What the public gets to see of museums is in the exhibitions in which their holdings are presented; beyond the archival functions of conservation, categorization, and restoration, this presentation is at the heart of museums as cultural institutions. Until a few decades ago, exhibitions were predictable in format and structure. Visitors attended monographic and period exhibitions to be instructed and to enjoy themselves according to the old adage of utile dulci. Every exhibition was an episode in a traditional conception of the management of art's relation to the public. Curators were also conservators; they studied, preserved, and categorized art objects and presented a selection of these according to the knowledge acquired. The space in which the objects were presented was kept as neutral as possible, so as not to disturb the viewer.

This essay uses the example of the long‐lived and popular Burma‐Shave advertising campaign to argue that literary critics should extend their attention to the vast amounts of poetry written for advertising purposes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Burma‐Shave campaign—which featured sequences of rhyming billboards erected along highways in the United States from 1926 to 1963—not only cultivated characteristics of literary and even avantgarde writing but effectively pressured that literariness into serving the commercial marketplace. At the same time, as the campaign's reception history shows, the spirit of linguistic play and innovation at the core of Burma‐Shave's poetry unintentionally distracted consumers' attention away from the commercial message and toward the creative forces of reading and writing poetry. A striking example of popular reading practices at work, this history shows how poetry created even in the most commercial contexts might resist the commodification that many twentieth‐century poets and critics feared. (MC)

Anglo‐Saxonists often explore connections between The Dream of the Rood and two ritual objects, the silver Brussels cross and the sandstone Ruthwell monument, inscribed with verses related to the poem. This essay offers a new perspective on these artifacts, elucidating not a historical narrative linking them but rather an Anglo‐Saxon poetics made visible in their juxtaposition. It argues that these three manifestations reveal a dialectic of inscription and performance in Anglo‐Saxon poetics. Reading the familiar Old English text through J. H. Prynne's “A Note on Metal” (1968), which imagines dialectics both of metal and stone and of inscription and performance, the essay also interrogates certain divisions between premodern and modern aesthetic traditions. Theories of media, performance, and inscriptionality help to stage an interdisciplinary analysis of The Dream of the Rood and to show that its poetics originate in the formal frameworks of Anglo‐Saxon material culture. (SC)

Simon Pokagon's writings exemplify a complex process of linguistic‐material worldmaking. His birch‐bark booklets bring together multiple cultural traditions, including nineteenth‐century tourist art, traditional Algonquian writing, and a long history of writing on bark that dates to the early history of writing itself. Neither purely things nor purely texts, these documents interweave nature and culture in such a way that Pokagon can be said to be engaging in a process of naturalization whereby the cultural is presented as a feature of nature. To promote his reformist agenda, Pokagon capitalizes on a rich cache of naturalist symbolism that was of particularly high cultural value in Victorian America. What is perhaps most notable about Pokagon's use of naturalization is that he makes this linguistic trope into a materialist discourse. (JB)

This essay considers the instability of the typewriter as a writing machine and as an object within the media history of the twentieth century, examining how the typewriter keyboard and the transcriptive protocols of the modern office materially shape writing practice. The standardization of the typewriter system produces a textual aesthetics of error and uncertainty rather than of mechanized circumscription. Andy Warhol's a is a novel whose mode of production explores the limits of the typewriter's transcriptive uncertainty. Written by a distributed network of typists and inundated with errors and ambiguities, a offers a radically defamiliarizing representation of how the typewriter system opens new pathways of authorship, embodiment, and literary production. Drawing on a's aesthetic experimentation, this essay argues that the localized, idiosyncratic, yet often suppressed disruptions produced by the typewriter suggest the possibility of an alternative to linear, teleological conceptions of media history. (PB)

This essay examines the underappreciated work of the Hollywood scenarist and humor writer Anita Loos. In general, Loos is known separately to film scholars, as a prominent writer of silent films, and to historians of American culture, as an important twentieth‐century humorist. However, her film‐writing career and her work in the theory of film writing influenced the narrative structure and assumptions of her fiction. Through readings of Loos's three early novels, the essay demonstrates how the humor and complex cinematic structure of these texts depend on a stark text‐image divide that stems directly from her ideas about writing for silent film. Looking at Loos's fiction in the light of her intimate familiarity with the film industry provides new insight into dialogues about high and popular culture and into the engagement of modernism with cinema. (BEH)

