Book Review: Against Self-Reliance: The Arts of Dependence in the Early United States by William Huntting Howell
Stressing in his introduction that his concern is the ‘facts on the ground’ (11) in American history, Howell draws on quotidian and largely overlooked aesthetic projects such as the design of coins and schoolgirl samplers to offer some genuinely original work on how creative work in America was consanguineous with the processes of state-building.
Continue ReadingCurating LGBT History Month: Lessons Learned
February 2016 featured the most successful LGBT History month event series the University of Nottingham has ever seen. Hannah Rose Murray, programme organiser, reflects on the challenges she faced when curating the series and what systems of support she needed in place when she began. The post concludes with a series of event reviews from postgraduates in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Pynchon’s California edited by Scott McClintock and John Miller
This collection of essays offers additional proof of Pynchon’s continued centrality in American literature by displaying the politics of place and premeditated murder of some California stereotypes although Pynchon lets the utopian dreams for California, America, and the 1960s gracefully, painfully recede yet linger in these works as well.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Critical Insights: David Foster Wallace edited by Philip Coleman
In Adam Kelly’s overview of the critical field surrounding David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), he notes that during the last years of Wallace’s life there was ‘a steady stream of scholarly interest, but more recently that stream has become a torrent’ (46). If we consider the vast amount of blogs, reviews, and think pieces, that have emerged to coincide with the recent U.S. release of the film The End of the Tour – which portrays five days with Wallace on the promotional tour for Infinite Jest (1996) – we can discern that that torrent has become a deluge. Indeed, it may be that we are fast approaching – or have already hurtled past – the point that marks ‘peak Wallace’.
Continue ReadingBook 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 ReadingReview: American Historical Association Annual Meeting
The AHA Presidential Address by Vicki L. Ruiz (University of California, Irvine) entitled, ‘Class Acts: Latina Feminist Traditions, 1900-1930’, challenged the dominant historiographical genealogy of Latina feminism, which typically focuses on seventeenth-century Mexican women poets and then jumps to the 1970s Chicana movement. Instead, Ruiz explored the work of two key early-twentieth-century Latina labour activists: Puerto Rican Luisa Capetillo and Guatemalan Luisa Moreno (born Rosa López Rodríguez).
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
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