Nature's Metropolis

William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: WW Norton, 1991)

Here, Cronon looks at Chicago as both a product of and a shaper of the "first-nature" environment surrounding its metropolitan areas. This is the best possible example of how environmental history could integrate the urban and the rural and downplay the concept of "wilderness," a goal that everyone is always talking about. Cronon shows how Chicago used its position on Lake Michigan to attract railroads, which in turn attracted trade from the "great West"'s hinterlands, which in turn located Chicago as a gateway city: raw goods would enter the city and exit as value-added commodities, with Chicago performing the work of abstracting the commodity from its original context. Chicago was dependent on the strength and financial capital of New York and Philadelphia, which financed the railroads and established Chi-town as the broker of Midwestern ecological capital.

Commodities that Cronon looks at include wheat, lumber, and meat. In each case, Cronon argues, manufacturers in Chicago figured out how to use economies of scale to aggregate these goods into mass quantities and to abstract their value from their physical presence. This last happening worked especially well with wheat, which created the modern concept of the "exchange," at which people traded wheat without ever even seeing the wheat in question. (Here is where I figured out what a "futures market" is - it's more fascinating than one could ever imagine.)

Cronon writes that Chicago's effect upon the rural sites which came within its orbit was both positive for people's lives (easier selling of their goods; better access to cheaper things) and negative (they were at the mercy of distant forces for their livelihood; if they were merchants, they were undercut by cheaper Chicago prices). Cronon shows how certain small-potatoes merchants and farmers resisted the pressure of the giant Chicago firms through associations (sometimes more effective, other times less).

I've been waiting to read this one for a long time, and it was definitely un-disappointing. Cronon's ability to be both a good storyteller and a "man of infinite research" (as TR said about Henry Adams) is a thing to envy. His inclusion of financial records, technological analysis, and cultural productions (novels, esp. in the World's Fair chapter) makes this book a model of enviable American Studies practice.

Cultures of United States Imperialism

Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke UP, 1993).

This (654-page) anthology of essays aims to integrate the study of foreign relations and the study of American culture, breaking down boundaries between internal and external imperialisms and generally rejecting the idea that America is special because it hasn't had an empire (except for those little island states taken over at the end of the 19th century). Authors look at the ways in which America's project has been a fundamentally imperial one since the beginning.

Some of the noteworthy essays that I may need to refer to later:
-Donna Haraway's "Teddy Bear Patriarchy," on the fear of degeneration and white male anxiety in the founding of the AMNH (this essay originally appeared in Social Text and also appears in Primate Visions)
-Bill Brown's "Science Fiction, the World's Fair, and the Prosthetics of Empire, 1910-1915," is fantastic - analyzes the ways that scifi from this period merges man's perfect body and the extensions of his machines to imagine the technological manipulation of distant "prosthetic" places (as exemplified by the Panama Canal - which is the gap which Hercules creates in the body of the earth, in the image appearing on the cover of the book). Brown contrasts this emphasis on the perfect body with the previous century's scifi, and scifi from Europe, which sees science as a way to recuperate lost bodies or make up for deficiencies. Brown is at Chicago and co-edits Critical Inquiry - he also has written on "Thing Theory," which Janet had referred me to earlier this year and which integrates the analysis of the movements of material objects into an analysis of lit
-Vincente Rafael's "White Love: Surveillance and Nationalist Resistance in the US Colonization of the Philippines" contrasts the United States census, which was used as an "educational" tool by American colonizers intent on "lifting" certain Filipinos above others, and which fixed categories of race and gender, with Filipino street theatre which celebrated indigenous gender categories and created a Filipino identity
-Amy Kaplan's "Black and Blue on San Juan Hill" describes the controversy over TR's description of the supposed "cowardice" of the black soldiers during the Rough Riders' surge over San Juan Hill - Kaplan writes that the black community resisted this categorization, and that the way that TR focused on this cowardice, and the supposed disorganization of the Cuban resisters who assisted the United States, shows that race, and the organization of categories, was the most visible "happening" in the middle of a confusing battlefield. This episode also shows how TR lumped Cubans and American blacks together - they are seen as usable, when commanded by a white man, but not effective soldiers if working by themselves.
-In "Anti-Imperial Americanism," Walter Benn Michaels (Univ. of Illinois at Chicago, writes on race, literature and national identity) describes how pro-KKK southern writers saw themselves as "colonized" by Reconstruction.
-In "The Patriot System, or Managerial Heroism," Susan Jeffords talks about the Gulf War (which took up an inordinate amount of space in this book - see pub date, 1993) - she writes that Americans justify the war by describing themselves as the most competent of techno-managers - it's interesting to think about how different this thesis would look if applied to the current Iraq War...

Natural Visions

Finis Dunaway, Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)

Dunaway's book looks at imagery of environmentalism in the twentieth century, examining how photographers and filmmakers participated in and were funded by organizations both governmental and non-governmental whose mandate was to foster environmental awareness. Dunaway moves from looking at a Progressive-era photographer, Herbert Gleason, who created romantic-sublime imagery of the West; to the New Deal-era documentaries of Robert Flaherty, who lamented the death of the farm family, and Pare Lorentz (whose "The Plow That Broke The Plains" provides this image of a baby with the implement in question, which Dunaway argues exemplifies Lorentz' belief that the early pioneers were like prodigal children who wrecked the land without thinking); to the Sierra Club coffee-table books by the likes of Eliot Porter, which were the brainchildren of David Brower, whose vision of a nature outside of technology and humanity directly contradicted the New Deal technophilic imagination.

Throughout, Dunaway argues that environmental reformers who used art in their appeals passed over Benjamin's anxieties about the efficacy of the mechanically reproduced work of art, choosing instead to believe that their art could create a new "ecological sublime" (shades of David Nye) which would "rejoin beauty and sublimity, turn the ordinary into the astonishing, find awe in the diminutive, seek wonder in the everyday" (212).

But my question is: does it work? Do people change their minds after seeing pictures of bugs or cows? Nye's argument was that the technological sublime operates in part by bringing people together to witness something that exemplified human progress. How could the ecological sublime take advantage of this same dynamic? Nye also argues that the technological sublime always trumps the ecological sublime - at least, the "bigger" ecological sublime, of Adams' Yosemite and the like.

Dunaway is a professor of history at Trent University in Ontario. I know he has an article in the recent American Quarterly about use of imagery in seventies environmentalism.

