From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park

Lauter Paul Lauter

Description

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.

Sujets

• USA
• Inglés estadounidense
• American English
• États-Unis
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 17 avril 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822380474
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

FROM WALDEN POND TO JURASSIC PARK

N E W A M E R I C A N I S T SH A E . P E A S ES E R I E S E D I T E D B Y D O N A L D FROM WALDEN POND

TO JURASSIC PARK

A C T I V I S M , C U L T U R E , & A M E R I C A N S T U D I E SH P A U L L A U T E R

d u k e u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s d u r h a m a n d l o n d o n 2 0 0 1

∫2001 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper!

Typeset in Scala by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

appear on the last printed page of this book.

FOR ANNIE

O my America! my new-found-land

My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d,

My Mine of precious stones, My Empery,

How blest am I in this discovering thee!

—John Donne, ‘‘Elegy XIX’’

CONTENTS

Introduction

1

Part One. Practicing American Studies

Chapter One. Reconfiguring Academic Disciplines: The Emergence of American Studies 11

Chapter Two. American Studies, American Politics, and the Reinvention of Class 34

Chapter Three. Versions of Nashville, Visions of American Studies 64

Chapter Four. Culture and Conformity in Wartime America: My Junior High School Songbook 82

Chapter Five. Dinosaur Culture: FromMansfield ParktoJurassic Park99

Part Two. American Studies in a Racialized World

Chapter Six. American Studies and Ethnic Studies at the Borderlands Crossroads 119

Chapter Seven. OfChadorsand Capital

139

Chapter Eight. Fiction as Exploration: The Novels of Charles Chesnutt 153

Part Three. Revisiting the Canon: The Question of Modernism

Chapter Nine. Reflecting onThe Heath Anthology of American Literature175

Chapter Ten. Melville Climbs the Canon

199

Chapter Eleven. And Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, May I Present Miss Amy Lowell 221

Chapter Twelve. Cold War Culture and the Construction of Modernism 234

Notes

Index

251

281

INTRODUCTION ‘‘Whatever it is, I’m against it.’’ Horsefeathers First, shopper, what this book isnot. It is not a survey of the field called ‘‘American studies,’’ though it contains information based on much observation of what American studies programs do, at home and overseas. It is not a chronicle of Ameri- can studies, though I do occasionally pass myself o√ as a historian of moments in what some still call the American studies movement. It is not a set of examples that exhaust the assorted tactics American studies scholars use to examine the equally varied things we study— books, movies, paintings, posters, politics, circuses, classroom prac- tices, catalogs, whaling ships, laws, and ri√s. It is not, despite my best intentions, a political tract, though I hope on occasion that it speaks to or rather against the drift to unadorned greed and superficial moralism that mark this time, Bu√ett to Gingrich to Starr. It is not a memoir, though somewhat to my surprise, one of its first readers pointed to how many of the essays depart from and try to interpret personal experiences. If I’ve now painted myself into a negative cor- ner, I need to strike a more positive note about what I’m trying to do in this book.