[PDF] Reconceptualizing American Literary Cultural Studies eBook
Reconceptualizing American Literary Cultural Studies Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of Reconceptualizing American Literary Cultural Studies book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.
Three extensively revised essays by Mailloux, an influential proponent of cultural studies, describe his approach in depth. Following are ten essays, nine of them written specifically for this volume, by scholars who offer various perspectives on Mailloux's ideas. Each essayist weighs the strengths and limitations of the cultural studies movement in general and Mailloux's approach in particular.
Gregory S. Jay boldly challenges the future of American literary studies. Why pursue the study and teaching of a distinctly American literature? What is the appropriate purpose and scope of such pursuits? Is the notion of a traditional canon of great books out of date? Where does American literature leave off and Mexican or Caribbean or Canadian or postcolonial literature begin? Are today's campus conflicts fueled more by economics or ideology? Jay addresses these questions and others relating to American literary studies to explain why this once arcane academic discipline found itself so often in the news during the culture wars of the 1990s. While asking some skeptical questions about new directions and practices, Jay argues forcefully in favor of opening the borders of American literary and cultural analysis. He relates the struggle for representation in literary theory to a larger cultural clash over the meaning and justice of representation, then shows how this struggle might expand both the contents and the teaching of American literature. In an account of the vexed legacy of the Declaration of Independence, he provides a historical context for the current quarrels over literature and politics. Prominent among these debates are those over multiculturalism, which Jay takes up in an essay on the impasses of identity politics. In closing, he considers how the field of comparative American cultural studies might be constructed.
A Companion to American Literary Studies addresses the most provocative questions, subjects, and issues animating the field. Essays provide readers with the knowledge and conceptual tools for understanding American literary studies as it is practiced today, and chart new directions for the future of the subject. Offers up-to-date accounts of major new critical approaches to American literary studies Presents state-of-the-art essays on a full range of topics central to the field Essays explore critical and institutional genealogies of the field, increasingly diverse conceptions of American literary study, and unprecedented material changes such as the digital revolution A unique anthology in the field, and an essential resource for libraries, faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates
Joining the current debates in American literary history, José David Saldívar offers a challenging new perspective on what constitutes not only the canon in American literature, but also the notion of America itself. His aim is the articulation of a fresh, transgeographical conception of American culture, one more responsive to the geographical ties and political crosscurrents of the hemisphere than to narrow national ideologies. Saldívar pursues this goal through an array of oppositional critical and creative practices. He analyzes a range of North American writers of color (Rolando Hinojosa, Gloria Anzaldúa, Arturo Islas, Ntozake Shange, and others) and Latin American authors (José Martí, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Gabriel García Márquez, and others), whose work forms a radical critique of the dominant culture, its politics, and its restrictive modes of expression. By doing so, Saldívar opens the traditional American canon to a dialog with other voices, not just the voices of national minorities, but those of regional cultures different from the prevalent anglocentric model. The Dialectics of Our America, in its project to expand the “canon” and define a pan-American literary tradition, will make a critical difference in ongoing attempts to reconceptualize American literary history.
This landmark collection brings together a range of exciting new comparative work in the burgeoning field of hemispheric studies. Scholars working in the fields of Latin American studies, Asian American studies, American studies, American literature, African Diaspora studies, and comparative literature address the urgent question of how scholars might reframe disciplinary boundaries within the broad area of what is generally called American studies. The essays take as their starting points such questions as: What happens to American literary, political, historical, and cultural studies if we recognize the interdependency of nation-state developments throughout all the Americas? What happens if we recognize the nation as historically evolving and contingent rather than already formed? Finally, what happens if the "fixed" borders of a nation are recognized not only as historically produced political constructs but also as component parts of a deeper, more multilayered series of national and indigenous histories? With essays that examine stamps, cartoons, novels, film, art, music, travel documents, and governmental publications, Hemispheric American Studies seeks to excavate the complex cultural history of texts and discourses across the ever-changing and stratified geopolitical and cultural fields that collectively comprise the American hemisphere. This collection promises to chart new directions in American literary and cultural studies.
Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature examines the preponderance of food imagery in nineteenth-century literary texts. Contributors to this volume analyze the social, political, and cultural implications of scenes involving food and dining and illustrate how "aesthetic" notions of culinary preparation are often undercut by the actual practices of cooking and eating. As contributors interrogate the values and meanings behind culinary discourses, they complicate commonplace notions about American identity and question the power structure behind food production and consumption.
Beyond Imagined Uniqueness: Nationalisms in Comparative Perspectives is a collection of essays from a variety of disciplines and theoretical perspectives that explore the contentious issue of nationalism in historical and contemporary settings. They adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the topic of nationalism and its permutations and modes of expression. The unspoken context of these essays is the trends subsumed under the processes of globalization. Though the world may be becoming more integrated economically, these essays suggest social, cultural, and political forces, historically rooted, keep the nation and national identity alive and well. The comparative perspectives offered by the essays appear in two ways: one set is the explicit comparisons of nations made by several authors within their essays and between the essays themselves when the authors focus on developments within a single nation. A second, and indeed more thought-provoking set of comparisons come from the way the essays address nationalism in disparate scholarly approaches that include visual culture, history, sociology, and literature. Moreover, while traditional themes in the study of nationalism are not ignored, these essays expand the discussion with case studies of nationalism in Turkey, Asia, and Eastern Europe. Even when nationalism is considered in those areas that have been the central focus of nationalism studies (Western Europe and the USA), the authors bring unique voices to the conversation as in the use of portraiture as a vehicle of nationalism in Cold War America or children’s literature shaping a Swedish American identity or in the idea of a covenant as a source of Dutch nationalism or the role of minority languages in West European societies. Section One of this volume contains essays that examine the terrain of the national imaginary through language, monuments, and visual culture. Several of the essays in this traverse the cultural sites of representation and commemoration of the nation, looking carefully at the “politics of memory” in places, material objects, and texts. Section Two provides more individual case studies of nations, though many of these essays engage significant regional and international tensions especially in a post Cold War world that has often influenced the internal dynamics of nation-building. Section Three moves the focus away from the nation to immigrant communities, especially those in the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean. Diasporas throughout the world have challenged many theories about the nation, as crossing borders becomes the norm rather the exception.
Focusing on cultural practices, and gender issues during a period of the early 20th-century that witnessed radical transformations in sex roles, this anthology of original (and one classic) essays will generate a greater understanding of women's contributions to modernist culture, and explore how that culture was affected by gender issues. The essays provide a wealth of insights into literature, painting, architecture, design, anthropology, sociology, religion, science, popular culture, music, issues of race and ethnicity, and the influence of 20th-century women and sexual politics.
These essays deal with the scholarly study of the genesis, transmission, and editorial reconstitution of texts by exploring the connections between textual instability and textual theory, interpretation, and pedagogy. What makes this collection unique is that each essay brings a different theoretical orientation-New Historicism, Poststructuralism, or Feminism-to bear upon a different text, such as Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, or hypertext fiction, to explore the dialectical relationship between texts and textuality. The essays bring some of the textual theories that compete with each other today into contact with a broad range of primarily literary textual histories. That texts are intrinsically unstable, frequently consisting of a series of determinate historical versions, has consequences for all students of literature, because different versions of a literary work frequently help shape different readings independently of the interpretations brought to bear upon them. Textual instability of the works is relevant to our understanding of how the meanings of texts are generated. The contributors build on the numerous challenges to the Anglo-American editorial tradition mounted during the past decade by scholars as diverse as Jerome McGann, D.F. McKenzie, Peter Shillingsburg, D.C. Greetham, Hershel Parker, and Hans Walter Gabler. The volume contributes to the paradigm shift in textual scholarship inaugurated by these scholars. Index.