Meredith A. Bak - Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Childrens Media Culture
Here you can read online Meredith A. Bak - Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Childrens Media Culture full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: Cambridge, year: 2020, publisher: MIT Press, genre: Science / Art. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
- Book:Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Childrens Media Culture
- Author:
- Publisher:MIT Press
- Genre:
- Year:2020
- City:Cambridge
- Rating:4 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Childrens Media Culture: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Childrens Media Culture" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
The kaleidoscope, the stereoscope, and other nineteenth-century optical toys analyzed as new media of their era, provoking anxieties similar to our own about children and screens.
In the nineteenth century, the kaleidoscope, the thaumatrope, the zoetrope, the stereoscope, and other optical toys were standard accessories of a middle-class childhood, used both at home and at school. In Playful Visions, Meredith Bak argues that the optical toys of the nineteenth century were the new media of their era, teaching children to be discerning consumers of mediaand also provoking anxieties similar to contemporary worries about childrens screen time. Bak shows that optical toyswhich produced visual effects ranging from a moving image to the illusion of depthestablished and reinforced a new understanding of vision as an interpretive process. At the same time, the expansion of the middle class as well as education and labor reforms contributed to a new notion of childhood as a time of innocence and play. Modern media culture and the emergence of modern Western childhood are thus deeply interconnected.
Drawing on extensive archival research, Bak discusses, among other things, the circulation of optical toys, and the wide visibility gained by their appearance as printed templates and textual descriptions in periodicals; expanding conceptions of literacy, which came to include visual acuity; and how optical play allowed children to exercise a sense of visual mastery. She examines optical toys alongside related visual technologies including chromolithographywhich inspired both chromatic delight and chromophobia. Finally, considering the contemporary use of optical toys in advertising, education, and art, Bak analyzes the endurance of nineteenth-century visual paradigms.
Meredith A. Bak: author's other books
Who wrote Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Childrens Media Culture? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Childrens Media Culture — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Childrens Media Culture" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Font size:
Interval:
Bookmark:
Playful Visions
Optical Toys and the Emergence of Childrens Media Culture
Meredith A. Bak
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
Grateful acknowledgement is given to the Rutgers Research Council for a subvention and grant. A different version of chapter 6 was published in Early Popular Visual Culture 10, no. 2 (2012): 147167. An earlier portion of the introduction was published as The Ludic Archive: The Work of Playing with Optical Toys in Film History 16, no. 1 (2016): 116.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN: 978-0-262-53871-8
d_r0
For my parents, Pat and Vic Bak,
and for Jordan and Lars
List of Figures
Clockwise from top left: thaumatrope, phenakistoscope, zoetrope, praxinoscope. Printed in Gaston Tissandier, Popular Scientific Recreations (New York: W. H. Stelle & Co., 1883), 122126.
Edmund Evans, frontispiece from T. William Erles Childrens Toys, and Some Elementary Lessons in General Knowledge Which They Teach (London: C. Kegan Paul, 1877).
Optical toy supplement to a December 1881 issue of the Boys Own Paper. Courtesy of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter.
Paper zoetrope templates. Left: Neals Penny Games: Shadows, Models, Dissected Puzzles &c: Wheel of Life (London). Right: Lebensrad Zootrop (Germany, ca. 1890). Princeton University Library.
Flirtation thaumatropes, late nineteenth century. Are you engaged? Can I refuse? Princeton University Library.
Rebus puzzle in Mother [Goose] in Hieroglyphics (New York: Sherman and Co., 1855), 37. Princeton University Library.
Le prisonnier bird-and-cage thaumatrope. Princeton University Library.
Cat out of the Bag thaumatrope. H. G. Clark, London, ca. 1860s. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Advertisement for conversation card sets. McLoughlin Brothers, Catalogue of McLoughlin Bros. Toy Books, Games, ABC Blocks, &c. (New York: McLoughlin Brothers, 1882). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
The top of a phenakistoscope box depicting a busy social scene. Courtesy of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter.
Parties using the zoetrope. Top: Reproduced in Ruth Sunderlin Freeman and Larry Freeman, Cavalcade of Toys (Watkins Glen, NY: Century House, 1942), 245. Bottom: Caroline L. Smith, Popular Pastimes for Field and Fireside; Or, Amusements for Young and Old (Springfield, MA: Milton Bradley, 1867), 230. Courtesy of HathiTrust.
Reynauds praxinoscope theater (side view). Courtesy of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter.
