Chapter 7 - A Connecticut Yankee’s Media Wars

Summary

In Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), the encounter between a skilled Yankee mechanic and the novel’s fanciful Middle Ages becomes a confrontation not simply between America and Britain, or between progress and stasis, but between oral and literate cultures. The novel’s perspective and even its origins bear out its connections to a late-nineteenth-century American anthropology that anticipated twentieth-century theories of orality and literacy. Twain’s own aspirations and experiences as a would-be new-media magnate, especially his sponsorship of James Paige’s mechanical compositor, inform his treatment of media history as a realm of antagonism and supersession. In the novel’s chilling final scene, techno-cultural rivalries expand into warfare and mass annihilation, a vision in which electricity and the Gatling gun figure as the doubles of the era’s new media technologies.