Trains, Culture, and Mobility Riding the Rails

by Fraser, Benjamin; Spalding, Steven D.; Collins, Samuel Gerald; Divall, Colin; Grunow, Tristan R.; Masterson-Algar, Araceli; Medcalf, Alexander; Morka, Agata; Shimoda, Hiraku; Shin, Hiroki; Soppelsa, Peter; Wilken, Rowan

• ISBN13: 9780739167496
• ISBN10: 0739167499
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-12-30
• Publisher: Lexington Books

Summary

Trains, Culture and Mobility: Riding the Rails goes beyond textual representations of rail travel to engage an impressive range of political, sociological and urban theory. Taken together, these essays highlight the complexity of the modern experience of train mobility, and its salient relation to a number of cultural discourses. Incorporating traditionally marginal areas of cultural production such as graffiti, museums, architecture or even plunging into the social experience of travel inside the traincar itself, each essay constitutes an attempt to work from the act of riding the train toward questions of much larger significance. Crisscrossing cultures from the New World and Old, from East and West, these essays share a common preoccupation with the way in which trains and railway networks have mapped and re-mapped the contours of both cities and states in the modern period. Bringing together individual and large-scale social practices, this volume traces out the cultural implciations of SRiding the Rails.

Author Biography

Benjamin Fraser is assistant professor of Spanish at the College of Charleston, South Carolina. He is currently the managing editor of the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, the author of the monographs Disability Studies and Spanish Culture, Henri Lefebvre and the Spanish Urban Experience, and Encounters with Bergson(ism) in Spain, as well as the editor and translator of Deaf History and Culture in Spain. Steven D. Spalding is assistant professor of French at Christopher Newport University. He has published on topics related to French literary and cultural studies in a number of scholarly journals and collections.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction Riding the Rails: Cultures of Trains	p. ix
Speed and Vision
Cultures of Speed and Conservative Modernity: Representations of Speed in Britain's Railway Marketing	p. 3
The Speed of Signs: Train Graffiti, Cultural Production, and the Mobility of the Urban in France and Spain	p. 27
On Passengers
"What to Wear and Where to Go": Picturing the Modern Consumer on the Great Western Railway 1921-1939	p. 61
Seen from a Carriage: A Rhythmanalytic Study of Train Travel and Mediation	p. 91
City Networks
Urban Railways, Industrial Infrastructure, and the Paris Cityscape, 1870-1914	p. 117
Subways and Cell Phones: Seoul as a Network City	p. 145
Inside the Station
Brief Encounters and Lasting Impressions: Contemporary Train Station Architecture	p. 171
Digging Madrid: A Descent into Madrid's Subway Museum, Anden 0 [Platform 0]	p. 205
Shifting States
Trains, Modernity, and State Formation in Meiji Japan	p. 235
"The Super-Express of Our Dreams" and Other Mythologies about Postwar Japan	p. 263
Index	p. 291
Notes on Contributors	p. 307
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