Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2001. [Vol. 7.] Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 27)

Studies - Zoltán Simon: The Image of Technology in Selected American Novels of the 1920's

ZOLTÁN SIMON THE IMAGE OF TECHNOLOGY IN SELECTED AMERICAN NOVELS OF THE 1920S I. Following the industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century, the first decades of the tv/entieth century could generally be characterized as a period of coming to terms with technology by the wider population of the United States. The previous, merely sporadic encounters with technology that were thrilling, awe-inspiring, or frightening a generation or two before gradually became a part of the everyday reality for the average American. No longer would a grandson of Henry Adams, in a walk through an exposition, stumble upon a huge dynamo (or, to provide a chronologically more appropriate example, an early experimental television set such as the one first publicly demonstrated in 1927), and respond to it with the same mixture of admiration, curiosity, and apprehension as his grandfather did. The assimilation of the machine into the modern American psyche and existence that took place in the first third of our century made such technological epiphanies once and for all obsolete in the U.S.A. The decade of the 1920s was chosen in this paper for the purposes of demonstrating the reflection of this growing technological awareness in American literature for two reasons. In the first place, it appears that the processes of industrialization, mechanization, urbanization, and standardization that had continued for several decades culminated in the decade following World War I, finally to reach a stage where quantitative changes have turned into qualitative 47