American Studies Commons^™

Cultural-Studies Criticism, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

Faulkner’s “career” within cultural studies began, within the history of the cultural-studies movement itself, comparatively late. This is not an especially remarkable point about Faulkner or any one particular writers; as a critical movement, cultural studies was never concerned more with any one figure than another, and was always concerned with an interdisciplinary and interdiscursive focus rather than a writer’s singularity. It is a point worth noting, however, because of the specific ways in which Faulkner’s work seems hospitable to cultural studies’ concerns. From his earliest stages of writing, Faulkner was aware of his work’s position within a field of …

A Certain Comfort: Betty Ford As First Lady, Nichola D. Gutgold, Linda B. Hobgood

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Her White House stay was short-lived, but the lessons of Betty Ford's experience remain vividly instructive. By accident of a national political crisis which catapulted her to the rank of the first lady in 1974, Mrs. Ford's tenure lasted a brief two years until her husband, Gerald R. Ford lost his bid for reelection. During that time, she developed a relationship of candor with the press and public. She spoke her mind on social and moral issues that were at the forefront of public debate. The positions she took were not always popular with the majority of Americans, many of …

[Introduction To] Growing Up In The South: An Anthology Of Modern Southern Literature, Suzanne W. Jones

Bookshelf

Something about the South has inspired the imaginations of an extraordinary number of America’s best storytellers—and greatest writers. That quality may be a rich, unequivocal sense of place, a living connection with the past, or the contradictions and passions that endow this region with awesome beauty and equally awesome tragedy. The stories in this superb collection of modern Southern writing are about childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood—in other words, about growing up in the South. Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” set in a South that remains segregated even after segregation is declared illegal, is the story of a …

[Introduction To] In The Presence Of Mine Enemies: Civil War In The Heart Of America, 1859-1863, Edward L. Ayers

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Winner of the Bancroft Prize: Through a gripping narrative based on massive new research, a leading historian reshapes our understanding of the Civil War.

Our standard Civil War histories tell a reassuring story of the triumph, in an inevitable conflict, of the dynamic, free-labor North over the traditional, slave-based South, vindicating the freedom principles built into the nation's foundations.

But at the time, on the borderlands of Pennsylvania and Virginia, no one expected war, and no one knew how it would turn out. The one certainty was that any war between the states would be fought in their fields and …

The Origin Of Armstrong's Hot Fives And Hot Sevens, Gene H. Anderson

Music Faculty Publications

It has been almost fifty years since Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of 1925-1928 were first recognized in print as a watershed of jazz history and the means by which the trumpeter emerged as the style's first transcendent figure. Since then these views have only intensified. The Hot Fives and Hot Sevens have come to be regarded as harbingers of all jazz since, with Armstrong's status as the “single most creative and innovative force in jazz history” and an “American genius” now well beyond dispute. This study does not question these claims but seeks, rather, to determine …

[Introduction To] South To A New Place: Region, Literature, Culture, Suzanne W. Jones, Sharon Monteith

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Taking Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place as a starting point, contributors to this exciting collection continue the work of critically and creatively remapping the South through their freewheeling studies of southern literature and culture. Appraising representations of the South within a context that is postmodern, diverse, widely inclusive, and international, the essays present multiple ways of imagining the South and examine both new places and old landscapes in an attempt to tie the mythic southern balloon down to earth.

In his foreword, an insightful discussion of numerous Souths and the ways they are perceived, Richard Gray explains …

[Introduction To] From Within The Frame: Storytelling In African-American Studies, Bertram D. Ashe

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The book explores the written representation of African-American oral storytelling from Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison to James Alan McPherson, Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman. At its core, the book compares the relationship of the "frame tale" - an inside-the-text storyteller telling a tale to an inside-the-text listener - with the relationship between the outside-the-text writer and reader. The progression is from Chesnutt's 1899 frame texts, in which the black spoken voice is contained by a white narrator/listener, to Bambara's sixties-era example of a "frameless" spoken voice text, to Wideman's neo-frame text of the late …

Race Relations, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

Since the early nineteenth century, when white southern writers began to defend slavery, relationships between blacks and whites became a central concern in southern literature. Many nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century works by white writers exacerbated racial prejudice by reproducing southern white society's racist ideology. But other southern writers, both white and black, have attempted to redress this problem by using literature to dismantle stereotypes and to imagine new relationships. The results of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement speeded up the process, suggesting new plots, new endings, and new points of view to southern writers of both races.

