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The Perpetual Motion Machine - The Story of an Invention by Paul Scheerbart (Paperback, 2011)

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About this product

Product Information

In the last days of 1907, the German velist and exponent of glass architecture Paul Scheerbart embarked upon an attempt to invent a perpetual motion machine. For the next two and a half years he would document his ongoing efforts (and failures) from his laundry-room-cum-laboratory, hiring plumbers and mechanics to construct his models while spinning out a series of imagined futures that his invention-in-the-making was going to enable. The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention, originally published in German in 1910, is an indefinable blend of diary, diagrams and digression that falls somewhere between memoir and reverie: a document of what poet and translator Andrew Joron calls a two-and-a-half-year-long tantrum of the imagination. Shifting ambiguously from irony to enthusiasm and back, Scheerbart's unique amalgamation of visionary humor and optimistic failure ultimately proves to be a more literary invention than scientific: a perpetual motion of a fevered imagination that reads as if Robert Walser had tried his hand at science fiction. With toiling wheels inextricably embedded in his head, Scheerbart's visions of rising globalization, ecological devastation, militaristic weapons of mass destruction and the possible end of literature soon lead him to dread success more than failure. The Perpetual Motion Machine is an ode to the fertility of misery and a battle cry of the imagination against praxis.

Product Identifiers

Publisher
Wakefield Press
ISBN-10
0984115544
ISBN-13
9780984115549
eBay Product ID (ePID)
104136903

Product Key Features

Author
Paul Scheerbart
Format
Paperback
Language
English
Topic
Literary Criticism

Additional Product Features

Place of Publication
Cambridge
Content Note
Black & White Line Drawings, Figures
Translated by
Andrew Joron
Date of Publication
31/01/2011
Country of Publication
Australia

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