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Material Unconscious : American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economics of Play by William Brown (1997, Trade Paperback)

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Weight: 1.19 lbs. Number of Pages: 384. ISBN10: 0674553810. Publication Date: 1997-02-01. Publisher: Harvard University Press.

About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherHarvard University Press

ISBN-100674553810

ISBN-139780674553811

eBay Product ID (ePID)597339

Product Key Features

Number of Pages384 Pages

Publication NameMaterial Unconscious : American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economics of Play

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year1997

SubjectPopular Culture, American / General, Semiotics & Theory, Subjects & Themes / General

FeaturesReprint

TypeTextbook

AuthorWilliam Brown

Subject AreaLiterary Criticism, Social Science

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height1 in

Item Weight13 Oz

Item Length9.2 in

Item Width6.1 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceScholarly & Professional

LCCN96-026028

ReviewsBrown offers not only breathtaking readings of individual works but an argument that Crane's modernism derives precisely from the penetration into his corpus of the objects of mass culture. The result is not only a splendid book on Crane, but a powerful reinterpretation of turn-of-the-century American culture and politics., In trying to rethink the relations between material, intellectual and literary history, Bill Brown has produced an adventurously researched and especially rich cultural diagnosis of [Stephen] Crane's America. His diagnosis understands that history's most effective force in literature is to linger on obliquely in ghostly form, pleading its case with some shyness from that hollow place which echoes material life. We know it by its ephemeral shadow.

Dewey Edition21

IllustratedYes

Dewey Decimal813.4

Edition DescriptionReprint

Table Of ContentAbbreviations Introduction: Recreation and Representation Economies of Play The Material Unconscious Spacing: Realism, Recreation, Romance Stephen Crane Recreational Space: Methodism and Its Discontents Rational and Irrational Recreation The Pleasure Machine Visibility The Machine in the Garden Deep Play Recreational Time The Economic Problem of Masochism Melodramatic Economy The Chance-Thing and the Logic of New Historicism Interlude: The Agony of Play in "The Open Boat" The War Game: Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest Spectatorship Embodiment The Photographic Body Exquisite Correspondents American Childhood and Stephen Crane's Toys Producing the Child Producing the Toy Economies of Childhood Recreational Realism Monstrosity Museums, Monsters, Minstrels Typology, Faciality, Monstrosity Teratology in the Field of Vision Monsters and Modernism Coda Uneven Development Henry's Fate Notes Index

SynopsisWithin the ephemera of the everyday--old photographs, circus posters, iron toys--lies a challenge to America's dominant cultural memory. What this memory has left behind, Bill Brown recovers in the "material unconscious" of Stephen Crane's work, the textual residues of daily sensations that add up to a new history of the American 1890s. As revealed in Crane's disavowing appropriation of an emerging mass culture--from football games and freak shows to roller coasters and early cinema--the decade reappears as an underexposed moment in the genealogy of modernism and modernity. Brown's story begins on the Jersey Shore, in Asbury Park, where Crane became a writer in the shadow of his father, a grimly serious Methodist minister who vilified the popular amusements his son adored. The coastal resorts became the stage for debates about technology, about the body's visibility, about a black service class and the new mass access to leisure. From this snapshot of a recreational scene that would continue to inspire Crane's sensational modernism, Brown takes us to New York's Bowery. There, in the visual culture established by dime museums, minstrel shows, and the Kodak craze, he exhibits Crane dramatically obscuring the typology of race. Along the way, Brown demonstrates how attitudes toward play transformed the image of war, the idea of childhood and nationhood, and the concept of culture itself. And by developing a new conceptual apparatus (with such notions as "recreational time," "abstract leisure," and the "amusement/knowledge system"), he provides the groundwork for a new politics of pleasure. A crucial theorization of how cultural studies can and should proceed, The Material Unconscious insists that in the very conjuncture of canonical literature and mass culture, we can best understand how proliferating and competing economies of play disrupt the so-called "logic" and "work" of culture., Within the ephemera of the everyday--old photographs, circus posters, iron toys--lies a challenge to America's dominant cultural memory. What this memory has left behind, Brown recovers in the "material unconscious" of Stephen Crane's work, the textual residues of daily sensations that add up to a new history of the American 1890s.

LC Classification NumberPS1449.C85Z564 1996