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1936 was a watershed year for computability. Debates among Gödel, Church and others over the correct analysis of the intuitive concept “human effectively computable”, an analysis at the heart of the Incompleteness Theorems, the Entscheidungsproblem, the question of what a finite computation is, and most urgently—for Gödel—the generality of the Incompleteness Theorems, were definitively set to rest with the appearance, in that year, of the Turing Machine. The question I explore here is, do the mathematical facts exhaust what is to be said about the thinking behind the “confluence of ideas in 1936”? I will argue for a cultural role in Gödel’s, and, by extension, the larger logical community’s absorption of Turing’s 1936 model. As scaffolding I employ a conceptual framework due to the critic Leo Marx of the technological sublime; I also make use of the distinction within the technological sublime due to Caroline Jones, between its iconic and performative modes—a distinction operating within the conceptual art of the 1960s, but serving the history of computability equally well.

In pursuit of this argument, I interrogate the relation between modern technology and concepts of history through a number of Twain's works, especially A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), whose \"poet in steel,\" Hank Morgan, Twain modeled after Paige.12 This approach builds on the work of a number of critics who have read Connecticut Yankee alongside Twain's personal history with the Paige Compositor.13 Indeed, Twain himself links the novel to the machine in an 1889 letter, in which he documents his plan to complete the novel on the same day Paige promised to finish the machine.14 Critics who have read Twain's investment in the Paige Compositor alongside Connecticut Yankee have treated the former as a master text, a key for decoding the novel's various contradictions and inconsistencies.15 This essay reverses that standard approach: I examine the novel to better understand both the tenor of Twain's \"eureka!\" and the surrounding discourse of historical rupture, a fiction endemic to second-stage industrialization.16 Just as the compositor marked, for Twain, a fissure in the history of technology, Connecticut Yankee, at least as Twain had planned it, was to establish a marked \"contrast\" between nineteenth-century liberalism and medieval barbarism.17 The novel itself would come to tell quite a different story. Over the course of writing the novel, Twain celebrated the rupture of second-stage industrialization as a rejection of the South's \"sham gauds and sham chivalries,\" only to expose that Yankee optimism as little more than the inverted image of the South's neo-feudalism.18 Connecticut Yankee reveals that if the regressive South had been reduced to what William Faulkner would later call \"an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names,\" the progressive North had the opposite problem:19 it believed too much in the progressive fiction of rupture, motored as that fiction often was by labor-saving machinery, one of the material foundations of a postbellum vision of historical progress that promised (however tenuously) to liberate the United States from its feudal ties.20 I begin with the argument that Twain's exuberant claims to Year Zero, found in his January 1889 letters and throughout much of his prolabor writings in the 1880s, give voice to an ideological occlusion of both the continuities between modern \"marvels\" and earlier technologies and labor-saving machinery's political role within the industrial capitalist mode of production. Against the working compositor's apparent fetishistic power, its failure to enter the marketplace invites us to pivot from the epiphanic moments of invention, innovation, and windfall profits to the mechanistic discourses of mechanical engineering and the economic processes undergirding the machine's construction- namely, the transfer from labor to automation. \"23 To illustrate this claim, I trace Twain's historical imaginary through three stages: his embrace of the discourse of historical rupture endemic to second-stage industrialization, a position I locate in Twain's writings on the Paige Compositor and in Hank Morgan's spectacular \"miracles\" in Connecticut Yankee; Twain's mechanistic philosophy of history, in which the machine embodies history as an unbroken chain of material causes and effects; and, finally, a mediation between the apparently incommensurate duration of mechanistic historiography and the instantaneity of technological spectacle, a mediation that produces what I call Twain's spectacular history.

This dissertation examines the link between Korea’s technological modernity and its earliest cinematic history through the aesthetic lens of the sublime. Cinema was introduced to Korea in conjunction with the expansion of infrastructures under a direct and indirect system of colonial rule. And it immediately served as a technique and technology of national and imperial governance, as a way of forging new political subjects during a tumultuous time of social change. Focusing on primitive representations of film technology, the aesthetic conventions of travel film genres, preliminary forms of state-policy films, chain drama’s production of national landscapes, and the influence of colonial urbanism on the building of cinematic networks, this dissertation reconstructs the contested beginning of motion-picture technology in Korea during which the Korean experience of modernity was shaped and defined in negotiation with nation-building and globalization. In doing so, my approach takes a distinct perspective with recourse to the aesthetics of the colonial sublime. In the first place, as an aesthetic category in origin that refers to the subject’s emotions of shock and terror, the sublime is a useful concept to understand the formation of the strangely masochistic spectatorship of early cinema for which sensation and astonishment were so central. With the modification of the adjective “colonial,” however, the colonial sublime has also lent itself well to an examination of the aestheticization of colonial politics and the colonial politics of aesthetics. By bringing together early cinema studies and studies on colonial modernity in Korea, I show that cinema as visual technology — along with other infrastructural projects — has been constantly aestheticized as a spectacle in the development of cinematic culture in Korea.

Kirby and Lee’sThe Fantastic Four, on which they worked in tandem from 1961 to 1970, was Marvel’s flagship and, along with Ditko and Lee’sThe Amazing Spider-Man, one of the signature superhero comics of its era. It led the sudden surge in creativity which, as we’ve seen, overtook and transformed Marvel between 1961 and about 1963 and that laid the foundation for the since much-elaborated Marvel Universe. Understandably, a great deal has been written aboutThe Fantastic Four, mostly in the fan press, and many comic book creators have weighed in on its significance and on what it is

Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1991 short story ‘Newton’s Sleep’ begins in a utopic society that escaped the environmental and social calamity of a near-future Earth and created an enlightened culture on a space station. The group, led by a scientific elite, pride themselves on eradicating the irrational prejudices and unempirical mentality that hamstringed Earth; but chaos blossoms as the society struggles with the reappearance of religious intolerance, and becomes confused by an outbreak of mass hallucinations of the Earth they left behind. This narrative trope of the necessity of nature for the survival of humanity—physically, mentally, and spiritually—represents a new and relatively common allegory in contemporary science fiction in an era distinguished by separation from the natural world.