Nicole Maruo-Schröder

Florian Sedlmeier

Eric Erbacher

The volume reexamines the trope of the intrusive machine and the regenerative pastoral garden, laid out fifty years ago by Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden, one of the founding texts of American Studies. Contributions explore the lasting influence of the trope in American culture and the arts, rereading it as a dialectics where nature is as much technologized as technology is naturalized. They trace this dialectic trope in filmic and literary representations of industrial, bureaucratic, and digital gardens; they explore its function in the aftermath of the civil war, the rural electrification during the New Deal, in landscape art, and in ethnic literatures; and they discuss the historical premises and lasting influence of Leo Marx's seminal study.

Nature and Technology in American Culture

Rereading the Machine in the Garden

Christian Ludwig

Despite its popularity, the newest wave of dystopian narratives is often viewed as derivative and deficient. This collection proposes a different, more nuanced viewpoint, arguing that contemporary dystopian fiction changes and updates genre conventions to tackle controversial and contemporary issues in complex ways, such as environmental destruction (Julie Bertagna's 'Exodus' (2002), Sacci Lloyd's 'The Carbon Diaries: 2015/2017' (2009, 2010), Julianna Baggott's 'Pure' (2012)), the effects of bio-technological progress gone awry (Lauren DeStefano's 'Chemical Garden' trilogy (2011-2013), Karen Sandler's 'Tankborn' (2011)), or the consequences of war (Lauren Oliver's 'Delirium' (2011)). While the volume's first part collects essays that approach dystopia from a literary and cultural studies perspective, the second part explores the potential that texts such as Veronica Roth's 'Divergent' (2011), Suzanne Collin's 'The Hunger Games' (2008) or David Macaulay's graphic novel 'BAA' (1985) have for the EFL classroom.

Nicole Maruo-Schröder

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