Technology and Literary Imagination: Williams and Ashbery

Technology and Literary Imagination: Williams and Ashbery

  America has been associated with technological advances of the 20th century such as telephone, Ford, IBM, and Silicon Valley, and such invention of technology has affected the way people live and think. This paper will examine how William Carlos Williams and John Ashbery have tried to incorporate what they see as distinctive American culture and sensibility shaped and changed by the 20th century technology and technological products to their writings in order to make their writings vitally consonant with their own ages. Williams"s writing represents the aesthetic and functional dimensions of Modern "machine technology" like automobiles while Ashbery"s writing reflects Postmodern American culture shaped by "information technology" like Internet. The poets present distinctive literary styles that are appealing to the appearance of and the qualities of machine and information technology and technological products. Such observations will make me conclude that there has been a parallel development between literary imagination and technology throughout the 20th century.