The Pilot and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in the United States [Paperback]

Leo Marx (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 3, 1989

For over forty years, Leo Marx has studied American culture as a dialectical process, a fruitful contest between conflicting ways of seeing the world and expressing its meaning. The Pilot and the Passenger, a collection of essays spanning Marx's career, explores the meaning of this contest as it makes itself felt in America's literature, technology, and cultural politics.
Marx first examines such major writers as Melville, Thoreau, Mark Twain, and Frost, revealing how each responded to the contraries of American culture. He then considers certain larger controversies generated by science, technology, and urban industrialism. He concludes with a section on modern criticism, including a moving reminiscence of F.O. Matthiessen and a study of Susan Sontag's account of the Vietnam War.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

These essays by one of America's most eminent cultural critics, author of The Machine in the Garden, are the product of an imagination that's as much sociological as literary. Based on the "dialectical concept" of American culture, they examine the creative uses to which native writers past and present have been able to put the conflicting and even incompatible interpretations of reality that prevail in the culture at large. The book is divided into three sections: the first dealing with individual writers of the past, principally Twain, Melville and Thoreau; the second with the wider conflicts generated by science, technology and urban industrialization; and the third with writers, themes and problems of our timeNorman Mailer and Susan Sontag, the cultural impact of left-wing thought, the curious mix of pastoralism and revolution in the 1960s. Included also is a perceptive tribute to literary scholar F. O. Matthiessen who committed suicide in 1950.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

In these essays, published between 1950 and 1987, Marx demonstrates how the dialectical method of his The Machine in the Garden (1964) may be used by American culturalists to study 19th- and 20th-century literature, science, and society. While readers may wish that Marx had developed the theoretical framework in his introduction and avoided such ambiguities as conflating dialectics and dialogics, they will recognize the significance of his call for the interpretation of literary and social phenomena within their cultural contexts by critics whose imaginations are "at once literary and sociological." C. Mark Hurlbert, Indiana Univ. of Pennsylvania
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (August 3, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195048768
• ISBN-13: 978-0195048766
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,411,519 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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