Imagining Language in America

Imagining Language in America PDF Author: Michael P. Kramer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400862264
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
In this study of the rhetoric of American writings on language, Michael Kramer argues that the prevalent critical distinction between imaginative and nonimaginative writing is of limited theoretical use. Breaking down the artificial, disciplinary barriers between two areas of scholarly inquiry--the literature of the American Renaissance and the study of language in the United States between the Revolution and the Civil War--Kramer finds in various walks of intellectual life a broad range of writers who "imagined language" for the new experiment in self-government. Each of these men combined ideas about language with ideas about America so as to form cultural fictions, or creative renderings of the nation--its meaning, its character, and how it worked. In order to reassess American linguistic and literary nationalism, Kramer allows Noah Webster, whose influential grammatical and lexicographic works have been considered only marginal to literary history, to share the stage with more conventionally literary figures--the neglected Longfellow and the canonical Whitman. Then an essay on The Federalist and the pragmatic language-related problems faced by the founding fathers introduces revisionary analyses of two New England writers who confronted American culture and society through their Romantic critiques of language: the minister and theologian Horace Bushnell and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Imagining Language in America

Imagining Language in America PDF Author: Michael P. Kramer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400862264
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this study of the rhetoric of American writings on language, Michael Kramer argues that the prevalent critical distinction between imaginative and nonimaginative writing is of limited theoretical use. Breaking down the artificial, disciplinary barriers between two areas of scholarly inquiry--the literature of the American Renaissance and the study of language in the United States between the Revolution and the Civil War--Kramer finds in various walks of intellectual life a broad range of writers who "imagined language" for the new experiment in self-government. Each of these men combined ideas about language with ideas about America so as to form cultural fictions, or creative renderings of the nation--its meaning, its character, and how it worked. In order to reassess American linguistic and literary nationalism, Kramer allows Noah Webster, whose influential grammatical and lexicographic works have been considered only marginal to literary history, to share the stage with more conventionally literary figures--the neglected Longfellow and the canonical Whitman. Then an essay on The Federalist and the pragmatic language-related problems faced by the founding fathers introduces revisionary analyses of two New England writers who confronted American culture and society through their Romantic critiques of language: the minister and theologian Horace Bushnell and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Imagining Language

Imagining Language PDF Author: Jed Rasula
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262681315
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 644

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Book Description
When works such as Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Stein's Tender Buttons were first introduced, they went so far beyond prevailing linguistic standards that they were widely considered "unreadable," if not scandalous. Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery take these and other examples of twentieth-century avant-garde writing as the starting point for a collection of writings that demonstrates a continuum of creative conjecture on language from antiquity to the present. The anthology, which spans three millennia, generally bypasses chronology in order to illuminate unexpected congruities between seemingly discordant materials. Together, the writings celebrate the scope and prodigality of linguistic speculation in the West going back to the pre-Socratics.

Imagining Judeo-Christian America

Imagining Judeo-Christian America PDF Author: K. Healan Gaston
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022666385X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
“Judeo-Christian” is a remarkably easy term to look right through. Judaism and Christianity obviously share tenets, texts, and beliefs that have strongly influenced American democracy. In this ambitious book, however, K. Healan Gaston challenges the myth of a monolithic Judeo-Christian America. She demonstrates that the idea is not only a recent and deliberate construct, but also a potentially dangerous one. From the time of its widespread adoption in the 1930s, the ostensible inclusiveness of Judeo-Christian terminology concealed efforts to promote particular conceptions of religion, secularism, and politics. Gaston also shows that this new language, originally rooted in arguments over the nature of democracy that intensified in the early Cold War years, later became a marker in the culture wars that continue today. She argues that the debate on what constituted Judeo-Christian—and American—identity has shaped the country’s religious and political culture much more extensively than previously recognized.

Imagining Vietnam and America

Imagining Vietnam and America PDF Author: Mark Philip Bradley
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807860573
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
In this study of the encounter between Vietnam and the United States from 1919 to 1950, Mark Bradley fundamentally reconceptualizes the origins of the Cold War in Vietnam and the place of postcolonial Vietnam in the history of the twentieth century. Among the first Americans granted a visa to undertake research in Vietnam since the war, Bradley draws on newly available Vietnamese-language primary sources and interviews as well as archival materials from France, Great Britain, and the United States. Bradley uses these sources to reveal an imagined America that occupied a central place in Vietnamese political discourse, symbolizing the qualities that revolutionaries believed were critical for reshaping their society. American policymakers, he argues, articulated their own imagined Vietnam, a deprecating vision informed by the conviction that the country should be remade in America's image. Contrary to other historians, who focus on the Soviet-American rivalry and ignore the policies and perceptions of Vietnamese actors, Bradley contends that the global discourse and practices of colonialism, race, modernism, and postcolonial state-making were profoundly implicated in--and ultimately transcended--the dynamics of the Cold War in shaping Vietnamese-American relations.

