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A CONFESSION: THE FILM ADDRESSED IN THIS ARTICLE, Field of Dreams, typically makes me cry when I view it. I know, however, that I am not alone in this regard. My friend and former teacher, St. Norbert College professor of humanities Tom Myers (the person responsible for first showing me the film in December 1989), typically uses Field of Dreams in conjunction with the novel that served as its inspiration, W. P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe, in a course entitled "American Ideals and Identities." When teaching the film, he tells how, when Field of Dreams played in theaters in 1989, a particular phenomenon occurred. When the film's final image-an aerial shot of a miles-long line of cars approaching a baseball field shimmering in an Iowa cornfield-faded to black and the closing credits began to role, many viewers remained in their seats, crying. I have also observed the same phenomenon years later when using the film as I teach units on magical realism in my high school American literature courses.
Perhaps those tears-those of late 1980s movie-goers, those of high school students in an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse Green Bay, Wisconsin high school, and even those to which I have confessed-are the very reason Field of Dreams makes such an apt subject for critical inquiry. That the story of Ray Kinsella, a fictional Iowa farmer who carves a baseball diamond into his cornfield at the prompting of voices only he seems to hear, characteristically elicits such a response from contemporary viewers indicates that within the film's network of symbols, archetypes, and tropes,1 something vital takes place. This deceptively simple story that utilizes baseball, regarded as the American game since its inception in the 1840s, contains something worthy of critical exploration using the tools of cultural studies.
That "something" in this seemingly American film may be illuminated, ironically, through the application of the insights on contemporary culture and philosophy made by a professor of German and comparative literature, Andreas Huyssen. Huyssen's critique and analysis of Pop Art, museum culture, cultural amnesia, temporality, and the crises inherent in modernity and postmodernity open Field of Dreams to readings that demonstrate the film's protagonist, Ray Kinsella, as both artist and curator, and his baseball field in the corn is simultaneously a...