Abstract
The thirty-two letters that the ’49er ‘everyman’ David E. Wilson wrote back to his family from California during the early 1850s do not speak of success, nor is the writer famous. Yellowed and faded, they tell of a partial and sudden presence, but what is made visible and present to us is what makes what is not the more pressing. This chapter approaches Wilson’s letters in four ‘frames’ to read for historical, aesthetic, epistemic and discursive invisibilities as illustrations of the ‘materiality of the invisible.’ They read the ‘potentially there’ as an aesthetics of chance in a momentary flicker of light into the relative obscurity of the many unknown participants in the very known Gold Rush.
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Johannessen, L.M. (2019). Materiality of the Invisible in David Wilson’s “California Letters”. In: Grønstad, A., Vågnes, Ø. (eds) Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16291-7_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16291-7_11
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