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Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study. By Tim Armstrong. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. 1998. x, 309 pp. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $19.95.
Armstrong's book is a fascinating and frenetic study of the ways in which the body is fragmented, reconstructed, and resurrected by technology and the theoretical projects of modernism. Exploring modernism's remarkable range of corporeal interventions and obsessions-from dietary regimens to sex change operations-Armstrong orchestrates an impressive (and occasionally cacophonous) spectacle. In the early twentieth century, Armstrong argues, the body was penetrated by emerging technologies, making its inner workings visible for the first time and thus available for commodification and systematization. At the same time, and especially after World War I, bodies were perceived increasingly as vulnerable, fragmented, in need of prosthetic augmentation. Modernism took to exploring the body as its new frontier and, adapting the new discourses and methodologies of technology in...