This book is an invitation to think about why children chew pencils; why we talk to our cars, our refrigerators, our computers; rosary beads and worry beads; Cuban cigars; why we no longer wear hats that we can tip to one another and why we don't seem to long to; what has been described as bourgeois longing. It is an invitation to think about the fetishism of daily life in different times and in different cultures. It is an invitation to rethink several topics of critical inquiry-camp, collage, primitivism, consumer culture, museum culture, the aesthetic object, still life, "things as they...
This book is an invitation to think about why children chew pencils; why we talk to our cars, our refrigerators, our computers; rosary beads and worry...
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...
Within the ephemera of the everyday--old photographs, circus posters, iron toys--lies a challenge to America's dominant cultural memory. What this ...
By the time he was ten years old, Billy Brown was running a successful little business on the black market: whatever you needed, from bricks and firewood to dress material or machetes, Billy Brown could get it - or knew a man who could. And, for the right price, he would deliver it direct to your door in an old carriage pram. With energy and insight, Billy Brown paints a vivid and lively picture of Britain emerging from the ruins of the war, the hunger for opportunity, the growing pace of modernisation and the pride and optimism that held communities together. Londoners were intent on...
By the time he was ten years old, Billy Brown was running a successful little business on the black market: whatever you needed, from bricks and firew...