Through Other Continents

Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)

This book is a call to think outside the limits of American literary study (and study of other literatures as well). Dimock calls for interpreting American culture as an extreme holism incorporating human experiences reaching back into "deep time" and across the globe, a paradigm she sees as best illustrated by the spread of religion and languages. (She also uses Deleuze/Guattari's rhizome idea to illustrate this.)

Articulating an understanding of humans as fundamentally connected through the experience of embodiment, she then goes on to destabilize any number of other supposed "connections" which create the categories by which we define our academic studies. "Eras," she argues, should be seen as more plastic; even death should not curtail our inclusion or exclusion of particular people in categories of inquiry (this is a post-human moment). Dimock argues that the nineteenth century, with its expanding scientific knowledge, created opportunities for some people to see themselves as part of a "species" instead of as nations.

An example of a person in the nineteenth century American scene whose thought must be seen as transcending these boundaries is Thoreau, whose interest in the Bhagavad Gita Dimock sees as a "translation" across time. (John Brown, she argues, is also translated "across death" by his actions and by Thoreau's writings.) The acts of reading, writing, and translation are all radical acts, she argues, which challenge the primacy of time and allow us to hear the dead and reaffirm connections between ourselves and those who live far from us. Ezra Pound and fascism; Henry James in Italy; Robert Lowell and Vietnam all show up in different chapters. Her final chapter, on Gary Snyder and Native American and Japanese thought about tricksters (liminal animal/human figures), animals and ecology, reaffirms her conclusion that embodiment points the way to connection and empathy.

Dimock is in the English and American Studies departments at Yale. She recently co-edited a book on transnationalism and literary studies, Shades of the Planet, with Lawrence Buell; has written a book on Melville and individualism; and co-edited, with Priscilla Wald, a special issue of American Literature which I should read: Literature and Science: Cultural Forms, Conceptual Exchanges (Duke UP, 2002).

American Technological Sublime

David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994)

Nye teaches at the University of Southern Denmark, and has written several other books on technology and modernity in the US, including Electrifying America (on my list) and Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies. I'm not sure if he was trained in American Studies, but he apparently got his degree from Minnesota, so it seems likely. Regardless, this book could easily be used to answer the question "What does an ideal American Studies book look like?"

This book approaches its subject not through some artificially delineated rubric defined by race, age, gender, or time ("Italian immigrants in the cities, 1881-1911"). Nye picks an idea - that there is a particularly American form of expression/social interaction, called the "technological sublime" - and then picks a bunch of examples throughout American history in order to develop this idea. He effectively, then, creates a new rubric or a new category. And he uses the breadth of methodological sources that I would want from an American Studies book - responses from observers both "high" and "low"; examples from public entertainment settings (such as from expositions) and from cityscapes and defense departments (this shows how "technological sublime" is produced and managed by various agencies, with a larger or smaller degree of intent); the inclusion of fiction. I do think he could have had more in here about film, though.

Nye traces how the sublime, originally a concept articulated by Burke and Kant in order to describe a response to a natural object of great magnitude or impressiveness, shifted its boundaries in America to encompass the technological. On the way, Nye argues, the experience of facing the sublime shifted from an individual to a crowd context; from being provoked by nature to being provoked by machinery; and from an experience of "substance" into an electric image (277). His examples of various varieties of "technological sublime" include the electric sublime (see: lighting displays at World's Fairs); the industrial sublime (the curving, uniform lines of the factory walls at Manchester, NH's Amoskeag Mills - "complexity and order on a massive scale" [113]); the geometric sublime (skyscrapers and dams) and the dynamic sublime (the railroads).

His penultimate chapter, which describes the rededication of the Statue of Liberty in 1986, shows how the technological sublime as practiced in these public contexts participates in a utopianism that promises not a difference in social interactions but a difference in the kind of "stuff" that we own. These sort of un-radical (or even repressive) historical precedents for the technological sublime of television can be found way earlier, however, in the "industrial sublime," which subsumed images of workers below images of machinery, beginning in the late nineteenth century, and in the "geometric sublime," embodied by skyscrapers that shut out and alienated the street-level public while impressing a generalized "public" with their mass.

There is interesting thought in here too about the interplay between nature and technology - Nye claims that if a naturally sublime site faces down a technologically sublime possibility, as in the case of dam construction, the naturally sublime will always lose to the potential of construction, because while the natural sublime speaks of limits, the technological sublime speaks of "the idea of reason in constant evolution" (60).

Technological Utopianism in American Culture

Howard Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985)

This book promised to tell me about twenty-five different utopian thinkers in the years 1880-1940ish, all of whom counted on technology to carry out many of their utopian objectives. However, frustratingly, there was only one chapter on the actual plots of the utopias themselves. Segal seemed to dismiss his own sources, calling them stilted and sometimes formulaic, and chose to concentrate instead on the social circumstances surrounding the writing of these utopic texts. That was a bit annoying, considering that there were some really awesome-looking images in that chapter, particularly of the plans for King Camp Gillette's city in The Human Drift (1894) - a book which I think I should check out.

Segal argues that these twenty-five authors turned to writing about technological utopia, rather than creating actual utopian communities (like the Brook Farms and Fourierian phalansteries of the earlier part of the century) because society had grown to be more complex and bureaucratic, and it was harder and harder to imagine change on a community level. In the absence of this, these writers turned to technology on two counts: the technology of writing/imagination; and the technology of social control. Like the efficiency experts I covered in my review essay about Haber, Jordan, et. al, these writers saw administration as the saving technology which would eliminate emotions from politics and leave society running rationally.

These writers favored "megalopoli", as opposed to small towns, as ideal imagined communities. (See picture of Gillette's planned apartment building in his city, "Megalopolis," described in The Human Drift.)

Elements of the technological utopia which Segal argues have actually come to pass include the interpenetration of work and leisure; the elimination of popular political thought (partially as the result of the former); the death of play; the bureaucratization of art; and conformism in personality.

On page 95, Segal criticizes Leo Marx for saying that Americans stopped searching for the middle landscape after the Civil War - says instead that urban, suburban, and regional "middle landscapes" continued to be seen as ideal - ex. Frederick Law Olmsted's parks.

Segal teaches at the University of Maine, and has written on Henry Ford's village industries and a book called Future Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of Technology in America.

Disciplines of Virtue

Title: Disciplines of Virtue: Girls' Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)

Author: Lynn Vallone, professor of English at Texas A&M. Her most recent book is Becoming Victoria (2001), about Queen Victoria's childhood in cultural context. Vallone was also an editor for the Norton Anthology of Children's Literature (2005).

