Usable Futures, Disposable Paper: Popular Science, Pulp Science Fiction and Modernizaton in America, 1908--1937 (2001)
Drown, Eric Miles (Author)
University of Minnesota
Rabinowitz, Paula
Edition Details: Advisor: Rabinowitz, Paula
Physical Details: 312 pp.
Language: English
From 1908 to 1937 Hugo Gernsback's magazines such as {italic}Radio News, Electrical Experimenter, Science and Invention, Amazing Stories{/italic}, and {italic}Science Wonder Stories{/italic} assured readers that their passionate interest in science and invention was more than just a diverting hobby. Knowledge and skill acquired through reading would secure them an honored place in the technological future that was emerging from the laboratories of Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and Guglielmo Marconi. In wiring diagrams, science articles, biographies of exemplary inventors, science fiction stories, editorial exhortations, advertisements for technical training, and readers' letters, Gernsback magazines promoted the virtues of the amateur experimenter to men working as mill-workers, machine tenders, clerks, or salesmen. Unlike such men, the amateur experimenter was free to choose his own projects, to work the way he saw fit, and to reap fame and fortune from his labors. Ironically, amateur experimenters entered the national mythology just as it became clear that invention would increasingly be carried out by professionals working in industrial laboratories. Even as Gernsback offered readers a model of masculinity that poorly-fit them to the new kinds of work, the popular science (fiction) culture he promoted offered men a cultural enclave where they set the rules of behavior, engaged in ritual conflict with one another, and policed its borders against female incursion. More than a history of pulp science fiction and popular magazines, "Usable Futures" explains how young men faced with the reorganization of work during the first three decades of the twentieth century built their identities on autonomy, individualism, and adventure. Following the work of theorists Michel De Certeau, Tony Bennett, and Michael Denning, Gernsback's magazines are treated as a form of social practice capable of organizing relations between social formations and human subjects. Treating the cultural products of a group too often dismissed as crackpots and social misfits in this way opens a new archive for cultural historians. Furthermore, it identifies and decodes a vital cultural resource for American workingmen who aspired to future free from the fetters of corporate industrialism. Finally, it expands current discussions on the shape and meaning of twentieth-century American modernism.
...MoreDescription “Gernsback's magazines promoted the virtues of the amateur experimenter …[and] are treated as a form of social practice capable of organizing relations between social formations and human subjects.” Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 62 (2002): 3831. UMI order no. 3031972.
Similar Citations
Article
Drown, Eric;
(2006)
“A Finer and Fairer Future”: Commodifying Wage Earners in American Pulp Science Fiction
(/isis/citation/CBB000771701/)
Book
Currell, Susan;
Cogdell, Christina;
(2006)
Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s
(/isis/citation/CBB000774027/)
Article
Castagnaro, Mario;
(2012)
Lunar Fancies and Earthly Truths: The Moon Hoax of 1835 and the Penny Press
(/isis/citation/CBB001200842/)
Article
Schwartz, Matthias;
(2013)
How Nauchnaia Fantastika Was Made: The Debates about the Genre of Science Fiction from NEP to High Stalinism
(/isis/citation/CBB001201410/)
Book
Cheng, John;
(2012)
Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America
(/isis/citation/CBB001202122/)
Book
Ashley, Michael;
(2007)
Gateways to Forever: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1970 to 1980
(/isis/citation/CBB001033740/)
Book
Krome, Frederic James;
(2012)
Fighting the Future War: An Anthology of Science Fiction War Stories, 1914--1945
(/isis/citation/CBB001033384/)
Article
Newell, Dianne;
Lamont, Victoria;
(2005)
Rugged Domesticity: Frontier Mythology in Post-Armageddon Science Fiction by Women
(/isis/citation/CBB001031059/)
Book
Bould, Mark;
(2009)
The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction
(/isis/citation/CBB001033218/)
Article
Griswold, Robert L.;
(2012)
“Russian Blonde in Space”: Soviet Women in the American Imagination, 1950--1965
(/isis/citation/CBB001320683/)
Article
Dziubinskyj, Aaron;
(2007)
Eduardo Urzaiz's Eugenia: Eugenics, Gender, and Dystopian Society in Twenty-Third-Century Mexico
(/isis/citation/CBB001031089/)
Thesis
Nichols, Rachael L.;
(2010)
The Human Animal: Tangles in Science and Literature, 1870--1920
(/isis/citation/CBB001567211/)
Thesis
Conley, Gregory Dean;
(2013)
Alien Evolutions: Darwinian Influence on the History and Transformation of the Anglo-American Science Fiction Alien, 1885--1936
(/isis/citation/CBB001567514/)
Chapter
Waugh, Patricia;
(2011)
Mind in Modern Fiction: Literary and Philosophical Perspectives after Darwin
(/isis/citation/CBB001202033/)
Article
Aimee Slaughter;
(2014)
Ray Guns and Radium: Radiation in the Public Imagination as Reflected in Early American Science Fiction
(/isis/citation/CBB404161784/)
Article
Gorp, Baldwin Van;
Rommes, Els;
Emons, Pascale;
(2014)
From the Wizard to the Doubter: Prototypes of Scientists and Engineers in Fiction and Non-Fiction Media Aimed at Dutch Children and Teenagers
(/isis/citation/CBB001420109/)
Article
Persson, Mathias;
(2004)
Ett numinöst och programmerat kosmos: Religion och naturvetenskap i Peter Nilsons Projekt Nyaga
(/isis/citation/CBB000770375/)
Article
Bowler, Peter J.;
(2013)
Popular Science Magazines in Interwar Britain: Authors and Readerships
(/isis/citation/CBB001320568/)
Article
Arnaud Parent;
(2022)
Science in Eighteenth-Century French Literary Fiction: A Step to Modern Science Fiction and a New Definition of the Human Being?
(/isis/citation/CBB388925684/)
Book
Emanuela Piga Bruni;
(2023)
La macchina fragile. L'inconscio artificiale fra letteratura, cinema e televisione
(/isis/citation/CBB294063311/)
Be the first to comment!