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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Strana 1
... writers in this study , identified and tried to tell untold stories . In so doing , these authors came to understand why the stories they wanted to tell had remained so long untold . They confronted the limits of storytelling . In their ...
... writers in this study , identified and tried to tell untold stories . In so doing , these authors came to understand why the stories they wanted to tell had remained so long untold . They confronted the limits of storytelling . In their ...
Strana 3
... writers ' unsettling sense of not enjoying full authorial liberty in their texts , their uneasy awareness of a larger story controlling their sto- ries . But these works also convey their authors ' understanding that those larger ...
... writers ' unsettling sense of not enjoying full authorial liberty in their texts , their uneasy awareness of a larger story controlling their sto- ries . But these works also convey their authors ' understanding that those larger ...
Strana 10
... writers , and the contexts in which I read their works in each chapter reflect the different aspects of their encounters with cultural anxiety and the different arenas ... writing — emerges consistently as a means 10 CONSTITUTING AMERICANS.
... writers , and the contexts in which I read their works in each chapter reflect the different aspects of their encounters with cultural anxiety and the different arenas ... writing — emerges consistently as a means 10 CONSTITUTING AMERICANS.
Strana 11
Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form Priscilla Wald. the process of writing — emerges consistently as a means of ... writers , as Herman Melville and Harriet Wilson knew , were not immune from the imperatives that circumscribed Douglass's ...
Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form Priscilla Wald. the process of writing — emerges consistently as a means of ... writers , as Herman Melville and Harriet Wilson knew , were not immune from the imperatives that circumscribed Douglass's ...
Strana 12
... writing and not the botched precursor of later and greater ( and shorter ) masterpieces . Although I have made personhood rather than race the central term of my investigation , my project has benefited greatly from recent work in the ...
... writing and not the botched precursor of later and greater ( and shorter ) masterpieces . Although I have made personhood rather than race the central term of my investigation , my project has benefited greatly from recent work in the ...
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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