“Richly engaging. . . . Apart from its distinct contribution to the transnational turn in American studies, The Buddha in the Machine introduces a sophisticated framework for analyzing ethnicity and technology.”—Rachel McBride Lindsey, American Studies
Winner of the 2012 Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication.
Winner of the 2015 American Comparative Literature Association's Harry Levin Prize.
“With a rare combination of scholarly patience and writerly panache, Williams has provided a new and indispensable account of the Western fascination with the Far East. More precisely, he demonstrates how utterly constitutive Asia-as-technê has been to the promotion of our contemporary technological cultures. Eye-opening, first page to last.”—Bill Brown, University of Chicago
“Williams’s genre-hopping archaeology of Asia-as-technê not only brings a crucial component of our ongoing technological imaginary to light, but presents a thoroughly satisfying—dare I say it?—‘East/West’ balance of piercing analysis and resonating pattern recognition.”—Erik Davis, author of TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information
“In this far-reaching yet highly readable book, R. John Williams resets the conversation on what is American Orientalism, brilliantly showing how our longstanding anxieties about the machine-in-the-garden have been answered by utopian fantasies of the buddha-in-the-machine.”—Colleen Lye, author of America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945
“Buddha in the Machine is nothing short of a reimagining of a field. A radical reorientation of literary and cultural studies, Williams’s work reveals why Buddhism (from modernist poetics to global capitalist logic) matters for all scholars hoping to understand or respond to the ‘technical’ challenges of cultural studies in the Pacific Era.”—Jonathan Stalling, author of Poetics of Emptiness: Transformations of Asian Thought in American Poetry
“John Williams has written an extraordinary, beautiful, intelligent book, one of the best things I’ve read in years.”—Eric Hayot, author of The Hypothetical Mandarin
