Journal of American & Comparative Cultures最新文献

{"title":"“If I Warn't Too Drunk to Get There…”: On Race","authors":"Gregory Fowler","doi":"10.1111/J.1537-4726.2001.2401_49.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1537-4726.2001.2401_49.X","url":null,"abstract":"The prejudices of one's breeding are not gotten rid of just at a jump. -Mark Twain The Hannibal of Mark Twain's youth was permeated by what Forrest Robinson called \"bad faith\": the unthinking hypocrisy of people who daily violated the moral norms to which they paid lip service while pretending they were doing nothing of the sort. Twain eventually came to understand the phenomenon and the self-delusion and communal collusion required to sustain it. By dissecting the human relations obtained in the world of his childhood, Twain would become an acerbic analyst not only of \"bad faith but of its close cousin, the lie of silent assertion\" that could hold an entire nation in its thrall. A whitewashed fence is one thing. A whitewashed history is another. -Shelly Fisher Fishkin The first really beautiful day during my first visit to Berlin was on the day we went to visit the Sachsenheusen concentration camp. The weather seemed out of place somehow-brilliant with a slight chill. As we neared the gates, my German friend pointed to several houses and commented that it was there that the SS officers lived with their families. In slightly strained English he commented on how those officers would come home after murdering hundreds of men, women, and children to their own families where they were good fathers and husbands. \"Double faced\" is the term he used, and after some thought I agreed that this term was probably more accurate than \"two-faced\" because it didn't carry the same negative connotation. A person who is two-faced pretends to be one thing when in fact he is another. These soldiers were not pretending or attempting to deceive-in fact it could be argued that they were genuinely both cold killers and good fathers, pleased with the work they did on both fronts. Each was a part of who they were. It was hard to believe that the people who lived in those houses could be such cold-blooded killers. Everything about the places-the lace curtains at the windows, the gardens in the back, even the fences around the yards-suggested a normal domestic life. For a short period as I stared at those houses, it was easy to fall into the trap of thinking of these men as simply monsters-twisted, lacking the part of humanity which separates us from beasts. \"How could they?!\" was the constant question in my mind. But as I continued to look at those houses, a strange thing happened. We passed by one with a gated yard, and a memory flashed through my mind of a white picket fence, and a small boy painting it on a Saturday morning. The fence here, north of Berlin, was not so different from a fence Tom Sawyer was painting in Missouri. And I remembered how the little slave boy Jim came along on an errand from Aunt Polly. Whereas I had often taken this image in a romantic setting before, I was now jarred by the discrepancy. How could figures as likable as Aunt Polly, the Widow Douglas, and the other people in that Missouri town support such a notion of slavery? The answer to my ea","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"5 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":"126535171","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":"Regimental Bands in the Civil War","authors":"W. Rosengren","doi":"10.1111/J.1537-4726.2001.2401_191.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1537-4726.2001.2401_191.X","url":null,"abstract":"Marching Brass Bands were new to the musical scene at the time of the Civil War and they performed in ways that seem odd and out of tune with our times. Brass bands of that era were part of the great shift from a \"prismatic\" to an \"urban/ industrial\" society. A prismatic society is analogous to an actual prism. Just as a prism is rotated slightly and a new color appears, so, too, in a prismatic society, the behavior of individuals can shift and change without regard to the situation at stake or the expectation of others. It is a world of interactional surprises. People living in such a culture are simply not subject to the role segmentation that makes life bearable in modern complex bureaucratized society. All of this means that prismatic people enjoy a wide range of options in what roles they can play and how they can play them. It is this feature of the prismatic circumstances of the Civil War era that is reflected in the culture and behavior of Bands and musicians during that time, and wherein culture is a kaleidoscope that can suddenly take a different shape and content. The South was still rooted in this \"prismatic\" stage (Rip-2s). The North was farther along the road to modernity, though it too retained much of the prismatic ethos. In a prismatic society social institutions overlap: family norms mix with political usages, economic with religious, and so forth. In them individual behavior is volatile and unstable-shifting quickly from one institutional expression to others. During these fleeting years of transition, persons were free of the stifling conformity demanded in a \"folk\" society, but not yet subject to the constraints to emerge in modern organizational society. The impact of a prismatic environment can be reflected in all aspects of culture, including bands and music. This is so because all role performances are less scripted than in the urban/organized world, and there is greater latitude for