Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real (Leonardo Books) [Paperback]

Richard Coyne (Author)

Book Description

Series: Leonardo Books | Publication Date: January 26, 2001

This book explores the spectrum of romantic narrative that pervades the digital age, from McLuhan's utopian vision of social reintegration by electronic communication to claims that cyberspace creates new realities.

Technoromanticism pits itself against a hard-headed rationalism, but its most potent antagonists are contemporary pragmatism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, surrealism, and deconstruction—all of which subvert the romantic legacy and provoke new narratives of computing. Thus the book also serves as an introduction to the application of contemporary theory to information technology, raising issues of representation, space, time, interpretation, identity, and the real. As such, it is a companion to Coyne's Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age: From Method to Metaphor (MIT Press, 1995).

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

It's no secret that contemporary culture romanticizes digital technologies. In books, articles, and movies about virtual community, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, artificial life, and other wonders of the digital age, breathless anticipation of vast and thrilling changes has become a running theme. But as Richard Coyne makes clear in Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real, a dense but rewarding piece of academic criticism, we also get romantic about the new technologies in a more rigorous sense of the word. Whether heralding an electronic return to village communalism or celebrating cyberspace as a realm of pure mind, today's utopian thinking about the digital, Coyne argues, essentially replays the 18th- and 19th-century cultural movement called Romanticism, with its powerful yearnings for transcendence and wholeness.

And this apparently is not a good thing. Romanticism, like the more sober Enlightenment rationalism against which it rebelled, has outlived its usefulness as a way of understanding the world, Coyne argues. And so he spends the duration of the book bombarding both the romantic and the rationalist tendencies in cyberculture with every weapon in the arsenal of 20th-century critical theory: poststructuralism, Freudianism, postmodern pragmatism, Heideggerian phenomenology, surrealism--Coyne uses each in turn to whack away at conventional wisdoms about digital tech. Whether the conventional wisdoms remain standing at the end is an open question, but Coyne's tour of the contemporary intellectual landscape is a tour de force, and never before has digital technology's place in that landscape been mapped so thoroughly. --Julian Dibbell --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"This is an excellent and most welcome study of the discourse about computer communications, their narrativity as Coyne says, with particular attention to the classic theme of unity and fragmentation."
—Mark Poster, Professor of History and of Information and Computer Science, University of California at Irvine



"This book provides the most comprehensive philosophical and cultural context for understanding information technologies that I have ever seen."
—N. Katherine Hayles, University of California, Los Angeles

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 408 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (January 26, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262531917
• ISBN-13: 978-0262531917
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,164,255 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Richard Coyne is Professor and Head of the School of Arts, Culture and Environment at the University of Edinburgh. He is an architect researching and teaching in architectural theory, design theory and digital media. He is author of four books with MIT Press: Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age (1995), Technoromanticism (1999), Cornucopia Limited (2005), and The Tuning of Place (2010). With Adrian Snodgrass he co-authored Interpretation in Architecture: Design as a Way of Thinking (Routledge, 2006). Richard was brought up in Melbourne, attended the Universities of Melbourne and Sydney, and settled in Edinburgh in the mid 1990s.