Journal of American & Comparative Cultures最新文献

{"title":"The “Girl Business”+ the Bachelor of Nature: Romancing Thoreau","authors":"B. Ryan","doi":"10.1111/1542-734X.00028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1542-734X.00028","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127453201","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Genre and Masculinity in Ed McBain's 87th Precinct Novels","authors":"Erin E. Macdonald","doi":"10.1111/1542-734X.00009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1542-734X.00009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"176 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115469223","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"American Pop Culture Invades Germany: Some Love It—Some Don't","authors":"A. Schuetz","doi":"10.1111/J.1537-4726.2001.2403_23.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1537-4726.2001.2403_23.X","url":null,"abstract":"A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of Americanization. Neither Adenauer nor De Gaulle, Italian chefs or French farmers have been able to stop it. Some, especially in Germany, apparently have not even tried. It has been claimed that \"West Germany is beyond question the most Americanized country outside America.\"'1 A casual tourist walking through the streets of Frankfurt would probably agree. Advertisements for anything from automobiles to airlines may be addressing the viewer in English as likely as in German. Popular music blaring out of radios is probably sung in English. While France has made headlines with legal attempts to block such subversive terms as \"weekend\" or \"sandwich\" from polluting the purity of the Gallic tongue, few such stories have ever emanated from Germany. After the unconditional surrender of its military in 1945, it seems the country has raised the white flag to all imports wrapped in red, white, and blue. West Germany permitted coca-colazation without a whimper. Obviously, the story is not that simple. While lots of popular music is indeed imported from the Anglo-Saxon countries, the Berlin Philharmonic still exists. Mercedes-Benz has not surrendered to Detroit. On the contrary, it has spread its wings across the Atlantic and it is not the only one. German companies regularly invest in the United States, and U.S. companies reciprocate in Germany. Both countries are prime actors in our global economy. Nevertheless the strong degree of Americanization of Germany cannot be denied. The question may be raised: why Germany, and why to that extent? A closer look at the issue will show the incredible material and psychological imbalance between the two countries after the Second World War, but it will also show considerable resistance to the blind adoption of cultural imports from the United States. More often than not, \"Americanization\" carries a negative connotation. It is frequently being used as a metaphor for a variety of different phenomena. They include materialism and material prosperity, mass culture or the cheapening of \"high\" culture, convenience, reliance on technology, social mobility, political equality, and social egalitarianism. Sometimes \"Americanization\" may simply imply modernism and social, political, or economic progress. Before the Second World War, the contact Germans had with American popular culture was largely sporadic and indirect. The New World, literally, was still worlds apart from the old one. The way to get there was by ocean liner. Tickets were expensive, travels were long, while average earnings were low and vacations short. After 1945, the picture changed dramatically. On May 8, 1945, the war in Europe came to an end. Germany was not just defeated, it was crushed. It ceased to exist as a sovereign nation. Towns, cities, and industries were destroyed; the population was decimated; housing, clothing, food-basic necessities to sustain life-were in short supply. Germany had become a moral outc","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120702732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Corroborating His Phrenology\": The American Phrenological Journal, the Great American Crisis, and U.S. Grant","authors":"A. Wrobel","doi":"10.1111/J.1537-4726.2001.2403_161.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1537-4726.2001.2403_161.X","url":null,"abstract":"On May 18, 1875, so Nelson Sizer records in his memoirs, Forty Years in Phrenology, \"a quiet gentleman in plain, citizen's dress\" (360) presented himself at the New York phrenological depot of S. R. Wells at 753 Broadway for a complete cranioscopic character description. A major figure in phrenological annals, Sizer was said to have conducted over three hundred thousand examinations during a career that started in 1849 when he joined the pre-eminent phrenological firm of Fowler and Wells (Stem 79). Dictating his findings to a shorthand writer, the Pitman system being but one of the myriad enthusiasms the firm espoused during its long and colorful life, Sizer described, melodramatically, a person with a robust and energetic constitution coupled with excessive mental restlessness and excitability. Sizer counseled his client to \"contrive to sleep an hour or two more every night\" so as to rest the brain; to \"avoid everything exciting in the way of luxury, condiment, food, or drink,\" for these, he said, set \"your nerves on fire, worse than...those of most men\"; and to \"avoid overdoing\" (360), observing