzia Vacchelli, and Antonella Malvicini: “I was an hungred, and ye gave me [veggies]: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in.” I am eternally in your debt. Finally, I thank my family, childhood friends, and my high-school Macedonian teacher Bojka Nakova who remains the best pedagogue I have ever encountered. Some of them were born in the Ottoman Empire, others in Yugoslavia, yet others in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, now living or resting in a brand-new North Macedonia or scattered around the world. May our homeland and our hearts find peace beyond any ethnic, religious or naming dispute, just in the name of friendship. vi “Ohi!” Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio INTRODUCTION Listening to the South: Machines, Sound, and the Novel during the Second Industrial Revolution “It is a very grave thing, leaving Europe!” – Eça de Queirós, The City and the Mountains The machine in the novel is loud, disobedient, and disruptive. It cares not for human needs unless programmed to; it overrides their feeble voices, and has no ear for orders. Human beings, when they are not out to eroticize it, react with hostility to the machine’s stubborn sonic and material presence. More often than not, its noises and speech are perceived as frustrating if not threatening. Nevertheless, machines have a way of making themselves heard and their message can be summarized in two words: care and attention. Such at least is the situation in European literature written during the two Industrial Revolutions (ca. 1760-1914), and, to a great extent, still is in our society today. All throughout the nineteenth century, machines forced human interlocutors to reevaluate who and what counts as partaking in humanity and conversation. They began modifying Europe’s land-