My review: This collection of previously published essays moves from England to America and roughly chronologically, delineating how books, both novels and "conduct books," instructed female children in the arts of self-discipline and virtue. Vallone visits discourses around reclaimed prostitutes, Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), dowries, humor, and dirt. Her ultimate idea: the concept of "virtue" is used to signal to girls and young women that they can add value to themselves through their efforts to be good. If they self-negate enough, eventually they might be seen as virtuous enough that they could marry "up" in class, as Pamela does. Side casualties of this ideology are tomboys (liminal figures) and humor: "the ultimate lesson is that girlhood is not funny" (132).

(Ironically, Vallone writes, one of the ways of self-negating or being "good" in eighteenth-century England is by helping reform penitent prostitutes. Thus, through the act of helping, the "good" female accrues sexual value, while the prostitute is scrubbed of her one-time value and left in position of being suitable only for domestic service.)

Finally, Vallone points out, usefully, that in girls' fiction, as opposed to boys', the danger comes from within, not from the world.

The reviews of others: In American Literature, Barbara Ryan wrote that the choice of texts reads oddly to Americanists (yes) and wishes that Vallone had juxtaposed her textual readings with understandings of how girls read the books (as opposed to aligning them with general cultural practices). In the American Historical Review, Lori D. Ginzburg agreed that Vallone's work would have done well to pay better attention to the books' audiences, and added that she wished Vallone had paid more attention to the lives of the women, not dealt with in the book, who remain tomboys or never marry (and some of whom become authors of children's books).

Words: "abecedarian" ("a person who is learning the words of the alphabet, or a beginning learner of any kind"); "eudemonism" ("the doctrine that the basis of moral obligations is to be found in the tendency of right actions to produce happiness"); "soteriological" ("the theological doctrine of salvation as effected by Jesus").

Leads: Secondary: Anne Scott MacLeod, A Moral Tale: Children's Fiction and American Culture (1975); Elliot West and Paula Petrik, Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850-1950 (1992)

The Word in Black and White

Title: The Word in Black and White: Reading "Race" in American Literature 1638-1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)

Author: Dana D. Nelson, professor of English at Vanderbilt. Her other book is National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Duke University Press, 1998). Looks like she's working on a project about the history of alternative ideas of democracy.

My review: I'm going to have to get over my distaste for the use of quotation marks around words like "race" or "black" or "white", and the capitalization of the word "Other", and a host of other early-90s-race-lit-crit things which just distract and annoy me. This book is about the "ingraining" of categories of race through literature, in the pre-Civil War US. Basic philosophy: "to write is to know is to dominate" (see Lepore). The authors discussed include Edgar Allen Poe (for the awesome Arthur Gordon Pym book), Cotton Mather, Fenimore Cooper, Sedgwick, and Lydia Maria Child, the last being the only author Nelson describes as fulfilling the ultimate liberal white authorial mission of both disdaining racism and proposing alternative modes of racial interaction. Other authors, including Melville, whose "Benito Cereno" comes under Nelson's scrutiny, manage to criticize white slave-owning but don't move beyond into prescriptiveness.

Nelson borrows ideas from Richard Slotkin, Annette Kolodny, Richard Drinnon, Mary Louise Pratt, Karen Halttunen, and Abdul JanMohammed.

Books: Secondary: Nancy Stepan, Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960 (1982)

American Civilization

Title: American Civilization (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993; but written in 1950)

Author: Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901-1989), Marxist scholar from Trinidad. Through his life, which was lived in T&T, London, and America, CLR James engaged with various strands of Marxism (while he repudiated Stalinism). He was integral to the anti-colonial movement, and wrote on such subjects as A History of Negro Revolt (1938) and The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Rebellion (1938). He also wrote on dialectics, Melville, and cricket. Throughout his writing, he engaged with the theme that constitutes most of American Civilization's concerns: how should the individual human live within a system that continually seeks to dehumanize?

My review: Throughout this book, James sets up a series of dichotomies between civilization and barbarism (which he sees as regimes which, like Stalinism, decline to develop the potential of individuals); people and monopolies; freedom and slavery; and democracy and oligarchy. He never uses the word "Marxism," perhaps partially because he's trying to write this book to convince authorities to let him stay in the US even though his visa has expired, but partially perhaps because he's invested in the idea of finding a way forward that's not constrained by a particular ideology?

The history of America, he says, is the history of individualism: first, from 1776 through the middle of the nineteenth c, an individualism that finds expression; then, from the middle of the nineteenth c onward, an individualism that either gets perverted into monomania (as in Melville's Ahab, a character James sees as prescient) or gets subverted by the capitalist system. People in America, James thinks, are unhappy, and have been unhappy ever since the mid-nineteenth c, because secretly deep-down they recognize that the ideals of individualism and happiness have been hopelessly submerged by the realities of capitalism.

James says that America's lack of truly significant cultural production is due to these conditions. The writers of the American Renaissance mostly failed at expressing this thought, because they were the first to try to express the question of the relationship of the totally free individual to his/her society. This left them with exhilarating possibilities but a sense of formlessness (see Whitman). The mass culture of the forties and fifties is an example, for James, of the degree to which the mind of the masses has become sad and upset at the state of things - if the mass culture is an expression of the mind of the people, as James says it is, then the movies of the forties and fifties betray a deep fear at the state of society.

The connection between this mass culture and the state of mind of the American "negro" (as he says) is that the realization that society is not what it says that it is is a quintessentially American one - the frustration of the black American at the continual failure of white America to live up to its rhetoric. Similarly, American women are in despair because they are now responsible for creating, out of the home, the one site where society lives up to its promise.

James calls for the abolition of what he sees as the bankrupt intelligentsia, the training of workers in both technical and intellectual realms, and factory ownership by workers. Only by advancing this collective well-being, he argues, can the individual be truly well.

