A cultural-historical reading of the dinosaur's image from its
discovery in the 1840s to its current media superstar status as
popular icon, from Mitchell (Engish and Art/Univ. of Chicago). This
book was conceived as a message in a bottle, written for future
intergalactic explorers to help them understand how the dinosaur
figured in human civilization, treating "both the real and the
imaginary, the scientific and the popular dinosaur as fossils in a
common archaeological dig." Though Mitchell does do justice to the
theories of dinosaurs as palpable artifacts (and how their study is
"accorded special treatment totally out of proportion to their
practical and scientific importance"), as a broadly curious
humanist and student of icons, he appreciates that paleontology
doesn't begin to explain the meaning of the dinosaur. He wants to
know why there are more dinosaur images today than there ever were
actual beasts; to decipher the dinosaur's cultural function, as a
wonder and a toy and a logo; monster and metaphor and monument.
He's drawn to its ambiguity: How did a synonym for failure became a
surefire commercial attraction? As befits a book whose content is
as jumpy and intellectually charged as bebop, and whose layout
resembles a mildly tranquilized Wired magazine, great fistfuls of
ideas and analyses and textual intricacies are showered upon the
reader. They include a totemic exploration of "Calvin and Hobbes,"
Lacan and Walter Benjamin and Levi-Strauss, as well as Jurassic
Park, Stephen Jay Gould, Italo Calvino, the artists Robert Smithson
and Alan McCollum, and a supporting cast of thousands. It is
dispiriting, though, that so vibrant a meta-analysis - such
provocative fun and polished wit - finds that "the time when
dinosaurs ruled the earth is now, and their rule is synonymous with
the global dominance of American culture." (Kirkus Reviews)
This text addresses the question of how dinosaurs moved from
natural extinction to pop culture resurrection, exploring the
animal's place in our lives and the source of its popular appeal.
In tracing the cultural family tree of the dinosaur there is
discovered a creature of striking flexibility, linked to dragons
and mammoths, skyscrapers and steam engines, cowboys and Indians.
Here the dinosaur becomes a cultural symbol whose plurality of
meaning and often contradictory nature is emblematic of modern
society itself. As a scientific entity, the dinosaur endured a
near-eclipse for over a century, but as an image it is enjoying its
widest circulation. The text suggests it endures because it is
uniquely malleable, a figure of both innovation and obsolescence,
massive power and pathetic failure - the totem animal of modernity.
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