Abstract: In our rejoinders to the advance of technology, we often assume that ours is an unprecedented historical conjuncture. This talk, however, will consider a prior conjuncture, in the late 1960s, when some poets and activists responded with mixed feelings toward automation, nuclear proliferation, and the apparent cohesion of an electronic "global village." Setting these novelties in context, a range of writers

--- from Martin Luther King Jr. and Shulamith Firestone to W.S. Merwin and Thomas Merton to James Laughlin and Philip José Farmer --- instead imagined how poetry and collective life might survive the sudden arrival of unfamiliar machines.

Speaker bio: Matt Tierney is Assistant Professor of English at Penn State, University Park. He holds the Ph.D. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and is the author of What Lies Between: Void Aesthetics and Postwar Post-Politics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), along with articles in the journals Cultural Critique, Camera Obscura, and Image and Narrative. He recently co-edited a special issue of the journal Postmodern Culture titled "Medium and Mediation." This presentation is an excerpt from a book in progress titled A World of

Incomparables: Interruptions of Communicative Globalism.