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Fascination - Trance, Enchantment, and American Modernity (Hardcover)
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Fascination - Trance, Enchantment, and American Modernity (Hardcover)
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Most cultural critics theorize modernity as a state of disenchanted
distraction, one linked to both the rationalizing impulses of
scientific and technological innovation and the kind of dispersed,
fragmented attention that characterizes the experience of mass
culture. Patrick Kindig's Fascination, however, tells a different
story, showing that many fin-de-siecle Americans were in fact
concerned about (and intrigued by) the modern world's ability to
attract and fix attention in quasi-supernatural ways. Rather than
being distracting, modern life in their view had an almost magical
capacity to capture attention and overwhelm rational thought.
Fascination argues that, in response to the dramatic scientific and
cultural changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, many American thinkers and writers came to conceive of
the modern world as fundamentally fascinating. Describing such
diverse phenomena as the electric generator, the movements of
actresses, and ethnographic cinema as supernaturally alluring, they
used the language of fascination to process and critique both
popular ideologies of historical progress and the racializing logic
upon which these ideologies were built. Drawing on an archive of
primary texts from the fields of medicine, (para)psychology,
philosophy, cultural criticism, and anthropology-as well as
creative texts by Harriet Prescott Spofford, Charles Chesnutt,
Theodore Dreiser, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Edward S. Curtis, Robert J.
Flaherty, and Djuna Barnes-Kindig reconsiders what it meant for
Americans to be (and to be called) modern at the turn of the
twentieth century.
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