The American Modernity Crisis and Disruptive Technologies

Abstract

This introductory chapter provides a theoretical and historical account of nineteenth-century disruptive technologies and ways in which these disrupt the phenomenology of autobiographical narrative. The chapter closes with a reading of Mark Twain’s The Autobiography of Mark Twain in which I argue that this text registers Twain’s ambivalence to the mediation produced by his increasingly technologized act of composition.