Worlds of Wonder: National Parks, Zoos, Disney, and the Genealogies of Wonder in U.S. Culture.
Year: 2014
Type: dissertation
Abstract: “Worlds of Wonder: National Parks, Zoos, Disney, and the Genealogies of Wonder in U.S. Culture” is an environmental cultural study that focuses on three institutional contexts and histories shaped by wonder rhetoric. These sites ground my articulation of three genealogies of wonder, based in (1) travel and the foundation of the U.S. national parks; (2) histories of scientific collecting and zoos; and (3) technological innovations and Disney attractions. Wonder, I argue, is not a conceptual given. It is a historically shaped emotion and discourse that has become a major discursive force for thinking about U.S. environments. Wonder has a distinctive history in the U.S., and I show that over the course of the nineteenth century, it was first used as a shifting signifier to describe a range of sights and experiences; it then became a codified rhetoric referring to particular kinds of landscapes and experiences that were, in turn, commodified through tourism. In tracing the codification of wonder and its institutional uses, “Worlds of Wonder” offers a cultural and literary analysis grounded in readings of a varied set of textual and visual media. Focusing on specific moments in institutional history, I analyze archival materials such as Northern Pacific Railway’s Wonderland guidebooks and advertising campaign; visual and textual rhetorical practices of travel narratives by Washington Irving, Alexis de Tocqueville, Frances Trollope, John Charles Fremont, Edwin Bryant, Samuel Bowles, Theodore Dreiser; and material sites, such as exhibits at zoos in Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, San Diego, the Bronx, and theme park attractions such as Disney California Adventure’s “World of Color”. Each chapter examines wonder in the context of several interdisciplinary fields: chapter one locates wonder in environmental history and American literary and cultural studies; chapter two treats wonder and affect studies, animal studies, and zoo history; and chapter three contributes to Disney studies and technological histories. These interdisciplinary contexts ground my argument that national parks, zoos, and Disney theme parks create and deploy wonder discourses in the making of “experience economies” that produce collective wonder practices and define ways of participating in the nation, ecological worlds, and globalized corporate environments.
Author: Genevieve Creedon
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W320848190