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Aesthetic Innovation and the Democratic Principle
This collection of essays by a leading scholar of American literature and culture demonstrates the impressive scope and depth of Heinz Ickstadt's scholarly interventions and his intense engagement with crucial concepts and questions that have preoccupied the field of American studies over the past decades. Moving from the philosophy of pragmatism to issues of identity formation, from aesthetic experience to pluralist aesthetics, and from imaginaries of American modernism to strategies of commemoration, Ickstadt's recent work explores the complexities of the agenda of literary and cultural studies at large.
American Icons
American painters and graphic artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sought inspiration for their work in the uniquely American experience of history and nature. The result was a transformation of the conventional Old World visual language into an indigenous and populist New World syntax. The twelve essays in this volume explore the development of a frontier mythology, a democratic style depicting common people and objects, and an American artistic consciousness and identity. Conceived and written from the perspectives of both cultural and art historians, American Icons initiates an interdisciplinary discussion on the complex relationships between American and European art.
The Poetics and Politics of the Desert
This study explores the ways in which the desert, as topographical space and cultural presence, shaped and reshaped concepts and images of America. Once a territory outside the geopolitical and cultural borders of the United States, the deserts of the West and Southwest have since emerged as canonical American landscapes. Drawing on the critical concepts of American studies and on questions and problems raised in recent debates on ecocriticism, The Poetics and Politics of the Desert investigates the spatial rhetoric of America as it developed in view of arid landscapes since the mid-nineteenth century. Gersdorf argues that the integration of the desert into America catered to the entire spectrum of ideological and political responses to the history and culture of the US, maintaining that the Americanization of this landscape was and continues to be staged within the idiomatic parameters and in reaction to the discursive authority of four spatial metaphors: garden, wilderness, Orient, and heterotopia.
Re-framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies
What is the state of American studies in the twenty-first century?
The Oxford History of the Novel in English
An overview of US fiction since 1940 that explores the history of literary forms, the history of narrative forms, the history of the book, the history of media, and the history of higher education in the United States.
Narrated Communities – Narrated Realities
Culture studies try to understand how people assume identities and perceive reality. In this light narration is a fundamental cultural technique. What is considered "fictitious" or "real" no longer separates narratives from an "outside" they refer to, but rather represents different narratives. The book’s unique interdisciplinary approach shows how the implications of this fundamental insight go far beyond the sphere of literature and carry weight for both scholarly and scientific disciplines.
Harry Partch, Hobo Composer
During the Great Depression, Harry Partch rode the railways, following the fruit harvest across the country. From his experience among hoboes he found what he called ""a fountainhead of pure musical Americana."" Although he later wrote immense stage works for instruments of his own creation, he is still regularly called a hobo composer for the compositions that grew out of this period of his life. Yet few have questioned the label''s impact on his musical output, compositional life, and reception. Focusing on Partch the person alongside the cultural icon he represented, this study examines Par.
Time and Trace: Multidisciplinary Investigations of Temporality
Scholars in the arts, the humanities, and the sciences offer a multi-faceted investigation of the fundamental human experience of temporality—from reproductive politics and temporal logic to music and theater, from law to sustainability, from memory to the Vikings.
Reading the Social in American Studies
Reading the Social in American Studies offers a unique exploration of the advantages and benefits in using sociological terms and concepts in American literary and cultural studies and, conversely, in using literature—understood broadly—to uncover a microlevel of the social. Its temporal scope ranges from the early 19th to the 21st century, providing a historical dimension that is otherwise often missing from studies on the conjunction of literature and sociology. The contributors’ approaches include genre reflections as well as close readings, theoretical discussions of crucial sociological terms, and literary observations backed up by empirical sociological studies. The book will familiarize international readers with ideas on the social from both sides of the Atlantic, including scholarship of such figures as John Dewey, Georg Simmel, Norbert Elias, and Pierre Bourdieu.
