Lesley Marx
Biographic Data
| ID | 147072 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lesley Marx |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lesley |
| FAMILY NAME | Marx |
| SIGNATURE | MARX L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cape Town |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9657-293X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 55 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 140 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 55 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1948 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
How much does anyone need to know about Eugène Marais?’ The Guest and Die Wonderwerker
Comparing and contrasting two film versions of Eugène Marais's life by means of close analysis, this article explores the relationship between film and history, where history includes both that of the film-makers and that of the referential world they seek to represent, in this case specifically history as it is embodied in the enigmatic figure of Eugène Marais – naturalist, short-story writer, poet, journalist and morphine addict – whose protean…
Cinematic representations of diaspora: Italians and Jews
In this article we consider recent re-evaluations of the concept of diaspora and extend the notion of diasporic space using cinematic representations of two diasporic experiences, Italian and Jewish. The first film selected is the work of Edward Dmytryk, a controversial member of the Hollywood Ten (prominent film-makers who refused to disclose their political affiliations during the McCarthy period). The second film is the work of Joan Micklin Si…
At the End of the Rainbow: Jerusalema and the South African Gangster Film
Between Oliver Schmitz’s Mapantsula, released in 1988, and Ralph Ziman’s Jerusalema, released twenty years later, lies the history of a country torn apart by systematic racist oppression for half a century. Reborn under the sign of truth and reconciliation, the brave new world carries not only the scars of the old, but has given birth to mutations of poverty, disease, crime and rampant violence. Since the glory days of classic Hollywood, when Cag…
Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept
When the word technology was introduced into American English in the nineteenth century, it referred to the study of-or treatises in-the mechanic arts. It did not achieve currency as a reference to those arts as such until c. 1900-1930. By the 1840s, however, when Daniel Webster eloquently summarized the remarkable transformation of life attributable to advances in science and what later would come to be called technology , public discourse was f…
The idea of nature in America
Daedalus Spring 2008 The idea of nature is–or, rather, was– one of the fundamental American ideas. In its time it served–as the ideas of freedom, democracy, or progress did in theirs–to de1⁄2ne the meaning of America. For some three centuries, in fact, from the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to the closing of the Western frontier in 1890, the encounter of white settlers with what they perceived as wilderness –unaltered nature–was the de1⁄2ning Ame…
Bodies and Borders: Vietnam/Namibia
Ten years ago I sat at a kitchen table in a beautiful home at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Boulder, Colorado, and told my hosts the history of my three brothers, all of whom had been conscripts in the South African Defence Force (SADF), each of whose lives demanded that a different kind of story be told. And so the discussion developed: how would one—how would I—ever tell that story, those stories? My listeners suggested that the story…
Home on the Range: The Americanization of my Father
In this article, Marx explores the social and historical roots of her family's attachment to country and western music. Specifically, she examines the influence of American popular culture on her father, born to a large Afrikaans family, and informed by film, musical and pulp fiction stories of the west. These stories have helped to frame the way in which he reads his life story. She suggests that her father's experience offers flexible ways of a…
Cinema, Glamour, Atrocity: Narratives of Trauma
Cinematic treatments of trauma have to confront the challenge that every aesthetic choice is also an ethical one. This challenge poses special problems for questions of truth and the representation of victims and perpetrators. Three documentaries made by Mark Kaplan (1996–2004) explore the history of South African student activist Siphiwo Mtimkulu, tortured and murdered by security policemen in the early 1980s, and the subsequent interaction betw…
Epilogue: The Garden of Ashes
“So,” say the parable-makers, “is your pastoral life whirled past and away.” We cannot deny the fact without denying our history. When the Republic was founded, nine out of ten Americans were husbandmen; today not one in ten lives on a farm. Ours is an intricately organized, urban, industrial, nuclear-armed society. For more than a century our most gifted writers have dwelt upon the contradiction between rural myth and technological fact.
