Mechanical Reproduction in the Age of Immediacy

"Mechanical Reproduction in the Age of Immediacy" examines the influence of technical media on the aesthetic categories that antebellum American authors inherited from British Romanticism. I argue that Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne turned to the optical devices of copyists and showmen as models for literary form, with the result that, in their writing, the reflective mind comes to resemble a machine. The viewing machines of nineteenth century popular culture ¬ -- the diorama, the camera obscura, the daguerreotype -- figuratively recast the imaginative eye of Romanticism as a construction to be scrutinized, disassembled, and tested. I argue that insistent invocation of technical media in the writing of America's second-generation Romantics reveals a changing conception of literary form as less a record of experience than an objectification of the mind's faculties at work./nMy first chapter, an introduction, traces the central place of copies and repetition in the Romantic aesthetic theory that formed the basis for antebellum American writing, and in particular the poetics of Wordsworth and Coleridge, for whom imagination always departs from simple duplication. After tracing their theories in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, I make the case that the theory of photography offers a particularly useful model of study for the American authors who followed Emerson (or resisted him)./nMy second chapter, "The Poet and the Pendulum," tracks Edgar Allan Poe's figurative recourse to the camera obscura as a model for his fictional settings and the metronome as a model for poetic meter, conceits that come together in his tales "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Masque of the Red Death." Poe's habit of sealing characters in dark rooms resembles the optical experiments performed by Newton and Goethe in the camera obscura, a chance to test the senses in isolation. While these tales aestheticize scientific instruments, I argue, the poetic theory expressed in "The Rationale of Verse" and "The Philosophy of Composition" suggests that literary experience, often regarded in Romantic criticism as an hallucination or a dream, can in fact be measured and quantified./nMy third chapter examines Herman Melville's use of visual concepts such as foreshortening and outline as cognitive metaphors in his novel Pierre and his late book of poems Timoleon. For Melville, these terms of art approximate the workings of the mind as it forms a manageable conceptual picture from the confused matter of experience. I compare Melville's figurative outlines with the artistic theory and practice of William Blake, George Cumberland, and John Flaxman, whose popular illustrations of Homer and Dante feature prominently in Pierre./nMy fourth chapter argues that Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun links his career-long meditation on the nature of guilt with the aesthetic question of how transitory impressions become fixed as images, a technical problem that surfaces frequently in the early theory of photography. To this end, The Marble Faun contrasts different degrees of vividness and permanence in the arts, comparing sketches with finished paintings, clay models with marble sculptures. In parallel, Hawthorne questions at what point a fancied crime becomes a fixed spiritual fact.

Advisor: Otter, Samuel