Locating American Studies

Locating American Studies PDF Author: Lucy Maddox
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801860560
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
This collection of 17 esays first printed in "American Quarterly", the journal of the American Studies Association. To mark the Association's 50th anniversary in 1998, the editor has brought together works by a group of scholars which she believes provide a window into the history and evolution of the practice of American studies. Each essay, originally published between 1950 and 1996 is accompanied by a commentary in which a scholar from a related field provides critical information for understanding the continuing importance of the work to the American Studies field. Contributors include: Gene Wise; Henry Nash Smith; Barbara Welter; Alexander Saxton; and Kevin Mumford.

Locating American Studies

Locating American Studies PDF Author: Lucy Maddox
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801860560
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 458

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collection of 17 esays first printed in "American Quarterly", the journal of the American Studies Association. To mark the Association's 50th anniversary in 1998, the editor has brought together works by a group of scholars which she believes provide a window into the history and evolution of the practice of American studies. Each essay, originally published between 1950 and 1996 is accompanied by a commentary in which a scholar from a related field provides critical information for understanding the continuing importance of the work to the American Studies field. Contributors include: Gene Wise; Henry Nash Smith; Barbara Welter; Alexander Saxton; and Kevin Mumford.

American Studies

American Studies PDF Author: Janice A. Radway
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405113510
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 639

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Book Description
American Studies is a vigorous, bold account of the changes in the field of American Studies over the last thirty-five years. Through this set of carefully selected key essays by an editorial board of expert scholars, the book demonstrates how changes in the field have produced new genealogies that tell different histories of both America and the study of America. Charts the evolution of American Studies from the end of World War II to the present day by showcasing the best scholarship in this field An introductory essay by the distinguished editorial board highlights developments in the field and places each essay in its historical and theoretical context Explores topics such as American politics, history, culture, race, gender and working life Shows how changing perspectives have enabled older concepts to emerge in a different context

Locating American Art

Locating American Art PDF Author: Cynthia Fowler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351559818
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
How does museum location shape the interpretation of an art object by critics, curators, art historians, and others? To what extent is the value of a work of art determined by its location? Providing a close examination of individual works of American art in relation to gallery and museum location, this anthology presents case studies of paintings, sculpture, photographs, and other media that explore these questions about the relationship between location and the prescribed meaning of art. It takes an alternate perspective in that it provides in-depth analysis of works of art that are less well known than the usual American art suspects, and in locations outside of art museums in major urban cultural centers. By doing so, the contributors to this volume reveal that such a shift in focus yields an expanded and more complex understanding of American art. Close examinations are given to works located in small and mid-sized art museums throughout the United States, museums that generally do not benefit from the resources afforded by more powerful cultural establishments such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Works of art located at institutions other than art museums are also examined. Although the book primarily focuses on paintings, other media created from the Colonial Period to the present are considered, including material culture and craft. The volume takes an inclusive approach to American art by featuring works created by a diverse group of artists from canonical to lesser-known ones, and provides new insights by highlighting the regional and the local.

Transcendental Resistance

Transcendental Resistance PDF Author: Johannes Voelz
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 1584659483
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
A timely and engrossing critique of the New Americanists

Engaging Heritage, Engaging Communities

Engaging Heritage, Engaging Communities PDF Author: Bryony Onciul
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783271655
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
International, multi-disciplinary perspectives on the key question of community engagement in theory and practice in a diverse range of heritage settings. Across the global networks of heritage sites, museums, and galleries, the importance of communities to the interpretation and conservation of heritage is increasingly being recognised. Yet the very term "meaningful community engagement" betrays a myriad of contrary approaches and understandings. Who is a community? How can they engage with heritage and why would they want to? How do communities and heritage professionals perceive one another? What does itmean to "engage"? These questions unsettle the very foundations of community engagement and indicate a need to unpick this important but complex trend. Engaging Heritage, Engaging Communities critically explores the latest debates and practices surrounding community collaboration. By examining the different ways in which communities participate in heritage projects, the book questions the benefits, costs and limitations of community engagement. Whether communities are engaging through innovative initiatives or in response to economic, political or social factors, there is a need to understand how such engagements are conceptualised, facilitated and experienced by boththe organisations and the communities involved. Bryony Onciul is Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter; Michelle Stefano is the Co-Director of Maryland Traditions, the folklife program for the state of Maryland and Visiting Assistant Professor in American Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Stephanie Hawke is a project manager and fundraiser, working on a range of projects aiming to engage communities with culturalheritage. Contributors: Gregory Ashworth, Evita Busa, Helen Graham, Julian Hartley, Stephanie Hawke, Carl Hogsden, Shatha Abu Khafajah, Nicole King, Bernadette Lynch, Billie Lythberg, Conal McCarthy, Ashley Minner, Wayne Ngata, Bryony Onciul, Elizabeth Pishief, Gregory Ramshaw, Philipp Schorch, Justin Sikora, Michelle Stefano, Helen Tully, John Tunbridge.

Anthropologists and the Rediscovery of America, 1886–1965

Anthropologists and the Rediscovery of America, 1886–1965 PDF Author: John S. Gilkeson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139491180
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This book examines the intersection of cultural anthropology and American cultural nationalism from 1886, when Franz Boas left Germany for the United States, until 1965, when the National Endowment for the Humanities was established. Five chapters trace the development within academic anthropology of the concepts of culture, social class, national character, value, and civilization, and their dissemination to non-anthropologists. As Americans came to think of culture anthropologically, as a 'complex whole' far broader and more inclusive than Matthew Arnold's 'the best which has been thought and said', so, too, did they come to see American communities as stratified into social classes distinguished by their subcultures; to attribute the making of the American character to socialization rather than birth; to locate the distinctiveness of American culture in its unconscious canons of choice; and to view American culture and civilization in a global perspective.