The Garden
Although Shakespeare and his contemporaries had thought about the unspoiled terrain of the New World as a possible setting for a pastoral utopia, a fully articulated pastoral idea of America did not emerge until the end of the eighteenth century. The story of its emergence illustrates the turning of an essentially literary device to ideological or (using the word in its extended sense) political uses. By 1785, when Jefferson issued Notes on Virgi…
Shakespeare’s American Fable
Some of the connections between The Tempest and America are well known. We know, for one thing, that Shakespeare wrote the play three or possibly four years after the first permanent colony had been established at Jamestown in 1607. At the time ail of England was in a state of excitement about events across the Atlantic. Of course, the play is not in any literal sense about America; although Shakespeare is nowhere explicit about the location of t…
Sleepy Hollow, 1844
The pastoral ideal has been used to define the meaning of America ever since the age of discovery, and it has not yet lost its hold upon the native imagination. The reason is clear enough. The ruling motive of the good shepherd, leading figure of the classic, Virgilian mode, was to withdraw from the great world and begin a new life in a fresh, green landscape. And now here was a virgin continent! Inevitably the European mind was dazzled by the pr…
The Machine
In his Life of Johnson Boswell describes the moment when he first recognized the significance of the new technology. In March 1776, he visited Matthew Boulton’s great Soho works where a steam engine was in production. The “very ingenious proprietor” himself was his guide. “I wish,” Boswell writes, “that Johnson had been with us: for it was a scene which I should have been glad to contemplate by his light. The vastness and the contrivance of some …
Two Kingdoms of Force
Then the little locomotive shrieked and began to move: a rapid churning of exhaust, a lethargic deliberate clashing of slack couplings travelling backward along the train, the exhaust changing to the deep slow clapping bites of power as the caboose too began to move and from the cupola he watched the train’s head complete the first and only curve in the entire line’s length and vanish into the wilderness, dragging its length of train behind it so…
The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America
For over four decades, Leo Marx’s work has focused on the relationship between technology and culture in 19th- and 20th-century America. His research helped to define—and continues to give depth to—the area of American studies concerned with the links between scientific and technological advances, and the way society and culture both determine these links. The Machine in the Garden fully examines the difference between the “pastoral” and “progres…
American studies: Margins, middles and metropoles
Slouching towards Bethlehem: Ubu and the truth commission
1998). Slouching towards Bethlehem: Ubu and the truth commission. African Studies: Vol. 57, No. 2, pp. 209-220
Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism
The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology . Carroll W. Pursell
Underworld RSA
Elting Morison, 1909-1995
Memorials ELTING MORISON, 1909-1995 Editor s note.—On the first of December, 1995, the Program in Science, Technology and Society and the School of Humanities and Social Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hosted a one-day colloquium honoring Elting Morison. The day brought many of Elting’s friends and family back to MIT, where he had spent much of his career as a teacher and scholar. Thomas Parke Hughes, long a close friend, sug…
Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism
The Idea of “Technology” and Postmodern Pessimism
Comment and Response on the Review of In Context
Communications COMMENT AND RESPONSE ON THE REVIEW OF IN CONTEXT To the Editor: Several people have written me asking what I think of Leo Marx’s critique of In Context {Technology and Culture, April 1991). Frankly, I was amazed, because, after carefully pointing out the contributions made by the authors represented in this volume, this usually prescient scholar proceeds to question the raison d’être of the history of technology. If it employs the …
"Comment and Response on the Review of "In Context
The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America
For over four decades, Leo Marx’s work has focused on the relationship between technology and culture in 19th- and 20th-century America. His research helped to define—and continues to give depth to—the area of American studies concerned with the links between scientific and technological advances, and the way society and culture both determine these links. The Machine in the Garden fully examines the difference between the “pastoral” and “progres…
Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept
When the word technology was introduced into American English in the nineteenth century, it referred to the study of-or treatises in-the mechanic arts. It did not achieve currency as a reference to those arts as such until c. 1900-1930. By the 1840s, however, when Daniel Webster eloquently summarized the remarkable transformation of life attributable to advances in science and what later would come to be called technology , public discourse was f…
The idea of nature in America
Daedalus Spring 2008 The idea of nature is–or, rather, was– one of the fundamental American ideas. In its time it served–as the ideas of freedom, democracy, or progress did in theirs–to de1⁄2ne the meaning of America. For some three centuries, in fact, from the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to the closing of the Western frontier in 1890, the encounter of white settlers with what they perceived as wilderness –unaltered nature–was the de1⁄2ning Ame…
Underworld RSA
Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism
Thoughts on the Origin and Character of the American Studies Movement
would be surprising if there weren't, one useful contribution to its resolution would be an improved understanding of the movement's own history. What brought American Studies into existence? Why did it arise when it did? What purposes did it serve for those who invented it and for the larger academic and intellectual culture? To answer these questions about the past, I assume, would enhance our ability to evaluate the present condition and futur…
Home on the Range: The Americanization of my Father
In this article, Marx explores the social and historical roots of her family's attachment to country and western music. Specifically, she examines the influence of American popular culture on her father, born to a large Afrikaans family, and informed by film, musical and pulp fiction stories of the west. These stories have helped to frame the way in which he reads his life story. She suggests that her father's experience offers flexible ways of a…
Cinema, Glamour, Atrocity: Narratives of Trauma
Cinematic treatments of trauma have to confront the challenge that every aesthetic choice is also an ethical one. This challenge poses special problems for questions of truth and the representation of victims and perpetrators. Three documentaries made by Mark Kaplan (1996–2004) explore the history of South African student activist Siphiwo Mtimkulu, tortured and murdered by security policemen in the early 1980s, and the subsequent interaction betw…
