"Ploughshares to Processors:  an ecological critique of technology in Post-War Finnish and American fiction"

Evan Wright. "Ploughshares to Processors:  an ecological critique of technology in Post-War Finnish and American fiction." 

Tools and technologies mediate relationships between human society and the natural world.  Post-war literature in the United States and Finland reveals a high degree of sensitivity to the transformation of ethical considerations and sublimated subjecthood of non-human nature.   Plougshares to Processors seeks to explain the changes in social perceptions and discourse of landscape and ecology that result from rapid hyper-productivity brought to agrarian and rural lifestyles by industrialization and mechanization.  Presentations and juxtapositions of human, tool and landscape in the post-war and contemporary novels Täällä pohjantähden alla, Jänisken vuosi, Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi from Finland and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and The Monkeywrench Gang from the United States show how information and transportation technologies mediate and even form human engagements with each other and non-human nature at material and cognitive levels.  Artifacts of technology themselves become meaningful symbols of ecological concern.

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