The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting
Joan Acocella reviews Darren Wershler-Henry's interesting book on typewriters, " The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting", over at The New Yorker.
Wershler-Henry follows the fortunes of the typewriter into the twentieth century, with special emphasis on the role of women in the story (...)
Wershler-Henry covers these matters in the first half of his book. But he is a scholar of the postmodern persuasion, and, as he soon tells us, his interest is not in the typewriter’s history but in its “discourse.” In the postmodern vocabulary, this means the web of assumptions that collect around a cultural fact, with heavy emphasis on notions that have been unmasked as naive and ridiculous by Frenchtheorists.
In particular Acocella laments that while Wershler-Henry spends time exploring the experience with the typewriter, he does not "spend much time on the difference between that and our relationship to the personal computer."
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