[PDF] American Nightmare American Dream eBook

Author : Kathryn Hume
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 325 pages
File Size : 14,68 MB
Release : 2022-08-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 025205413X

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In this celebration of contemporary American fiction, Kathryn Hume explores how estrangement from America has shaped the fiction of a literary generation, which she calls the Generation of the Lost Dream. In breaking down the divisions among standard categories of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender, Hume identifies shared core concerns, values, and techniques among seemingly disparate and unconnected writers including T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ralph Ellison, Russell Banks, Gloria Naylor, Tim O'Brien, Maxine Hong Kingston, Walker Percy, N. Scott Momaday, John Updike, Toni Morrison, William Kennedy, Julia Alvarez, Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Don DeLillo. Hume explores fictional treatments of the slippage in the immigrant experience between America's promise and its reality. She exposes the political link between contemporary stories of lost innocence and liberalism's inadequacies. She also invites us to look at the literary challenge to scientific materialism in various searches for a spiritual dimension in life. The expansive future promised by the American Dream has been replaced, Hume finds, by a sense of tarnished morality and a melancholy loss of faith in America's exceptionalism. American Dream, American Nightmare examines the differing critiques of America embedded in nearly a hundred novels and points to the source for recovery that appeals to many of the authors.

Author : Richard Lord
Publisher :
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 40,15 MB
Release : 2005
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN :

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Homeowners who can't borrow from banks have long turned to the subprime lending industry for mortgages. Increasingly, that industry has turned on them by charging outrageous fees and usurious interest, and then taking their homes through foreclosure. Richard Lord explores the spread of predatory lending practices. And it tells the stories of borrowers who've been taken, contractors and brokers who've been co-opted, lenders who've cheated--and the world's biggest financial titans, who've cashed in. A battle is taking shape that could determine whether home ownership for working people will be an achievable dream or an American nightmare. Richard Lord is a writer for the "Pittsburgh City Paper" whose work on subprime lending has won numerous awards.

Author : Carolina Hein
Publisher : GRIN Verlag
Page : 16 pages
File Size : 45,30 MB
Release : 2008-06-19
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 3638065766

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Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Constance, language: English, abstract: This term paper deals with the origin of the American Dream, with the American Nightmare and with the two novels "The Rise of Silas Lapham" written by William D. Howell (1885) and "The American" by Henry James (1877). The term paper mainly concentrates on the main characters and their social life and shows that the protagonists, who live the way that the term “American Dream” implies, experience the seamy side of the American Dream. The American Dream has a long history which goes back several hundred years. For some people the American Dream might stand for property, for others it might be the image of freedom and equality. By all means, the American Dream promises a more comfortable life and the realization of the deepest dreams. But reality can turn the American Dream into the American Nightmare. Searching for a well paid job to raise their standards of living, people acknowledge that it is difficult to move up the economic ladder. Longing for equal opportunity, people face discrimination due to their race or social class. This term paper deals with the origin of the American Dream and two novels The Rise of Silas Lapham written by William D. Howell, originally published in 1885, and The American by Henry James published in 1877. The term paper mainly concentrates on the main characters and their social life and shows that the protagonists, who live the way that the term “American Dream” implies, experience the seamy side of the American Dream. Before Europeans had moved to the new continent, the first immigrants living in America were Asians (Jordan, Winthrop D./Leon F. Litwack. The United States, Conquering a Continent Volume 1. California: North West, 2003: 1). In 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered an unknown continent which was named “America” after the explorer Amerigo Vespucci. Reports of America visitors connected the impression of America with “a paradise on earth” and the “El Dorado” and thus attracted people (Freese, Peter. The American Dream and the American Nightmare: General Aspects and Literary Examples. Paderborner Universitätsreden 7. Paderborn: Universität-Gesamthochschule, 1987: 8). Terrible and dangerous life situations, daily suffered by men and women during the “Protestant Reformation”, forced victims of “religious persecution” to flee the countries (Freese 1987: 10). Searching for protection, they moved from the “Old World” to the “New World” (15).

