By Roger Whitson, Washington State University Paolo Bacigalupi’s steampunk novel The Wind-Up Girl imagines a world where the loss of fossil fuels and electricity has completely transformed the politics of our planet and brought about a second industrial age.[i] The strange new Victorian-styled machines populating this world rely on human and animal caloric expenditure enhanced by a complicated system of springs to maximize the output. Technology is completely redesigned to function appropriately, with combustion-engines reserved for the extremely rich. Bacigalupi’s
Read moreTag: Telectroscope
Roundtable on Paul St George’s Telectroscope
As part of JVC‘s ongoing commitment to exploring the continually evolving intersections Victorian culture with contemporary literature, arts, and popular culture, we have convened a virtual roundtable discussion on Paul St George’s Telectroscope. This roundtable is also being simultaneously published in the print edition of JVC 17.4 : http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjvc20/17/4. From May until June of 2008, New York City and London were visually connected in real time via the Telectroscope’s tubes and tunnels, to the amazement and delight of residents and
Read moreRoundtable on Paul St George’s Telectroscope – David L. Pike
The post below is David L. Pike’s initial response to the questions posed in the JVC Online roundtable on Paul St George’s Telectroscope. David Pike is Professor of Literature at the American University. To view the questions and ongoing conversation, as well as the other participants’ initial responses, use the links below. Questions & Ongoing Conversation || Jay Clayton || David L. Pike || Paul St George There are a number of possible factors in the popularity of the Telectroscope.
Read moreRoundtable on Paul St George’s Telectroscope – Paul St George
The post below is Paul St George’s initial response to the questions posed in the JVC Online roundtable on Paul St George’s Telectroscope. Paul St George is an artist and the creator of the Telectroscope. To view the questions and ongoing conversation, as well as the other participants’ initial responses, use the links below. Questions & Ongoing Conversation || Jay Clayton || David L. Pike || Paul St George I thought I would join this conversation by answering one of
Read moreRoundtable on Paul St George’s Telectroscope – Jay Clayton
The post below is Jay Clayton’s initial response to the questions posed in the JVC Online roundtable on Paul St George’s Telectroscope. Jay Clayton is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. To view the questions and ongoing conversation, as well as the other participants’ initial responses, use the links below. Questions & Ongoing Conversation || Jay Clayton || David L. Pike || Paul St George In May, 2008, two enormous drills burst upward through piers on
Read moreNew Agenda – David L. Pike, ‘Afterimages of the Victorian City’
The Victorian street and underworld have had remarkable afterlives in twentieth-century reinterpretations of Victorian cityscapes. In JVC 15.2, David L. Pike explores what persists in our vision of the nineteenth-century city well over a century after it was, so to speak, first seen, and how what persists impacts on our attempts to reconstruct that act of seeing. He sees spectral ‘afterimages’ of the Victorian street and underground, in a variety of contemporary sources, ranging from Gary Sherman’s Death Line (1972)
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