Date:
Location:
"The 'Industrial Experience' in Mass Culture: Railways, Simulations, and the Early American Amusement Park"
Speaker:
Charles Gaillard, PhD Candidate in History and Theory of Architecture, Harvard University.
Contact:
Charles Gaillard
cgaillard@fas.harvard.edu
Chair:
Panagiotis Roilos, Faculty Associate. George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies, Department of the Classics; Professor of Comparative Literature, Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University.
Abstract:
Both Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco saw the twentieth-century American amusement park as embodying the “hyperreal,” an order of representation in which reality is displaced by simulation. This is most visible in the contrast, Baudrillard observes, between a park’s self-enclosed imaginary world and the surrounding “wasteland” of parking lots. However, this interior/exterior distinction was not always so clear. This paper investigates the structural and symbolic role of railways in the early American amusement park, arguing that the railway both provided the infrastructural basis for park development and, as a metonym for industrial modernity as such, served as an experiential model for many park attractions. Through an analysis of three case studies (the Midway Plaisance at the 1893 Chicago Exposition, Coney Island, and the “trolley park”), it situates early railway simulations in relation to contemporary understandings of modern subjectivity that emphasized the physiological character of sense perception. In doing so, it identifies several discrete developmental phases, periodizing the emergence of this distinctly American hyperreal typology.
