Download or read book From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park written by Paul Lauter and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2001-04-17 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul Lauter, an icon of American Studies who has been a primary agent in its transformation and its chief ambassador abroad, offers a wide-ranging collection of essays that demonstrate and reflect on this important and often highly politicized discipline. While American Studies was formerly seen as a wholly subsidiary academic program that loosely combined the study of American history, literature, and art, From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park reveals the evolution of an independent, highly interdisciplinary program with distinctive subjects, methods, and goals that are much different than the traditional academic departments that nurtured it. With anecdote peppered discussions ranging from specific literary texts and movies to the future of higher education and the efficacy of unions, From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park entertains even as it offers a twenty-first century account of how and why Americanists at home and abroad now do what they do. Drawing on his forty-five years of teaching and research as well as his experience as a political activist and a cultural radical, Lauter shows how a multifaceted increase in the United States’ global dominion has infused a particular political urgency into American Studies. With its military and economic influence, its cultural and linguistic reach, the United States is—for better or for worse—too formidable and potent not to be understood clearly and critically.
Download or read book The Key Concept of the Frontier Transformed From Walden to Jurassic Park written by Andreas Schwarz and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2012-02 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 2,0, Free University of Berlin (John-F.-Kennedy-Institut), language: English, abstract: This paper will try to work and point out parallels and differences between a classical piece of American literature, Henry David Thoreau's Walden, and contemporary Hollywood blockbuster cinema, represented by Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park. Point of departure and main focus of this paper will be the concept and aspects of the frontier and it's reoccurrence as a mythological tool throughout American cultural history. After establishing the historical concept of the frontier, I will therefore go ahead and dig for traces of how this is woven into both works, which in conclusion will hopefully show the assumed American cultural connection between the later acclaimed book written some 150 years ago looking deep into the romantic soul of its protagonist and a consumerist movie from the early nineties that was able to use the benefits of a huge marketing machine to attract its viewership and became a worldwide box office hit. The usefulness of such an undertaking may be questionable for followers of classical cultural American studies but I would like to go with Paul Lauter here and filter out the trivial in mass culture to get to the subject's core of meaning. Essays from his book From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park inspired to look for similarities in those two pieces and maybe find a development of what the concept of the frontier has been transformed into through societal and cultural changes within the last century.
Download or read book Rereading the Machine in the Garden written by Eric Erbacher and published by Campus Verlag. This book was released on 2014-11-06 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume reexamines the trope of the intrusive machine and the regenerative pastoral garden, laid out fifty years ago by Leo Marx in "The Machine in the Garden," one of the founding texts of American Studies. Contributions explore the lasting influence of the trope in American culture and the arts, rereading it as a dialectics where nature is as much technologized as technology is naturalized. They trace this dialectic trope in filmic and literary representations of industrial, bureaucratic, and digital gardens; they explore its function in the aftermath of the civil war, the rural electrification during the New Deal, in landscape art, and in ethnic literatures; and they discuss the historical premises and lasting influence of Leo Marx's seminal study.
Download or read book Unplugging Popular Culture written by K. Shannon Howard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unplugging Popular Culture showcases youth and young adult characters from film and television who defy the stereotype of the "digital native" who acts as an unquestioning devotee to screened technologies like the smartphone. In this study, unplugged tools, or non-digital tools, do not necessitate a ban on technology or a refusal to acknowledge its affordances but work instead to highlight the ability of fictional characters to move from high tech settings to low tech ones. By repurposing everyday materials, characters model the process of reusing and upcycling existing materials in innovative ways. In studying examples such as Pitch Perfect, Supernatural, Stranger Things, and Get Out, the book aims to make theories surrounding materiality apparent within popular culture and to help today’s readers reconsider stereotypes of the young people they encounter on a daily basis.
