THE BUDDHA IN THE MACHINE: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West

For Williams, the Asian technê that he traces through Sarah Wyman Whitman's book designs, Jack London's writing and photographs, Ezra Pound's machine art, Lin Yutang's typewriter, Robert Prisig's motorcycle, Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture, and Wang Zi Won's sculptures, among many other artists and authors, is itself an instrument that "reflects a general, therapeutic effort to explore alternatives to the overtechnologization . . . of Western modernity" (6). [...]by the final page Williams persuades readers that American encounters with "the East" in the long shadow of the Columbian Exposition evince, alongside Lin's typewriter, a "possibility of imagining therapeutic and alternative forms of modernity outside the Euro-American myths of progress and white, Western superiority" (148).