Over the past decade the critical study of museums has matured, as the number of books, journals, and conferences devoted to all facets of museum studies has dramatically increased. While many approaches to the topic are possible, I would like to examine how museums in Asia function in religious ways and how religious sites, such as temples, have come to function as museums. Pursuing this tack might seem puzzling, or even controversial, to those familiar with Theodor W. Adorno's now well-known essay inveighing against the immuration of objects in museums, in which he emphasizes the unpleasant overtones of the German word museal (“museum-like”), used to describe “objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying…. Museums are like the family sepulchers of works of art” (175). Adorno's essay articulates a sentiment about museums that was born in the past and has persisted down to the present. We hear echoes of Adorno's disdain and feelings of dehumanization, for example, in James Boon's recent essay “Why Museums Make Me Sad,” which expresses his own melancholic reaction to museums. If museums are merely mausoleums where dead objects are housed, how could they possibly function as religious sites? How could their contents ever provide religious inspiration?

I am often asked how a Victorianist came to write a book about museum exhibitions and the British quest for and Traffic in pre-Columbian antiquities. When I began, I had no formal training in these subjects and thus little that would count as a theory or method. Of course, as my interest grew I read as much of the scholarly literature as I could: critical studies of important collectors; analyses of exhibitionary practice and museum administration; the history of the museum from cabinets of curiosity to the virtual collections of the present. Yet much of what I learned in writing my own book, Informal Empire, was pieced together, often haltingly, one fragment at a time through a deep immersion in a rich archive. Sensing I was on new ground, I rejected any overarching schema, adhering to the perhaps counterintuitive notion that the best way to make the archive speak was to resist imposing a theory on it and instead to allow the shape of the materials themselves to suggest ways of proceeding. To illustrate both the advantages and the liabilities of this method, which I employed while working on nineteenth-century ethnography collections, I have chosen here to reconstruct the key steps of the scholarly journey that took me from the library to the world of museums and archives. I offer this reflection on critical practice first as an exercise in demystification and second as an encouragement to anyone, but especially students, who might wish to travel similar paths.

Walking Through an Exhibit Takes Time: Time to Navigate the Museum Building, Time to Encounter Objects on Display That Witnessed times long past, or time to reflect on the relations among the presented past, the experienced present, and an imaginative future. Eliciting historical and aesthetic affect, museums are ineluctably bound up with temporalities—of viewing, of display, and of representation.

A set of major old-master paintings looted from Spanish Royal Collections, including important canvases by Velázquez (fig. 1), Correggio, and others, was discovered in Joseph Bonaparte's baggage, abandoned along with the rest of his property as he fled from the Battle of Vitoria, which ended his tumultuous five-year reign as king of Spain in 1813. Years later the duke of Wellington offered to return the collection to the restored monarch. But Ferdinand VII—who owed his throne to the duke's victories—refused to take it. What in its day would have been called the return to legitimacy, the restoration of the Bourbon line after the defeat of Napoléon, did not result in the restitution of Napoleonic loot. The works remain at Apsley House, the duke's home in London, where they have been on display in the Waterloo Gallery since 1819, a usurper's booty transformed by its history into an emblem of royal generosity, gratitude, and military prowess (fig. 2). The collection is now part of the museum officially established at the duke's residence in 1947, following another European military cataclysm in which Britain prevailed.

This Essay Took Shape in an Encounter with Bones: With Curving, Darkened Skeletons Propped on Shelves or Hanging Suspended in white cases. They are displays of tuberculosis, scoliosis, and osteomalacia (rickets) in the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh (figs. 1 and 2). With bowed bones and spinal columns twisted into seemingly impossible shapes, the skeletons give the fantastic illusion of having been caught in mid-swirl in their cases, frail objects blown by invisible winds. A few of the bones of the feet at some point dropped off one of the skeletons with rickets. They were reattached with small and now faded ribbons.