Download or read book Literature and Ethnicity in the Cultural Borderlands written by Jesús Benito and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2002 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume stems from the idea that the notion of borders and borderlines as clear-cut frontiers separating not only political and geographical areas, but also cultural, linguistic and semiotic spaces, does not fully address the complexity of contemporary cultural encounters. Centering on a whole range of literary works from the United States and the Caribbean, the contributors suggest and discuss different theoretical and methodological grounds to address the literary production taking place across the lines in North American and Caribbean culture. The volume represents a pioneering attempt at proposing the concept of the border as a useful paradigm not only for the study of Chicano literature but also for the other American literatures. The works presented in the volume illustrate various aspects and manifestations of the textual border(lands), and explore the double-voiced discourse of border texts by writers like Harriet E. Wilson, Rudolfo Anaya, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Louise Erdrich, Helena Viramontes, Paule Marshall and Monica Sone, among others. This book is of interest for scholars and researchers in the field of comparative American studies and ethnic studies.
Download or read book The Fiction of America written by Susanne Hamscha and published by Campus Verlag. This book was released on 2013-05 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fiction of America juxtaposes classic literature of the American Renaissance with twentieth-century popular culture--pairing, for instance, Ralph Waldo Emerson with Finding Nemo, Walt Whitman with Spiderman, and Hester Prynne with Madonna--to investigate how the "Americanness" of American culture constitutes itself in the interplay of the cultural imaginary and performance. Conceptualizing "America" as a transhistorical practice, Susanne Hamscha reveals disruptive, spectral moments in the narrative of "America," which confront American culture with its inherent inconsistencies.
Download or read book Color Monitors written by Martin Kevorkian and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Color Monitors looks at a particular subset of imagined computer use, focusing on scenarios that demand from the person at the keyboard an intimate technical knowledge. My research has uncovered a peculiar pattern: race comes into sharp relief when computer use is depicted as difficult labor requiring special expertise. Time and again, in such scenarios, the helpful person of color is there to take the call—to provide technical support, to deal with the machines. In interpreting such images, Color Monitors analyzes the computer-fearing strain in American whiteness, an aspect of white identity that defines itself against information technology and the racial other imagined to love it and excel at it."—Martin KevorkianFollowing up on Ralph Ellison's intimation that blacks serve as "the machines inside the machine," Color Monitors examines the designation of black bodies as natural machines for the information age. Martin Kevorkian shows how African Americans are consistently depicted as highly skilled, intelligent, and technologically savvy as they work to solve complex computer problems in popular movies, corporate advertising, and contemporary fiction. But is this progress? Or do such seemingly positive depictions have more disturbing implications? Kevorkian provocatively asserts that whites' historical "fear of a black planet" has in the age of microprocessing converged with a new fear of computers and the possibility that digital imperatives will engulf human creativity.Analyzing escapist fantasies from Mission: Impossible to Minority Report, Kevorkian argues that the placement of a black man in front of a computer screen doubly reassures audiences: he is nonthreatening, safely occupied—even imprisoned—by the very machine he attempts to control, an occupation that simultaneously frees the action heroes from any electronic headaches. The study concludes with some alternatives to this scheme, looking to a network of recent authors, with shared affinities for Ellison and Pynchon, willing to think inside the black box of technology.Connecting race, technology, and American empire, Color Monitors will attract attention from scholars working in emerging areas of race theory, African American studies, film studies, cultural studies, and technology and communication studies.
