CONTRIBUTORS
121
from the performance unharmed” (Kasson 72). For Brown, “disaster [becomes]
the privileged mode for effecting the recreational sublime,” as “the serial
reproduction of disastrous destruction marks the moment when the amusement
industry routinizes the aleatory” (118). In situating the pleasure machine next to
Vesuvius, the amusement park constructs a historical narrative of catastrophe
that reminds the amused subject that disaster and contingency are nothing new
and that although mechanical catastroph