Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Lawnmowers: An Illustrated History. 1 This is both an apology and the start of an apology, as his study takes us through the lawnmower's invention, its meteoric rise in popularity (the industry is now worth around 50 billion dollars annually in the UK, USA and Europe alone), its many types (from the camel-drawn to the voice-activated) and the mechanical principles for cutting grass (cylinder, rotary, reciprocating knife and flail). 2 In the same vein, the microgenre of lawnmower poetry is captivated by the lawnmower's capacity both to bore and to endlessly suggest, often simultaneously.It modifies genres such as the pastoral and the georgic; tackles themes such as violence, childhood, mortality, masculinity and the 'quotidian'; juggles classical and biblical contexts; and negotiates binaries such as man and machine, nature and machine, the country and the city (or, more specifically and ambiguously, the country and the suburb), agency and determinism, destruction and preservation, and conflict and harmony.This article will explore a representatively diverse sample of lawnmower poetry through the lens of technography, a theoretical approach clustered around the Open Humanities Press series edited by Steven Connor, David Trotter and James Purdon.The series explores 'the cultural (written) history of material technologies', arguing that technology's origins in the Greek philosophical concept of techne (τέχνη, making/art/craft) and its common contemporary usage (a machine, system or piece of kit) are still very much intertwined.3 It also stresses that, naturalised as it has become, writing is itself a technology, in being a mediating system which we ourselves have invented-and the converse is true: 'all machines are also media', in that they 'come between their users or originators and those users' purposes, as well as providing substitute ways to achieve those purposes'.4 As James Purdon states, '[t]echnography does not presuppose where, if anywhere, text begins, and the machine stops'.5 A text, then, might not just be concerned with technology in terms of its content (i.e. a poem is about a machine) but through its form (i.e. a poem functions like the machine that it is about).
Source: Critical Quarterly
DOI: 10.1111/criq.12818
Author: Francesca Gardner
Institution: University of Cambridge
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,900
OpenAlex ID: W4410419642