Welcome to Patrick Vert's Thesis (B.A.Honours, Interdisciplinary Studies).
20th Century's Narrative of Acceleration:
Mobility, Spacetime, and the Railroad in North America.
Acknowledgements: Prof. Rob Shields (supervisor); Prof. Charles Gordon
(secondary reader); Alanna MacDougal (peer-editor),
I.
Historical Overview of the North American Railroad.
There was even railway time observed in clocks, as if the sun itself
had given in.
Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, 1848.
(i)
industrialism
...
..4
(ii)
Modernity
...9
(iii)
Colonizing Landscape.
..
12
II.
Comparative Analysis: Auto-Culture.
Oh the passenger. He rides and he rides. He sees things from under glass. He looks through his window side. He sees the things he knows are his.
He sees the bright and hollow sky. He sees the city's ripped backsides. He sees the stars are out tonight. He sees the winding ocean drive.
And everything was made for you and me.
Iggy Pop, The Passenger, 1977.
(i)
Rise of the Automobile
14
(ii)
Auto vs. Rail: publicity wars
....16
(iii)
Colonizing Temporality
....18
III.
Acceleration.
(i)
Vertical Integration of Transport and
Communications
.......
19
(ii)
Urbanism
.21
(iii)
Colonizing the Future.
..
29
IV.
Negotiating Spacetime.
Time
and space died yesterday. We
already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent
speed.
F.T. Marinetti, Manisfesto of Futurism, 1909
(i)
Vision
and Space
.
35
(ii)
Motion and Perception
.39
(iii)
Presence
and Duration: Jim Jarmuschs Dead Man.
......45
(iv)
Inertia and Interface.
....48
V.
Colonizing the Self
Along
the iron veins that traverse the frame of our country, beat and flow the fiery
pulses of its exertion, hotter and faster every hour. All vitality is
concentrated through those throbbing arteries into the central cities
John
Ruskin, The Lamp of Memory, 1849.
(i)
Network
Heterogeneity
.
54
(ii)
The Postmodern Subject
62
(iii)
Summary: The Narrative of Acceleration.
.
.....63
VI.
Conclusions.
The
base banner under which they fight, bears the motto, Expediency is our God!
RAILROADS are our politics!
Robert
Jackson MacGeorge, editor Streetsville Weekly Review, 1854.
..........
............................................................................................67
VII.
Sources.
....
.........................................................................................69.
~~embedded photos:
--Via Rail promotional photos
--Robert Crumb's "A Short History of America
--Mollar International's Flying Car.
--Dead Man poster.
copyright 2003 by Patrick Vert