Top: Milton Bradley zoetrope strips, Wood Sawyers and Chewing Gum (1867). Bottom: Phenakistoscope disks from Journal des Demoiselles (1867). Top: Courtesy of the Strong National Museum of Play, Rochester, New York. Bottom: Collections of Museo Nazionale del CinemaTurin.
Image accompanying The Story of the Inky Boys. Heinrich Hoffmann, The English Struwwelpeter, Or, Pretty Stories and Funny Pictures for Little Children, 31st ed. (London: A. N. Myers & Co., 1885), 11.
Phenakistoscope disks with full-color and silhouetted figures. Collections of Museo Nazionale del CinemaTurin.
Phenakistoscope disks with mechanical motifs. Collections of Museo Nazionale del CinemaTurin.
Fantascope (phenakistoscope) disks with green-faced figures and slithering snakes. Joseph Plateau and Rudolf Ackermann (London, 1833). Princeton University Library.
Cups and Balls from Deans New Book of Parlor Magic (London: Dean and Son, 1862). Princeton University Library.
The man turns into a skeleton when the flap is lifted. Benjamin Sands, Metamorphosis (Cadiz, Ohio, 1835). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
The kingdom asleep, two of five changes. Sleeping Beauty, Pantomime Toy Book series (New York: McLoughlin Brothers, 1882). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
Autumn, Little Showmans series (New York: McLoughlin Brothers, 1884). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
The Snake Charmer, Little Showmans series (New York: McLoughlin Brothers, 1886). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
Before and after the cigar. Naughty Girls and Boys Magic Transformations (New York: McLoughlin Brothers, 1882). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
Versions of Milton Bradleys Smashed-Up Locomotive puzzle, ca. 1890. Top: Box top with crashed train. Courtesy of Joe Seymour. Bottom: Finished puzzle. Courtesy of the Strong National Museum of Play, Rochester, New York.
Patent figures showing ships wheel-like components. Left: Charles G. Bush, US Patent 151,005 Improvement in Kaleidoscopes, May 19, 1874. Right: Robert F. Macy, US Patent 174,690 Improvement in Kaleidoscopes, March 14, 1876.
Bradleys color wheels and top. Milton Bradley, Elementary Color (Springfield, MA: Milton Bradley, 1895), 3132.
Nearly a mile straight down, and only a step, from Glacier Point (N.W.), Yosemite, Cal. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection, New York Public Library Digital Collections, New York Public Library.
Top to bottom: Wheatstone mirror stereoscope, Brewster stereoscope, Holmes stereoscope.
Street peddlers cart on Elizabeth Streetlooking north from Hester Street, New York City. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, New York Public Library Digital Collections, New York Public Library.
Tortilla Making, Salvador. Keystone view number 292. Elihu Burritt Library, Central Connecticut State University.
Visualization of stereoscopic looking, Keystone View Company. Reproduced in Anna Verona Dorris, Visual Instruction in the Public Schools (New York: Ginn, 1928), 136.
Seating charts explaining how to pass the stereoscope. Philip Emerson and William Charles Moore, Geography through the Stereoscope: Students Stereoscopic Field Guide (New York: Underwood & Underwood, 1907), xiv.
GoldieBlox and the Movie Machine, 2014.
Sony BRAVIA-Drome, 2008.
This project benefited from many kinds of support from many people. It got underway in the intellectually adventurous context of the graduate program in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Thanks to my dear friends and colleagues from that time, including Ryan Bowles Eagle, Hye Jean Chung, Anastasia Hill, Regina Longo, Rahul Mukherjee, Josh Neves, Dan Reynolds, Jeff Schieble, Nicole Starosielski, Athena Tan, and Ethan Tussey. To my wonderful dissertation committee, who supported this project even as it cascaded beyond disciplinary conventions and boundaries: Cristina Venegas, Greg Siegel, Lisa Parks, and Bishnupriya Ghosh. Peter Blooms belief in this project at the beginning, ongoing mentorship, and friendship have made all the difference. Thanks to him, I understood the importance of approaching this work with curiosity and rigor for as long as it took. I benefited from the vision and support of the film and media studies faculty at UCSB, including Jen Holt, Bhaskar Sarkar, Janet Walker, and Chuck Wolfe. My interests in optical toys were also stoked in Antonia Lants seminar on Archives, Museums, and Collections at NYU, and working in the Education Department at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City, where I met lifelong friends (and my spouse).
Font size:
Interval:
Bookmark:
Similar books «Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Childrens Media Culture»
Look at similar books to Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Childrens Media Culture. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Discussion, reviews of the book Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Childrens Media Culture and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.