Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces

Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces PDF Author: Andrew Keller Estes
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9401208999
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
In Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces Andrew Estes examines ideas about the land as they emerge in the later fiction of this important contemporary author. McCarthy's texts are shown to be part of larger narratives about American environments. Against the backdrop of the emerging discipline of environmental criticism, Estes investigates the way space has been constructed in U.S. American writing. Cormac McCarthy is found to be heir to diametrically opposed concepts of space: as something Americans embraced as either overwhelmingly positive and reinvigorating or as rather negative and threatening. McCarthy's texts both replicate this binary thinking about American environments and challenge readers to reconceive traditional ways of seeing space. Breaking new ground as to how literary landscapes and spaces are critically assessed this study seeks to examine the many detailed descriptions of the physical world in McCarthy on their own terms. Adding to so-called 'second wave' environmental criticism, it reaches beyond an earlier, limited understanding of the environment as 'nature' to consider both natural landscapes and built environments. Chapter one discusses the field of environmental criticism in reference to McCarthy while chapter two offers a brief narrative of conceptions of space in the U.S. Chapter three highlights trends in McCarthy criticism. Chapters four through eight provide close readings of McCarthy's later novels, from Blood Meridian to The Road.

Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces

Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces PDF Author: Andrew Keller Estes
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9401208999
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces Andrew Estes examines ideas about the land as they emerge in the later fiction of this important contemporary author. McCarthy's texts are shown to be part of larger narratives about American environments. Against the backdrop of the emerging discipline of environmental criticism, Estes investigates the way space has been constructed in U.S. American writing. Cormac McCarthy is found to be heir to diametrically opposed concepts of space: as something Americans embraced as either overwhelmingly positive and reinvigorating or as rather negative and threatening. McCarthy's texts both replicate this binary thinking about American environments and challenge readers to reconceive traditional ways of seeing space. Breaking new ground as to how literary landscapes and spaces are critically assessed this study seeks to examine the many detailed descriptions of the physical world in McCarthy on their own terms. Adding to so-called 'second wave' environmental criticism, it reaches beyond an earlier, limited understanding of the environment as 'nature' to consider both natural landscapes and built environments. Chapter one discusses the field of environmental criticism in reference to McCarthy while chapter two offers a brief narrative of conceptions of space in the U.S. Chapter three highlights trends in McCarthy criticism. Chapters four through eight provide close readings of McCarthy's later novels, from Blood Meridian to The Road.

American Spaces of Conversion

American Spaces of Conversion PDF Author: Andrea Knutson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195370929
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
This study examines how the concept of conversion and specifically the legacy of the doctrine of preparation, as articulated in Puritan Reform theology as transplanted to the Massachusetts Bay colony, remained a vital cultural force shaping developments in American literature and philosophy. It begins by discussing the testimonies of conversion collected by the Puritan minister Thomas Shepard, which reveal an active pursuit of belief by prospective church members occurring at the intersection of experience, perception, doctrine, affections, and intellect. This pursuit of belief, codified in the morphology of conversion, and originally undertaken by the Puritans as a way to conceptualize redemption in a fallen state, established the epistemological contours for what Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James would theorize as a conductive imaginary-consciousness imagined as a space organized or that self-organizes around the dynamics and tensions between abstract truth and concrete realities, certainty and uncertainty, and perception and objects perceived. Each writer offers a picture of consciousness as both a receptive and active force responsible for translating the effects of experience and generating original relations with self, community, and God. This study demonstrates that each writer "ministered" to their audiences by articulating a method or habit of mind in order to foster an individual's continual efforts at regeneration, conceived by all the subjects of this study as a matter of converting semantics, that is, a dedicated willingness to seeking out personal and cultural renewal through the continual process of attaching new meaning and value to ordinary contexts.

Transnational American Spaces

Transnational American Spaces PDF Author: Tina Powell
Publisher: Vernon Press
ISBN: 1648894380
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
As people migrate, they face the need to create a stable space within a disconcertingly unfamiliar environment. This experience of creating new spaces opens opportunities for positive transcultural connections; however, these opportunities can also serve as the disciplining of the migrant body. This text focuses on the movement of bodies in transnational communities and the formation of domestic and communal spaces that provide respite from migratory paths, negotiate transnational relationships, or establish a new home. In doing so, we explore literary texts that question, challenge, and deepen our understanding of the experience of migration through the use of space and place. The texts in question examine three levels of transnational spaces: intimate spaces such as family, personal growth, or sexuality; inherited spaces reflected in generational conflicts, religious identity, and inherited histories; and national spaces that look at issues of broader national identities. The texts we examine engage with transnational communities within the United States, and the ways in which narratives reimagine new space to negotiate change and create new norms. These narratives can sometimes bridge both cultures or can sometimes result in a violent sense of displacement. Each chapter problematizes a different aspect of transcultural adaptation, and the geographic ties of each community focus reflect the multicultural reality of the U.S., with connections to Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America.

British Atlantic, American Frontier

British Atlantic, American Frontier PDF Author: Stephen John Hornsby
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781584654278
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
A pioneering work in Atlantic studies that emphasizes a transnational approach to the past.

