In our Tuesday Zoom session, we’ll be discussing a famous excerpt from Henry Adams’ (strange) autobiography – – “The Dynamo and the Virgin.” Make three digital annotations on Adams’ text – – use your annotations to pinpoint places in the text where you’re confused, flummoxed, and/or mystified and to describe what makes these moments so confounding. (Still feeling unsteady about annotating – – remember our “How to annotate page.”) It would be great if you finished your annotations by Monday evening so that Deanna and I can browse through them before class on Tuesday.
Adams first published his memoir/autobiography – – The Education of Henry Adams – – privately in 1907 and then allowed his estate to publish the text to the general public after his death in 1918. The title of the memoir points to one of its major themes – – education and self-development (what Germans call “bildung” and a theme /narrative that describes a whole genre – – the “Bildungsroman.” This genre can include everything from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre to Jay-Z’s Decoded.) As you’ll see in “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” Adams is on a perpetual quest to learn and to find worthy teachers. Obviously, given the title of this excerpt, the text is also about technology. (You can imagine how dynamos and electricity fundamentally changed everyday life in fin-de-siecle American society and culture.) More broadly, “The Dynamo and the Virgin” is also about how we make sense of historical change and technology’s role in historical change. (A more recent and lively version of this quest can be found in Ian Bogost’s work on the iPhone – – see Bogost’s essay “The Geek’s Chihuahua,” which also became a booklet (The Geek’s Chihuahua: Living with Apple) that you can read online.)