Telling the American Story

Telling the American Story PDF Author: Livia Polanyi
Publisher: Bradford Books
ISBN: 9780262660624
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Stories reflect culture, and American stories reflect American culture is Livia Polanyi's provocative thesis in Telling the American Story. Combining linguistic and cultural analyses, Polanyi provides thoughtful insights into many features of conversational stories that have either been put aside or omitted from formal analysis within cognitive science. She also brings to life stories as cultural artifacts in which every evaluation, presupposition, point, perspective, and interpretation is a reflection of popular culture.Examining the structure of autobiographical stories, Polanyi pays close attention to the storyteller's own evaluation of the events he or she is narrating -- why it is being told, and what the audience is to learn by it. This leads to an extended discussion of the ways in which narrative structure is embedded in conversation. Polanyi shows how in negotiating a story and negotiating the point of a story, false starts and repairs can be used to further the narrative.Polanyi then analyzes several personal American stories such as "Fainting on the Subway" and "Eating on the New York Thruway" -- for the propositions they express about American culture and draws these propositions together in a broad compendium, or grammar, of cultural assumptions. These chapters in particular provide perhaps the earliest and best efforts at making explicit the commonsense knowledge that underlies discourse and every other human activity.The book concludes with the creation of "The American story," a text made up of sentences each of which can be seen as a compressed form of a myriad of "real" stories told in American conversation. Livia Polanyi is with Bolt, Beranek and Newman. A Bradford Book.

Telling the American Story

Telling the American Story PDF Author: Livia Polanyi
Publisher: Bradford Books
ISBN: 9780262660624
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Get Book Here

Book Description
Stories reflect culture, and American stories reflect American culture is Livia Polanyi's provocative thesis in Telling the American Story. Combining linguistic and cultural analyses, Polanyi provides thoughtful insights into many features of conversational stories that have either been put aside or omitted from formal analysis within cognitive science. She also brings to life stories as cultural artifacts in which every evaluation, presupposition, point, perspective, and interpretation is a reflection of popular culture.Examining the structure of autobiographical stories, Polanyi pays close attention to the storyteller's own evaluation of the events he or she is narrating -- why it is being told, and what the audience is to learn by it. This leads to an extended discussion of the ways in which narrative structure is embedded in conversation. Polanyi shows how in negotiating a story and negotiating the point of a story, false starts and repairs can be used to further the narrative.Polanyi then analyzes several personal American stories such as "Fainting on the Subway" and "Eating on the New York Thruway" -- for the propositions they express about American culture and draws these propositions together in a broad compendium, or grammar, of cultural assumptions. These chapters in particular provide perhaps the earliest and best efforts at making explicit the commonsense knowledge that underlies discourse and every other human activity.The book concludes with the creation of "The American story," a text made up of sentences each of which can be seen as a compressed form of a myriad of "real" stories told in American conversation. Livia Polanyi is with Bolt, Beranek and Newman. A Bradford Book.

Telling the American Story

Telling the American Story PDF Author: Livia Polanyi
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
This book explores the complexity of story text. Its thesis is that one can elicit the world view of a people from a close structural analysis of their narrative discourse. It is the first methodological explanation of how stories can be used as a source of cultural data and an illustration of how to do a rhetorically close analysis of a story text. A theory of narrative structure is presented which leads to a conversationally based definition of what can properly be called a story.

The Warmth of Other Suns

The Warmth of Other Suns PDF Author: Isabel Wilkerson
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679763880
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 642

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S FIVE BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY “A brilliant and stirring epic . . . Ms. Wilkerson does for the Great Migration what John Steinbeck did for the Okies in his fiction masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath; she humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth.”—John Stauffer, The Wall Street Journal “What she’s done with these oral histories is stow memory in amber.”—Lynell George, Los Angeles Times WINNER: The Mark Lynton History Prize • The Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction • The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize • The Hurston-Wright Award for Nonfiction • The Hillman Prize for Book Journalism • NAACP Image Award for Best Literary Debut • Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize FINALIST: The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction • Dayton Literary Peace Prize ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times • USA Today • Publishers Weekly • O: The Oprah Magazine • Salon • Newsday • The Daily Beast ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker • The Washington Post • The Economist •Boston Globe • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • Entertainment Weekly • Philadelphia Inquirer • The Guardian • The Seattle Times • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Christian Science Monitor In this beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson presents a definitive and dramatic account of one of the great untold stories of American history: the Great Migration of six million Black citizens who fled the South for the North and West in search of a better life, from World War I to 1970. Wilkerson tells this interwoven story through the lives of three unforgettable protagonists: Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife, who in 1937 fled Mississippi for Chicago; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, and Robert Foster, a surgeon who left Louisiana in 1953 in hopes of making it in California. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous cross-country journeys by car and train and their new lives in colonies in the New World. The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is a modern classic.

