The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economics of Play

by William Brown

Overview

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, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674553811
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	02/01/1997
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Bill Brown is Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations

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

What People are Saying About This

Brown 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.

Michael Rogin

Brown 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.
— Michael Rogin, University of California, Berkeley

Editorial Reviews

Brown 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.

Michael Rogin

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.

Ian F. A. Belln Studies [UK]

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.

American Studies [UK] - Ian F. A. Bell

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.
— Ian F. A. Bell

American Studies [UK]