Masses, Forces, and the Urban Sublime

Abstract

CHRISTOPHE DEN TANDT Masses, Forces, and the Urban Sublime The Realization of Multitudinous Humanity Observers of the urban scene in nineteenth and early twentieth-century fiction are recurrently confronted with what American novelist Robert Herrick calls "the realization of multitudinous humanity": 1 the city defeats their powers of perception. In William Dean Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), this experience is triggered by masses of immigrants. Gazing from the New York elevated train, upper-middle-class editorialist Basil March discovers slum dwellers with disquieting features-"small eyes, … high cheeks, … broad noses, … cue-filleted skulls." As Basil's ethnic clichés cannot keep up with this diversity, he seeks comfort in Social Darwinist generalities: the streets, he ventures, are ruled by the "play of energies" of the "struggle for survival." 2 If Howells's flâneur dared to immerse himself into the crowd, he would likely share the plight of Avis Everhard, the heroine of Jack London's dystopia The Iron Heel (1908), whose perceptual distress is compounded with disgust and terror. Trapped in a riot of the Chicago underclass, Avis must thread her way through the "awful river" of a subhuman mob made up of "carnivorous … apes and tigers, anaemic consumptives and hairy beasts of burden." 3 In other texts, the object of urban dread is industry. French science-fiction pioneer Jules Verne's The Begum's Fortune (1879) features gothic depictions of a city designed by German gun manufacturers: Stahlstadt is "a dark mass, huge and strange" whose "forest of cylindrical chimneys … vomit clouds of dense smoke." 4 Likewise, North England towns in Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil, Or the Two Nations (1845) are "wilderness[es] of cottages … interspersed with blazing furnaces." 5 For Emile Zola, steam engines in coal mines are "vile

The supply‐chain sublime: Spectacles of unagency in fictions of planetary economy

“…Indeed, both British and American writers have long wrestled with their place in a globalizing economy, and have frequently turned to sublime aesthetics as a tool for making vivid the system's resistance to perception. Christophe Den Tandt, for instance, identifies in some 19 th century novels an “industrial sublime” that depicts early industrial production as “a spectacle defeating human perception” (Den Tandt, 2013, p. 2). Later, Den Tandt observes, British and American writers applied sublime aesthetics less to industrial and more to urban scenes, shifting their attention from “industrial production and the proletarian experience” to the “mechanisms of the urban market,” that is, from the production of material goods to their consumption (Den Tandt, 2013, pp.…”