Imagining America

Imagining America PDF Author: Alan M. Ball
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0585482772
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
In Imagining America, historian Alan M. Ball explores American influence in two newborn Russian states: the young Soviet Union and the modern Russian Republic. Ball deftly illustrates how in each era Russians have approached the United States with a conflicting mix of ideas—as a land to admire from afar, to shun at all costs, to emulate as quickly as possible, or to surpass on the way to a superior society. Drawing on a wide variety of sources including contemporary journals, newspapers, films, and popular songs, Ball traces the shifting Russian perceptions of American cultural, social, and political life. As he clearly demonstrates, throughout their history Russian imaginations featured a United States that political figures and intellectuals might embrace, exploit, or attack, but could not ignore.

Re-Imagining America

Re-Imagining America PDF Author: Chris Schaefer
Publisher: Hawthorn Press
ISBN: 1912480301
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This anthology covers diverse yet interconnected themes, including what it means to be a conscious witness of our times, questions about 9/11, the second Bush administration and the American Empire Project, the global economic crisis, income inequalities, personally navigating chaos and the election of Donald Trump. Here are alternative, radical ideas for social reform and tackling inequality. They offer an account of how American economic and political elites have undermined democracy and drastically weakened the U.S., while causing untold suffering in the Middle East and around the world. The author shows how we can make a lasting difference. The seeds of practical hope are nurtured for navigating chaos and for countering fear. He also suggests what we can do to re-imagine America as, "e;the promise of a new beginning."e; He calls for a new Covenant between the American people and its government that engages both conservatives and progressives

Imagining Native America in Music

Imagining Native America in Music PDF Author: Michael V Pisani
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300130732
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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Book Description
This book offers a comprehensive look at musical representations of native America from the pre colonial past through the American West and up to the present. The discussion covers a wide range of topics, from the ballets of Lully in the court of Louis XIV to popular ballads of the nineteenth century; from eighteenth-century British-American theater to the musical theater of Irving Berlin; from chamber music by Dvoˆrák to film music for Apaches in Hollywood Westerns. Michael Pisani demonstrates how European colonists and their descendants were fascinated by the idea of race and ethnicity in music, and he examines how music contributed to the complex process of cultural mediation. Pisani reveals how certain themes and metaphors changed over the centuries and shows how much of this “Indian music,” which was and continues to be largely imagined, alternately idealized and vilified the peoples of native America.

Imagining Multilingual Schools

Imagining Multilingual Schools PDF Author: Ofelia García
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
ISBN: 1853598941
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
This book brings together visions and realities of multilingual schools throughout the world so as to examine the pedagogical, socioeducational and sociopolitical issues that impact on their development and success. It considers issues of multilingual schooling in different countries and for diverse populations.

Imagining Black America

Imagining Black America PDF Author: Michael Wayne
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300206879
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
DIVScientific research has now established that race should be understood as a social construct, not a true biological division of humanity. In Imagining Black America, Michael Wayne explores the construction and reconstruction of black America from the arrival of the first Africans in Jamestown in 1619 to Barack Obama’s reelection. Races have to be imagined into existence and constantly reimagined as circumstances change, Wayne argues, and as a consequence the boundaries of black America have historically been contested terrain. He discusses the emergence in the nineteenth century—and the erosion, during the past two decades—of the notorious “one-drop rule.” He shows how significant periods of social transformation—emancipation, the Great Migration, the rise of the urban ghetto, and the Civil Rights Movement—raised major questions for black Americans about the defining characteristics of their racial community. And he explores how factors such as class, age, and gender have influenced perceptions of what it means to be black. Wayne also considers how slavery and its legacy have defined freedom in the United States. Black Americans, he argues, because of their deep commitment to the promise of freedom and the ideals articulated by the Founding Fathers, became and remain quintessential Americans—the “incarnation of America,” in the words of the civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph./div

Imagining the Nation

Imagining the Nation PDF Author: David Leiwei Li
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804741309
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
This book identifies the forces behind the explosive growth in Asian American literature. It charts its emergence and explores both the unique place of Asian Americans in American culture and what that place says about the way Americanness is defined.