Working Papers in American Studies, vol. 4: Transformation: Nature and Economy in Modern English and American Culture (original) (raw)
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Module Convener, AM-113 Introduction to American Literature and Culture [Swansea University, 2016]
Introduction to American Literature and Culture "This module offers an interdisciplinary survey of American literature and culture from the Nineteenth century to the present day, examining the construction of a specifically American identity in relation to the sweeping social, technological and economic changes which characterize the American experience. The module as a whole explores American culture and literature in a lively and interdisciplinary manner, reading the search for an American Self as an attempt to come to terms with the bewildering transformation of the world, and the position of the individual within it." Reading List 2016: * Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Emma Lazarus, Melvin Tolson, Sandra Cisneros [selected poems and extracts for introductory lecture] * Edgar Allan Poe - 'The Fall of the House of Usher & Other Stories' [various short stories, Gothic fiction] * Willa Cather - 'My Antonia' [modernism, regionalism] * Mark Twain - 'Huckleberry Finn' [Southern literature, racial politics, vernacular style] * Emily Dickinson [various poems, modernism] * John Dos Passos - 'Manhattan Transfer' [modernism, the city, urban space, cinema, advertising, industrial age] * Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Stirling A. Brown [selected poems as part of 'Harlem Renaissance'] * Don DeLillo - 'White Noise' [postmodernism, simulara, mass media, waste, history]"
Toni Morrison's Home: an Ecolingustic Analysis
Literary Studies
Since the publication of Arran Stibbe's critically acclaimed book Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology, and the Stories We Live By (2015), a new approach to ecolinguistics has emerged, one that focuses on how much ecologically constructive or destructive views are included in the discourses contained in the "stories" that people "live by" every day. Toni Morrison, expanding the possibilities of African American ecological writing, explores the healing impact of nature that is reflected in the "stories" the characters "live by" in her novels. Her writings build a narrative frame in which nature is the benefactor and healer. On the one hand the narratives poignantly and painfully expose the psychological or emotional wounds suffered by the African- Americans and on the other depict nature as a healer of these wounds. Our concern in this paper is Morrison’s novel Home (2012). It is a story of a veteran soldier, Frank Money who returns home, with...
Literary Reinventions of America at the End of the Eighteenth Century by Benjamin Hoffmann
The allusions to Crèvecœur in the Letters Written from the Banks of the Ohio reveal the inherent contradictions in the literary project of Claude-François-Adrien de Lezay-Marnésia (1735–1800). Placed at the head of this collection of letters, the “Editor’s Foreword” launches an all-out attack against the men of letters who, before Lezay-Marnésia, had ventured to describe North America: “It seems as if they have been in league to deceive us. The ones, extravagant enthusiasts or biased authors, have taken, to paint all of America, the colors that Milton used to paint heaven on earth, presenting its inhabitants like so many perfect Spartans. The others, as unjust as they are excessive, have tried to make us believe that this enormous continent, disavowed by nature, was condemned to an eternal infancy and did not have the strength to produce anything but weak, cowardly, and degenerate animals.” 1 The second group of writers includes without a doubt Buffon and Cornelius de Pauw. In several works, Buffon had indeed speculated that the cold and humidity of the climate in America explained the inferior size, weight, vigor, and variety of the American animal species in relation to the European species, as well as the progressive degeneration of the species that originated in Europe and were transported to America.
Movement and Adjustment in Twentieth-Century Western Writing
Pacific Historical Review, 2003
Western American literature in the twentieth century has effectively mirrored life in the region. The West has for centuries seen more geographic movement, and accompanying cultural adjustment, than other American regions. These themes of movement and adjustment have dominated western writing. Literary historians' frameworks for categorizing and analyzing this writing have emphasized a tidy process of organic development in western writing, from "frontier fiction" to more mature "regional writing," or from frontier to regional to post-regional literature. Such models underestimate the degree to which movement and adjustment continued to shape western writing in the twentieth century and tend to separate literature produced by white Europeans from that of other cultural groups. This essay suggests that the more fluid movement and adjustment model can better illuminate the connections between ostensibly separate cultural literary streams.
European journal of American studies, Vol 9, No 3 | 2014
2016
Combining insights from human geography, critical regionalism, and environmental literary criticism, I argue that the concept of the translocal, rather than the transnational, is useful to describe the complex poetics of place in Agha Shahid Ali’s A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991) and Arthur Sze’s The Ginkgo Light (2009). Engaging with landscapes of the American Southwest and elsewhere, and in particular with the natural environment, both poets reimagine the region as a site of translocal attachments and as the grounds for transethnic affiliations, especially with local Native American peoples. What emerges from this inclusive and yet open sense of belonging to place is an ethics of being in and with nature that attempts to reckon with the increasing pressures of both globalization and global environmental crisis. Literature, as Ali’s and Sze’s poetry suggest by foregrounding poetic strategies like intertextuality and metaphorical On Common Ground: Translocal Attachments and Tran...
Our current political discourse is scattered with claims and accusations regarding which persons or groups qualify as “American,” “not American,” or “un-American.” This question has profound consequences that can range from the mundane—such as attempts at tarnishing a reputation—to the more serious, such as democratic in/exclusion, and legal and extralegal violence. What it means to “be American” was pivotal in the nation’s founding as Paine’s Common Sense and Crèvecœur’s Letters From an American Farmer make clear, but the politics of Americanness were negotiated, oftentimes violently, in the centuries of Colonial Era politics and culture that preceded the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It is arguably more critical now than ever to understand what “Americanness” is (or can be) and what made it this way—starting from the beginning (or close thereto). Focusing in pre-1800 American literature and culture, our endeavor will navigate through exploration and captivity narratives, US slavery and the trans- and circum- Atlantic slave trade, indigenous American literature, religion and the Puritan tradition, Enlightenment discourse, the ideological underpinnings of the American Revolution and the Constitution, early-American print culture (including the sentimental novel), gender studies, and perspectives in law and literature. Finding motivation in the problems, issues, and contradictions within the figuration of collective identity, we will better understand the political discourse surrounding “what it means to be American” as it was then, and therefore, as it is now.