In what is of late one of the most quoted passages in American Letters, W. E. B. Dubois describes the Double Consciousness that makes the Negro “a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world” (5). Paradoxically, given the visual logic of his accounting, the very power of DuBois's notion has obscured the incident whose recounting generates it. Describing his boyhood initiation into racial self-knowledge in his early life “as a little thing, away up in the hills of New England … in a wee wooden school-house,” DuBois focuses on a moment in which he and his schoolmates splurge on “gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange.” The social ritual is “merry” until an authoritative onlooker, a “tall girl, a newcomer,” “refused my card— refused it peremptorily, with a glance” (4). At this precise moment, we're meant to believe, the boy's individualist faith in character as destiny is “forever shattered” (Lewis 33). With the girl's refusal, “the shadow swept across me”; “it dawned upon me that I was different from the others, … shut out from their world by a vast veil” (DuBois 4).

Among other things, photographs are deposits of social relations. To put it another way, they are social relations temporarily hardened into images—figured, captured, frozen. The most obvious of those relations, that between the photographer and the sitter, has been a regular subject of inquiry for art history. Acknowledging but leaving that kind of interest aside for the moment, we may explore other sorts of relations in and around a photograph and pursue a line of inquiry more in keeping with visual culture. Here's a quick example.

Mimic (1982) is an early and much discussed picture by the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, with the discussion centering largely on two topics: its subject matter and its setting (fig. 1). The subject is racism, and in this regard Mimic is “characteristic,” as Wall's best critic, Michael Fried, has observed, “of Wall's engagement in his art of the 1980s with social issues” (Why 235). Subsequently, as Fried also notes, “Wall has tended to distance himself from the overtly political concerns that are front and center in works like Mimic” (64). Indeed, in recent interviews Wall has insisted on this distance, remarking, for example, that “[t]wenty-five years ago I thought subject matter had some significance in itself” and going on to say that “Mimic was about racism in some way, about hostile gestures between races, but I'm glad the picture itself is good and it doesn't need that to be successful. Now I try to eliminate any additional subject matter—those things are for other people, they're not my problem” (Denes). His point here is not exactly that Mimic isn't antiracist—actually, its antiracism is so obvious and uncontroversial that a recent critic, Régis Michel, has complained that it “verges on political correctness” (63). The idea is rather that the success of the picture—the fact that it's a “good” picture—has nothing to do with those politics. Which leaves open the question of whether the picture's success has nothing to do with any politics or nothing to do with the particular politics of antiracism. In other words, is the picture's success independent of politics as such? Or is there a politics of the good picture?

If I were to choose a single image to represent the interest and challenge of working with visual materials, I think it would be the rather outlandish bit of kitsch in figure 1 and not a more attractive or impressive example. Part of the appeal for me, I would have to admit, is the visual humor of the situation, for this image of Oscar Wilde appears on a collectible cigar card, one that adult smokers were apparently meant to save, just as young baseball fans now save and cherish the cards of their heroes. In fact, this must have been one of the first such cards, which had only been in use for a few years when it appeared sometime around 1882. The novelty of the enterprise of collectible cards might explain Wilde's unexpected appearance here, where it is surprising to find a literary subject.

When Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in “Experience” (1844) that “men seem to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual retreating and reference,” he means that we see through our current moment by looking forward. The “art” that Emerson evokes to describe the restlessness and expansiveness of the nineteenth century is the art of perspective: we gain perspective, in other words, when we project for ourselves an image of the world in which everything takes shape in relation to something else. “All our days are so unprofitable while they pass,” says Emerson, because we orient our present toward our prospects; taking the long view “degrade[s] today” by distancing us from where we are. We retreat from our momentary positions to be part of the big picture. We want to stay relevant, but Emerson looks askance at our constant need to look toward the emerging pattern of events. “The men ask, ‘What's the news?‘” he says, “as if the old were so bad” (472).