This essay looks at the iconography of the telegraph in Hnery James's major phase, and seeks to understand The Ambassadors as exemplary of his fascination with "the idea of connectibility." The essay also inquires more broadly into the means by which technologies of communication become objects of emotional attachment, affective intensity, and even sensuous engagement. Reading across a range of period represetations of the telegraph, the essay shows how James's stylistic prodigality/-/-his "magnificent and masterly indirectness," as James himself calls it/-/-travesties a telegraphic economy of expression, even as his narratives fixate on the inscrutable pleasures of mediated communication.
Focusing on James's account of New York in the 1850s from A Small Boy and Others, this essay argues that, despite his clear antipathy toward the "modern" New York he describes in The American Scene, his own memories of an "old" New York involve a much more varied and pleasurable response to the city itself. Indeed, James's nostalgia for the city of his childhood reflects a prior modernity marked everywhere by media (dioramas, panoramas, posters) and spectacle (melodramas, theatrical displays, the Barnum Museum)—a modernity whose "visibility," for James, has been "smothered" but not lost.
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