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"American literature--History and criticism"
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The Shape of the Signifier
The Shape of the Signifieris a critique of recent theory--primarily literary but also cultural and political. Bringing together previously unconnected strands of Michaels's thought--from \"Against Theory\" toOur America--it anatomizes what's fundamentally at stake when we think of literature in terms of the experience of the reader rather than the intention of the author, and when we substitute the question of who people are for the question of what they believe.
With signature virtuosity, Michaels shows how the replacement of ideological difference (we believe different things) with identitarian difference (we speak different languages, we have different bodies and different histories) organizes the thinking of writers from Richard Rorty to Octavia Butler to Samuel Huntington to Kathy Acker. He then examines how this shift produces the narrative logic of texts ranging from Toni Morrison'sBelovedto Michael Hardt and Toni Negri'sEmpire. As with everything Michaels writes,The Shape of the Signifieris sure to leave controversy and debate in its wake.
eBook
Ghost-Watching American Modernity:Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination
In Ghost-Watching American Modernity, Maria del Pilar Blanco revisits nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts from Spanish America and the United States to ask how different landscapes are represented as haunted sites. Moving from foundational fictions to Westerns, Blanco explores the diverse ways in which ghosts and haunting emerge across the American hemisphere for authors who are preoccupied with evoking the experience of geographical transformations during a period of unprecedented development. The book offers an innovative approach that seeks to understand ghosts in their local specificity, rather than as products of generic conventions or as allegories of hidden desires. Its chapters pursue formally attentive readings of texts by Domingo Sarmiento, Henry James, Jose Marti, W. E. B. Du Bois, Juan Rulfo, Felisberto Hernandez, and Clint Eastwood. In an intervention that will reconfigure the critical uses of spectrality for scholars in U.S./Latin American Studies, narrative theory, and comparative literature, Blanco advances ghost-watching as a method for rediscovering haunting on its own terms.
eBook
The Global Remapping of American Literature
This book charts how the cartographies of American literature as an institutional category have varied radically across different times and places. Arguing that American literature was consolidated as a distinctively nationalist entity only in the wake of the U.S. Civil War, Paul Giles identifies this formation as extending until the beginning of the Reagan presidency in 1981. He contrasts this with the more amorphous boundaries of American culture in the eighteenth century, and with ways in which conditions of globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century have reconfigured the parameters of the subject.
In light of these fluctuating conceptions of space, Giles suggests new ways of understanding the shifting territory of American literary history. ranging from Cotton Mather to David Foster Wallace, and from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Zora Neale Hurston. Giles considers why European medievalism and Native American prehistory were crucial to classic nineteenth-century authors such as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. He discusses how twentieth-century technological innovations, such as air travel, affected representations of the national domain in the texts of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. And he analyzes how regional projections of the South and the Pacific Northwest helped to shape the work of writers such as William Gilmore Simms, José Martí, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Gibson.
Bringing together literary analysis, political history, and cultural geography,The Global Remapping of American Literaturereorients the subject for the transnational era.
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The Sentimental Touch
Between 1850 and 1940, with the rise of managerial capitalism in the United States, the most powerful businesses ceased to be family owned, instead becoming sprawling organizations controlled by complex bureaucracies. Sentimental literature--work written specifically to convey and inspire deep feeling--does not seem to fit with a swiftly bureaucratizing society. Surprisingly, though, sentimental language persisted in American literature, even as a culture of managed systems threatened to obscure the power of individual affect. The Sentimental Touch explores the strange, enduring power of sentimental language in the face of a rapidly changing culture. Analyzing novels by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, and Nathanael West, the book demonstrates that sentimental language changes but remains powerful, even in works by authors who self-consciously write against the sentimental tradition. Sentimental language has an afterlife, enduring in American literature long after authors and critics declared it dead, insisting that human feeling can resist a mechanizing culture and embodying, paradoxically, the way that literary conventions themselves become mechanical and systematic.
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Prejudices
These essays, first published between 1919 and 1927, ushered in a new cosmopolitanism and skepticism in twentieth-century America. Taking on all aspects of the conformism and provincial narrowness of the American worldview that he saw, Mencken launched himself at a wide variety of targets with his usual humor and richness.
Book
Empire’s Proxy
Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series In the late
nineteenth century, American teachers descended on the Philippines,
which had been newly purchased by the U.S. at the end of the
Spanish-American War. Motivated by President McKinley's project of
\"benevolent assimilation,\" they established a school system that
centered on English language and American literature to advance the
superiority of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, which was held up as
justification for the U.S.'s civilizing mission and offered as a
promise of moral uplift and political advancement. Meanwhile, on
American soil, the field of American literature was just being
developed and fundamentally, though invisibly, defined by this new,
extraterritorial expansion. Drawing on a wealth of material,
including historical records, governmental documents from the War
Department and the Bureau of Insular Affairs, curriculum guides,
memoirs of American teachers in the Philippines, and 19th century
literature, Meg Wesling not only links empire with education, but
also demonstrates that the rearticulation of American literary
studies through the imperial occupation in the Philippines served
to actually define and strengthen the field. Empire's Proxy boldly
argues that the practical and ideological work of colonial
dominance figured into the emergence of the field of American
literature, and that the consolidation of a canon of American
literature was intertwined with the administrative and intellectual
tasks of colonial management.
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