Schivelbusch the railway journey full#

With a detailed discussion of the history of the steam engine. In The Railway Journey, Schivelbusch opens My sense of this is a compression of time and a curious elasticity of space of oftentimes disquieting and othertimes most welcome transparency and that constant pull to the little screens that, so it would seem, we all feel these days, whenever, wherever. There are indeed many parallels, however, to start with, t he literature on Far West Texas is exponentially greater and– more to the point– since the time I was traveling in Baja California, the experience of traveling itself has been radically transformed by the Digital Revolution. In recent weeks, this question of machineĮvolution, to my surprise, has begun to interest me intensely.Īt first I had thought of this book I am writing about Far West Texas as a doppelgänger to my 2002 memoir of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, Miraculous Air, for the ecosystems and early exploration and mission histories of these two regions have many parallels. Points along / on the same trajectory of machine evolution?” Originally published as Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise, the English translation came out in 1979 I read the 2014 edition with a new preface, “World Machines: The Steam Engine, the Railway, and the Computer,” in which Schivelbusch asks,Īccelerator of the Industrial Revolution, and the computer occupy different Of late: The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, a German historian and scholar of cultural studies. Stimulus Shield: or, the Industrialized Consciousness Railroad Accident/ 'Railway Spine' and Traumatic Neurosis World Machines: The Steam Engine, the Railway, and the ComputerĮxcursus. Now updated with a new preface, The Railway Journey is an invaluable resource for readers interested in nineteenth-century culture and technology and the prehistory of modern media and digitalization.

Schivelbusch the railway journey full#

As a history of the surprising ways in which technology and culture interact, this book covers a wide range of topics, including the changing perception of landscapes, the death of conversation while traveling, the problematic nature of the railway compartment, the space of glass architecture, the pathology of the railway journey, industrial fatigue and the history of shock, and the railroad and the city.īelonging to a distinguished European tradition of critical sociology best exemplified by the work of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, The Railway Journey is anchored in rich empirical data and full of striking insights about railway travel, the industrial revolution, and technological change.

In a highly original and engaging fashion, Schivelbusch discusses the ways in which our perceptions of distance, time, autonomy, speed, and risk were altered by railway travel. In The Railway Journey, Schivelbusch examines the origins of this industrialized consciousness by exploring the reaction in the nineteenth century to the first dramatic avatar of technological change, the railroad. But this was not always the case as Wolfgang Schivelbusch points out in this fascinating study, our adaptation to technological change-the development of our modern, industrialized consciousness-was very much a learned behavior. The impact of constant technological change upon our perception of the world is so pervasive as to have become a commonplace of modern society.