Download or read book Teaching American Studies written by Elizabeth A. Duclos-Orsello and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “What if American Studies is defined not so much in the pages of the most cutting-edge publications, but through what happens in our classrooms and other learning spaces?” In Teaching American Studies Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello, Joseph Entin, and Rebecca Hill ask a diverse group of American Studies educators to respond to that question by writing chapters about teaching that use a classroom activity or a particular course to reflect on the state of the field of American Studies. Teaching American Studies speaks to teachers with a wide range of relationships to the field. To start, it is a useful how-to guide for faculty who might be new to, or unfamiliar with, American Studies. Each author brings the reader into their classes to offer specific, concrete details about their pedagogical practice, and their students' learning. The resulting chapters connect theory and educational action as well as share challenges, difficulties, and lessons learned. The volume also provides a collective impression of American Studies from the point of view of students and teachers. What primary and secondary texts and what theoretical challenges and issues do faculty use to organize their teaching? How does the teaching we do respond to our institutional and educational contexts? How do our experiences and those of our students challenge or change our understanding of American Studies? Chapters in this collection discuss teaching a broad range of materials, from memoirs and novels by Anne Moody and Octavia Butler to cutting-edge cultural theory, to the widely used collection Keywords for American Cultural Studies. But the chapters in this collection are also about dancing, eating, and walking around a campus to view statues and gravestones. They are about teaching during the era of Donald Trump, Black Lives Matter, and giving up authority in the classroom. Teaching American Studies is both a new way to think about American Studies and a timely collection of effective ways to teach about race, gender, sexuality, and power in a moment of political polarization and intense public scrutiny of universities.
Download or read book Critics at Work written by Jeffrey J. Williams and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2004-03-01 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring interviews with nineteen leading U.S. literary and cultural critics, Critics at Work offers a unique picture of recent developments in literary studies, critical theory, American studies, gay and lesbian studies, philosophy, and other fields. It provides informative, timely, and often provocative commentary on a broad range of topics, from the state of theory today and the prospects for cultural studies to the role of public intellectuals and the place of political activism. These conversations also elicit illuminating and sometimes surprising insights into the personal and professional lives of its contributors. Individually, each interview gives a significant overview of a critic's work. Taken together, they provide an assessment of literary and cultural studies from the establishment of theory and its diffusion, in recent years, into various cultural and identity studies. In addition to the interviews themselves, the volume includes useful short introductions to each critic's work and biography. Interviewees: K. Anthony Appiah, Lauren Berlant, Cathy Davidson, Morris Dickstein, Stanley Fish, Barbara Foley, Nancy Fraser, Gerald Graff, Alice Kaplan, E. Ann Kaplan, Robin D.G. Kelley, Paul Lauter, Louis Menand, Richard Ohmann, Andrew Ross, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jane Tompkins, Marianna Torgovnick, and Alan Wald.
Download or read book A Companion to American Literature and Culture written by Paul Lauter and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This expansive Companion offers a set of fresh perspectives on the wealth of texts produced in and around what is now the United States. Highlights the diverse voices that constitute American literature, embracing oral traditions, slave narratives, regional writing, literature of the environment, and more Demonstrates that American literature was multicultural before Europeans arrived on the continent, and even more so thereafter Offers three distinct paradigms for thinking about American literature, focusing on: genealogies of American literary study; writers and issues; and contemporary theories and practices Enables students and researchers to generate richer, more varied and more comprehensive readings of American literature
Download or read book Brave New Words written by Elizabeth Ammons and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The activist tradition in American literature has long testified to the power of words to change people and the power of people to change the world, yet in recent years many professional humanists have chosen to distract themselves with a postmodern fundamentalism of indeterminacy and instability rather than engage with social and political issues. Throughout her bold and provocative call to action, Elizabeth Ammons argues that the responsibility now facing humanists is urgent: inside and outside academic settings, they need to revive the liberal arts as a progressive cultural force that offers workable ideas and inspiration in the real-world struggle to achieve social and environmental justice. Brave New Words challenges present and future literary scholars and teachers to look beyond mere literary critique toward the concrete issue of social change and how to achieve it. Calling for a profound realignment of thought and spirit in the service of positive social change, Ammons argues for the continued importance of multiculturalism in the twenty-first century despite attacks on the concept from both right and left. Concentrating on activist U.S. writers—from ecocritics to feminists to those dedicated to exposing race and class biases, from Jim Wallis and Cornel West to Winona LaDuke and Paula Moya and many others—she calls for all humanists to link their work to the progressive literature of the last half century, to insist on activism in the service of positive change as part of their mission, and to teach the power of hope and action to their students. As Ammons clearly demonstrates, much of American literature was written to expose injustice and motivate readers to work for social transformation. She challenges today’s academic humanists to address the issues of hope and purpose by creating a practical activist pedagogy that gives students the knowledge to connect their theoretical learning to the outside world. By relying on the transformative power of literature and replacing nihilism and powerlessness with conviction and faith, the liberal arts can offer practical, useful inspiration to everyone seeking to create a better world.