Trading Spaces

Trading Spaces PDF Author: Emma Hart
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022665981X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Looks at the shift from the marketplace as an actual place to a theoretical idea and how this shaped the early American economy. When we talk about the economy, “the market” is often just an abstraction. While the exchange of goods was historically tied to a particular place, capitalism has gradually eroded this connection to create our current global trading systems. In Trading Spaces, Emma Hart argues that Britain’s colonization of North America was a key moment in the market’s shift from place to idea, with major consequences for the character of the American economy. Hart’s book takes in the shops, auction sites, wharves, taverns, fairs, and homes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America—places where new mechanisms and conventions of trade arose as Europeans re-created or adapted continental methods to new surroundings. Since those earlier conventions tended to rely on regulation more than their colonial offspring did, what emerged in early America was a less-fettered brand of capitalism. By the nineteenth century, this had evolved into a market economy that would not look too foreign to contemporary Americans. To tell this complex transnational story of how our markets came to be, Hart looks back farther than most historians of US capitalism, rooting these markets in the norms of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. Perhaps most important, this is not a story of specific commodity markets over time but rather is a history of the trading spaces themselves: the physical sites in which the grubby work of commerce occurred and where the market itself was born.

American Sanctuary

American Sanctuary PDF Author: Louis P. Nelson
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253218225
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
This volume examines a diverse set of spaces and buildings seen through the lens of popular practice and belief to shed light on the complexities of sacred space in America. Contributors explore how dedication sermons document shifting understandings of the meetinghouse in early 19th-century Connecticut; the changes in evangelical church architecture during the same century and what that tells us about evangelical religious life; the impact of contemporary issues on Catholic church architecture; the impact of globalization on the construction of traditional sacred spaces; the urban practice of Jewish space; nature worship and Central Park in New York; the mezuzah and domestic sacred space; and, finally, the spiritual aspects of African American yard art.

Spaces of Law in American Foreign Relations

Spaces of Law in American Foreign Relations PDF Author: Daniel S. Margolies
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820338710
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
In the late nineteenth century the United States oversaw a great increase in extraterritorial claims, boundary disputes, extradition controversies, and transborder abduction and interdiction. In this sweeping history of the underpinnings of American empire, Daniel S. Margolies offers a new frame of analysis for historians to understand how novel assertions of legal spatiality and extraterritoriality were deployed in U.S. foreign relations during an era of increased national ambitions and global connectedness. Whether it was in the Mexican borderlands or in other hot spots around the globe, Margolies shows that American policy responded to disputes over jurisdiction by defining the space of law on the basis of a strident unilateralism. Especially significant and contested were extradition regimes and the exceptions carved within them. Extradition of fugitives reflected critical questions of sovereignty and the role of the state in foreign affair during the run-up to overseas empire in 1898. Using extradition as a critical lens, Spaces of Law in American Foreign Relations examines the rich embeddedness of questions of sovereignty, territoriality, legal spatiality, and citizenship and shows that U.S. hegemonic power was constructed in significant part in the spaces of law, not simply through war or trade.

American Urbanist

American Urbanist PDF Author: Richard K. Rein
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1642831700
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
"William H. Whyte's curiosity compelled him to question the status quo--whether helping to make Fortune Magazine essential reading for business leaders, warning of "groupthink" in his bestseller The Organization Man, or standing up for Jane Jacobs as she advocated for the vitality of city life and public space. This compelling biography sheds light on Whyte's bold way of thinking, ripe for rediscovery at a time when we are reshaping our communities into places of opportunity and empowerment for all citizens" -- Backcover.

Free Spaces

Free Spaces PDF Author: Sara Margaret Evans
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
What are the environments, the public spaces, in which ordinary people become participants in the complex, ambiguous, engaging conversation about democracy: participators in governance rather than spectators or complainers, victims or accomplices? What are the roots, not simply of movements against oppression, but also of those democratic social movements which both enlarge the opportunities for participation and enhance people's ability to participate in the public world? In Free Spaces, Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte argue for a new understanding of the foundations for democratic politics by analyzing the settings in which people learn to participate in democracy. In their new Introduction, the authors link the concept of free spaces to recent theoretical discussions about community, public life, civil society, and social movements.

Necessary Spaces

Necessary Spaces PDF Author: Saundra Murray Nettles
Publisher: IAP
ISBN: 1623963338
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
In Necessary Spaces: Exploring the Richness of African American Childhood in the South, Saundra Murray Nettles takes the reader on a journey into neighborhood networks of learning at different times and places. Using autobiographical accounts, Nettles discusses the informal instructional practices of community “coaches” from the perspective of African American adults who look back on their childhood learning experiences in homes, libraries, city blocks, schools, churches, places of business, and nature. These eyewitness accounts reveal "necessary spaces,” the metaphor Nettles uses to describe seven recurring experiences that converge with contemporary notions of optimal black child development: connection, exploration, design, empowerment, resistance, renewal, and practice. Nettles weaves the personal stories with social scientific theory and research and practical accounts of community-based initiatives to illuminate how local communities contributed human, built, and natural resources to support children’s achievement in schools. The inquiry offers a timely and accessible perspective on how community involvement for children can be developed utilizing the grassroots efforts of parents, children, and other neighborhood residents; expertise from personnel in schools, informal institutions (such as libraries and museums); and other sectors interested in disparities in education, health, and the quality of physical settings. Grounded in the environmental memories of African American childhood, Necessary Spaces offers a culturally relevant view of civic participation and sustainable community development at the local level. Educational researchers and policy makers, pre-service and in-service teachers, and people who plan for and work with children and youth in neighborhoods will find this book an engaging look at possibilities for the social organization of educational resources. Qualitative researchers will find a model for writing personal scholarly essays that use the personal to inform larger issues of policy and practice. In Necessary Spaces, local citizens in neighborhoods across the United States will find stories that resonate with their own experiences, stimulate their recollections, and inform and inspire their continuing efforts to create brighter futures for children and communities.