self-expression. Moreover, in the prismatic world appearances are poor guidelines to behavior. In short, things may seldom be what they seem in a prismatic society. Thus, when Robert E. Lee referred to his Union foes as \"Those people\" rather than as \"the enemy\" it was more than just a Southern gentleman speaking, and his remark did not mean he was inclined to kill fewer Yankees. Lee was merely speaking prismatically. On the other hand, when Sherman said, \"I will make Georgia howl,\" he meant precisely that. Similarly, when a thirteen year old bugle boy, who had been shot in the head with an arrow, shot the Indian who put it there and took his scalp, it was more than a kid playing cowboy and Indian. Likewise, when a Confederate Band marched onto the battlefield at Gettysburg and entertained friend and foe with waltzes, polkas and two-- steps, it was not a crazy impulse, it was prismatic behavior (Leinbach). During pauses in battles, Yankee and Rebel Bands would gather on opposite sides of a river and engage in \"battles of the Bands\" after which","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"79 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":"126968006","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":"We Didn't Do That Did We? Representation of the Veteran Experience1","authors":"Anne L. Shewring","doi":"10.1111/J.1537-4726.2000.2304_51.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1537-4726.2000.2304_51.X","url":null,"abstract":"\"I sometimes find myself wondering, in a sudden panic, whether I'm not in the way of developing great numb patches in my sensibility of which I shall never be cured even if I do come through this war...I sometimes see myself in the future transformed into a sort of invalid who has suffered an amputation of all his delicate sentiments, like a man who has lost all his fingers and can only feel things with a couple of stumps. And there will be millions of us like that.\" -Jules Romains, Men of Good Will \"I don't feel like me anymore.\" -Timmy, Born on the Fourth of July The theme of this paper is the returning war veteran. It began as a comparison of four films, The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946), The Men (Fred Zinnemann, 1950), Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1978), and Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone, 1989), each dealing with the experience of returning veterans from one of two conflicts, World War II or the Vietnam War. There was clearly what Dixon Wecter calls a \"repetition of pattern\" in those experiences, so that it became interesting to compare how far these patterns could be extended and what other mediums apart from film had been used to illustrate the veteran experience. It seemed that some kind of commonalty emerged from the accounts of veterans, their families and the wider society into which they returned, and that the difficulties and problems described in such accounts were universal. But popular culture, and perhaps popular myth also, leaves one with a sense that the experience for the Vietnam veteran was somehow different. Not only was this war more problematic for society but the position of its veterans was also more complicated. This paper seeks to question that sense of difference. Was the Vietnam veteran's experience much changed from that of other veterans and, if so, what reasons can be found for this difference? The paper will compare veteran experiences from a number of other conflicts and, while using the four films cited as a basis for discussion, it will also call upon evidence from literature and history. In his farsighted book, Veteran Comes Back, written in 1944 as America was considering the fate of the returning World War II veteran, Professor Willard Waller wrote extensively of the problems encountered by previous veteran groups. The issues he raises form a useful baseline for any consideration of the veteran experience. He writes most impressively about anger and isolation, the two traits which seem, at least initially, to define the veteran's state of mind. Waller describes his own encounters with veterans from World War I: The soldier is glad to be home, but he comes home angry... In the early months of 1919, the writer [Waller] talked with a great many other demobilized soldiers on Chicago streets. Although he had felt something of the service-man's rebellion, he was astonished as any civilian at the intensity of their fury. They were angry about something; it was not clear just what. The writer q","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"234 1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114206855","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":"Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism","authors":"R. Weir","doi":"10.5860/choice.36-4078","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.36-4078","url":null,"abstract":"Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism. Daniel Horowitz. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. 255 pp.