In a chartered steamship provided with every necessary comfort, a highly select group of sixty five excursionists including ministers of the gospels, doctors, high ranking officers and professors of various kind embarked on an a “pleasure excursion” to the Holy Land, Europe, Turkey, Egypt and intermediate points of interests. That was back in 1867. Mark Twain Samuel Langhorne...
The world we live in is divided into clearly defined territories and oppositions. Some of these mutually exclusive and hierarchical binary oppositions that spring to mind are Activity/Passivity, Sun/Moon, Culture/Nature, Day/Night, Father/Mother. All these dichotomies spring from the ultimate binary opposition Man/Woman, which is gendered and takes the male as the reference point...
Between 1909 and 1920, William Carlos Williams published in many literary magazines and managed to produce three books of poems despite his busy professional life as a doctor. However, the publication of the book Kora in Hell in 1920 marked a turning point in Williams’ career, as the volume, a collection of poetic prose fragments dedicated to Williams’ wife, Florence Herman...
The American novel, Leslie Fiedler writes, “is different from its European prototypes, and one of its essential differences arises from its chary treatment of woman and of sex” 31 . Indeed, American fiction written in the nineteenth century demonstrates a bias in favor of things male: in favor of hunting expeditions, whaling ships, and exploits in the wilderness. Ahab shaking his...
No sooner had the Second World War ended before articles started appearing in American periodicals graphically describing how the USA might fare in a nuclear attack[1] . Paradoxically since America emerged from the war with its mainland unscathed, its economy buoyant, and as the sole possessor of the new super-weapon, these narratives inverted the privilege of monopoly and...
Back in 1982, 20th Century Fox took a bold step where no major film studio had gone before by producing a movie entitled Making Love. Of course, films about lovemaking are old hat, but this one was unique in that the sex occurred between two attractive young men, Michael Ontkean and Harry Hamlin. The film was so bold in fact, that the producers prefaced it with an announcement...
In his autobiographical writings and letters Toomer characterized Cane as “a swan song ... the song of an end.“1 And recalling his visit to Georgia in 1921 he observed: “With Negroes also the trend was towards the small town and then towards the city- and industry and commerce and machines. The folk-spirit was walking in to die on the modern desert“ 142 . In a letter Toomer was...
The locale is the claustrophobically masculine precincts of the English Department of Harvard University. Chaos seems to break loose when the university is offered a million dollars for a professorship in the English Department, provided the holder is a woman. The professors of the department find it too tempting an offer to turn down, even if it means having a woman in their...
Emily Prager’s novel Eve’s Tattoo works within and against a gendered discourse of historical narratives, relying on oral tales and contemporary performance in order to revitalize a composite concentration camp victim whose fate is traced through a variety of frames. Ironic and postmodern, it acts as an important American Studies text for its interventions into historical...
“North American Culture and Institutions” courses, as they are called, have been taught in Brazil since the early 1980s. At the University of Brasilia where I teach, these courses have been offered since 1980 and are compulsory courses for the students of the Translation Department. They are designed to give support to English Language and Literature courses but look beyond...
This article deals with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” 1892 in the context of the interplay, at the end of the nineteenth century, between gender and family roles on the one hand, and questions of space and domesticity on the other. Gilman understood quite well that confinement to household work did not prepare women to join modern society and that...
A major aspect of what is termed Southern Renaissance literature in the US is known to be a striking obsession with the past. “The Southern writers of the postFirst World War age,” writes Lewis P. Simpson, “inaugurated a struggle to comprehend the nature of memory and history, and to assert the redemptive meaning of the classical-Christian past in its bearing on the present.” So...
American literature in the mid-twentieth century undertook a thorough critique of some of the guiding narratives of the nation’s popular mythology and political ideology. The fiction of the 1960s was especially intent on reevaluating such official discourses by de-centering narratives to include previously suppressed viewpoints.
As students of nineteenth-century American literature know, one issue that has aroused controversy is whether Henry James was, at least during the decade of the 1880s, a Zolaesque naturalist or not. The strongest argument comes from Sergio Perosa who writes that “James . . . for some time at least, felt at heart, and was in his fictional practice, a full-fledged scientific...
“Endings, endings everywhere; apocalypses large and small.” It is with this subtle rhythmic allusion to a classical masterpiece Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” that John Barth, theoretician and practitioner of American postmodernism, starts his latest book On with the Story: Stories 1996 . The booklength story opens by creating an ironic situation of...
The topic of this year’s seminar—“Communicating America: Media, Culture and Nation in the Age of Information” Cappadocia, October 1999 —aimed to focus on Americanization, its relationship to globalization, and what the implications of this might be for the future of American Studies in Turkey. The plenary speaker, Richard J. Pells University of Texas at Austin , had already...
Mark Twain’s two-volume Following the Equator 1897 is a fascinating travelogue, displaying all the characteristic touches of the author: keen powers of observation, ironic commentary, scathing wit, and a vividly evocative narrative style. The second volume, which relates Twain’s trip to India, achieves moreover a fine balancing act: there is in it both a colonial discourse and...
Demetra Vaka's In the Shadow of Islam, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1911, depicts Millicent Grey, a recent Radcliffe graduate bent on improving the world through her naïve attempts at international philanthropy. The athletic, blonde American heiress arrives in İstanbul with little more than the vaguest of good intentions and soon finds herself in a passionate struggle with a...
Captain Bainbridge set a unique table. Each quarter of the globe, America, Asia, Africa, and Europe, was represented by a decanter of fresh water drawn from it. He had samples of foods from each continent brought to the table simultaneously, to the great delight of his guests, who also came from the four corners of the world.
Hilda Doolittle 1886-1961 , a.k.a. H.D., remembered today alongside women poets contemporaneous with her such as Louise Bogan, Elenor Wyle, Edna St.Vincent Millay, and Mariannne Moore, first made a name for herself through her affiliation with the imagist and vorticist schools of modern poetry. Although she remained loyal to these technical innovations throughout her poetic...
In matters of theory and understanding, it is not uncommon for outsiders and spectators to gain a sharper and deeper insight into the actual meaning of what happens to go on before or around them than would be possible for the actual actors or participants, entirely absorbed as they must be in the events.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed a bill reforming the United States’ highly restrictive immigration policy. The site chosen for the ceremony was symbolic—the base of the Statue of Liberty. For Johnson and most Americans the statue was the most appropriate location to enact a bill that liberalized the nation’s immigration law. In the minds of many the Bartholdi statue...
This article provides a critical survey of the literature concerning the notion of realignment and examines to what an extent this theory can still account for electoral changes in present-day United States. Specifically, it checks the views of the major works on this topic against political developments and argues that, despite significant revisions, such a formulation no longer...
Wag the Dog is based on Larry Beinhart’s novel American Hero 1994 . Directed by Levinson and adapted to the screen by David Mamet, the film is a fairly stunning satire on the power of US media and their apparently complete control of people’s lives. It tells the tale of the final triumph of oblivion. In Wag the Dog an imaginary war is being created in order to detract public...
Co-written, directed by, and starring Warren Beatty, Bulworth 1998 is a scathing political satire that ranks with Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb 1963 . While Kubrick skewered assumptions about nuclear strategy at the height of the Cold War, Beatty indicts the current corporate manipulation of American politics. Bulworth...