New American Studies Journal最新文献

{"title":"Response to “Katrina Trask: The Gilded Age of Philanthropy,” by Khristeena Lute","authors":"Stéphanie Durrans","doi":"10.18422/74-1397","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18422/74-1397","url":null,"abstract":"A Response to “Katrina Trask: The Gilded Age of Philanthropy,” by Khristeena Lute","PeriodicalId":221210,"journal":{"name":"New American Studies Journal","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135395203","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 “Thingness” of the American Middlebrow:","authors":"Hannah Grace Lanneau","doi":"10.18422/74-737","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18422/74-737","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, I examine the ways in which Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby both critique and engage with materialism and consumerism as middlebrow texts. Bill Brown’s discussion of the power and meaning of “things” of literature (2003; 16-17) serves as a framework through which I analyze the double “thingness” of the middlebrow as depicted in these novels—that is, the simultaneous investment in and critique of consumer objects. To that end, I analyze both the print culture histories and content of Blondes (which is widely considered a middlebrow text in academic scholarship) in conversation with Gatsby (which is not always thought of as a middlebrow text). I argue that, rather than view middlebrow within a high/low brow paradigm, we should instead consider the ways in which the middlebrow operates with and within mass consumer culture as well as provides a critique of that culture. Because the American middlebrow has a distinct socioeconomic history, I demonstrate how these novels also grapple with the “thingness” of American identity and the Americanness of “things” by centering the protagonists’ engagement with material objects in the construction of their identities. Gatsby and Blondes demonstrate the middlebrow American quality of things through their narrative content, and the novels’ histories as print objects reflect their circulation as commercial things themselves. This article challenges understandings of the “middlebrow” as a genre unto itself by examining the historical situatedness of the term and its evolving definitions. This article also invites renewed conversation around the middlebrow by proposing a new perspective and an alternative approach to the understanding of middlebrow literature. I argue that these novels present an ideal re-entry into discussion of the middlebrow because of their disparate print culture histories and the cultural capital (or lack thereof) they signify in the present day. This article thus traces the print histories of these two novels alongside analyses of their reception histories and critiques the concept of a middlebrow literature, turning again to contradictory definitions of the term to suggest a more fluid understanding of the middlebrow in scholarship should be able to account both for the continuing appeal of early twentieth-century middlebrow literature and the ways in which the middlebrow itself as an aspirational aesthetic and consumerist ethic has evolved and is ubiquitous in the twenty-first century.","PeriodicalId":221210,"journal":{"name":"New American Studies Journal","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135396169","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":"Response to “Serving in the Household and the Imagination: The Brontës, Alcott and the Interconnected Roles of a Neglected ‘Transatlantic’ Female Figure,” by Paula Guimarães","authors":"Daniela Daniele","doi":"10.18422/74-1390","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18422/74-1390","url":null,"abstract":"A Response to “Serving in the Household and the Imagination: The Brontës, Alcott and the Interconnected Roles of a Neglected ‘Transatlantic’ Female Figure,” by Paula Guimarães","PeriodicalId":221210,"journal":{"name":"New American Studies Journal","volume":"240 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135396173","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":"My Life in American Studies – Memories and Expectations","authors":"Heinz Ickstadt","doi":"10.18422/74-1381","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18422/74-1381","url":null,"abstract":"I am now in that phase of life when old people like me tend to reminisce and give account. Since my long academic life was committed to American Studies, I wondered how this came about, and although I am aware of the inevitable mix between coincidence and symbolic self-construction, I believe that my career was rooted in certain moments of experience: a seminar on Melville, the physical exposure to “America,” and the significance America had for me from childhood on. I also believe that a temperamental affinity to an idea of democracy built on communication led me to embrace the democratic belief that is at the core of American Studies. At the same time, my own process of disillusionment ran parallel to the critical redefinition of American Studies that has characterized the development of the field during the last forty years or so. In what follows, I have tried to reflect on my original enthusiasm, and on where I stand now, in an effort to be realistic and optimistic at the same time.","PeriodicalId":221210,"journal":{"name":"New American Studies Journal","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135396174","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":"“Grief became my friend, my work:” Mary Todd Lincoln’s Uneasy Union with Memory in LeAnne Howe’s SAVAGE CONVERSATIONS (2019)","authors":"Stefanie Schäfer","doi":"10.18422/74-1391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18422/74-1391","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines the politics of service vested in the First Lady role and her affective labors by turning to a contemporary fictional representation of Mary Todd Lincoln. In Savage Conversations (2019), LeAnne Howe considers issues involving US national memory, White womanhood, and settler colonial violence. The play imagines Lincoln’s insanity episode in the Bellevue asylum in the 1870s, where, as Lincoln told her doctor, an “Indian” visited her every night, scalping her and wiring her eyelids open. By outlining Mary’s performance of caring widow and her petitioning for compensation for her public service, Howe reveals Mary’s complicity in the Lincoln presidency’s settler violence. The play recalibrates the gendered renditions of (public) service inherent to the narratives of mourning, motherhood, and insanity tied to Mary’s persona and shows the flip side of the care narrative, connecting the long 19th century to the First Lady persona of the present.","PeriodicalId":221210,"journal":{"name":"New American Studies Journal","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135396176","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":"Mary McCarthy and the Genealogy of Progressive Liberalism","authors":"Johannes Voelz","doi":"10.18422/74-1382","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18422/74-1382","url":null,"abstract":"Three decades after graduating from Vassar, in 1963, McCarthy published her bestselling novel The Group – a phenomenal commercial success that brought her fame, wealth, and plenty of scorn from her fellow New York intellectuals. In The Group, she revisits the site of her political and aesthetic awakening, Vassar College, by