Author : Randal O'Toole
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 23,13 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Home ownership
ISBN : 9781937184889

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The American Dream turned into a nightmare when the housing bubble burst, and people have been trying to figure out who to blame- Greedy bankers? Corrupt politicians? Ignorant homeowners? In American Nightmare: How Government Undermines the Dream of Homeownership, Randal O'Toole explores the forces at play in the housing market and shows how we can rebuild the American dream of homeownership by eliminating federal, state, and local policies that distort the free market for housing.

Author : James H. Cone
Publisher : Orbis Books
Page : 559 pages
File Size : 19,86 MB
Release : 1992
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0883448246

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Reexamines the ideology of the two most prominent leaders of the civil rights movement of the 1960s

Author : Jessica Narloch
Publisher : GRIN Verlag
Page : 105 pages
File Size : 42,5 MB
Release : 2008-10
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 364018145X

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Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Other, grade: 1,7, University of Duisburg-Essen, 60 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: "Predictively, any attempt at abstracting from the plethora of relevant publications something even faintly resembling a definition of the 'Dream' is doomed to failure." Peter Freese As Peter Freese precisely points out, defining the American Dream is a difficult if not irresolvable task. The reason for this is that "beyond an abstract belief in possibility, there is no one American Dream." Nevertheless, it is easy to find short definitions in various encyclopedias. In The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language it is defined as " a]n American ideal of a happy and successful life to which all may aspire: "In the deepening gloom of the Depression, the American Dream represented a reaffirmation of traditional American hopes."' The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy offers a different definition: " a] phrase connoting hope for prosperity and happiness, symbolized particularly by having a house of one's own. Possibly applied at first to the hopes of immigrants, the phrase now applies to all except the very rich and suggests a confident hope that one's children's economic and social condition will be better than one's own." A rather short and simple explanation of the term American Dream can be found in the dictionary WordNet by the Princeton University which says that it is "the widespread aspiration of Americans to live better than their parents did." All of these definitions describe various facets of the dream, but none of them gets to the point. In order to get an idea of what the dream really is or what it is assumed to be and how the idea of it came up, it is necessary to have a look at American history. The recapitulation in this work will make an attempt to reveal why it is the American dream and how it is related to American national id

Author : Ryan Dezember
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Page : 189 pages
File Size : 38,68 MB
Release : 2020-07-14
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1250241812

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Winner of the Bruss Real Estate Book Award His assignment was to write about a real-estate frenzy lighting up the Redneck Riviera. So Ryan Dezember settled in and bought a home nearby himself. Then the market crashed, and he became one of the millions of Americans who suddenly owed more on their homes than they were worth. A flood of foreclosures made it impossible to sell. It didn't help that his quaint neighborhood fell into disrepair and drug-induced despair. He had no choice but to become a reluctant and wildly unprofitable landlord to move on. Meanwhile, his reporting showed how the speculative mania that caused the crash opened the U.S. housing market to a much larger breed of investors. In this deeply personal story, Dezember shows how decisions on Wall Street and in Washington played out on his street in a corner of the Sunbelt that was convulsed by the foreclosure crisis. Readers will witness the housing market collapse from Dezember’s perch as a newspaper reporter. First he’s in the boom-to-bust South where a hot-air balloonist named Bob Shallow becomes one of the world’s top selling real-estate agents arranging condo flips, developers flop in spectacular fashion and the law catches up with a beach-town mayor on the take. Later he’s in New York, among financiers like Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman who are building rental empires out of foreclosures, staking claim to the bastion of middle-class wealth: the single-family home. Through it all, Dezember is an underwater homeowner caught up in the mess. A cautionary tale of Wall Street's push to turn homes into assets, Underwater is a powerful, incisive story that chronicles the crash and its aftermath from a fresh perspective—the forgotten, middle-class homeowner.