that: If you were an army officer and in active service, you would get as much work out of a horse as General Custer or Phil. Sheridan would, that is to say, as much as the horse could render. (361) At the end of the examination and after his client revealed his name-Custer-and then his initials, \"G.A.,\" Sizer must have been as awed as he was clearly self-congratulatory; without the benefit of Custer's trademark long locks to identify his client (\"I have had that cut off,\" Custer responded to Sizer's query about the absence of long hair), Sizer's character description was uncannily accurate, while his naming his client as a type of Custer would have tickled any phrenological examiner's vanity. Custer headed off to Chicago to attend Philip Sheridan's wedding and from there to meet his doom, thirteen months later when, failing to heed Sizer's admonitions, he recklessly led his command to slaughter at Little Big Horn. Custer's outcome, Sizer crowed was \"a verification of my description of his fiery energy which betrayed him to his doom\" (Sizer 361-62). The reading seems uncannily perspicacious. Or was it? Surely, phrenology's many supporters would have found in this profile confirmation of their faith in phrenology's ability to plumb depths of human character. But phrenology's critics would also have had good reason for skepticism. For them, that the full analysis was published two months after the Little Big Horn disaster raised the question of veracity. Could they be sure that the editors didn't add anything after the battle to make the original analysis seem all the more prescient? How likely, anyway, is it that the cabinet would have made a duplicate copy of the 1875 analysis and stored it? Further, they might well wonder, what prompted the publication of Custer's profile in the Journal in the first place? Was the profile published to reveal truths abo","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124055635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Bibliographic Imagination: Tracing the Nineteenth Century Origins of the Internet","authors":"David Michalski","doi":"10.1111/J.1537-4726.2001.2403_127.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1537-4726.2001.2403_127.X","url":null,"abstract":"Perception of the idea in the reality is the true communion of the human being. -Goethe The appeal to recollection is the jump by which I place myself in the virtual. -Deleuze Introduction The history of the Internet has often been written as a history of technological achievement, a story of how the inventions of new methods of telecommunications have ushered in a sea change in social arrangements. In this article, I want to step away from the technological view of social change, which positions the Internet as a concept invented in laboratories, and later presented to the populous, as a vessel to be filled.1 Instead, I ask how the Internet was constructed in the popular imagination. I look at how information was redefined in the nineteenth century, and how these redefinitions drove the social history of our contemporary information systems. Michel Foucault wrote, \"Museums and libraries have become heterotopias,\" his term for those \"other\" places, which operate asynchronously with the outer environment.2 There ... time never stops building up and topping it's own summit.. the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of a general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself out of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a perpetual and infinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. The museum and the library are heterotopias that are proper to western culture of the nineteenth century.3 My aim is to analyze the way information environments were pictured, arranged and experienced, as a means of shedding light on today's conception of an information society. The years between 1837 and 1914, beginning with the Coronation of Queen Victoria in London and ending with the beginning of World War I, provide bookends for this study. Between these years we can encapsulate the rising popularity and innovation in nineteenth century information systems, as well as witness analog attempts to respond to a growing desire for interactive information systems. In researching nineteenth century information environments I looked at architecture as well as the textual plans for information design. From the material evidence, and conceptual arguments I was able to construct an array of scales on which we can plot and assess contemporary information environments. By graphing the design characteristics of popular information spaces in the predigital era, we are able to position, and better understand the consequences of the wide variety of today's digital spaces. The Information Environment or Information Space The information environment is a cognitive space whereby information is organized, displayed, and served. The term is used here because it is inclusive of a variety of forms. Rather than speaking about libraries, museums, archives, or the street as separate and indep","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"97 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124675977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gag Gifts: Borders of Intimacy in American Popular Culture","authors":"Dennis Hall","doi":"10.1111/J.1537-4726.2001.2403_171.