Books - Benjamin Mangrum

The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence

This project began with an unexpected discovery: the computer’s first appearance on Broadway was in a romantic comedy, William Marchant’s The Desk Set (1955). This anecdote in literary history led me to study the many ways that comedy has shaped our collective experience of computing. I found that comedy has been central to how we’ve made sense of the computer’s sweeping effects on public life and private experience. To understand this cultural history, my book examines films, TV, plays, novels, and an archive of work by programmers, engineers, and other technologists.

The social assimilation of computers–some scholars describe this process as becoming computational–has generated distinct forms of incongruity, conflict, and socioeconomic uncertainty. Comedy is, among many other things, a genre of incongruities. For this and other reasons, comedy has shaped the history of computing, from the comic automatons and robots of the nineteenth century to popular films like You’ve Got Mail and joke-telling digital assistants. I argue that when we look at the comic forms that shape the cultures of computing, we come to better understand the tensions and contradictions internal to a social world oriented around advanced technology.

For more about The Comedy of Computation, visit the book’s listing at Stanford University Press. Copies are available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or IndiePubs. You can read the introduction on Stanford’s website. You can also read a short interview and discussion of the book here, as well as early reviews in ASAP Journal, Critical Inquiry, Genre, and the ACM’s Computing Reviews.

Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2019)

Winner of the 2019 Louis Bredvold Prize for Scholarly Publication.

Many histories of the decades following World War II describe this period as the “apex of American liberalism.” My book shows how the literary writing and civic culture of these decades in fact saw the development of a new type of liberalism–one that turned against the basic assumptions of New Deal reform and the legacy of the long Progressive era. To explore this major shift in American political culture, I examine the work of Vladimir Nabokov, Patricia Highsmith, Ralph Ellison, Walker Percy, and more than two dozen other writers and intellectuals. I read their work alongside major transformations in twentieth-century society. These transformations include the formation of new “aestheticized” models of civic society; the professionalization of psychology and the popularization of psychoanalysis; the reception of French existentialism; shifts in corporate management theory away from Fordism and Taylorism; and the rise of an “independence regime” in US political culture.

Land of Tomorrow puts literary studies in conversation with intellectual history and political theory. For instance, in the book’s third chapter, I show how many liberal thinkers borrowed from the psychological professions–and the theories of psychoanalysis–to understand poverty, crime, and mass conformity. This use of psychological templates influenced public intellectuals, novelists, and even the techniques of early television. As a result, collective behaviors were often recast as phenomena of a private psychological realm, and many liberals neglected the structural conditions of inequality by attending instead to the private lives of supposedly deviant and neurotic peoples. These liberals also recast possible social interventions after the image of therapy. I track this new way of thinking across work by several writers, including Patricia Highsmith and Richard Yates, as well as the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Each chapter of Land of Tomorrow moves between the granular features of individual cultural works and wider changes in the structures of thought and feeling in postwar America. By moving between the granular and the structural, Land of Tomorrow shows how a diverse body of postwar thought gave cultural prestige to political sensibilities that betrayed the reformist impulses of an earlier era of American liberalism.

For more about Land of Tomorrow, visit the book’s listing at Oxford University Press or Amazon. Here’s a PDF of the book’s Table of Contents.