+ notes, index. A Jewish girl leaves Peoria, Illinois, for Smith College. Upon her 1942 graduation she goes to grad school, works in New York, then marries. A move to the suburbs and three children complete the conformist cycle. But middle-class housewifery becomes a \"gilded cage,\" devoid of self-worth, identity, and purpose. The realization that other educated women share \"the problem that has no name\" prompts the writing of The Feminine Mystique (1963), the seminal text during the rebirth of American feminism in the 1960s. Sound familiar? Betty Goldstein Friedan's transformation from naive Illinois schoolgirl and bored housewife to feminist firebrand is a popular culture staple of mythic proportion. According to Smith College American Studies professor Daniel Horowitz, that's precisely the problem. Most mythic odysseys, including Friedan's, are equal parts reality and fancy. Like other social historians in the wake of E.P. Thompson, Horowitz turns his attention to the \"making\" of Betty Friedan, and the private drama behind the public persona. During Goldstein's childhood, Peoria was Illinois's second-largest city, and witnessed clashes between capital and labor. Labor conflict was discussed freely in the Goldstein household, as was antisemitism, the rise of fascism, free-thought, and literature. By the time Goldstein graduated from high school, she already enjoyed a reputation as a budding intellectual. Goldstein's mind blossomed at Smith. Horowitz draws on Goldstein's undergraduate papers and editorials in the campus newspaper she edited, to show that Goldstein was also an activist. He does a masterful job of linking Goldstein to Smith professors who shaped her thought. Goldstein's capacious mind led her to write on topics like pacifism, student rights, fascism, and socialism. Many articles were spirited defenses of labor unions and, at the urging of a professor, Goldstein visited Tennessee's Highlander Folk School, a hotbed of union activism. As a graduate student at Berkeley (1942-43), Goldstein immersed herself as much in the Popular Front as in psychology labs. She moved to New York, where from 1943 through 1946, she reported on labor and women's issues for the Federated Press. When she lost her job-partly due to sexism-Goldstein began writing for the UE News, the official journal of the United Electrical Workers, a radical union with a relatively progressive record on women. She continued to write for the News into 1952. Horowitz notes that her 1949 marriage to Carl Friedan did not silence Friedan's union radicalism, McCarthyism did. The UE's communist organizers led to right-wing attacks that so decimated UE membership that Friedan fell victim to staff cut-backs. Retreat to the suburbs failed to stifle Friedan. First in Queens, then in Rockland County, Fried","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126358724","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":"How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America","authors":"","doi":"10.5860/choice.36-4777","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.36-4777","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128213834","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 New Dollars and Dreams: American Incomes and Economic Change","authors":"Ulf Zimmermann","doi":"10.5860/choice.36-5795","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.36-5795","url":null,"abstract":"The New Dollars and Dreams: American Incomes and Economic Change. Frank Levy. NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1998. ISBN 0-87154-515-2. $16.95 paper. Levy's original Dollars and Dreams recounted the tremendous growth in incomes following World War II. The \"new\" version tells of the disturbingly little growth there has been since the early '70s. It tells, too, of the even more disturbing increase in income inequality: When the earlier growth peaked around 1969, the richest five percent of families claimed 15.6 percent of total income; by 1996 that share had shot up to 20.3 percent. So what happened? After the war it was possible for unskilled workers, including blacks from the South moving up north, to find well-paying jobs in heavy industry/manufacturing. (A considerable equalization of what had been vast regional discrepancies resulted as these migrants lowered average incomes in the North while raising them in the South by their departure.) But then that high-income North turned into the \"rustbelt\" as de-industrialization set in and such opportunities for the unskilled disappeared. The beginning of the end of this great growth came with the worldwide crop failures of 1972/1973 which led to a 34 percent increase in food prices. This was followed by the (contrived) oil shortage through which OPEC was able to triple prices. These inflations impacted family income considerably, to the point that it actually dropped (in 1997 dollars) from a postwar high of $40,400 in 1973 to $38,600 by 1975. (By 1989 it had risen merely to $43,600 and because inflation and productivity both stayed low it went down to $43,200 in 1996.) Incomes remained fairly flat for several reasons. There was a productivity decline in which three factors played a role: higher oil prices changed techniques used to achieve productivity; maturing baby boomers, and more women, entering the workforce in greater numbers lowered the average workforce experience and hence wages; and increased government regulation diverted research from streamlining production to reducing pollution and protecting workers. And there was a lack of technological change that contributed substantially as well. Pressure to improve productivity, and technology, didn't come until the early '80s, and by the mid-'80s it extended to the service sector, with first blue- (low-skilled) and then white-collar workers getting laid off. The beginning computerization of work played a familiar role in these years. It's true that there has been a substantial expansion of the service sector in the U.S. economy, but Levy makes it clear that this is not as radical as many believe and certainly is not the explanation for the sorry state of family incomes. As he reminds us, even in 1947 the service sector consumed 53 percent of hours of employment; by 1996 it was 77 percent. Productivity grows very slowly in services-you can only speed up a haircut so much, likewise brain surgery. What's really more the issue is that services involve ","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"75 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121847641","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":"Silent film and the socialization of American immigrants: lessons from an old new medium.","authors":"S. Kleinman, Daniel G. McDonald","doi":"10.1111/J.1537-4726.2000.2303_79.