(A quote from James on the status of the intelligentsia, as epitomized by the scientist: "The most miserable of all are the scientists. They are slaves if ever there were any, mutinous and rebellious sometimes in words, but slaves. They make atomic discoveries and bombs and then go home and cry. When Germany was defeated, the contending powers each captured where he could, some of the most highly developed and trained scientists, the most highly developed and trained minds the world has ever known, and put them to work in Moscow or Washington. They work, do as they are told, find what they are told to find, like any laborer at a dollar an hour. And in free America, if any one of them dared to defy the authorities and declare he would have nothing to do with a bomb which would kill a quarter of a million people, the whole machinery of politics and propaganda would set to roll and leave him utterly crushed. He would probably find it impossible to continue scientific work at all. And yet, the real dilemma is in his own mind, he does not know whether he ought to or not. The Journal of the Atomic Scientists is one of the most pathetic publications in the world." [262])

The Rites of Assent

Title: The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993)

Author: Sacvan Bercovitch, who admits in the preface that he was actually named after Sacco and Vanzetti! So awesome! Although the executed anarchists get no further mention in the book, the theme of dissent, coupled with the general awesomeness of the name, mean that they get pride of place in this entry. Bercovitch retired from teaching at Harvard U. in 2001, after a career including stints at Brandeis, UCSD, Princeton, and Columbia. Before and after retiring, he's won any number of Lifetime Achievement Awards, including the Bode-Pearson Prize for Lifetime Achievement in American Studies. Books mostly revolve around Puritanism and its place in the cultural imaginary: The Puritan Origins of the American Self, 1975; The American Jeremiad, 1978; The Office of The Scarlet Letter, 1991.

My review: This book is actually a collection of essays, published 1972-1991. The overarching story here is the way in which American official ideology establishes consensus, and has done so ever since the days of the Puritans.

The series of essays moves in chronological order. Bercovitch believes that after the Puritans, any belief in America also had to incorporate a belief in expansion and mission. The major contributions of the Puritans to the official American mindset, he writes, are "the preposition 'into'" (aka, the idea of progress), conceptual vagueness as to the nature of the community covenant, and the justification of imperialism on the continent (related to the first). Jonathan Edwards took the concepts of the Puritans and expanded them to a broader audience, modernizing and commercializing the message.

Meanwhile, after the Revolution, any concept of "dissent" or "rebellion" from this official ideology was also official-ized, meaning that revolution was state policy. Therefore, any threat of more "deep" or threatening revolutions, such as those perpetrated in France, could be submerged in the official fiction of omnipresent "American revolution." Thus, the individual and the nation emerge aligned.

Bercovitch sees this absorption of dissent as an immensely effective alternative for nation-building. He uses Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) as an example of how this plays out, literarily speaking: Hester eventually capitulates to the voice of the community and replaces her letter after casting it away. She's unable to find happiness outside the community, even if that would have meant freedom, and eventually returns. Bercovitch finds the ambiguity of Letter to be, in and of itself, somewhat smothering - if you can choose any meaning you want from the book, "its ambiguity is a function of prescriptiveness" (211) - the reader never ends up choosing, and therefore never ends up rebelling. Thus, American freedom of choice smothers all who would oppose. (Reminds me a bit of the Thomas Frank, Conquest of Cool, thesis - or perhaps it's vice versa.)

Reviews of others: In American Literature, Kenneth Price wished that Bercovitch had engaged with his critics while putting together this book, and pointed out that Bercovitch's idea of American ideological hegemony aligns itself too much with concepts of American exceptionalism. Price also writes that perhaps Bercovitch doesn't find an oppositional tradition within American thought because he's only looking at New Englanders - what about Rudolfo Anaya, or Harriet Jacobs, even Edith Wharton? Interesting. In the Journal of American History, James Hoopes wrote that Bercovitch's argument is a "greased pig" - if there's no such thing as radical dissent or even analysis that can step outside of the American tradition, then how could Bercovitch himself be analyzing? Hoopes doesn't buy the argument that SB's Canadian, Jewish, radical roots could give him enough of an oppositional positionality to make the switch happen.

Words: "chiliastic" ("of, pertaining to, or holding the doctrine of the millennium"); "apodictic" ("of clear demonstration; established on incontrovertible evidence").

Books to follow up on: Primary: Mary Shelley, The Last Man (1826); J. Fenimore Cooper, The Crater; Or, Vulcan's Peak (A Tale of the Pacific) (1847).

Moby-Dick

Images from leftist artist Rockwell Kent's 1930 illustrated version of Moby-Dick, which was sold through the Book-of-the-Month Club and revived the book's popularity. Kent was asked to do a version of Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, but proposed the Melville classic instead. Weirdly enough, the cover of this version did not credit Melville (is Moby-Dick himself the author? V. fitting).

Title: Moby-Dick, or, The Whale (1851). I read the Penguin Classics edition, introduced by Andrew Delbanco.

Author: Herman Melville, 1819-1891. It's sad to think how early in his life he wrote this amazing book, and how anti-climatically it was received. Melville's first couple of books, which were more conventional adventure stories, got a degree of popular acclaim, but Moby-Dick didn't sit so well with the type of readers who had gone for his more salty (sorry) stuff. Melville saw a revival in the 1920s, spearheaded by the writing of several biographies (Lewis Mumford wrote one in 1929! was there anything the Mum couldn't do?), as well as the belated publication of Billy Budd, Sailor in 1924. See above caption for info about the popular revival of Moby-Dick. There have also been a couple of film version of this book, including one made in 1930 and one in 1956, directed by John Huston and script-written by Ray Bradbury, which I would really like to see.

Some words: This book was totally wasted on seventeen-year-old me the first time I read it. It's a fever dream, it's obsessive, it's beautiful, it's funny and very sad.

I appreciated Andrew Delbanco's introduction for a number of reasons, but I most profited by keeping in mind his comment about the looseness of the narrative form. He writes that there are times in the novel when there's no way that Ishmael can still be the narrator, in the traditional first-person sense, and the reader must give up on wondering "How could Ishmael know what Ahab said to himself in the belowdecks...or what Starbuck said to Ahab in private conversations..." etc.

Forewarned, I pictured the narrative more as Ishmael's scrapbook on the fall of the Pequod, a series of texts, accounts of things he witnessed, reports of his studies, but also things he might have imagined or foreseen or projected. (I suppose you could also look at the book as alternating between first and third person narrators, but I think my way is more fun.)

I kept a list of the different narrative forms that these small texts/chapters took, and I came up with: Dramatic script or soliloquy; affadavit; natural history (these were the chapters on the whale's anatomy, which I thought were hundreds of pages long when I was in high school reading this, but were actually much shorter); adventure story; yarn-within-a-story, a la Heart of Darkness (the chapter on the Town-Ho!); Emersonian essay (the amazing "Whiteness of the Whale"); object study resulting in multiplicity of character perspectives (the chapter in which each character reacts to the doubloon pounded into the mast); and horror story (the appearance of the dead Parsee, lashed to Moby-Dick's back and staring at Ahab, was an indelible image worthy of Poe). This is a very postmodern book, perhaps. I'm sure somebody has written on that.

