What this is, is a cultural history, culture very broadly understood, of the railway.Īt first everything seemed so familiar that I could hardly perceive the insight. It bu Since I read this book with twinkling eyes and a smile on my face I tenderly recommend it to other readers, at least those who are interested in trains. Long enough for others to have drawn from it and for its messages to have passed through many stations. It helped to remember that this book has been rattling around since 1977. At first everything seemed so familiar that I could hardly perceive the insight. What this is, is a cultural history, culture very broadly understood, of the railway. Since I read this book with twinkling eyes and a smile on my face I tenderly recommend it to other readers, at least those who are interested in trains. 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.more
#The railway journey schivelbusch 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. I The impact of constant technological change upon our perception of the world is so pervasive as to have become a commonplace of modern society. The impact of constant technological change upon our perception of the world is so pervasive as to have become a commonplace of modern society.
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