Slouching towards Bethlehem: Ubu and the truth commission
1998). Slouching towards Bethlehem: Ubu and the truth commission. African Studies: Vol. 57, No. 2, pp. 209-220
Are Science and Society Going in the Same Direction
On 4 and 5 April 1983 the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry celebrated its 50th anniversary with an invited conference titled, "Where Are We Going?;-Critical Issues in Science and Technology." This article is a slightly revised version of Professor Marx's talk given there.-Ed
"Leo Marx's "Middle Landscape: A Critique, a Revision, and an Appreciation
American Studies. A Defense of an Unscientific Method
At the End of the Rainbow: Jerusalema and the South African Gangster Film
Between Oliver Schmitz’s Mapantsula, released in 1988, and Ralph Ziman’s Jerusalema, released twenty years later, lies the history of a country torn apart by systematic racist oppression for half a century. Reborn under the sign of truth and reconciliation, the brave new world carries not only the scars of the old, but has given birth to mutations of poverty, disease, crime and rampant violence. Since the glory days of classic Hollywood, when Cag…
Double Conciousness and the Cultural Politics of F. O. Mathiessen
The bulk of mankind believe in two gods. They are under one dominion here in the house, as friend and parent, in social circles, in letters, in art, in love, in religion; but in mechanics, in dealing with steam and climate, in trade, in politics, they think they come under another; and that it would be a practical blunder to transfer the method and way of working of one sphere into the other. What good, honest, generous men at home, will be wolve…
Literature and Covert Culture
The Pilot and the Passenger: Landscape Conventions and the Style of Huckleberry Finn
N OWADAYS it is not necessary to argue the excellence of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Everyone seems to agree that it is a great book, or in any event one of the great American books. But we are less certain about what makes it great. Why is it in fact more successful than most of Mark Twain's other work? No one would claim that it is free of his typical faults. It descends here and there to sentimentality, buffoonery, and (particularly in…
Yankee Science in the Making . Dirk J. Struik
The Story of American Railroads
Yankee Science in the Making . Dirk J. Struik
The Teacher
The last time I was in Matty's classroom he was talking about Theodore Dreiser. It was in the spring two years ago. A friend who had never heard him asked me to go, and we sat in the back row of the big room in Emerson Hall where he met the elementary course in American literature. There were several hundred students in the class.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click h…
Jonathan Edwards. Perry Miller
The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century . Perry Miller The New England Mind: From Colony to Province
The Machine in the Garden
The Pilot and the Passenger: Landscape Conventions and the Style of Huckleberry Finn
N OWADAYS it is not necessary to argue the excellence of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Everyone seems to agree that it is a great book, or in any event one of the great American books. But we are less certain about what makes it great. Why is it in fact more successful than most of Mark Twain's other work? No one would claim that it is free of his typical faults. It descends here and there to sentimentality, buffoonery, and (particularly in…
Literature and Covert Culture
Notes on the Culture of the New Capitalism
The idea of socialism is fading out of the American consciousness. I do not mean to imply that it ever was one of the brightest lights in our political thinking, but right now it is getting very dim indeed. In a recent review of a collection of essays from Dissent, a socialist journal, Dwight Macdonald has some interesting things to say on the subject. He notes the mechanical quality of mind, the lack of individual accent in the prose of some con…
American & British Technology in the Nineteenth Century: The Search for Labour-Saving Inventions
The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature
Flesh of Steel: Literature and the Machine in American Culture by Thomas Reed West (review)
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 111 the material; at least, this reader can see no merit in using those particular dates. Korman has opened up an important area of study. His lively imagina tion and deep understanding or social relations suggest that his further research along the lines here marked out will produce significant results. Unfortunately, limitations in concept and materials reduce the contribu tion of his present volume. Freder…
American Studies. A Defense of an Unscientific Method
Flesh of Steel: Literature and the Machine in American Culture
Commentary
Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-1860
"Leo Marx's "Middle Landscape: A Critique, a Revision, and an Appreciation
Thoughts on the Origin and Character of the American Studies Movement
would be surprising if there weren't, one useful contribution to its resolution would be an improved understanding of the movement's own history. What brought American Studies into existence? Why did it arise when it did? What purposes did it serve for those who invented it and for the larger academic and intellectual culture? To answer these questions about the past, I assume, would enhance our ability to evaluate the present condition and futur…
Double Conciousness and the Cultural Politics of F. O. Mathiessen
The bulk of mankind believe in two gods. They are under one dominion here in the house, as friend and parent, in social circles, in letters, in art, in love, in religion; but in mechanics, in dealing with steam and climate, in trade, in politics, they think they come under another; and that it would be a practical blunder to transfer the method and way of working of one sphere into the other. What good, honest, generous men at home, will be wolve…
Are Science and Society Going in the Same Direction
On 4 and 5 April 1983 the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry celebrated its 50th anniversary with an invited conference titled, "Where Are We Going?;-Critical Issues in Science and Technology." This article is a slightly revised version of Professor Marx's talk given there.-Ed
The Pilot and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in the United States
Developing a national science culture under free trade
A Backward Look at Forward Motion
The Pilot and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in the United States
The Railroad in American Art: Representations of Technological Change
These essays on paintings, prints, and photographs explore the wealth of railroad imagery in American art
History (33 works) · Sociology (30 works) · Philosophy (27 works) · Art (22 works) · Political science (22 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Art history (15 works) · Aesthetics (14 works) · History (13 works)