Invisible Subjects

Invisible Subjects PDF Author: Heidi Kim
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190456264
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Invisible Subjects broadens the archive of Asian American studies, using advances in Asian American history and historiography to reinterpret the politics of the major figures of post-World War II American literature and criticism. Taking its theoretical inspiration from the work of Ralph Ellison and his focus on the invisibility of a racial minority in mainstream history, Heidi Kim argues that the work of American studies and literature in this era to explain and contain the troubling Asian figure reflects both the swift amnesia that covers the Pacific theater of WWII and the importance of the Asian to immigration debates and civil rights. From the Melville Revival through the myth and symbol school, as well as the fiction of John Steinbeck and William Faulkner, the postwar literary scene exhibits the ambiguity of Asian forms in the 1950s within the binaries of foreigner/native and black/white, as well as the constructs of gender and the nuclear family. It contrasts with the tortured redefinitions of race and nationality that appear in immigration acts and court cases, particularly those about segregation and interracial marriage. The Melville Revival critics' discussion of a mythic and yet realistic diabolical Asian, the role of a Chinese housekeeper in preserving the pioneer family in Steinbeck's East of Eden, and the extent to which the history of the Mississippi Chinese sheds light on Faulkner's stagnant societies all work to subsume a troubling presence. Detailing the archaeology and genealogy of Asian American Studies, Invisible Subjects offers an original, important, and vital contribution to both our understanding of American literary history and the general study of race and ethnicity in American cultural history.

Paraliterary

Paraliterary PDF Author: Merve Emre
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022647402X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
“[Emre’s] intellectual moves . . . are many, subtle, and a pleasure to follow. . . . None of her bad readers could have written this very good book.” —Los Angeles Review of Books Literature departments tend to be focused on turning out, “good” readers—attentive to nuance, aware of history, interested in literary texts as self-contained works. But the majority of readers are, to use Merve Emre’s tongue-in-cheek term, “bad” readers. They read fiction and poetry to be moved, distracted, instructed, improved, engaged as citizens. How should we think about those readers, and what should we make of the structures, well outside the academy, that generate them? We should, Emre argues, think of such readers not as non-literary but as paraliterary—thriving outside literary institutions. She traces this phenomenon to the postwar period, when literature played a key role in the rise of American power. At the same time as American universities were producing good readers by the hundreds, many more thousands of bad readers were learning elsewhere to be disciplined public communicators, whether in diplomatic and ambassadorial missions, private and public cultural exchange programs, multinational corporations, or global activist groups. As we grapple with literature’s diminished role in the public sphere, Paraliterary suggests a new way to think about literature, its audience, and its potential, one that looks at the civic institutions that have long engaged readers ignored by the academy. “Paraliterary does for . . . reading . . . what The Program Era did for writing: profoundly upend what we thought we knew about how institutions other than the university have shaped our culture and our engagement with it.” —Deborah Nelson, University of Chicago

Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman

Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman PDF Author: Leypoldt Gunter Leypoldt
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474470262
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman deals with narratives of cultural legitimation in nineteenth-century US literature, in a transatlantic context. Exploring how literary professionalism shapes romantic and modern cultural space, Leypoldt traces the nineteenth-century fusion of poetic radicalism with cultural nationalism from its beginnings in transatlantic early romanticism, to the poetry and poetics of Walt Whitman, and Whitman's modernist reinvention as an icon of a native avant-garde. Whitman made cultural nationalism compatible with the rhetorical needs of professional authorship by trying to hold national authenticity and literary authority in a single poetic vision. Yet the notion that his 'language experiment' transformed essential democratic experience into a genuine American aesthetics also owes much to Whitman's retrospective canonization. What Leypoldt calls Whitmanian authority is thus a transatlantic and transhistorical discursive construct that can be approached from four angles: this book begins with an overview of transatlantic contexts such as the 19th-century literary field (Bourdieu) and the romantic turn to expressivism (Taylor); a detailed analysis of how Whitman's positions develop from the intellectual habitus and cultural criticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson follows, and in a third section Whitmanian authority is located within three conceptual fields that function as contact zones for European and American theories of culture: romantic notions of national style as a kind of music; place-centered concepts of national aesthetics; and traditional ideas about the aesthetic effects of democratic institutions. The final section, on Whitman's reinvention between the 1870s and the 1940s, discusses how the heterogeneous nineteenth-century perceptions of Whitman's work were streamlined into a modernist version of Whitman's nationalist program.

Whiteness, Otherness and the Individualism Paradox from Huck to Punk

Whiteness, Otherness and the Individualism Paradox from Huck to Punk PDF Author: D. Traber
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230603572
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Traber reexamines the practice of self-marginalization in Euro-American literature and popular culture that depict whites adopting varied markers of otherness to disengage from the dominant culture. He draws on critical theory, whiteness and cultural studies to counter an eager correlation between marginality and agency. The nonconformist cultural politics of these border crossings implode since the transgressive identity the protagonists desire relies upon, is built from, the center's values and definitions. An orthodox notion of individualism underpins each act of sovereignty as it rationalizes exploiting stereotypes of an Other constructed by the center. The work closes by positing a theory of identity based on Jean-Luc Nancy's concept of the emptied self. In recognizing the already mixed quality of being, identity is made a vacuous concept as the standards for determining self and difference become too slippery to hold.