R. John Williams

My academic work so far has focused on international histories of technological/media innovation and the perceived difference of racial and cultural otherness.  My recently published book, The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and The Meeting of East and West (Yale University Press, 2014), examines the role of technological discourse in representations of Asian/American aesthetics in late-nineteenth and twentieth century film and literature.  The book won the 2015 Harry Levin Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association.  I also just published a new essay in Critical Inquiry titled “World Futures” (see video and other links about this article here) which forms part 1 of a manuscript I am working on titled The Oracles of World Time.

Books

–The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West  (Yale University Press, 2014).
* Winner of the Heyman Prize for Outstanding Publication (Yale University)
* Winner of the Harry Levin Prize for the Best First Book Published in the Field of Comparative Literature (American Comparative Literature Association)

Articles

–“World Futures.” Critical Inquiry (Spring 2016).

–Forthcoming: “The Ghost and the Machine: Plates and Paratext in the Book of Mormon,” Americanist Approaches to the Book of Mormon, ed. by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman (Oxford University Press, 2016).

-“Technê-Zen and the Spiritual Quality of Global Capitalism.” Critical Inquiry: 38 (Autumn 2011): 17-70. 

-“The Chinese Parrot: Technê-Pop Culture and the Oriental Detective Film.” Modernism/modernity: 18.1 (2011). 

-“The Technê-Whim: Lin Yutang and the Invention of the Chinese Typewriter.” American Literature 82.2 (2010): 389-419. *** Winner of the 2010 Norman Foerster Prize for the best essay published in American Literature; read the ALS report here, pp. 9-11.

-“Global English Ideography and the Dissolve Translation in Hollywood Film.” Cultural Critique 72 Spring (2009): 89-136.  

-“Modernist Scandals: Ezra Pound’s Translations of ‘The’ Chinese Poem.” Orient and Orientalisms in American Poetry and Poetics. Ed. by Sabine Sielke and Christian Kloeckner. Frankfurt: Lang, 2009: 145-165.

-“‘I Like Machines’: Boris Artzybasheff’s Machine Aesthetic and the Ends of Cyborg Culture.” Technoculture: Special Issue of Interdisciplinary Humanities 23.1 (2007): 120-142.

-“Decolonizing Cathay: Teaching the Scandals of Translation through Angel Island Poetry.” Transformations: Special Issue on Teaching in Translation 17.2 (2007): 15-30.

-“‘Doing History’: Nuruddin Farah, Subaltern Studies, and the Postcolonial Trajectory of Silence.” Research in African Literatures 37.4 (2006): 161-176.

-“Naked Creatures: Robinson Crusoe, The Beast, and The Sovereign.” Comparative Critical Studies 2.3 (2005): 337-348. (If you can read French, you might be interested to see Jacques Derrida’s responses to this essay when it was still just a seminar paper, here).

-“A Marvelous Work and a Possession: Book of Mormon Historicity in an Era of Postcolónialism.” Dialogue 38.4 (2005): 37-55.