I am going to forebear to comment too much on the questions of what Moby-Dick means for America or American literature, since I'm pretty sure a couple of the authors I have yet to read will do that, but I am interested to know if anyone has written an ecocritical or animal-studies analysis of the book. The chapter on the possible future extinction of the whale (in which Ishmael points to the buffalo, who, he argues in 1851, are commonly slaughtered without going extinct, as evidence of the whale's similar ability to withstand constant culling - heh) is one candidate for an analysis, but I also kept fixating on how Ishmael constantly points out how ironic it is that the whale lights the scene of his own slaughter. There's something here about the way that the body of the animal is made to betray itself, and how the nineteenth-century character sees this as somehow grotesque yet inevitable.


Also, the entire project of Moby-Dick could be seen as a forced re-marriage of production and consumption; during a time in which whale oil is used to light the ceremonies and celebrations of humanity, Ishmael writes, fewer and fewer humans seem to understand the risks and death involved in the killing of whales (risks and death both for the whales and the humans). The chapters on the floating factory that is the Pequod after a kill point toward a sort of a Jungle for the whaling industry, but with a less activist slant - it seems as though Ishmael simply wants the landlubber to realize the ultimate madness of technological achievement that their desires can stimulate.

In a way, the madness of Ahab is the ultimate extension of an endeavor (whale-hunting) which comes about because of the mad strivings of humanity. Even Starbuck (aka reasonableness/rationality) is unable to stop it. The human bond, as between Ahab and Starbuck, is finally unable to slow down Ahab's mad desires - after Ahab bids Starbuck to come close and "let [him] look into a human eye", which gaze is "better than to gaze upon God" (591), the bond that's created doesn't stop Ahab from continuing, but seems rather to seal Starbuck's fate. The first mate is unable to make a moral stand against Ahab's madness, because he sees Ahab's humanity. So, Melville says, we are all complicit in allowing each other to run amuck with doing and fixing and pushing and achieving.


Other books I've read which analyze this one: In Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current, he points to both Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1938) and the writings of J.N. Reynolds (most prominently the story "Mocha-Dick" [1839]) which he describes as antecedents to Moby-Dick. Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden juxtaposes the chapter in which Ishmael sits on the masthead and meditates on the meaning of life and the dirty, dark production chapters, in order to show the conflict in American life between lofty transcendentalism and the underpinnings of capitalism and material progress.

Vocab words: "puissant" ("possessed of or wielding power"); "poniard" ("a small, slim dagger"); "tierce" ("a third part").

The Sexual Politics of Meat

I'm pretty sure this book did not mention the 1972 movie "Prime Cut", in which Lee Marvin finds Sissy Spacek naked, in a pen full of hay, in a barn, about to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. But it sure should have.

Title: The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1990)

Author: Carol J. Adams, who has a masters in divinity and an extensive career as an activist outside of her academic writings. She's not affiliated with an academic institution, so far as I can see, but guest-lectures at many, and seems to travel extensively, giving a slide show based on this book. Other books she's written include Help! My Child Stopped Eating Meat (2004); The Pornography of Meat (2004); and Living Among Meat Eaters (2003). Adams lives in Dallas, which is brave on many levels, considering her political commitments.

My review: Adams hopes to make the point that the act of eating meat has been persistently gendered male, and that the inherent assumptions of meat-eating are similiar to the assumptions of woman-oppressing. What are these assumptions? Adams argues that the "sexual politics of meat" include "the idea[s] that the end justifies the means...the objectification of other beings is a natural part of life...and that violence can and should be masked" (24). Adams uses the concept of the "absent referent" to anchor the various implications of these assumptions or ideas. For her, the act of eating meat obscures the life of the actual animal, just as the acts of objectification or violence or misogyny obscure the life of the actual female. Both the woman and the animal are unimportant in the greater system of meaning constructed by the patriarchy. (For this reason, Adams advocates inserting a "[sic]" after any sentence in which an animal is called "it", just as we would after a sentence in which "he" is used as a universal pronoun.) (See chapter "The Rape of Animals, the Butchering of Women", p 50.)

Adams wants to restore what she sees as a lost history of associations between feminism and vegetarianism, arguing that first-wave feminist activists in the nineteenth and early twentieth century recognized the connections between their own struggles for political recognition and the choice to be vegetarian. She also uses a wide array of literary sources, including utopic novels such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915; see Bryson entry); Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906); and children's lit such as Charlotte's Web (1952). She recounts anecdotes from her experience as a domestic violence counselor. She also uses images collected from advertisements and (very interestingly) from publications internal to the meat industry.

"Truck Accident" (2004), by artist Sue Coe, whose Dead Meat is a book of paintings and writings about slaughterhouses.

This book can be difficult for one who lies on the other side of the divide between meat-chewing and meat-eschewing. To her credit, Adams seems to know that the conversion to her "side" can be one that is so absolute as to be almost mystical. But there are moments in this book that feel disingenous, as when she cites a description of a snuff film but neglects to write that the film in question was not actually a snuff film at all (see Snopes.com's debunking of the matter - thanks to Nick for telling me that this was an urban legend and rescuing me from many nightmares); or when she suggests that the school shooters of the 1990s may have shot kids because they were hunters so they were "used to it". Not only that, but the book, I think, assumes too much when it comes to correlation vs. causation. Just because, historically, men have been given more meat to eat even when women require the protein for breast-feeding, does that mean that meat is inherently patriarchal? Did English laborers of the nineteenth century really participate in patriarchy by giving the male members of the family more meat to eat? Should they have tried to find a nice mix of quinoa and kale to serve up instead? Is my skepticism or pickiness about this book derived from some deep guilt about or ambivalence about my meat-eating, which will some day be unearthed in a flood of veganism? Only time will tell.

Reviews of others: In Environmental Ethics, Deborah Slicer wrote that the book should have been written in clearer, easier-to-follow language (it didn't seem too bad to me!) and that Adams' analyses of race and class issues were unnecessarily truncated. (This is true - there was an interesting bit on Western imposition of meat diets on colonized cultures, but it was brief and undeveloped. There's plenty of room for further investigation in this area - and of the questions of diet imposition in general. The Inuit, for example, eat plenty of meat, but American and English explorers still found their diet disgusting.)

Apparently, in a later book Adams addresses the abhorrent PETA ad phenomenon.

Books to follow up on: Primary: Henry Salt, ed., Killing for Sport: Essays by Various Writers (1914); the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children.