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1537-4726.2001.2403_171.X","url":null,"abstract":"So common that they commonly escape one's notice, joke or gag items are still big business, as they fill a niche in most gift shops, define an order of specialty store, and constitute a genre of retail merchandise. While difficult to define with scholarly precision, gag gifts are well known to all but the truly cloistered by taste or social class. The range of gag gift utterance is wide; t-shirts with pictures and slogans ranging from the innocuous to the rude, books on how to identify rednecks or seduce women, highball glasses that miraculously unclothe the pinup pictured on the glass as it is emptied, edible underwear, sunglasses that make the wearer's eyes look like those of a Hollywood film alien are among the more decorous of these goods. Much of the stuff in Prairie Home Companion's Wireless Catalog is of this kind, as is almost all of the stuff in the Funny Bone Catalog. If one lacks the inclination or the aesthetic courage for a trip to Frank's Fun Shop, punching \"Gag gifts\" into a Google search will surface a list with links to 37 sites-ranging from Art's Fart Mart (\"Browse through their selection of dog doo, whoopie cushions, fart spray, and foul smelling lollipops\") to Bachelorette Headquarters (\"Sells bachelorette party goods including adult gag gifts and bridal supplies\"), to Boink Mail (\"Embarrassing gag gifts for birthdays, retirement, graduation, and bachelor parties\"), to Fun Ideas (\"Features a large selection of gag gifts and novelty items\"), to Get Your Licks (\"Humorous lick sticks with your favorite medication name on the front-Viagra, Prozac, Xanax, Valium, Praxil, and Zoloft\"), to Wacky Weenies (\"Choose from such characters as Spank the Monkey and Choke the Chicken. Each comes with a comical name tag and special care instructions\"). The bestsellers at APracticalJoke.com are a Remote Control Fart Machine ($13.25), Shock Pen ($20.00), Shock Lighter ($20.00), Stink Bombs ($1.00/3 pack; order 10, get 2 free), Exploding Pen ($1.50), Squirt Lighter ($4.00), Rubber Chicken ($6.00), Pop a Putt (\"When your mark putts the ball into the hole, it pops right back out,\" $12.00), and a selection of five different \"winning\" lottery tickets ($1.25 each). Among the more sophisticated are the medical gag gifts on offer at Med-Psych.net and such high-end items as the Daiquiri Whacker ($254.95) and the Bar Stool Racer ($1695.00) at Wonderfullywacky.com. Somewhat more specialized are the offerings of \"Revenge Gag Gifts by the Turd Bird\" and the gag gift page of MakeStuff.com, which provides directions for making one's own gag gifts. SoImmature.com so efficiently captures the range and spirit of G-rated gag gifts that if the press of business limits exploration to only one site, this is the one to visit, with a catalog of eight fart products, 33 fake doo, vomit, and spill products, nine squirting products, 25 mask and body part products, 18 Billy-Bob teeth products, 39 classic products ranging from a two headed nickel, snapping gum, itching powder","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127762365","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Simpson Boarding House, 1901–1909: Reflecting the Roosevelt Largesse","authors":"Emilie C. White","doi":"10.1111/J.1537-4726.2001.2403_197.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1537-4726.2001.2403_197.X","url":null,"abstract":"In his message of September 8, 1908, to C. F. Weller, Secretary, The President's Homes Commission, President Theodore Roosevelt stated, In a democracy like ours, it is an ill thing for all of us, if any of us suffer from unwholesome surroundings or from lack of opportunity for good home life, good citizenship and useful industry. (Hart 234) And at the Pacific Theological Seminary, spring 1911, he stated, Nothing else takes the place or can take the place of family life, and family life cannot be really happy unless it is based on duty, based on recognition of the great underlying laws of religion and morality, of the great underlying laws of civilization, the laws which if broken mean the dissolution of civilization. (173) President Roosevelt's concern over conditions of housing and confirmation of family life was well founded in the burgeoning cities of his time, bursting with new arrivals of people from afar and people from farms. The boarding house was both praised for its provision of reputable accommodations in a homelike environment and blamed for its allowance of moral erosion in unsupervised settings. The upsurge of preference for lodging, rather than boarding, had begun by the turn of the twentieth century. In his article, \"On the Margins: Lodgers and Boarders in Boston, 1860-1900,\" Mark Peel quotes from sociologist Albert B. Wolfe's The Lodging House Problem in Boston that the late nineteenth-century lodger desired \"freedom and a bohemian existence.