| With the advent of the Machine Age, the increased presence of machinery changed the way artists conceptualized the capabilities of their media. Finding new avenues of expression in the gears and girders of the machine, modernists began to cultivate aesthetics meant to mimic the mechanical functions of industrial, automotive, aeronautic, and media technologies. For all its promises of a glittering future, however, the Machine Age carried with it the potential for (and in some cases the inevitability of) malfunction. Modernists consequently experimented not only with forms that mimic not only the mechanical functions of a machine, but also its glitch, those moments in which a mechanical error threatens to undermine the machine's efficiency. This dissertation explains how artists across media---specifically novels, film and video games---explore the aesthetic capabilities of the mechanical glitch, positing that modernists harnessed or unleashed the creative energies of mechanical malfunction to trouble the established strictures and trends of their respective media. This study expands from the twilight of the nineteenth century to today and argues that glitch aesthetics in contemporary me are indeed further permutations of the modernist project, searching for new ways to unlock the expressive capabilities of breaking the mechanics of the text.;The dissertation begins with the work of H.G. Wells. The first chapter examines how Wells incorporates his love of science and his value of efficiency into his writing, arguing that, instead of novels, he wrote machines designed to deliver information as clearly and directly as possible. The second chapter turns to James Joyce's Ulysses to show how his intimate relationship with the machinery and systems of production prompted him to use an aesthetic of typographical error to glitch the novel into a new form. Chapter three considers the comedy of the silent movie era, specifically the work of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. It argues that both Keaton and Chaplin toy with mechanisms of the camera and unpredictable body movement respectively to turn what appears to be an error of the cinema into a new form of comedy. Chapter four considers contemporary video games as texts that aestheticize computer glitch for particularly modernist ends. Looking at two games, Braid and Fallout 3, this chapter explains that each game uses glitch to expose the game's hidden architecture, inviting modes of digital interaction beyond the surface of the text. Finally, the dissertation ends with a brief coda, summarizing the significance of the previous chapters and looking at current trends of glitch criticism as incarnations of a modernist project that began in the Machine Age. |