Screening Readerly Pleasures: Modernism, Melodrama, And Mass Markets In If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

Although Faulkner had already, with his earlier fiction, established himself as a practitioner of a rarefied, regional modernism, in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem he addresses the reading tastes and pleasures of the commercial market. Commenting as he does on the doctor and his wife’s tastes in the novel’s opening, Faulkner reveals his disdain for people who prefer the culture industry’s generic products to something more personal or idiosyncratic. Yet as his potential audience, those people or their tastes were of interest to Faulkner in 1939, the year the novel appeared. Following extended periods working in Hollywood, as well as …

Epic, The Oral Community, And The Memory Of Emancipation In Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth, Patrice Rankine

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

As the recently published epistolary collection reveals, Ralph Ellison was an unabashed Americanist, for better and for worse. Ellison's faith in American identity and the democratic process, which is evident at the end of Invisible Man in the protagonist's determination to "affirm the principle on which the country was built [and not the men who did the violence]" (574), is again manifest in the posthumous novel, Juneteenth. According to John F. Callahan, Ellison's litearary executor, the novel celebrates "the indivisibility of the American experience" (Juneteeth xvi). James Alan McPherson (the African-American writer to whom Ellison showed a portion …

"Hair Drama" On The Cover Of "Vibe" Magazine, Bertram D. Ashe

English Faculty Publications

This study consists of a cultural reading of the cover photograph of the June-July 1999 issue of Vibe magazine. It explores the relationship between Mase, an African-American male rap star, and the three anonymous African-American female models that surround him. The study interprets the cover through the long, straightened hair of the models, locating the models' hair in a historically-informed context of black hair theory and practice. The study argues that the models' presence on the cover, particularly their "bone straight and long" hair, "enhances" Mase in much the same way breast-augmented "trophy women" "enhance" their mates. Ultimately, the study …

[Introduction To] Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators And American Identities, Laura Browder

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In the 1920s, black janitor Sylvester Long reinvented himself as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, and Elizabeth Stern, the native-born daughter of a German Lutheran and a Welsh Baptist, authored the immigrant's narrative I Am a Woman--and a Jew; in the 1990s, Asa Carter, George Wallace's former speechwriter, produced the fake Cherokee autobiography, The Education of Little Tree. While striking, these examples of what Laura Browder calls ethnic impersonator autobiographies are by no means singular. Over the past 150 years, a number of American authors have left behind unwanted identities by writing themselves into new ethnicities.

Significantly, notes …

[Introduction To] Crossing The Color Line: Readings In Black And White, Suzanne W. Jones

Bookshelf

The complex truth about the color line -- its destructive effects, painful legacy, clandestine crossings, possible erasure -- is revealed more often in private than in public and has sometimes been visited more easily by novelists than historians. In this tradition, Crossing the Color Line, a powerful collection of nineteen contemporary stories, speaks the unspoken, explores the hidden, and voices both fear and hope about relationships between blacks and whites. The volume opens with stories by Alice Adams, Toni Cade Bambara, Ellen Douglas, Reynolds Price, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, and John A. Williams that focus on misunderstandings created by racial stereotypes …

[Introduction To] Valley Of The Shadow: Two Communities In The American Civil War, Edward L. Ayers

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Two communities in America's Great Valley--Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and Augusta County, Virginia--separated by only a few hundred miles, share much in their politics and ways of life. Yet they emerge on opposing sides of a war in which they zealously send their sons to fight and die. Here we see a Civil War that is not the inevitable conflict of rival societies, but a human drama, immediate, particular, engrossing.