\" But, Peel maintains, Boarding continued to provide a familial setting for genteel American sociability. Lodging demanded a different relationship between housekeepers and tenants, one with fewer obligations and less interaction beyond the paying of rent. (823) Albert Wolfe expands this concept in his 1907 article, \"The Problem of the Roomer\": The boarder sleeps and eats in the same house; the roomer takes his meals at a restaurant...the probabilities are that the rooming house is everywhere displacing the old-time boarding house.... Moreover, lax as were boarding house conventionalities, they afforded far more restraints than can be found in the rooming house. A boarding house without a public parlor would be an anomaly, while a rooming house with one is a rarity. Wolfe laments the departure from the boarding house effecting \"the isolation of the individual in the great middle, work-a-day class that fills the rooming houses-an isolation which constitutes a very real social problem\" (959). So grave was the awareness of this change of preference that by 1909, the Lodging House Commission of Boston offered seven \"proposals for remedies\" to ameliorate the conditions of \"moral evil\" spawned by the rise of rooming houses and lodging houses (\"Boston's Lodging House Commission\" 738). In her book, Miss Mary Bobo's Boarding House Cookbook, Pat Mitchamore asks the question again in 1994, What was a boarding house? Generally, a large house with room to spare, a home to many. First, however, it served a","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"89 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128526858","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Community Performed: St. Nicholas, Lucifer, and Invented Tradition","authors":"Karen L. Gygli","doi":"10.1111/J.1542-734X.2001.TB00037.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1542-734X.2001.TB00037.X","url":null,"abstract":"Immigrants to the United States have used many strategies in order to survive and flourish, emotionally as well as materially, in the new environment surrounding them. The attempt to preserve traditions has been one such strategy. Festivals, food, songs, folktales, and performances have long served as a means of affirming identity and preserving some semblance of continuity while adapting to tremendous cultural change. However, this strategy cannot stem the tide entirely: some traditions die out because they are no longer relevant, some traditions are adapted to new surroundings, and some \"traditions\" are in reality invented to preserve group identity, especially when the group feels threatened by religious and political differences within itself. In his introduction to The Invention of Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm defines invented traditions in this way: \"Invented Tradition\" is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past.... In short, they are responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition. It is the contrast between the constant change and innovation of the modern world and the attempt to structure at least some parts of social life within it as unchanging and invariant, that makes the \"invention of tradition\". so interesting for historians of the past two centuries. (1-2) Hobsbawm argues that this construct can establish membership to a group, it can reinforce the authority of the institutions within that group, or it can reinforce models of behavior or value systems (9). Examination of an invented performance tradition thus can reveal ideals held by a group, what the group perceives as a problem and what has changed about the group, for as Hobsbawm notes, these invented traditions can serve as \"evidence\" (12). The invented tradition of a Slovene-language St. Nicholas operetta performed yearly in Cleveland, Ohio, and its roots in an earlier traditional village procession, will be examined here. The operetta serves as an example of how a performance was constructed in order to educate children about appropriate behavior within Slovene culture. While the operetta was originally invented to educate and entertain homeless boys while controlling their behavior, the operetta performance became for immigrants after World War II an annually performed model of orderly ethnic and religious cohesion. The Slovene immigrants after 1945, many of them middle-class, educated, politically conservative and devoutly Roman Catholic, found a deeply split Slovene-- American community waiting for them in Cleveland. One faction was active in Roman Catholic Slovene organizations. The other supported Josip Broz Tito's Partisans during World War II and was only nominall","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125425122","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Do We Get to Win This Time?”: POW/MIA Rescue Films and the American Monomyth","authors":"D. Sutton, J. Winn","doi":"10.1111/J.1537-4726.2001.2401_25.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1537-4726.2001.2401_25.X","url":null,"abstract":"On the evening of January 23, 1973, in a national radio and television address, President Richard Nixon announced the conclusion of a cease-fire agreement between the United States of America and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Nixon explained that all American prisoners of war would be released and there would also be \"the fullest possible accounting for all those who are missing in action\" (\"Agreement\" 153). In the years that followed such an accounting never materialized. Since then stories about American POW/MIAs in Southeast Asia have persisted. In the early 1990s, the U.S. Senate established a select committee to bring closure to this lingering question from the Vietnam War. Sutton points out that the committee concluded that there were no American POW/MIAs being held in Southeast Asia but not all Americans were convinced. In the 1980s several films with a basic plot structure that centered around the rescue of American POW/MIAs in Southeast Asia