Now updated with a new preface, The Railway Journey is an invaluable resource for readers interested in nineteenth-century culture and technology and the prehistory of modern media and digitalization. General and Thematic - Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Leamington Spa/Hamburg/New York: Berg publishers, 1986. Belonging to a distinguished European tradition of critical sociology best exemplified by the work of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, The Railway Journey is anchored in rich empirical data and full of striking insights about railway travel, the industrial revolution, and technological change. As a history of the surprising ways in which technology and culture interact, this book covers a wide range of topics, including the changing perception of landscapes, the death of conversation while traveling, the problematic nature of the railway compartment, the space of glass architecture, the pathology of the railway journey, industrial fatigue and the history of shock, and the railroad and the city. Railroads were demanded by elites, and hence, built by elites. Berkeley :University of California Press, 1986. The Railway Journey : the Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Berkeley :University of California Press, Chicago Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 1941. Although the means of a quick and reliable mode of transport was and is an important part of industrialization, it denaturalized and desensualized the passengers.
Man should be qualified, for it is a label that hide more than it reveals. The railway journey : the industrialization of time and space in the 19th century. The thesis for seems to be that the railroad altered the traveler’s perceptions of space, time, distance, nature and the senses. Railroads conquered perception, something far more intimate than man’s relationship to matter. In a highly original and engaging fashion, Schivelbusch discusses the ways in which our perceptions of distance, time, autonomy, speed, and risk were altered by railway travel. The nature of this shift is the thesis of this book. In The Railway Journey, Schivelbusch examines the origins of this industrialized consciousness by exploring the reaction in the nineteenth century to the first dramatic avatar of technological change, the railroad. 19.95 For all the sententious pronouncements and jubilation following the success of Apollo 1 1 in 1 969, there was a noticeable under-current of worry.
In The Railway Journey, Schivelbusch examines the origins of this industrialized consciousness by exploring the reaction in the nineteenth century to the first dramatic avatar of technological change, the railroad. The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the 19th Century, by Wolfgang Schivelbusch. But this was not always the case as Wolfgang Schivelbusch points out in this fascinating study, our adaptation to technological change-the development of our modern, industrialized consciousness-was very much a learned behavior. The impact of constant technological change upon our perception of the world is so pervasive as to have become a commonplace of modern society.