Lincoln's Smile and Other Enigmas
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Overview
"Lincoln's Smile demonstrates why Alan Trachtenberg has been the leading scholar in American studies for more than four decades." —Casey Nelson Blake, Columbia University
Alan Trachtenberg has always been interested in cultural artifacts that register meanings and feelings that Americans share even when they disagree about them. Some of the most beloved ones—like the famous last photograph of Abraham Lincoln, taken at the time of his second inaugural—are downright puzzling, and it is their obscure, riddlelike aspects that draw his attention in the scintillating essays of Lincoln's Smile and Other Enigmas. With matchless authority, Trachtenberg moves from daguerreotypes to literary texts to subjects as diverse as Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the early works of Lewis Mumford.
Synopsis
"Lincoln's Smile demonstrates why Alan Trachtenberg has been the leading scholar in American studies for more than four decades." —Casey Nelson Blake, Columbia University
Alan Trachtenberg has always been interested in cultural artifacts that register meanings and feelings that Americans share even when they disagree about them. Some of the most beloved ones—like the famous last photograph of Abraham Lincoln, taken at the time of his second inaugural—are downright puzzling, and it is their obscure, riddlelike aspects that draw his attention in the scintillating essays of Lincoln's Smile and Other Enigmas. With matchless authority, Trachtenberg moves from daguerreotypes to literary texts to subjects as diverse as Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the early works of Lewis Mumford.
Publishers Weekly
One of America's leading cultural historians, Trachtenberg (Shades of Hiawatha) has gathered together his essays from the last 40 years. Those who know Trachtenberg's work will recognize much that is familiar. The essay "Brooklyn Bridge as a Cultural Text," for example, plays with ideas that found their most mature expression in his pathbreaking book on the same topic. Many other essays take up Trachtenberg's interest in photographs; the title essay uses portraits of Lincoln to look at the 19th-century belief that photographs of faces reveal the subject's inner essence. Another fascinating piece examines the extent to which Walker Evans's Depression-era photographs created, rather than revealed, images of the South that to this day shape national discourse about the region. Trachtenberg is a gifted stylist, and he generally avoids academic jargon; still, his prose is dense, and not everyone will have the patience for sentences such as "Newspapers respond... to the increasing mystification, the deepening estrangement of urban space from interpenetration, from exchange of subjectivities." This book is episodic, and highlighted with many moments of brilliance-such as the analysis of the political meanings of daguerreotypes in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne and a discussion of deadpan in the work of Mark Twain that will please devotees. (Feb.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"After you read Lincoln's Smile, certain pictures and poetry and prose you took for granted are gone, for they are not the same after Alan Trachtenberg has had a good look at them. He has been teaching us—over many years and in many idioms—how to see our world anew without letting vision stand in for all our senses. These essays remind us of how good a teacher he has been." —James Livingston, Rutgers University
"For forty years, Alan Trachtenberg has been writing some of the most thoughtful cultural history and criticism on either side of the Atlantic. He has been especially adept at melding expressive forms too often kept apart—photography, imaginative literature, the urban built environment. It is a boon to our self-understanding to have these fine essays between two covers at last." —Jackson Lears, author of Something for Nothing: Luck in America
"Lincoln's Smile demonstrates why Alan Trachtenberg has been the leading scholar in American studies for more than four decades. His work is not only cultural history but cultural criticism of the highest order. In his essays on literature, photography, and architecture, he builds a bridge from the prophetic writings of Walt Whitman, Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, and Constance Rourke to our own perilous moment, daring us to imagine a more democratic horizon in the future." —Casey Nelson Blake, Columbia University
"Alan Trachtenberg is an eminent survivor of the now-dying discipline of American Studies. Lincoln's Smile and Other Enigmas movingly links Trachtenberg to the tradition that goes from Walt Whitman to Hart Crane and Walker Evans. That tradition is vital to whatever cultural eminence our nation may yet hope to retain."
—Harold Bloom
Publishers Weekly
One of America's leading cultural historians, Trachtenberg (Shades of Hiawatha) has gathered together his essays from the last 40 years. Those who know Trachtenberg's work will recognize much that is familiar. The essay "Brooklyn Bridge as a Cultural Text," for example, plays with ideas that found their most mature expression in his pathbreaking book on the same topic. Many other essays take up Trachtenberg's interest in photographs; the title essay uses portraits of Lincoln to look at the 19th-century belief that photographs of faces reveal the subject's inner essence. Another fascinating piece examines the extent to which Walker Evans's Depression-era photographs created, rather than revealed, images of the South that to this day shape national discourse about the region. Trachtenberg is a gifted stylist, and he generally avoids academic jargon; still, his prose is dense, and not everyone will have the patience for sentences such as "Newspapers respond... to the increasing mystification, the deepening estrangement of urban space from interpenetration, from exchange of subjectivities." This book is episodic, and highlighted with many moments of brilliance-such as the analysis of the political meanings of daguerreotypes in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne and a discussion of deadpan in the work of Mark Twain that will please devotees. (Feb.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.Library Journal
Trachtenberg (English & American studies, Yale Univ.; Shades of Hiawatha), the author of many books dealing with American culture, has compiled 19 of his lectures and essays from the past 40 years, which he divides into three sections. Part 1, which covers the mid-19th century, deals primarily with the new invention of photography, especially the Daguerreotype. Part 2 looks at the literature of the Gilded Age (e.g., Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn), with an excursion into architecture (Auditorium Building, Chicago). Finally, Part 3 focuses on aspects of the 20th century, especially its photography (e.g., the Depression-era photos collected by the Farm Security Administration), and includes essays on film noir and the Brooklyn Bridge. Many of the pieces are connected in that they offer close readings of artifacts, structures, and art forms that other critics would dismiss or discuss only in passing. Ultimately, they reflect Trachtenberg's passion for and advocacy of the field of American studies; after absorbing his essays on photography, for example, the reader will never look at a photograph again without considering the artistic and cultural questions he raises. Recommended for larger public library and university collections, especially those offering programs in American studies. (Photographs and index not seen.)—Morris Hounion