appeared. Budra, in \"Rambo in the Garden: The POW Film as Pastoral,\" argues that the POW/MIA rescue film is a sub-genre of the Vietnam film genre. This essay examines the films Uncommon Valor (1984), Missing in Action (1985), and Rambo: First Blood, Part II (1985) and finds that these films helped to lay the foundation for the POW/MIA rescue genre. However, more importantly, this paper argues that a key factor in the popularity of these films with American audiences lies in their ability to resolve the POW/ MIA question while also giving Americans a symbolic \"victory\" in the Vietnam War. For at the conclusion of these films some of the American POW/MIAs finally come home to be reunited with their families, and the Southeast Asian Communists are brutally defeated by an American warrior. In short, as Rambo suggests in First Blood, Part II the Americans get to \"win\" this time. There exists some debate about whether American Vietnam war films makeup a recognizable genre (e. g. Whillock). Budra points to the similarities between the narratives of these films and the narrative conventions of the classic Western genre with its ties to the American monomyth. The typical story in these films consists of the rescue of American POWs from the Vietnamese and is closely followed by several of these films and continued with slight variations in others. This essay uses these familiar narrative conventions to demonstrate that one of their appeals to American audiences is their use of key images found in the classic American monomyth. The films Uncommon Valor (1984), Missing in Action (1985), and Rambo: First Blood, Part 11 (1985) were foundational for the POW/MIA rescue film as a subgenre. American audiences flocked to these films, especially Rambo: First Blood, Part II, despite the lack of critical acclaim. Although their plots differ in some details, the Vietnam War POW/MIA rescue movies contain key images found in the classic American monomyth. In their research into the artifacts of American popular culture","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"118876546","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Control to Adaptation: America's Toy Story","authors":"K. Jackson","doi":"10.1111/J.1537-4726.2001.2401_139.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1537-4726.2001.2401_139.X","url":null,"abstract":"The child's toys and the old man's reasons are the fruits of the two seasons. -William Blake Introduction Nothing defines us more than our toys. From infancy, when we clutch brightly-colored blocks and cuddly teddy bears, to adulthood, when our toys of choice are fast cars, electronic games, and cute or expensive collectibles, toys say a great deal about who we are and what we value. Some toys, such as kites, jacks, and hoops, are inherently recreational, enabling us to have fun. More often than not, though, toys also serve a larger purpose as they exemplify our cultural truths: what skills we hope to develop, what attitudes we want to cultivate, and what possessions we wish to flaunt. Toys reflect the interplay between our society's view of play and its opposite, work. All societies have had toys, affirming a basic human need to connect with an object-perhaps a doll or a ball-in some form of play. However, it was not until the late sixteenth century that the word \"toy\"-which was associated with triviality, delusion, and lust-began to refer to children's playthings (Kuznets 10). In America by end of the nineteenth century, the notion of \"toy\" took on new meaning. Prior to this time, toys-which were almost always homemade, usually of wood-were few, as children endured endless hours of chores, leaving little time for play. The toys and games that they did have frequently embodied moralistic messages. By the Industrial Age, this began to change as mass-produced, affordable toys became available, and workers had the income to buy them. At the same time, children, who previously were regarded as little adults and treated accordingly, entered a new sphere. Deemed different from adults by virtue of their innocence, children warranted special care, protection, nurturing, and instruction as they moved through a distinct stage of development known as childhood, characterized by their own books, clothing, and playthings. In essence, they won the right to be children and to play, and toys became part of the formula. This attitude became even more entrenched by the 1950s when, during the the post-World War II baby boom, television invaded American homes attracting children with shows and advertising geared to them and espousing a child-centered, family-oriented agenda. In such a culture, where children are highly valued, the role of toys takes on greater importance, and several questions emerge, some practical, others ideological. What functions do, and should, toys provide? What messages do toys and the narratives that accompany them impart to children? How do toys reflect and affect attitudes and values in a dynamic, increasingly technological, careerist, and consumerist mass culture? Do we ever outgrow our toys? As artifacts of popular culture, toys embody the controversies of their time. Sites of philosophical struggle, they form a text that invites a discussion of contemporary issues regarding empowerment, control, social roles, and consumption. Then and","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126426460","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}