Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay by Katherine Roeder (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay by Katherine Roeder Matt Johnston Roeder, Katherine. 2014. Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. $60 hc. 221 pp. Over the past few decades, scholars in a range of disciplines have increasingly directed their attention to various mass cultural productions emerging in the modern era, seeing them as worthy objects of study in their own right. Rather than adopting a Baudrillard-like perspective that tends to see mass culture as an undifferentiated accumulation of simulacra, merely brute tools or unreflecting symptoms of industrialization and commercialization, they have taken its varieties seriously as quasi-artistic forms with complex modes of expression. However, in analyzing this artistry, such studies often problematically identify a self-conscious and critical authorial voice usually associated with modernist high art forms. If such a voice is accorded to a maker of popular films or advertisements, does this identification detract from an understanding of the work as a distinctly mass cultural form? Conversely, if such a voice is ignored or denied, how can the producer of popular entertainments be understood to offer any special insight into his or her world? As Bill Brown observes in A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (2003), analyses addressed squarely at the “things” of mass culture, engaging with the objects of mass culture on their own terms, might paradoxically leave “things behind, never quite asking how they become recognizable, representable, and exchangeable to begin with” (4). Katherine Roeder’s Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay (2014) is an admirable attempt to resolve this dilemma. Best known for his strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, which ran from 1905 to 1914 (and briefly from 1924 to 1927), McCay is an acknowledged founding figure of the modern-day newspaper cartoon. But, as Roeder points out, although his work has been reissued numerous times and he invariably finds his place in cartoon and comic anthologies, “no study as of yet gives critical, art historical attention to his work” (5). More specifically, though, Roeder wants to foreground “the modernist sensibility present in McCay’s comics, in an effort to position mass culture and modernist art in conjunction” and thereby avoid “the false dichotomy between mass culture and modernism” (5). In other words, [End Page 178] her study endeavors to uncover McCay’s modernist authorial voice while simultaneously being attentive to the specificity of the conventions of the medium in which he worked and which he helped put into place. Although Roeder runs into some substantial, perhaps unavoidable, methodological problems (discussed below), her book brings a needed complexity of analysis to McCay’s cartoons in terms of their own internal mechanics and the way they intersect with other popular entertainments of the time. The study enacts a valuable model of interpretation that should be of interest to other scholars of mass culture. Many of the details of McCay’s life, including his pioneering work with not only newspaper cartoons and illustrations but also vaudeville performance and animated shorts, has been covered in John Canemaker’s Winsor McCay: His Life and Art (1987). While acknowledging this useful source and being careful to cite it when she covers similar aspects of McCay’s career, Roeder makes a substantial addition from a research standpoint by more fully exploring how McCay’s cartoons intersect with a variety of early twentieth-century entertainment and commercial forms, conveniently organized into separate chapters. Thus, one chapter is devoted to “popular amusements,” including not just vaudeville but also circus performance and amusement parks. A real strength of Roeder’s approach lies in her close analysis of McCay’s pictorial choices in individual cartoons, married to an equally sensitive examination of the emerging conventions of these “popular amusements,” including the kinds of print advertising used to promote them. (Unfortunately, the original size of the cartoons makes it difficult to reproduce them clearly, although the 8 1/2 × 11 format used in Roeder’s book minimizes this loss of detail.) A similarly nuanced chapter looks at...