Secondary: Linda Birke, Feminism, Animals and Science: The Naming of the Shrew (1994); Gena Corea, The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs (1985); Mary Douglas, "Deciphering a Meal", in Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (1975); Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England (1985); Carolyn Steedman, "Landscape for a Good Woman", in Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing Up in the Fifties (1985).

Additionally, the book's bibliography is helpfully separated into subject areas, including "Vegetarian Writings", "Animal Concerns and Animal Defense", "Feminist Writings", "Sexual and Domestic Violence", "Literary Criticism", "History, Autobiography, Biography", "Fiction, Poetry, Drama", "Medical and Nutritional Writings", and "Other".

Shifting Gears

Charles Sheeler, "Ford Plant, River Rouge, Criss-Crossed Conveyors", 1927

Title: Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill: the UNC Press, 1987)

Author: Cecelia Tichi, of the English department at Vanderbilt. Her other books are numerous and have a broad range of subject matter: Exposes and Excess: Muckraking in America, 1900/2000 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Embodiment of a Nation: Human Form in American Spaces (Harvard UP, 2001); Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Konky-Tonk Bars (Duke University Press, 1998) (did she mean "honky-tonk bars"? I bet so); High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music (University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Electronic Hearth: Creating an American Television Culture (Oxford University Press, 1991); and New World: New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans through Whitman (Yale UP, 1979). Apparently she's also written three novels! Cool.

Stuart Davis, Percolator, 1927

My review: Tichi writes that although some writers, artists, and poets took an antimodern stance regarding the technological advances of the 1880-1930 period (there's gotta be a better name for that fifty years!), others of their contemporaries embraced not only the subject matter of the machine age, but also its methods of composition, adopting what Tichi calls a "gear and girder" approach to art-making.

On the ground, this engineering-style approach reflected itself in more pared-down prose (Hemingway, who cited his apprenticeship with a newspaper, during which he had to telegraph stories to his editor, as a motivator for his simple sentence construction); a materialist approach to poetry (William Carlos Williams - glad to see you again!); and a heightened sense of the motion and physicality of the "real world", taken from Taylorization's attention to detail (John Dos Passos).

Tichi's approach is at its most effective when she goes into deep textual analysis, but when she situates these writers in their cultural milieu, things feel more scattershot. The images chosen to illustrate this book exemplify the problems with this approach - many of them are postcards of major engineering projects, or advertisements mentioning "efficiency", "waste", or other Taylorizing keywords in a commercial context. But often the images are not analyzed in depth or situated within a larger analysis, serving mostly as window dressing for her larger points.

By far the most useful chapter for my purposes is the one on the "cult of the engineer" in American culture (p 97). Here, Tichi describes how the engineer became a heroic figure in children's lit, movies, advertisements, and fiction, taking the place of the cowboy in stories of Western settlement and becoming an aspirational figure. Tichi writes of his appeal: "He signified stability in a changing world...he was technology's human face, providing reassurance that the world of gears and girders combined rationality with humanity" (99). Here she cites Henry Adams, Rex Beach, and Herbert Hoover, among others.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Fallingwater, 1935

Reviews of others: Howard Segal wrote in the Journal of American History that the book was dispassionate and smart and steered clear of either hostility or worshipfulness, which were dangerous tendencies of other books about technology (this did come out in 1987, which was early in the "social-construction" game, I guess). He wished the book could have been more international. In American Literature, Christopher Nelson wrote that Tichi's method of analysis sometimes had trouble with matters of emphasis: why foreground one "cultural tendency" and background another as "latent"? This overstatement, Nelson wrote, led to occasional oversimplification, as when Tichi hit multiple times upon the "analogy of literary economy and engineering values". Nelson also wished that Tichi had included more material on the social realities of technology and its power relationships, such as the implications for labor or the structure of the working class.

Rube Goldberg device for cleaning shop windows; date of drawing unidentified on Rube Goldberg site. Goldberg's machines were parodies of labor-saving methods, exemplifying, like Chaplin's "Modern Times", the comic side of these obsessions with efficiency.

Books to follow up on: Primary: the Erector set for kids (1910s); The Book of Wonders (1916 kids' text); St. Nicholas magazine; journal: School and Society; Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888); William Book, The Intelligence of High School Seniors (1922); John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (1925); Frank Norris, The Octopus (1901); John H Randall, Our Changing Civilization: How Science and the Machine are Reconstructing Modern Life (1931); Civilization in the United States (anthology of intellectual thought in early 1920s); childrens' lit about engineering listed on page 100.

Secondary: Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (1979).

Vicious

Howard Pyle, The Salem Wolf, 1909 (painting used on the cover of Coleman's book)

Title: Vicious: Wolves and Men in America (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004)

Author: Jon T. Coleman, now of the department of history at Notre Dame, got his PhD from Yale (I think in history, not AMS). This book was his dissertation. There's not information on this site about his possible new project, but I heard from somebody at some point that he's writing about bears now (scuttlebutt, possibly). He writes often and entertainingly for the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

Argument: Telling the story of wolves in America, Coleman argues, entails creating an "interdisciplinary mutant" of methods from biology, folklore, and history in order to answer his operative questions: Why did European settlers in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, bent on colonizing the "new" world, kill wolves in such a "vicious" manner? And when and how did the balance of opinion shift such that wolves are now conserved instead of slaughtered? Coleman argues that "livestock, folklore, and sex underpinned the longevity of wolf hatred" - the first two being categories of property and cultural heritage that humans "designed to endure"; the third, biological reproduction, creating fodder for the cultural reproduction of the importance of these categories (11).

Chapter-by-chapter:
Part One: Southern New England
1. Howls, Snarls, and Musket Shots: Saying "This is Mine" in Colonial New England: I love the way this chapter opens with the way that the *sound* of wolf howls severely disconcerted and upset English settlers upon their arrival in New England. Coleman sets the tone for the book's focus on animal communication and animal-human misunderstanding. Communication is allied with concepts of territory - Coleman points out that Indians, settlers, and wolves were the top three groups of predators in the region, and each had different ideas of territoriality. When combined with miscommunication and mistrust, these overlapping territories led to strife and hate (see Lepore, as well as Virginia deJohn Anderson's Creatures of Empire). Wolves, who killed livestock, were seen as dire threats to European survival in the region: "The English colonists' concept of territory - the idea that land, animals, and even people were property - ambushed wolves" (36). Here there are also stories of the European use of mastiffs as instruments of control (33).

