European Journal of American Culture - Volume 33, Issue 1, 2014

This essay traces the impact of Gertrude Stein’s signature strategies of repetition with a difference and of divided, yet mutually reinforcing, attention, which she called ‘insistence’ and ‘genius’, respectively, on Pop artist Andy Warhol and, among his colleagues into the early 1960s, on avant-garde composer John Cage, most notably. By challenging the conventional ascription of the artist’s affective or psychological depth to the artwork’s surface, Stein’s twin concepts of insistence and genius resisted not merely what cultural critics typically nutshell as the ‘depth model’ but even its heteronormativity and its corollary interpretation of queerness as a symptom. For both Stein and Warhol, moreover, at the root of this pair of techniques was the impact of automatism, which Stein only experimented with while in college, yet Warhol actually practiced from the advent of his Pop art in 1961. By focusing on how Warhol’s reproductive techniques embodied Stein’s view of automatism as a gestural practice – one that is neither reducible to writing nor, otherwise, a significant vehicle for linguistic meaning – I aim to inscribe what is routinely dismissed as Warhol’s accidental formalism within a discourse not of artistic indifference but, to the contrary, of queer resistance.

The Disney park is usually condemned as a kind of Platonic cave of illusions, where visitors are so mesmerized by the verisimilitude of the displays that they begin to take it for ‘reality’. However, the park does not so much simulate the ‘real’ as celebrate the art of simulation, the ability to construct fantasy worlds as if they are ‘real’.

Main Street USA was designed to evoke the ‘excitement of a dawning century of new technology’. This theme was continued in the Carousel of Progress attraction. There were four scenes showing the life of a typical American family through the generations and the ways their lives were continually improved by the latest advances in technology. Horizons, which opened in 1983, was a kind of sequel to Carousel. It showed the same all-American family living and working in the ‘brave new world’ of the future. Both Carousel and Horizons were ostensibly designed to promote the ideal of a technologically controlled ‘reality’. However, the shows were actually a demonstration and celebration of the power of ‘imagineering’ – the ability of Disney’s Imagineers to simulate the real.

This essay explores and contextualizes the rising anti-Catholic sentiment during the 1910s found within American fraternal societies, particularly Freemasonry, in addition to its condemnation by the Catholic Church. The study is illustrated by the public controversy involving the so-called Masonic Whitewash Committee of 1914–15, which included prominent grand officers of the California Grand Lodge (some of whom were later involved in the 1921 California Ku Klux Klan controversy) that investigated an alleged oath of the Knights of Columbus entered into the 1913 United States Congressional Record. The oath was determined by this unofficial committee to be fallacious (as had countless others, including Congress), and its conclusion set off a nationwide controversy within the fraternal and public press as a defense for what was believed to be Catholic infiltration of institutions at all levels of American society. The California Grand Lodge joined in the condemnation, claiming the committee’s use of Masonic titles gave the false impression that it was officially sanctioned by the governing body. To make matters worse for the committee, their report was also admitted into the 1915 Congressional Record by Congressman William Kettner, the then Grand Marshal for the Grand Lodge.

Allegations of favoring Catholic political candidates, along with the ‘whitewashing’ of the committee’s actions via fraternal politicking and character assassination were played out in the era’s infamous anti-Catholic newspapers. The essay seeks to demonstrate that this little-known conflict is in fact one of many footnotes that characterized anti-Catholic nativism and hyper-patriotism during the 1910s, as well as highlighting the Catholic defense of their own contribution to the American way of life. This paper also illustrates the distinct and important role fraternal organizations and their members played as arbiters and, sometimes, challengers of social trends.

This article attempts to situate Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger in the context of American optimism at the onset of the twentieth century. While often considered one of the most pessimistic of Twain’s novels, The Mysterious Stranger is portrayed as Twain’s engagement with the philosophy of existentialism. Specifically, the article examines the ways that the text engages the existential premises of Jean Paul Sartre. Rather than abandoning his American optimism, Twain essentially destroys the visible world of endless warfare and religious obstruction to allow Americans to reclaim their Emersonian optimism by suggesting that we all ‘Dream other dreams and better.’ This article argues that the margins of the text suggest an existential attempt to come to terms with the disappointments of the Gilded Age and the inconsistencies of early twentieth-century America and its capitalistic society.

Spatial Regulation in New York City: From Urban Renewal to Zero Tolerance, Themis Chronopoulos (2011) New York and London: Routledge, 234 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0-415-85079-7 (PB) $44.95 ISBN-13: 978-0-415-89158-5 (HB) $141.00