Mind, Media, and Techniques of Remediation in America, 1850-1910

City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 6-2014 Mind, Media, and Techniques of Remediation in America, 1850-1910 Dominique Zino Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/309 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] MIND, MEDIA, AND TECHNIQUES OF REMEDIATION IN AMERICA, 1850-1910 by DOMINIQUE ZINO A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2014 © 2014 DOMINIQUE FRANCINE ZINO All rights reserved ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Dr. Joan Richardson Da t e Chair of Examining Committee Dr. Mario DiGangi Da t e Executive Officer Dr. Duncan Faherty Dr. Mary Ann Caws Supervisory Committee iii Abstract MIND, MEDIA, AND TECHNIQUES OF REMEDIATION IN AMERICA, 1850-1910 by Dominique Zino Adviser: Professor Joan Richardson This dissertation describes the way a renewed interest in picturesque aesthetics engaged the imaginations of writers, visual artists, philosophers, landscape designers, and collectors during the second half of the nineteenth century, reinvigorating a mode of inquiry that sanctioned the act of composing representations—mental, visual, and verbal—as a suitable response to social, political, and philosophical problems. The chapters that follow describe the understanding of the relationship between language, visual representation, and feeling that picturesque aesthetics formalized alongside the surface discourse of picturesqueness that was circulating through everyday genres, such as illustrated viewbooks, by the second half of the century. This dynamic picturesque sensibility becomes a technique for “remediating” nineteenth-century American culture in two ways: first, it grafts a younger American tradition of art, architecture, and literature onto an established European tradition to overcome and surpass any perceived deficiencies in the newer American tradition; secondly, it encourages an engagement with visual literacy in order to inspire interest in what might otherwise be perceived as more common and less awe-inspiring cultural sources. By the turn of the century, picturesque aesthetics in America becomes a tool for crafting self-fulfilling prophecies on local and national scales. iv There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967) We are like blind men exploring, not parts of an elephant, but the root system of a forest, the eddies of an estuary. The only certainty we have is that it is our monster; it is us. Paul Shepherd, Man in the Landscape (1967) v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I always read the acknowledgement pages of my books with a curiosity about where writers have been and who has influenced them and lent support. So it is great fun finally to get to write such a page or two myself. My first round of thanks goes without question to my advisor, Joan Richardson, whose seminars on American Aesthetics I had the pleasure of participating in three separate times. Especially in the earliest classes, I often felt slightly stunned into silence. Joan’s method of reading across many materials with grace, breadth, and depth has left a profound impact on my emerging method as scholar and my understanding of what scholarship can accomplish. Duncan Faherty provided incisive comments on my dissertation prospectus in 2010. Since then he has alerted me to important opportunities to do research and share my work and supported me in securing those opportunities. The way he has transformed the American Studies program during my time at the Graduate Center makes me wish (just a little) that I could stay on for a few years more and take just a few more courses. Mary Ann Caws’s incredibly rich writing about art and literature is what initially drew me to the Graduate Center in 2006. To have her read this dissertation eight years later is a complete pleasure. I also need to thank the staff at the American Antiquarian Society, where I spent a month doing research in 2011 and where I have subsequently returned multiple times for workshops and conferences. In particular, Paul Erickson, Director of Academic Programs, and Lauren Hewes, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts, have lent resources, guidance, and support. Even closer to home, Jay Barksdale at the New York Public Library granted me continued access to the Wertheim Study where I completed much of the reading and writing for this project. vi One of the most important things I learned in Graduate School was how to be a thoughtful colleague, while still being a rigorous one. This is modeled regularly by the excellent teachers and writers in the Graduate Center’s Composition and Rhetoric Community (GCCRC). Of the many members of that group who have influenced my attitude about how teaching and scholarship can