SOURCE: A review of Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk, in Technology and Culture, Vol. 38, No. 4, October, 1997, pp. 957-59.

In the following essay, Slade briefly discusses notions about the “technological sublime” in Joseph Tabbi's Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk.

In a 1932 essay that was once standard reading for students of American literature, Hart Crane insisted that writers had to “absorb” the machine by “acclimatizing” it instead of “pandering” to readers awed by technology. Crane's own awe overwhelmed his hope that literature could domesticate industrial wonders; The Bridge, the vision of a poet ravished by Roebling's masterpiece, genuflects toward networks of transportation, communication, and power. Crane nonetheless believed that the most urgent challenge for the writer was to find a place to stand in a culture defined by science and technology. Crane's dilemma anticipates the thesis of Joseph Tabbi's Postmodern...