2. Beasts of Lore: How Stories Turned Fearsome Monsters into Skulking Criminals: This is the Folklore Chapter, which fills out the picture of what ideas the Europeans had brought to the New World about wolves. Here, Coleman addresses interpretive questions: why do certain stories survive, while others are lost? Why are some seen as more important than others? Important sources of English wolf lore included the Bible, in which wolves were seen as threats to the pastoral ideal. Coleman also tries to suss out some ideas of what Native Americans thought about the wolf. These come to us via English sources, so are necessarily somewhat commercial: their hides were ceremonial gifts or currency. Englishmen didn't probe far enough to figure out the Indian's cultural interest in the wolf, if any, though one of them recorded that the Indians thought wolves who allowed themselves to be killed did so because they were atoning for past misdeeds (another interesting tidbit about Indian hunting practices and their possible ecological or non-ecological effects; see Krech).

3. Wolf Bullets with Adders' Tongues: How to Kill a Wolf in Colonial New England: Here we get to the nitty-gritty of how Englishmen carried out their campaigns of extermination. Coleman writes that, although Englishmen tried a variety of individual and social measures to extirpate wolves from their territory and keep them from threatening livestock ("dug traps, offered bounties, erected fences..." [52]), "humans and wolves coexisted belligerently for more than a hundred years in a patchwork landscape of agricultural strongholds and feral woods" (53). It's the record of this coexistence that Coleman examines. Interesting Indian-English relationships ensued: although many Indians killed wolves, they found it unproductive to try to collect bounties, as they were seen as deviant and false and needed white proof of their kill in order to cash in (61). In the end, Coleman writes, white colonists eliminated both wolves and Native Americans, sometimes by "offering rewards to one rival to hunt the other" (65).

Part Two: The Northeastern Woodlands
4. Predator to Prey: Wolves' Journey Through the Northeastern Woodlands: This chapter takes a broader chronological view of human cruelty to wolves, making the point that although wolves were mostly extirpated from the northeast by the eighteenth century, Americans have continued to kill them viciously through the 1950s (and even now). Coleman describes some myths about how wolves kill their prey (they suck blood! they hamstring!) These myths have allowed the animals to be categorized as "savage" and thus worthy of wrath. Coleman then describes how scientists such as Adolph Murie and L David Mech studied wolves in the 1940s and 1950s, using airplanes and radio collars, and finally put many (though not all) of the myths to rest. Returning to the eighteenth century, Coleman tells the stories of big-time wolf bounty hunters in the Northeast - their social standing tended to be high - and establishes the strong agricultural context of these killings.

I really like this portrait of L. David Mech, pioneer of radio telemetry, by photographer Layne Kennedy.

5. Surrounded: Fear and Retribution in the Northeastern Forests: Here are stories about northern settlers and wolves, with Coleman's attempt to place them in a fuller social context, despite the sometimes overwhelming lack of available clues about where the stories came from and what they meant to those who created and heard them. In these stories, Coleman says, Europeans, the "top predators" of the ecological niche, "an aggressive group of animals intent upon expanding their territory, transplanting their culture, and growing their wealth expressed their frustration and protested their vulnerability" (106). Through communal wolf hunts, colonists restored their primacy while "reordering the biotic community" (114) and regenerating themselves through violence (see Slotkin).

6. Metaphors of Slaughter: Two Wolf Hunts: Two stories of hunts seek to answer the question of why Euro-American colonists "felt so vulnerable" (122) in the face of wolves. One hunt took place in northeastern Ohio (the Western Reserve) in 1818; another took place in Nauvoo, IL, in 1844, and took as its context the precarious position of Mormon settlers in both the natural and cultural worlds of the West (this was not an actual "wolf hunt", but rather a possible massacre of Mormons by non-Mormons, which Coleman uses as a metaphor to show the way that the hunt worked to restore social order).

Part Three: The American West
7. A Wealth of Canines: Mormon Americans in the Great Plains: Coleman continues to use the story of the Mormons and their relationship with the landscape and its fauna, this time to ask the question of whether this story could have ever ended a different way (could humans have adopted/domesticated wolves? etc). He talks a bit about the social structure of wolf packs, and goes into the biology behind their cooperation, seguing into the story of Lois Crisler and her fascination with wolf communication (and the sad end of that story - which I forgot - she ended up killing all of her wolves). Moving back to the nineteenth century, Coleman talks about the Mormon settlers and their wolf relationships, worsened by wolf predation on livestock as well as their habit of occasionally eating dead human bodies (an activity which made them look all the worse to the Mormons, who perceived themselves as a very threatened community whose ties to the past and future were tenuous).

8. Call It a Coyote: How to Exterminate Wolves in Colonial Utah: Coleman makes the point that Mormon settlers very much wanted to leave the wolf-phase behind and enter into a civilized era. For this reason, they situated their wolf-stories in the past (and even changed the name of one species, the prairie wolf, to "coyote" in order to create the illusion of wolf extirpation).

Part Four: The Federal Government
9. Annihilation and Enlightenment: The Cultural Extinction of North American Wolves: Here we have the meaty (sorry) modernity section. Aldo Leopold's "Thinking Like a Mountain" starts us off, as a handy link between wolf-killing and wolf-loving (he used to work as a professional wolf killer via the USFS). Coleman then describes the way the government, in the first half of the twentieth century, organized wolf hunts in such a way that the wolves were cleared from "every region in the temperate United States in which a human could grow a marketable plant or animal" (192). Most interestingly, during this time, "last wolves", which were often seen as the most strong or powerful or smart of their species, were made into heroes (but not so heroic that they didn't deserve to die). Here, wolves were made sympathetic for the first time, through such stories as those of Ernest Thompson Seton, and urbanizing and industrializing America began to feel sad about their disappearance. (But, see footnote about utilitarianism of animal control in the 1920s, and traveling exhibits of animal parts, p 221).

Ernest Thompson Seton.

Reintroduction: A conclusion, based on contemporary wolf stories and conflicts between ranchers and conservationists. Some hopeful stories about the success of introduction into national parks, and Coleman's final assessment: "Wolves embody an unbroken history of conquest, worth pondering and protecting" (235).

The wolf-loving site I got this from, www.heartofthewolf.org, had this pic animated so that the wolf's mouth was opening and closing and you could see steam coming out. Tragically, I couldn't figure out how to transfer the Quicktime.

Reviews: In the Journal of American History, Karen Jones wrote that the book effectively pointed out the need for an integration of animal stories into human history. She liked the beginning of the book better than the end - she wished that the contemporary story of the wolves' image rehab had been covered more extensively. I remember that I read a positive review of this book in the Atlantic - that's what made me get the book in first place, and, not incidentally, reading the book is what made me want to go to grad school. That review started off "This is a sick-making book." It's interesting to think that this project could be seen by some as so overtly political - I don't think of it as being an animals rights book, though it's very anti-colonial, but I guess if you wanted to deploy it for animal-rights purposes, you certainly could.

