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Since their emergence in the late 19th century, amusement and later theme parks have inspired artists and writers to use these leisure spaces as a setting for their work. Representations of amusement and theme parks can be found in widely different media formats including films, television, and video games, but also literature. More often than not, these depictions stray from our mental image of amusement parks being places of frolic and fun. As opposed to theme park companies’ efforts to portray their parks in an idealized manner, the work of independent artists rather introduces a grim perception of the conventionally family-friendly theme park business, rejecting sanitization and the politics of exclusion of contested themes such as crime, disaster, and death. In this seminar, we will thus examine literary depictions of theme parks in a variety of genres – including Julian Barnes’s England, England (1998) and Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! (2011) – to find out whether these texts go beyond mere iconoclasm and what they tell us about theme parks – and the world in general. |
