Book Review: Say We Are Nations: Documents of Politics and Protest in Indigenous America Since 1887
Before the book begins in earnest Cobb is at pains to point out that this collection will, to a certain extent, go against the grain in terms of what one would expect. Taking a glance through the list of sources confirms that his objective has been achieved with many serving to pique the reader’s interest considerably.
Continue ReadingBook Review: American Education in Popular Media: From the Blackboard to the Silver Screen edited by Sevan G. Terzian and Patrick A. Ryan
Building upon conversations within cultural and media studies, Terzian and Ryan have curated a collection that grapples with the relationship between intent and interpretation—between the way popular media images (mis)represent educational circumstances and the way such images shape how Americans have expected to see their educational surroundings.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Poe and the Subversion of American Literature: Satire, Fantasy, Critique by Robert T. Tally, Jr.
One of the most valuable parts of Tally’s book is its revision of genre definitions. For example, his definition of terror (a definition it would be good for others to adopt) is that terror, at least in Poe, consists not just of the unknown but the unknowable–inscrutability. Such foundational illegibility terrified transcendentalism’s romanticized Enlightenment empiricism
Continue ReadingBook Review: Fighting over the Founders: How we remember the American Revolution by Andrew M. Schocket
Andrew M. Schocket, Fighting over the Founders: How we remember the American Revolution New York: New York University Press, 2015. Most readers of this book, scholarly or otherwise, will come to it with prejudices about the Revolution and its meanings. They are likely to find them subjected to healthy and timely challenge, given the recent resurgence of political uses of aspects of the era. Schocket pursues his exploration of “the contemporary memory of the American Revolution” (4) through its manifestations in political discourse, historical biography, museums and historic sites, films and tv series and, in a slightly grab-bag final chapter, court-rooms, contemporary political movements (including the Tea Party) and reenactors. Schocket defines his periods as follows: the historical Revolution covers the 1765 Stamp Act to the 1788 ratification of the Constitution, and contemporary memory encompasses 2000-2012 (with occasional forays outside). Schocket’s central argument is that all these interpreters of the Revolution […]
Continue ReadingBook Review: Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism by Rachel Greenwald Smith
Rachel Greenwald Smith’s fascinating monograph argues against what she terms ‘the affective hypothesis’: the belief that literature should offer, and is most meaningful, when it transmits, ‘the emotional specificity of personal experience’ (1). She contends that the affective hypothesis functions invisibly, moving interchangeably between all aspects of the literary marketplace
Continue ReadingBook Review: Stars, Fans and Consumption in the 1950s: Reading Photoplay by Sumiko Higashi
Sumiko Higashi’s Stars, Fans and Consumption in the 1950s is a book about popular imagery, namely those of the female icons of 1950s movies. Only this isn’t about the movies, rather Higashi’s text investigates the iconography of these women as it is shored up in magazines and on billboards, unveiling not only the rampant commodification of Fifties bodies, but also how and why they were so voraciously consumed.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Legal Realism and American Law by J. Zaremby
At a first glance, the concept of realism appears somewhat dated, belonging to a particular epoch of legal scholarship. Being essentially a movement that had emerged during 1920s “out of a fundamentally progressive mood” [1] and gradually has fallen by the wayside since, it may appear as a quaint historic notion that a few dedicated academics grew to be fond of perusing, in a way reminiscent of an interest in pennyfarthing bicycles or silent film.
Continue ReadingBook Review: An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H. L. Mencken by Hal Crowther
Facing a canonical author with an intimidating wealth of existing scholarship can, at times, beg the question: what is really left to say? Mencken certainly falls into this category, a fact acknowledged in the “Disarming Introduction to an Alarming American”. Yet, in only seventy-seven pages, Crowther manages to offer a valuable and engaging contribution to the discussion of an extensively discussed man.
Continue ReadingBook Review: American Hippies by W.J. Rorabaugh
Proclaiming its title against a bright, tie-dye backdrop in swirling, psychedelic font, the visual appearance of W.J. Rorabaugh’s latest work could be said to somewhat underplay the scholarly worth of its contents. This is, however, perhaps fitting given its subject matter. Where recognised at all as something separate and distinct from the era’s climate of activism, the counterculture has often been portrayed as a colourful, but ultimately frivolous sideshow within broad histories of the 1960s, and it is in this respect that the account offered by Rorabaugh differs.
Continue ReadingBook Review: American Guy: Masculinity in American Law and Literature edited by Saul Levmore and Martha C. Nussbaum
American masculinity has recently been reasserting itself as a legitimate topic for study. As recently as 2013, Stony Brook University (SUNY) established the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities under the directorship of Michael Kimmel, one of the foremost voices in masculinity studies in America today.
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