Power-lines: Electricity, Landscape, and the American Mind
Item
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Title
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Power-lines: Electricity, Landscape, and the American Mind
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:2649cdd6fa51:10951
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identifier
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11240
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Creator
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Wuebben, Daniel,
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Contributor
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Joan Richardson
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Date
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2011
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American studies | Language | Metaphysics | Electricity | Emerson | Landscape | Technology | Telegraph | Tesla
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Abstract
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Power-lines examines the intersections between electricity (power-) and landscape (-lines) as they were manifest in American art, literature, science, technology, religion, and philosophy throughout the nineteenth century and into the first part of the twentieth. It alternates between two parallel trajectories. The first line follows "electricity" and "landscape" as defined and circulated by writers such as Samuel Morse, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and Nikola Tesla. I argue that the science of electricity, the aesthetics of the electric, and the understanding of electric technologies provided models for thinking about the perception of nature and landscape. The telegraph particularly influenced popular ideas about communication and the environment, and what I call "the Line" became a popular way to think about, and with, electricity. The telegraph was not only a metaphor but a physical artifact inserted into the environment. Thus, the second trajectory traces poles and wires as described in American fiction, poetry, landscape painting, and film. Overhead grids were crucial to the development of industries and politics that spanned the nation. The Line framed the way Americans looked at themselves and their environment. For example, Henry David Thoreau, who famously rebuked the need for a telegraph line between Maine and Texas, sat beneath the wires and documented the sounds emitted by what he called "the telegraph harp." The wire's sounds were a sign of a supernatural infrastructure that could offer its listeners access to a higher plane of existence. Later in the nineteenth century, the wires stemming from Niagara Falls' power plant seemed to provide a substitute for the frontier lines which historian Frederick Jackson Turner said had disappeared from the American landscape. Such coincidences suggest that the theories and language of electricity---especially terms like shocks, waves, and currents---and electrical infrastructures had a collective influence on popular attitudes about politics, communication, progress, and technology. Although new grids and nation-spanning networks seemed to unite landscape and electricity in a pastoral equipoise, power-lines have signified the increasingly potent and ambiguous effects of lining our environment (and minds) with wires.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
