Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative FormDuke University Press, 1995 - Počet stran: 390 Ever since the founders drafted "We the People," "we" have been at pains to work out the contradictions in their formulation, to fix in words precisely what it means to be American. Constituting Americans rethinks the way that certain writers of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century contributed to this project; in doing so, it revises the traditional narrative of U.S. literary history, restoring an essential chapter to the story of an emerging American cultural identity. In diverse ways, very different writers—including Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Harriet Wilson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Gertrude Stein—participated in the construction and dissemination of an American identity, but none was entirely at ease in the culture they all helped to define. Evident in their work is a haunting sense of their telling someone else’s story, a discomfort that Priscilla Wald reads in the context of legal and political debates about citizenship and personhood that marked the emergence of the United States as a nation and a world power. From early-nineteenth-century Supreme Court cases to turn-of-the-century Jim Crow and immigration legislation, from the political speeches of Abraham Lincoln to the historical work of Woodrow Wilson, nation-builders addressed the legal, political, and historical paradoxes of American identity. Against the backdrop of their efforts, Wald shows how works such as Douglass’s autobiographical narratives, Melville’s Pierre, Wilson’s Our Nig, Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folks, and Stein’s The Making of Americans responded, through formal innovations, to the aggressive demands for literary participation in the building of that nation. The conversation that emerges among these literary works challenges the definitions and genres that largely determine not only what works are read, but also how they are read in classrooms in the United States today. Offering insight into the relationship of storytelling to national identity, Constituting Americans will compel the attention of those with an interest in American literature, American studies, and cultural studies. |
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... authorship . Yet the resonances among these works have made clear to me that these concerns reached across historical and sociological bound- aries — as well as genre classifications — through which current narratives of literary ...
... authorship . Yet the resonances among these works have made clear to me that these concerns reached across historical and sociological bound- aries — as well as genre classifications — through which current narratives of literary ...
Strana 10
... authorship , anx- ieties generated by the reformulation of personhood first as the United States struggled to define itself as a nation in the mid - nineteenth century and later as it contended with the difficulties of its emergence as ...
... authorship , anx- ieties generated by the reformulation of personhood first as the United States struggled to define itself as a nation in the mid - nineteenth century and later as it contended with the difficulties of its emergence as ...
Strana 13
... authorship and led them to both literary innovations and analyses of We the People . In the relationships among their experiences , their innovations , and their analy- ses lies a story of the overlapping and sometimes contradictory ...
... authorship and led them to both literary innovations and analyses of We the People . In the relationships among their experiences , their innovations , and their analy- ses lies a story of the overlapping and sometimes contradictory ...
Strana 14
... authorship by white abolitionists . Ironically , the abolitionists were troubled by Douglass's gifts . By all accounts a man on fire , Douglass gave speeches alive to the nuances of words and timing . They are tactile , gripping . Yet ...
... authorship by white abolitionists . Ironically , the abolitionists were troubled by Douglass's gifts . By all accounts a man on fire , Douglass gave speeches alive to the nuances of words and timing . They are tactile , gripping . Yet ...
Strana 15
... authorship . Douglass's partial mischaracterization of the Narrative in the later work is not surprising . My Bondage and My Freedom also tells two stories , and his parallel struggle for authorial control in that work is evident in ...
... authorship . Douglass's partial mischaracterization of the Narrative in the later work is not surprising . My Bondage and My Freedom also tells two stories , and his parallel struggle for authorial control in that work is evident in ...
Obsah
Neither Citizen nor Alien National Narratives Frederick Douglass and the Politics of SelfDefinition | 16 |
As From a Faithful Mirror Pierre Our Nig and Literary Nationalism | 108 |
The Strange Meaning of Being Black The Souls of Black Folk and the Narrative of History | 174 |
A LosingSelf Sense The Making of Americans and the Anxiety of Identity | 239 |
An American We | 301 |
Notes | 307 |
Selected Bibliography | 355 |
377 | |
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Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form Priscilla Wald Náhled není k dispozici. - 1994 |
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