Download or read book Embodying Difference written by Linda Saborío and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Embodying Difference offers a fresh perspective on the current theoretical debates about the role of Latinas in today's multicultural society and globalization's impact on cultural attitudes toward femininity. Saborío's interdisciplinary approach links feminist and gender discourse, cultural studies, and theatrical performances as a means of exploring many dynamic forms of cultural productions.
Download or read book The South Seas written by Sean Brawley and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-04-21 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The South Seas charts the idea of the South Seas in popular cultural productions of the English-speaking world, from the beginnings of the Western enterprise in the Pacific until the eve of the Pacific War. Building on the notion that the influences on the creation of a text, and the ways in which its audience receives the text, are essential for understanding the historical significance of particular productions, Sean Brawley and Chris Dixon explore the ways in which authors’ and producers’ ideas about the South Seas were “haunted” by others who had written on the subject, and how they in turn influenced future generations of knowledge producers. The South Seas is unique in its examination of an array of cultural texts. Along with the foundational literary texts that established and perpetuated the South Seas tradition in written form, the authorsexplore diverse cultural forms such as art, music, theater, film, fairs, platform speakers, surfing culture, and tourism.
Download or read book American Pacificism written by Paul Lyons and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-09-27 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This powerful critique of American-Islander relations draws upon extensive resources, including literary works and government documents, to explore the ways in which conceptions of Oceania have been entwined in the American imagination.
Download or read book One Nation Under Goods written by James J. Farrell and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Loved and hated, visited and avoided, seemingly everywhere yet endlessly the same, malls occupy a special place in American life. What, then, is this invention that evokes such strong and contradictory emotions in Americans? In many ways malls represent the apotheosis of American consumerism, and this synthetic and wide-ranging investigation is an eye-popping tour of American culture's values and beliefs. Like your favorite mall, One Nation under Goods is a browser's paradise, and in order to understand America's culture of consumption you need to make a trip to the mall with Farrell. This lively, fast-paced history of the hidden secrets of the shopping mall explains how retail designers make shopping and goods “irresistible.” Architects, chain stores, and mall owners relax and beguile us into shopping through water fountains, ficus trees, mirrors, and covert security cameras. From food courts and fountains to Santa and security, Farrell explains how malls control their patrons and convince us that shopping is always an enjoyable activity. And most importantly, One Nation Under Goods shows why the mall's ultimate promise of happiness through consumption is largely an illusion. It's all here—for one low price, of course.
Download or read book Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age written by Emory Elliott and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Papers from conference titled "Aesthetics and Difference," held October 22-24, 1998 by the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California, Riverside.
Download or read book A Concise Companion to American Studies written by John Carlos Rowe and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2010-02-12 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to American Studies is an essential volume that brings together voices and scholarship from across the spectrum of American experience. A collection of 22 original essays which provides an unprecedented introduction to the "new" American Studies: a comparative, transnational, postcolonial and polylingual discipline Addresses a variety of subjects, from foundations and backgrounds to the field, to different theories of the “new” American Studies, and issues from globalization and technology to transnationalism and post-colonialism Explores the relationship between American Studies and allied fields such as Ethnic Studies, Feminist, Queer and Latin American Studies Designed to provoke discussion and help students and scholars at all levels develop their own approaches to contemporary American Studies