focusing on the lives of eight – or, at closer counting, nine – Vassar girls, a group of friends from the class of ‘33, who have just graduated, and now are off to put their Vassar-bred ambitions into practice, or not. At first sight, the novel is not concerned with politics. Yet indirectly, it reinterprets and reevaluates the liberalism of the 1930s. And it does so, curiously, by hanging on, in some crucial ways, to the model function of Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, though what it appropriates from Dos Passos no longer corresponds to the young McCarthy’s enthusiasm of the year 1933.","PeriodicalId":221210,"journal":{"name":"New American Studies Journal","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135396177","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":"Woman’s Work is Never (Un-)Done: A Response to “Contemplating Women’s Imperial Service: Mabel Bent as Photographer, Travel Writer, and Collector,” by Esther Wetzel","authors":"Verena Laschinger","doi":"10.18422/74-1395","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18422/74-1395","url":null,"abstract":"A Woman’s Work is Never (Un-)Done: A Response to “Contemplating Women’s Imperial Service: Mabel Bent as Photographer, Travel Writer, and Collector,” by Esther Wetzel","PeriodicalId":221210,"journal":{"name":"New American Studies Journal","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135395202","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":"Where Is Utopia in a Time of Disaster and Catastrophe?","authors":"Allegra Hyde, Catrin Gersdorf","doi":"10.18422/74-1385","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18422/74-1385","url":null,"abstract":"In search of new literary voices that might present an answer to Amitav Ghosh’s 2016 lament on the failure of contemporary literary fiction to find forms that adequately express the multiple challenges of the Anthropocene, I came across a review of Allegra Hyde’s debut novel in the Los Angeles Times. The novel’s title, Eleutheria, was suggestive enough to pique my interest: etymologically, it evokes the concepts of liberty and freedom; geographically, it calls to mind the small island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas that was colonized in the late 1640s by a group of English Puritans known as the Eleutheran Adventurers. Add to this that Willa Marks, the novel’s narrator-protagonist, is a twenty-two-year-old member of Generation Z, the same generation as the students we teach these days, and Eleutheria (2022) becomes a worthy candidate for an American Studies syllabus. What kind of narrative tapestry was the author able to weave out of the materials of history, climate change, and a young generation’s growing frustration with the ecological and political state of the world? I was ready to discuss these and similar questions with a group of students in a seminar on Anglophone Literature in the Anthropocene during the summer semester 2023. Serendipitously, the son of an American colleague and long-time friend studied with Allegra Hyde at Oberlin College, where she is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing. He suggested that she might be willing to discuss her novel with a group of German students. When I issued the invitation to join us digitally for one session, she accepted. I interviewed Hyde, who is also the author of two short story collections – Of This New World (2016) and The Last Catastrophe (2023)– a few days later. The following text is the transcript of that conversation. It has been edited for readability.","PeriodicalId":221210,"journal":{"name":"New American Studies Journal","volume":"205 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135396172","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":"Serving in the Household and the Imagination: The Brontës, Alcott, and the Interconnected Roles of a Neglected “Transatlantic” Female Figure","authors":"Paula Alexandra Guimarães","doi":"10.18422/74-1389","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18422/74-1389","url":null,"abstract":"Tabitha Aykroyd, Martha Brown, Nancy and Sarah Garrs were just a few of the very many girls and women working as domestic servants in early Victorian Britain. The main purpose of this article is to analyze the precise context and conditions in which they were employed in Haworth Parsonage, where the Brontë sisters lived for most of their lives (1820–1855), and the influence that they had on the well-being of this famous family and on the imagination and literary activity of the sisters. Aspects connected with the following will be explored and problematized: the value and respect that the Brontës attributed to or showed these domestic laborers and their work, including sharing in their tasks and duties; brief but useful connections of these figures with the sisters’ own professional activities as middle-class women (namely, when serving as teachers and governesses themselves); and also comparison with some relevant literary representations of the figure and role of the “female servant” in the Brontës’ novels. A complementary purpose is of a more transatlantic nature: to compare their earlier British domestic context with Louisa May Alcott’s later American one, and their literary representations of the female servant with Alcott’s own extensive treatment of that neglected figure in some of her fictional works. The justification for this comparison does not lie so much in the known influence that the works written by the Brontës, in particular Charlotte’s, had on Alcott, but more in their sharing of very similar concerns as regards this topic, in spite of very specific (transatlantic) differences that can be revealing of their respective attitude towards servitude.","PeriodicalId":221210,"journal":{"name":"New American Studies Journal","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135396179","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":"Francis Augustus Silva - A Life","authors":"J. C. Pereira","doi":"10.18422/73-19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18422/73-19","url":null,"abstract":"A recent reviewer labelled Francis Augustus Silva a ‘minor league’ artist. It is true that although his works are still respected by experts, his is not a household name with the general public. Among the former he is best known for his careful attention to detail and his treatment of light; and yet, not much is known about him and his inner life. Born two years before Emerson’s American Scholar, Silva grew during one of the formative periods of a distinctive American cultural identity, and his art can be said to reflect this. In his later years, however, Silva witnessed the rise of a new generation of American painters again looking to Europe for inspiration. The years following the end of the Civil War had crushed the early optimism but Silva did not stray from the path. His art kept true to the influence of emotion and the search for harmony with Nature, not just as a manifestation of his convictions but also as an attempt to find a place of solace, and might be our best guide to learning more about him and his personal convictions. Nonetheless, a close reading of some of his life’s events and interactions allows some clarification and a better understanding of this painter.","PeriodicalId":221210,"journal":{"name":"New American Studies Journal","volume":"2013 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114675938","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}