Telling an American Horror Story

Telling an American Horror Story PDF Author: Cameron Williams Crawford
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476680612
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Telling an American Horror Story collects essays from new and established critics looking at the many ways the horror anthology series intersects with and comments on contemporary American social, political and popular culture. Divided into three sections, the chapters apply a cultural criticism framework to examine how the first eight seasons of AHS engage with American history, our contemporary ideologies and social policies. Part I explores the historical context and the uniquely-American folklore that AHS evokes, from the Southern Gothic themes of Coven to connections between Apocalypseand anxieties of modern American youth. Part II contains interpretations of place and setting that mark the various seasons of the anthology. Finally, Part III examines how the series confronts notions of individual and social identity, like the portrayals of destructive leadership in Cult and lesbian representation in Asylum and Hotel.

I Cannot Tell a Lie

I Cannot Tell a Lie PDF Author: Linda Allen Bryant
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595767087
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 487

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Book Description
THE FIRST PRESIDENT Documented national history states that the nation's first president had no children. But the oral history of the descendants of this African American family tells a different story. THE CONTROVERSY Many people will believe the story of George Washington fathering a slave son. Others will find it difficult, if not impossible, to believe that Washington had an intimate relationship with a slave named Venus. Their fateful union during the era of antebellum slavery produced a son, West Ford. THE SECRET As time and space distanced the Ford family from its beginnings at Mount Vernon, each generation continued to walk a precarious line, bearing the weight of their heritage and battling issues of skin color, status, and identity. Linda Allen Bryant, a descendant of West Ford, pens her family's narrative history in I Cannot Tell a Lie. Their genealogy is rich in adventure, love, tragedy, sacrifice and courage-a story that will haunt you long after you turn the last page.

Telling the American Story in the ILO

Telling the American Story in the ILO PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Labor unions
Languages : en
Pages : 4

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Book Description


To Tell a Free Story

To Tell a Free Story PDF Author: William L. Andrews
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252054636
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
To Tell A Free Story traces in unprecedented detail the history of Black autobiography from the colonial era through Emancipation. Beginning with the 1760 narrative by Briton Hammond, William L. Andrews explores first-person public writings by Black Americans. Andrews includes but also goes beyond slave narratives to analyze spiritual biographies, criminal confessions, captivity stories, travel accounts, interviews, and memoirs. As he shows, Black writers continuously faced the fact that northern whites often refused to accept their stories and memories as sincere, and especially distrusted portraits of southern whites as inhuman. Black writers had to silence parts of their stories or rely on subversive methods to make facts tellable while contending with the sensibilities of the white editors, publishers, and readers they relied upon and hoped to reach.

This America: The Case for the Nation

This America: The Case for the Nation PDF Author: Jill Lepore
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631496425
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 75

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Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection One of President Bill Clinton’s “Best Things I’ve Read This Year” From the acclaimed historian and New Yorker writer comes this urgent manifesto on the dilemma of nationalism and the erosion of liberalism in the twenty-first century. At a time of much despair over the future of liberal democracy, Jill Lepore makes a stirring case for the nation in This America, a follow-up to her much-celebrated history of the United States, These Truths. With dangerous forms of nationalism on the rise, Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, repudiates nationalism here by explaining its long history—and the history of the idea of the nation itself—while calling for a “new Americanism”: a generous patriotism that requires an honest reckoning with America’s past. Lepore begins her argument with a primer on the origins of nations, explaining how liberalism, the nation-state, and liberal nationalism, developed together. Illiberal nationalism, however, emerged in the United States after the Civil War—resulting in the failure of Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, and the restriction of immigration. Much of American history, Lepore argues, has been a battle between these two forms of nationalism, liberal and illiberal, all the way down to the nation’s latest, bitter struggles over immigration. Defending liberalism, as This America demonstrates, requires making the case for the nation. But American historians largely abandoned that defense in the 1960s when they stopped writing national history. By the 1980s they’d stopped studying the nation-state altogether and embraced globalism instead. “When serious historians abandon the study of the nation,” Lepore tellingly writes, “nationalism doesn’t die. Instead, it eats liberalism.” But liberalism is still in there, Lepore affirms, and This America is an attempt to pull it out. “In a world made up of nations, there is no more powerful way to fight the forces of prejudice, intolerance, and injustice than by a dedication to equality, citizenship, and equal rights, as guaranteed by a nation of laws.” A manifesto for a better nation, and a call for a “new Americanism,” This America reclaims the nation’s future by reclaiming its past.

How to Tell a Story, and Other Essays

How to Tell a Story, and Other Essays PDF Author: Mark Twain
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description


These Truths: A History of the United States

These Truths: A History of the United States PDF Author: Jill Lepore
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393635252
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 733

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Book Description
“Nothing short of a masterpiece.” —NPR Books A New York Times Bestseller and a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation. Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review), Jill Lepore’s one-volume history of America places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas—“these truths,” Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise? These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. “A nation born in contradiction… will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history,” Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.