Notes
[ 191 ] Notes Introduction 1. By calling the texts in this book “modernist,” I mean to point out a number of their commonalities beyond that of publication date. In contemporary critical parlance, “modernism” can designate both a literary period—usually “about 1890 to 1945” (Mao and Walkowitz 738)—and a range of formal devices employed by writers in that period. For recent contestation of the periodization of modernism, see Friedman , “Definitional Excursions” and “Periodizing Modernism.” 2. Financed by millionaire Augustus Belmont, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company ’s subway line ran from City Hall up the east side of Manhattan to Grand Central Terminal, connected to Times Square, and then ran up the west side of Central Park. At 103rd Street, the subway branched off into two lines that extended into the Bronx (Interborough Rapid Transit and Cudahy 24–25). Clifton Hood’s 722 Miles is widely regarded as the definitive academic history of the New York subway’s construction and expansion. For a more popular account, see Cudahy, Under the Sidewalks. 3. Indeed, Randy Kennedy (“A Day in the Subway”) emphasizes the many ways in which the infrastructure has stayed the same over time: “The levers [the dispatcher] moves look like the ones her predecessors moved when the subway started. The [ 192 ] notes to PAges 4–12 trains she dispatches still run on the same kind of wheels (steel), sit atop rails of the same gauge (4 feet, 8.5 inches) and draw the same blue-sparking direct current (625 volts) from the ominous third rail.” 4. Sidonie Smith also discusses the interplay between different types of movement and different forms of writing when she says, “If the mode of moving a body through space affects the traveler who moves through spaces as that body, then the mode of motion informs the meaning that the traveler sends back home in narration” (xii). 5. Jonathan Crary is another critic who sees modernist aesthetics intertwined with modernization: “Any effective account of modern culture must confront the ways in which modernism, rather than being a reaction against or transcendence of processes of scientific and economic rationalization, is inseparable from them” (85). 6. As Mark Bahnisch notes, “In one sense, the minute division of labour characteristic of Taylorism, and the alienated work which is its consequence, have become a floating signifier written into central narratives and myths of the 20th century” (54). For Fordist efficiency in modern narratives, see Banta, Taylored Lives. For Taylorism in modernist poetry, see Tichi 257–67. 7. See Seiler 25–29 for a discussion of how scientific management works against earlier conceptions of individualism in this period. 8. For an analysis of the subway in relation to New York’s reputation as an “unfinished city,” see Bender 23, 40. For the subway as an instance of the urban underworld, see Pike, Metropolis on the Styx and “Urban Nightmares.” 9. I discuss the critical history of the subway as underworld in chapter 1. 10. For a thorough guide to the history of this critical tradition, see de la Peña, “Slow and Low Progress.” 11. In his important 1963 essay “The Modern City as a Field of Historical Study,” Oscar Handlin considers “the appearance of the common carrier” to be a “critical breakthrough ” in the size and complexity of the modern city (12). 12. For further discussion of these early forms of urban transit, see Cheape; Cudahy, Cash, Tokens, and Transfers; Fischler. 13. See Stilgoe 8 and Douglas 4. 14. Wolfgang Schivelbusch discusses the ways in which train travel altered the modern sense of time (see 33–44). Many critics also discuss the importance of time as a regulating force in the modern city. See Handlin 14 and Kern 15. 15. The city began dismantling elevated lines in 1939. See Stalter, “Farewell to the El,” for a description of the social and cultural response to the razing of the final holdout, the Third Avenue El, in 1955. 16. Recent critical attention to the elevated train has emphasized its panoramic quality and the distanced relationship to the city sights (particularly the lives of the poor) that resulted. See Brooks 36–46; Haenni 36–48; Tichi 247–48. In the few instances when the El is represented from the perspective of a Bowery apartment, it is generally an oppressive urban force. See Kirby 165. 17. See Augé 70; Gitelman and Pingree xv; and Marvin 4. 18. See Seiler 25–30 and Lears. [3.137.171.121] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 12:39...
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