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1537-4726.2000.2303_79.X","url":null,"abstract":"Many people today are voicing concerns about the potentially deleterious social effects of media such as television and the Internet. The turn of the twenty-first century provides an interesting vantage point from which to look back one hundred years and examine people's concerns about the impacts of an earlier communication technology - silent film. This kind of historical exercise reminds us, first, that each major communication technology has had its proponents and its critics, and second, that the social influences of communication technologies are more profound than their developers could have anticipated. The turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century marked the beginning of a communications revolution that was to have a major impact in defining social life in the United States during the twentieth century. That move first began to take shape in devices developed in the late nineteenth century but not finding a strong social place until the twentieth; audio recordings, radio broadcasting, and motion pictures were some of the technologies developed during the last decades of the nineteenth century that were to be characteristic of the twentieth. In addition to changes in communication technology, vast social changes were occurring as a result of urbanization and immigration. The rise of the large American city and its attendant social problems became a major concern of social workers and social commentators. Increasing immigration became a national issue during the 1890s and early 1900s. Millions of people, primarily those from European countries, poured into New York City and settled in areas that seemed most familiar and affordable to them-those made up of other recent immigrants-- forming ghettos and neighborhoods defined by country of origin. This article traces the early development of motion picture technology and examines the roles that motion pictures and the moviegoing experience played in communicating \"American\" values, sensibilities, and emotions to immigrant populations. The silent motion picture provided an inexpensive and accessible form of entertainment for America's new immigrants. The lack of spoken language was an advantage in that actors in the early cinema used body language and facial expression to their full impact. Unhindered by the complex plots and characters that were to appear with sound films, silent films, as well as the moviegoing experience, provided immigrants with a glimpse of this new country, including what to expect, how to behave, and what to feel. As a new medium at the turn of the twentieth century, silent film helped transform individuals, institutions, and the relationships among people and between social groups. U.S. Immigration in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries United States immigration history is often divided into waves-the \"Old Migration\" from approximately 1820-1880, the \"New Immigration\" from approximately 1885-1930, and the modern era, which began around 1930. The Old Migration","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"85 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126972299","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":"Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock","authors":"R. Browne","doi":"10.5860/choice.36-3527","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.36-3527","url":null,"abstract":"Plymouth Rock Plymouth, MA There s a Book About It on . Memory s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock: Amazon.de: John ... One wonders reading the initial reviews of John Seelye?s magisterial survey of the representation of Plymouth Rock,Memory?sNation.The common plaint is that ... Memory s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (review) Long celebrated as a symbol of the country s origins, Plymouth Rock no longer . often entertaining study of the place of Plymouth Rock in the national memory. Amazon.fr Memory s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock John ... Memory s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock. Long celebrated as a symbol of the country s origins, Plymouth Rock no longer receives much national... Memory s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock John D. Seelye ... Plymouth Rock, inscribed with 1620, the year of the Pilgrims landing in the . 29–30; John D. Seelye, Memory s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (1998, ... Memory s Nation : The Place of Plymouth Rock pdf . New downloads download the book copy here. The Memory s Nation : The Place of Plymouth Rock we think have quite excellent writing style that make it easy to comprehend. Memory s Nation The Place of Plymouth Rock pdf ebook 820bg free . Review. DOC. TYPE. Book Review. ABSTRACT. Reviews the book Memory s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock, by John Seelye. ACCESSION #. 