nourish one another, I especially thank Benjamin Miller, who is one of the keenest and, just as importantly, one of the most generous thinkers I know, and Erica Kaufman, who is fearless as a poet and as a teacher in ways that I find inspiring. Amanda Licastro, Andrew Lucchesi, and Sean Molloy let me get good work done in what is really not my office anymore— eavesdropping on what they’re up to is endlessly informative. Finally, the composition and rhetoric faculty at CUNY, especially Sondra Perl, Jessica Yood, Mark McBeth, and Amy Wan, have informed my habit of thinking across literary studies, rhetoric, and writing studies and have lent much encouragement. Having classmates who are also friends has been important. I have learned more than I can say here about how to find my own way to “do” graduate school (and how to finish) from a cadre of incredibly intelligent women, including but not limited to Jill Belli, Emily Stanback, Simone White, Anne Donlon, and Rowena Kennedy-Epstein. Finally, moving on to this next stage of my scholarship and my career would not have been possible—or at least would have taken me much longer—had I not received support in all forms from my parents, Frances Zino and Michael Zino. This dissertation is dedicated to them. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of images ix Introduction 1 1. Unsettling Emersonian Horizons 31 2. Fixing a Picture of Progress: Living in Picturesque Time 61 3. Man in the Landscape, Woman in the Garden 91 4. Automated Visions, Recovered Philosophies 114 5. Henry James’s Aching Void 159 Afterword 184 Bibliography 189 viii LIST OF IMAGES Figure 1: Otis Norcross’s Claude Glass x Figure 2: Engraving of fish merchant sitting on empty market stall 83 Figure 3: Frontispiece for A Century After (1875) 90 Figure 4a: Diagram of a fascicle from Mrs. Phelps’s Familiar lectures on botany 113 Figure 4b: Specimen of the sweet-william, a fascicle from Dickinson’s herbarium 113 Figure 5: “Boys Playing Leap-Frog,” Descriptive Zoopraxography 158 Figure 6: “Some Consecutive Phrases of the Amble,” Descriptive Zoopraxography 158 ix Figure 1: “A Claude Lorrain Mirror, also called a Claude Glass, was used to mirror scenery, and gave the effect of a Claude Lorrain landscape painting. Used from late 18th century until about 1880. (See Oxford Dictionary under Claude.) This mirror used by Otis Norcross about 1860.” Otis Norcross was the 19th Mayor of Boston and a third cousin to the poet Emily Dickinson. Images taken by author, June 2011, courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. x INTRODUCTION 1. ON BANALITY, IRRITATION, AND UNCERTAINTY: ANOTHER LOOK AT THE PICTURESQUE TRADITION “Serious people do not linger long in a picturesque world.” Sidney K. Robinson, Inquiry into the Picturesque (xiii) Living in the world challenges us for many reasons. This project takes up two of them in particular: first, our media environments keep changing; secondly, we keep trying to make our media invisible in order to convince ourselves that we, finally, are interacting directly with a real world. We exist and resist through our media, in other words, as much as we resist the mediums themselves.1 At its broadest level this project is about the difficulties of living in and through media at once. Or, to put it another way, it is about the relationship between aesthetics and morality. The picturesque—an aesthetic formulation that for a substantial length of time, from the late-eighteenth through the late-nineteenth century, exerted an identifiable influence on the way British and American citizens saw and reproduced their world—offers a case study for how media environments, or what media studies scholars call “media ecologies,” operate. Media environments consist of things, from malleable physical mediums to technologies to the structures that house our actions and interactions around media; they also include the rhetorical situations that lend media meaning and represent our reliance on media back to us. Artists and writers are especially conscious of the fact that when we use media we change our environment; 1WJT Mitchell and Mark Hansen (2010) note that modern uses of the term medium fall into two categories, 1) “something that is intermediate between two degrees, amounts, qualities, or classes,” and 2) “a person or thing which acts as intermediary,” whether a token of exchange, a material used in artistic expression, a “channel of mass communication,” the “physical material...used for recording or reproducing data, images, or sound,” a “substance through which a force acts on objects at a distance or through which impressions are conveyed to the senses,” including “the substance in which an organ lives,” or a spiritualist who communicates with the dead.

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