Refighting Old Wars: Race Relations And Masculine Conventions In Fiction By Larry Brown And Madison Smartt Bell, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

Since the Civil War white male writers of the American South have created fond fictions about childhood friendships that crossed the color line. For example, much of the poignancy of Faulkner's The Unvanquished (1938) comes from Bayard Sartoris's description of the close relationship he had with a black servant boy Ringo in the Mississippi small town that will separate them as they grow older and that from the beginning marked them as different, based on race. After their boyhood games and real Civil War adventures together, Bayard and Ringo grow up to be, not close friends, but master and faithful …

On The Jazz Musician's Love/Hate Relationship With The Audience, Bertram D. Ashe

English Faculty Publications

An assistant professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, Bertram D. Ashe discusses how the intersection of an African American cool style with a black vernacular tradition and multi-racial audiences complicates audience-performer relations. In the vernacular tradition, performers play not "to" but "with" an audience, drawing on the call-response patterns that characterize the black aesthetic. Ashe notes that the vernacular tradition is not racial but cultural, and class can be as important a marker as race in determining audience expectations. Differing cultural backgrounds create, in Ashe's words, "competing realities," distinct sets of expectations that can shape a …

African-American Proverbs In Context By Sw. Anand Prahlad (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Growing up in Hanover, Virginia, "surrounded by people who cast the world in vibrant and poetic colors," Sw. Anand Prahlad "fell in love with proverbs at an early age" (ix). This lifelong love affair has resulted in a rich collection of African American proverbs that expanded as Prahlad went through college and graduate school, and did postgraduate research. All the while, he was sharpening his critical skills and developing the theoretical framework to establish a model for use in examining the varied components of proverbial speech in the African American community, proceeding on the assumption that in order to understand …

Edith Wharton's "Secret Sensitiveness" The Decoration Of Houses, And Her Fiction, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

Surely one of the reasons that Edith Wharton lived most of her life in France was that she greatly admired the way the French "instinctively applies to living the same rules that they applies to artistic creation." Wharton believed that the French had an eye for beauty, or what she called "the seeing eye," in contrast to Americans whose sight had been dimmed by the puritanism of their Anglo-Saxon heritage. However, in her last and unfinished novel, The Buccaneers (1938), Wharton suggests through her American protagonist's relationship with her European governess, Laura Testvalley, that the art of seeing can be …

New Narratives Of Southern Manhood: Race, Masculinity, And Closure In Ernest Gaines's Fiction, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

In his fiction Ernest Gaines is interested not only in deconstructing stereotypes but also in presenting new models of southern manhood, for both black and white men. While Gaines has employed traditional definitions of manhood in his fiction, the vision he presents in his most recent novel, A Lesson Before Dying, is similar to that of Cooper Thompson and other contemporary theorists of masculinity, who believe that young men must learn 'traditional masculinity is life threatening' and that being men in a modern world means accepting their vulnerability, expressing a range of emotions, asking for help and support, learning non-violent …

[Introduction To] The Oxford Book Of The American South: Testimony, Memory, And Fiction, Edward L. Ayers, Bradley C. Mittendorf

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Resonating with the testimony of slaves and slaveholders, the powerful and the powerless, women and men, black people and white, The Oxford Book of the American South combines the most telling fiction and nonfiction produced in the South from the late eighteenth century to the present. The first anthology to put short stories, novels, autobiographies, diaries, memoirs, and journalism together, this collection is a rich and varied record of life below the Mason Dixon line. We see the antebellum period both from the perspective of those who experienced it first-hand, such as Thomas Jefferson and Harriet Jacobs, as well as …

Moore, Opal, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Moore, Opal (b. 1953), poet, short story writer, essayist, educator, and critic of children's literature. Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Opal Moore was influenced from childhood by the particular dynamics of the Pentecostal church; echoes of that institution reverberate in her plots, themes, characters, tone, and language. When Moore entered Illinois Wesleyan University's School of Art in 1970, she was so shocked by her first real encounter with racism and her sens~ of powerlessness in the face of it that she sought some control over what was happening to her by writing, thus initiating her first journals. She also …

[Introduction To] The Viper On The Hearth: Mormons, Myths, And The Construction Of Heresy, Terryl Givens

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Nineteenth-century American writers frequently cast the Mormon as a stock villain in such fictional genres as mysteries, westerns, and popular romances. The Mormons were depicted as a violent and perverse people--the "viper on the hearth"--who sought to violate the domestic sphere of the mainstream. While other critics have mined the socio-political sources of anti-Mormonism, Givens is the first to reveal how popular fiction, in its attempt to deal with the sources and nature of this conflict, constructed an image of the Mormon as a religious and social "Other."

