| I want to thank, first of all, the Temple University Faculty Senate for a semester's study leave in 1992 and for a subsequent grant-in-aid of research, without which this book would not have been possible. To colleagues in English at Temple who supported this work at various stages and to former Dean Lois Cronholm and Dean Carolyn Adams, additional thanks are due. |
| Several of these essays originated as talks, and I am most grateful to the following persons for affording me an occasion to put together my thoughts, and an audience: To Iris Hill, Director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, for inviting me to talk, early in 1992, at a conference organized to celebrate one of the great works of the century, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a work that, for years, has colored much of my own thinking about problems of representation. To Rob Kroes and the Netherlands American Studies Association for inviting me to a meeting in 1992 that was the culmination of a project at the Netherland Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS), devoted to the reception of American mass culture in Europe; and to David Nye, resident for that year at NIAS, for helping me toward an understanding of Disneyland. To Cristina Giorcelli, past president of the Italian Association for the Study of North America and to Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, who succeeded her, for inviting me to think about technology and culture at a conference in Venice (what could be more inviting?) in 1993; and to Emory Elliott, who first inspired that invitation. |
| In addition, I want to thank Mike Weaver, of Oxford, for prompting me, in 1991, to think about Lewis Hine in the context of a special issue of History of Photography on Hine. My thanks also to Gail Stavitsky, Curator at the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey, for inviting me (in 1993) to contribute an essay to the catalogue she was editing on Precisionism (appearing here as "The Artist Looks at the Machine"). |
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