Mechanical Occult

Alan Ramon Clinton received his PhD. in English from the University of Florida, and he has published articles on technology, spirituality, and twentieth-century literature. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia.

«In ‘Mechanical Occult’ Alan Ramon Clinton succeeds in aligning the hitherto problematic tensions in modernism between science and spiritualism through the use of ‘switch words‘, vocabulary used equally smoothly in either discourse.» (Elisabeth Joyce, Author of ‘Cultural Critique and Abstraction: Marianne Moore and the Avant-Garde’)«Automatic writing, the use of coincidence, rigorous games – these activities, despite their apparent extravagance, derive from more established sources: Freud’s psychoanalysis, Taylorism‘s routinization of industrial production, and Hollywood‘s industrialization of commercial filmmaking. While the Surrealists used these procedures for specific purposes (literature, painting, the re-enchantment of ‘everyday life‘), this book extends their project into literary criticism. Andre Breton‘s ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ had tantalizingly proposed that move; Alan Clinton has taken Breton at his word.» (Robert B. Ray, Author of ‘How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies’)