[Introduction To] All Over The Map: Rethinking American Regions, Edward L. Ayers, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Stephen Nissenbaum, Peter S. Onuf

Bookshelf

Even as Americans keep moving "all over the map" in the late twentieth century, they cherish memories of the places they come from. But where do these places—these regions—come from? What makes them so real? In this groundbreaking book a distinguished group of historians explores the concept of region in America, traces changes the idea has undergone in our national experience, and examines its meaning for Americans today.

Far from diminishing in importance, the authors conclude, regional differences continue to play a significant role in Americans' self-image. Regional identity, in fact, has always been fed by the very forces that …

"Murder And Mystery Mormon Style": Violence As Mediation In American Popular Culture, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

Terryl Givens's discussion of popular representations of Mormonism ("'Murder and Mystery Mormon Style': Violence and Mediation in American Popular Culture ) is a case in point, emphasizing the violence inherent in the acts of sociocultural and fictional mediation that have tried to contain the heretical challenge of Mormon theocracy. Mormonism has a complex cultural identity, as a religious group clearly outside the American mainstream and yet historically and ethnically American to the core. Nineteenth-century fictional representations of Mormonism tended to demonize the religion while at the same time deploring the violence of anti-Mormon bigotry; such representations mediated social violence …

Various Black Virginians As Told To Daryl Cumber Dance, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Shuckin' and Jivin': Folklore from Contemporary Black Americans, published in 1978, derived from fieldwork done far a doctoral dissertation at Virginia Commonwealth University by Daryl Cumber Dance (the only woman named Daryl I have heard of aside from Daryl Hannah). She gathered stories and verses from black Virginians in colleges, senior citizens' centers, and a penitentiary. Though she doesn't bring to the party an editorial touch as enlivening as Zora Neale Hurston's, she has an ear and-unlike far, far too many assiduous collectors of folktales - knows how to capture vocal rhythms on a page.

Reading The Endings In Katherine Anne Porter's "Old Mortality", Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

With these final sentences of "Old Mortality" (1937), Katherine Anne Porter qualifies the progress eighteen-year-old Miranda has made toward self-knowledge and sophisticated reading strategies. This long story is a bildungsroman of sorts, tracing Miranda's development from childhood to young adulthood, but focusing particularly on her apprenticeship as a reader. Porter links Miranda's quest for self-discovery with her attempts to determine fact from fiction in the stories her family tells about the love affairs, brief marriage, and early death of her beautiful Aunt Amy. By dismissing both her father's romantic legend and her Cousin Eva's feminist critique as untrue--by focusing on …

"He's Long Gone": The Theme Of Escape In Black Folklore And Literature, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Throughout their experiences in this country, certain segments of the Black population have viewed themselves as enslaved, whether they were chattel owned by slaveowners prior to emancipation, whether they were impressed into peonage and forced to work on white plantations and in chain gangs after slavery, whether they were victims of sharecropping systems that virtually reenslaved them during the twentieth century, whether they were the repressed and disfranchised and persecuted in Southern Jim Crow towns throughout the first half of the twentieth century, whether they are those trapped by unemployment and poverty today, or whether they are among the Blacks …

[Introduction To] The Promise Of The New South: Life After Reconstruction, Edward L. Ayers

Bookshelf

At a public picnic in the South in the 1890s, a young man paid five cents for his first chance to hear the revolutionary Edison talking machine. He eagerly listened as the soundman placed the needle down, only to find that through the tubes he held to his ears came the chilling sounds of a lynching. In this story, with its blend of new technology and old hatreds, genteel picnics and mob violence, Edward Ayers captures the history of the South in the years between Reconstruction and the turn of the century.

Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee …

[Introduction To] The Edge Of The South: Life In Nineteenth-Century Virginia, Edward L. Ayers, John C. Willis

Bookshelf

The chapters in this volume explore diverse scenes of nineteenth-century Virginia: the big house and the slave quarters, small farms and battlefields, freed slaves in the country and freed slaves in the city, dark coal mines and brightly illuminated caverns, raucous political rallies and genteel meetings of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Each essay offers a new perspective on a past which refuses to fit familiar ways of thinking about the nation and the South.

Afro-American Studies, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Afro-American Studies: Reference Works