The subject of property : race, prosthesis, and possession in American culture, 1865-1927 / Stephen Michael Best.

Format:

Book

Manuscript

Microformat

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Best, Stephen Michael.

Contributor:

Baker, Houston A., Jr., 1943- advisor.

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Penn dissertations--English.

English--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--English.

English--Penn dissertations.

Physical Description:

ix, 436 pages ; 29 cm

Production:

1997.

Summary:

In White-Smith Music Co. vs. Apollo Co. (1908), the United States Supreme Court rules that player pianos ("pianolas," for short) perform no activity against which a musical composer might reasonably seek copyright protection. The Constitution's copyright guarantees, the Court reasons, govern only "the concrete and not ... the abstract right of property"--protect "the tangible thing," or "copy," which, distinct from "the intellectual conception," requires (and presumes) the presence of "a written or printed record of it in intelligible notation." Music, a clearly intangible thing, can only become tangible, receive protection, and satisfy the standard of intelligibility when transformed into a writing. These conditions do not obtain, it concludes, with the pianola.

The Court's dilemma (that of fixing intangible sound as a property) arises from the novel forms of property made available by the inventions of the late-nineteenth century--phonographs and player pianos introduce the ephemeral property of sound; cinema transforms an ever-elusive motion, a recognized literary property, as well as a carnate yet intangible "personality" into less familiar (and, hence, legally suspect) forms of cinematic property. How is the acoustic sign, necessarily ephemeral and intangible, to be "fixed" as property? How is motion, a temporal as well as spatial phenomena that seems incapable of clear demarcation, to be turned into a recognizable property of the medium of film? Etienne-Jules Marey's claim that motion expresses une langue inconnue of the human body, one captured, in the end, by his methode graphique, betrays a shared set of mechanisms between legal semiotics and technological form. Similarly, Thomas Edison's claim that his phonograph is best suited to "letter-writing ... dictation" and the reproduction of books anticipates the Supreme Court's dilemma, as well as its efficacious legal mechanisms and rhetoric.

There are numerous ways in which the narrative and textual forms of early cinema elucidate the Court's dilemma in White-Smith. The various turn-of-the-century versions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin mark significant steps in the transformation of literary property into cinematic property; the late-nineteenth century products of the earliest film production companies struggle to give shape to motion and the body's langue inconnue; the event of history is turned into cinematic property in D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915); and recorded sound marks a pivotal shift in cinematic practice in The Jazz Singer (1927). Importantly, each of these moments deals, via a number of explicit means, with blackness. The Subject of Property looks to these and other texts for evidence of the problem (and efforts toward the resolution) of the complex discrepancy between the material and the immaterial. This dissertation argues that, through rhetorical, legal, and structural means, blackness figures the breach between the corporeal, visible, and tangible, on the one hand, and the incorporeal, invisible, and intangible, on the other, lending to the latter properties present in the former.

Notes:

Adviser: Houston A. Baker, Jr.

Thesis (Ph.D. in English) -- University of Pennsylvania, 1997.

Includes bibliographical references.

Local Notes:

University Microfilms order no.: 98-14820.

OCLC:

187456360