4896121 ... plymouth adventure (1952) Lehigh University 25 Nov 1998 . In Memory s Nation: the Place of Plymouth Rock, John Seelye analyzes how Americans over two centuries have revised the meaning of their ... Nonfiction Book Review: Memory s Nation: The Place of Plymouth . Buy Memory s Nation: Place of Plymouth Rock by John Seelye (ISBN: 9780807824153) from Amazon s Book Store. Free UK delivery on eligible orders. Abrams, Ann Uhry. The Pilgrims and Pocahontas: Rival Myths of American Origin. Westview, 1999. 378 pp. online edition ... Memory Nation Leaves No Plymouth Rock Unturned .By Mitomi ... Memory s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock [John Seelye] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Long celebrated as a symbol of the ... Memory s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock by John Seelye jstor 8 Nov 2015 . Plymouth Rock is the traditional site of disembarkation of William ... As for the book, Memory s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock Good ... Memory s Nation (Book Review) EBSCOhost Connection Pressestimmen. Memory s Nation by John Seelye is a rich and enormously detailed study of the idea of Plymouth Rock in American cultural and political life. Memory s nation, the place of Plymouth Rock, John Seelye Memory s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock. Christiana Morgan Grefe. Article first published online: 5 JUL 2004. DOI: 10.1111/j.0022-3840.2004.107_4.x. Memory s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock Wiley Online Library Plymouth Rock is the stone upon which the Pilgrims were said to have stepped when the Mayflower arrived in . Memory s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock. Memory s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock: John","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"60 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127215736","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":"Entrepreneurial Masculinity: Re‐tooling the Self‐made Man","authors":"James V. Catano","doi":"10.1111/J.1542-734X.2000.2302_1.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1542-734X.2000.2302_1.X","url":null,"abstract":"Perhaps the most wide-ranging, durable, and popular tale in Western culture is the myth of the selfmade man. The most well-known American versions of the myth are Horatio Alger's morally uplifting, turn-of-the-century tales of overcoming less-thanspectacular origins and reaping justly deserved personal rewards. Popular interest in such tales has underwritten a cottage industry in entrepreneurial autobiographies and non-fiction essays during the last two decades. My basic claim here is that the popularity of these tales of corporate prowess rests on their ability to embody the most persistent and complex of social values-those devoted to gender. What is commonly being offered in the myth, which is dominated by male figures, is access to real masculinity. At the same time, these tales do not resolve masculine gender tensions. Instead they reenact psychological and social conflicts over \"correct\" gender behavior (exemplified in the myth's own internal contradictions) that cannot be readily resolved. In short, representations of masculine self-making are symptomatic of an incomplete symmetry between social claim and individual experience. The resulting disparity between societal goals and self-perceived identity produces an anxiety that paradoxically reinforces interest in the myth, as both society and its subjects attempt to perform and re-perform the myth's contradictory behaviors in an ongoing attempt to alleviate the very tensions the myth dramatizes. Among the contradictory appeals that the myth produces, one key element is a call to fight one's way up the corporate ladder that is paradoxically accompanied by an appeal to anti-institutionalism, to a rejection of the status quo and the flabby, bureaucratic, non-masculinity embodied in the aging fathers and the corporate powers-that-be. This is not a new argument, of course. Andrew Carnegie used it in another classic of the genre, his own autobiography of men and steel. But like all social myths, gender is subject to historical strains that intensify its internal contradictions, and one modern source of deep tension is the clash between Carnegie's still-active ideal of nineteenthcentury rugged individualism, especially entrepreneurial self-making, and the middle-class reality of modern corporate life. The twentieth-century rise of modern corporations has shifted the more blatantly masculinized, oedipal motifs of nineteenth-century industrial rhetoric, such as portrayals of fistfights between workers and managers, toward representations based on a carefully maintained blend of anti-institutionalism, corporate prowess, and personal risk. To these motifs is added a rhetorical dynamic that colors the mythic rhetoric as a whole: a call for movement forward into the future, which is paradoxically underwritten by nostalgia for the past. That nostalgia is further enhanced by the need to offset an end-of-the-century threat to the United States's industrial dominance, and the masculinity it underpins, with ","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127120062","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":"Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States","authors":"M. Shannon","doi":"10.5860/choice.35-4677","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.35-4677","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132591619","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}