Books to follow up on: Secondary: Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (1991); Patrick Malone, The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics Among the New England Indians (2000); Marion Schwartz, A History of Dogs in the Early Americas (1997).

Strange Weather

Poster for 1939 World's Fair.

Title: Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (London: Verso, 1991)

Author: Andrew Ross, of NYU's American Studies department (but called a "professor of social and cultural analysis"). Areas of interest are "labor and work; urban and suburban studies; intellectual history; social and political theory; science; ecology and technology; cultural studies." Lately, he seems most interested in labor and globalization. Ross' other books are multitudinous: No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (Routledge, 1989); the awesomely-titled The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt to Society (Verso, 1994); The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney's New Town (Ballantine, 1999); Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade-Lessons from Shanghai (Pantheon, 2006; Vintage, 2007). Many of his books are published or co-published by non-scholarly presses.

Argument: After reading a couple of reviews of this book, I was happy to find out that I wasn't the only one who had a hard time discerning the overall argument. In general, it's something about the inherent contingency and mutability of Science and Technology. Also, "isn't it interesting when Science/Technology hit the public sphere?" I think that's basically it. The book's chapters also succinctly illustrate - at least, to me - the dangers of choosing extremely contemporary topics for academic study. Some of these are fairly dated now.

Chapter-by-chapter:
One: New Age—A Kinder, Gentler Science?: New Age philosophies (of 1991 - see comment above) are antiscientific, in that they reject many of the accepted tenets of "Western" medicine, etc. However, they use Western scientific discourse in the way they present their ideas, showing that they still believe in the legitimacy of the inherent form. There is also a split within New Age between those who believe in the use of machines for New Age ends (like machines that re-calibrate brain waves, and the like) and those who believe only in the "body's energy". Also, new advances in physics, which bring the field closer to metaphysics, have narrowed the gap between New Age and "straight" science. Ross attends a New Age conference, and reads their magazines, but doesn't do any ethnography.

Two: Hacking Away at the Counterculture: There're people called hackers, and while they're nominally anti-establishment or maverick, they are actually usually white men who fit into a profile of the postmodern Protestant success story: "hacker culture celebrates high productivity, maverick forms of creative work energy, and an obsessive identification wtih online endurance (and endorphin highs)—all qualities that are valorized by the entrepreneurial code of silicon futurism" (90). Ross wants to open up the concept of "hacking" to include any form of technoliteracy (or literacy of other stripes) that challenges existing systems of rationality.

Three: Getting Out of the Gernsback Continuum: This chapter would be the most valuable to me, because it's historical, examining the convictions of Hugo Gernsback, "the father of science fiction" who believed that SF's role was to explain features of the fantastic new science and technology of the era to the public, and to recruit new scientists. Ross uses Gernsback as a touchstone to describe interwar faith in engineering and technology and the culture that sprang up around that faith, including describing the debates within science fiction fandom around the issue of scientific legitimacy. (Here is the discussion of the 1939 World's Fair and its futuristic idealism, as well.)

Cover of a Gernsback magazine.

Four: Cyberpunk in Boystown: White male folklore of the 1980s, Ross argues, is embodied in novels by cyberpunk writers such as William Gibson (Neuromancer). He writes that these imaginings of radical urban decay, often penned by suburbanites, took the place of the frontier fantasies we all know and love so well. Here, the body has disintegrated into a machine or a system, which Ross juxtaposes to other 80s masculine pinups like Arnie and Stallone.

Neuromancer fan art.

Boy, was I confused by this Keanu Reeves movie, when I rented it at a sleepover in middle school.

Five: Getting the Future We Deserve: This is a chapter about imaginations of the future, with brief histories of the interest groups who have parlayed futurology in the twentieth century. Departing from the technocratic ideals he discussed in the third chapter, Ross describes how futurism moved from being the business of those who would imagine socialist technological utopias, and into the hands of corporate or governmental interests, who would like to perpetuate the status quo.

Six: The Drought This Time: Another chapter that would be useful to me, about the effect of globalism on thinking about weather (though, once again, in light of events in the past fifteen years, this reads more like a primary source than a secondary one). Here's an overview of the previous theory of global cooling, and its effect on thinking about global warming, as well as short historical sections on previous populist weather observers, like James Pollard Espy. These briefly gloss changes in weather observation in the history of the United States, making brief contingent points about the history of nationalism (cue Anderson's Imagined Communities). The Weather Channel: Nationalizing, but corporatizing, weather information.

Reviews: In Technology and Culture, Rosalind Williams opined that the book lacks a coherent development of argument but says that a more serious objection is that Ross wants to interdisciplinize to the point of mishmosh ("instead of any meaty research or analysis, we are served a salad of secondary references dressed with quotations from Marx, Foucault, Geertz and other usual suspects"). She also wrote that the book is political without offering any concrete solutions, and that it has no clear audience, besides other cultural critics. Howard Segal, in the Journal of American History, wrote that Ross, while refreshingly non-technophobic, for an academic, fell into the dreaded technological-determinist trap, seeing technologies as drivers of culture, rather than products of it.

Vocab words: "negentropic" ("causing or accompanied by a decrease in entropy or an increase in order [sometimes with the implication that the second law of thermodynamics is being contravened]"); "mensuration" ("the action, process, or art of measuring; measurement").

More 1939 World's Fair publicity.

Things to look up: Technocracy (see references). Joe Egressia, "blind eight year old who discovered the telephone company's signal tone while whistling" (84). US government attempts to waterlog the Ho Chi Minh trail during the Vietnam War (203).

Books to follow up on: Primary: Scifi mags from the 1920s/1930s: Frank Reade Weekly Magazine (cited in Michael Ashley, ed., The History of the Science Fiction Magazine, Part One); Science and Invention; Radio News.

Secondary: William Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900-1941 (1977); Stanley Aronowitz, Science as Power (1988); Henry Elsner, Jr, The Technocrats: Prophets of Automation (1967); Helen A. Harrison, Dawn of a New Day: The New York World's Fair, 1939/40 (1980); Raymond Williams, The Year 2000 (1983) and "Ideas of Nature", in Problems in Materialism and Culture (1980) ; Arthur Wrobel, ed., Pseudo-Science and Society in Nineteenth Century American Culture (1987).