Lincoln's Smile and Other Enigmas
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A new assemblage of masterly essays from a foremost scholar of American history and culture
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 the daguerreotypes that entranced Americans from the start (and that Hawthorne made much of in The House of Seven Gables) to literary texts of which he is a peerless interpreter: Howell's novels, Horatio Alger's stories, Huckleberry Finn, the cityscapes of Walt Whitman and Stephen Crane. In his exploration of the ways that nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century writers tried to make sense of the modern American city he also addresses subjects as diverse as Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the early works of Lewis Mumford. The celebrated author of Reading American Photographs concludes his important new book with "readings" not only of the photographs of Walker Evans, Wright Morris, and Eugene Smith, but of the city images of film noir.
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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.
