122
Popular Culture Review
“docile bodies” rendered all the more efficient and usable upon their return to
work Monday morning. But for its proponents and detractors, its buyers and
sellers alike, turn-of-the-century Coney Island was a social crucible in which a
nervous culture tested the limits of the body in the shadow of the machine. At a
time when Americans began to take play seriously and charge recreation with
the responsibility of remedying the deleterious effects of modem life,
amusement park patrons ignored Beard’s prescription that the neurasthenic seek
“rest and change” in favor of undergoing Coney’s radical new “shock therapy.”
University of Minnesota
Chris Kamerbeek
Notes
1 Quoted in Pilat and Ranson, Sodom by the Sea, 133.
2 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” 250.
3 “Coney Island: A Case Study in Popular Culture and Technical Change” Journal o f
Popular Culture 33:2.
4 “Man and Machine.”
5 “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” 176.
6 “The Culture Industry” 137.
7 Huneker New Metropolis 162.
8Amusing the Million 72.
9 Material Unconscious 46.
10 Kasson 78.
11 “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” 175.
12 Quoted in Pilat and Ranson 214.
13 Cosmopolitan 39 July 1905.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Illuminations. Random House,
1988.
--------- “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations.
Random House, 1988.
Brown, Bill. The Material Unconscious. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1996.
Hartt, Rollin Lynde. “The Amusement Park.” Atlantic Monthly 99 May 1907.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. “The Culture Industry.” Dialectic o f
Enlightenment. New York: Continuum, 1995.
Huneker, James. New Metropolis. London: T. Wemer Laurie.
Kasson, John. Amusing the Million. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.
La Gallienne, Richard. “Human Need of Coney Island.” Cosmopolitan. 39 July 1905.
Pilat, Oliver and Jo Ranson. Sodom by the Sea. New York: Doubleday, 1941.
Snow, Robert E. and David E. Wright. “Coney Island: A Case Study in Popular Culture
and Technical Change.” Journal o f Popular Culture 33:2, 1976.