American Allegory

Author : Black Hawk Hancock
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022604307X
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Allegory written by Black Hawk Hancock and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-05-30 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Perhaps,” wrote Ralph Ellison more than seventy years ago, “the zoot suit contains profound political meaning; perhaps the symmetrical frenzy of the Lindy-hop conceals clues to great potential power.” As Ellison noted then, many of our most mundane cultural forms are larger and more important than they appear, taking on great significance and an unexpected depth of meaning. What he saw in the power of the Lindy Hop—the dance that Life magazine once billed as “America’s True National Folk Dance”—would spread from black America to make a lasting impression on white America and offer us a truly compelling means of understanding our culture. But with what hidden implications? In American Allegory, Black Hawk Hancock offers an embedded and embodied ethnography that situates dance within a larger Chicago landscape of segregated social practices. Delving into two Chicago dance worlds, the Lindy and Steppin’, Hancock uses a combination of participant-observation and interviews to bring to the surface the racial tension that surrounds white use of black cultural forms. Focusing on new forms of appropriation in an era of multiculturalism, Hancock underscores the institutionalization of racial disparities and offers wonderful insights into the intersection of race and culture in America.

Author : D. Madsen
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230379931
Total Pages : 203 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Allegory in America written by D. Madsen and published by Springer. This book was released on 1995-12-18 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Allegory in America surveys the history of American allegorical writing from the Puritans through the period of American romanticism to postmodernism. In a series of theoretical chapters the cultural function of allegory is discussed in relation to the mythology of American exceptionalism. Each theoretical chapter is followed by a chapter that analyzes a specific text or group of texts. Allegorical indeterminacy is seen to produce a literary tradition that both represents and subverts the ideals of American orthodoxy.

Author : J. Elliott
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230612806
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory written by J. Elliott and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-06-09 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that popular feminist fiction provided a key means by which American culture narrated and negotiated the perceived breakdown of American progress after the 1960s. It explores the intersection of two key features of late twentieth-century American culture.

Author : Frederick M. Dolan
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501726234
Total Pages : 246 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Allegories of America written by Frederick M. Dolan and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Allegories of America offers a bold idea of what, in terms of political theory, it means to be American. Beginning with the question What do we want from a theory of politics? Dolan explores the metaphysics of American-ness and stops along the way to reflect on John Winthrop, the Constitution, 1950s behavioralist social science, James Merrill, and William Burroughs. The pressing problem, in Dolan's view, is how to find a vocabulary for politics in the absence of European metaphysics. American political thinkers, he suggests, might respond by approaching their own theories as allegories. The postmodern dilemma of the loss of traditional absolutes would thus assume the status of a national mythology—America's perennial identity crisis in the absence of a tradition establishing the legitimacy of its founding. After examining the mid-Atlantic sermons of John Winthrop, the spiritual founding father, Dolan reflects on the authority of the Constitution and the Federalist. He then takes on questions of representation in Cold War ideology, focusing on the language of David Easton and other liberal political "behaviorists," as well as on cold War cinema and the coverage of international affairs by American journalists. Additional discussions are inspired by Hannah Arendt's recasting of political theory in a narrative framework. here Dolan considers two starkly contrasting postwar literary figures—William S. Burroughs and James Merrill—both of whom have a troubled relationship to politics but nonetheless register an urgent need to articulate its dangers and opportunities. Alongside Merrill's unraveling of the distinction between the serious and the fictive, Dolan assesses the attempt in Arendt's On Revolution to reclaim fictional devices for political reflection.

Author : Maureen Quilligan
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501724487
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Language of Allegory written by Maureen Quilligan and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively and innovative work treats a body of literature not previously regarded as a unified genre. Offering comparative readings of a number of texts that are traditionally called allegories and that cover a wide time span, Maureen Quilligan formulates a vocabulary for talking about the distinctive generic elements they share. The texts she considers range from the twelfth-century De planctu naturae to Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and include such works as Le Roman de la Rose, Langland's Piers Plowman, Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, Melville's Confidence Man, and Spenser's Faerie Queene. Whether or not readers agree with this book, they will enjoy and profit from it.

Author : Rita Copeland
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139827898
Total Pages : 325 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Allegory written by Rita Copeland and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-25 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Allegory is a vast subject, and its knotty history is daunting to students and even advanced scholars venturing outside their own historical specializations. This Companion will present, lucidly, systematically, and expertly, the various threads that comprise the allegorical tradition over its entire chronological range. Beginning with Greek antiquity, the volume shows how the earliest systems of allegory developed in poetry dealing with philosophy, mystical religion, and hermeneutics. Once the earliest histories and themes of the allegorical tradition have been presented, the volume turns to literary, intellectual, and cultural manifestations of allegory through the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The essays in the last section address literary and theoretical approaches to allegory in the modern era, from reactions to allegory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to reevaluations of its power in the thought of the twentieth century and beyond.

Author : K. Sugg
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230616216
Total Pages : 251 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Gender and Allegory in Transamerican Fiction and Performance written by K. Sugg and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-10-27 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By rethinking contemporary debates regarding the politics of aesthetic forms, Gender and Allegory in Transamerican Fiction and Performance explores how allegory can be used to resolve the "problem" of identity in both political theory and literary studies. Examining fiction and performance from Zoé Valdés and Cherríe Moraga to Def Poetry Jam and Carmelita Tropicana, Sugg suggests that the representational oscillations of allegory can reflect and illuminate the fraught dynamics of identity discourses and categories in the Americas. Using a wide array of theoretical and aesthetic sources from the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, this book argues for the crucial and potentially transformative role of feminist cultural production in transamerican public cultures.

Author : Russell J J Mathews
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781662407604
Total Pages : 136 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Commander and Chief written by Russell J J Mathews and published by . This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The door slammed open. He was now in the open. He insisted on avoiding the underground tunnels of the US Capitol. The Secret Service advance team had a fit. Too bad. He did it anyway. Fierce and unrelenting, he chose his battles. He never lost a campaign. As a decorated Army soldier in Afghanistan, he worthily received several medals for valor in combat. Then the impossible happened. A stealthier drone in the sky suddenly spit fire at the President from overhead. This dragon duped everyone, including the Secret Service. Its contrail sizzled at high velocity, hissing and whistling blasphemies against democracy and the new President. That serpent knew his face, and its package had the President's name on it. And next, a blinding flash. It was as though the new President, Micco Menewah, had been blindsided by a thug in an alley-one that was meaner and more nefarious. The nation got played, and the President got popped. The opponent forced its hand with a fist clenched with no rules. The heat intensified with a blinding white-hot flash, and then the lights went out for the moment. The first Native American President of the United States of America will listen and then go to work, keeping his oath during his first day on the job.

Author : Stephanie Pratt
Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN 13 : 0806188847
Total Pages : 210 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Indians in British Art, 1700-1840 written by Stephanie Pratt and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2013-02-11 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ask anyone the world over to identify a figure in buckskins with a feather bonnet, and the answer will be “Indian.” Many works of art produced by non-Native artists have reflected such a limited viewpoint. In American Indians in British Art, 1700–1840, Stephanie Pratt explores for the first time an artistic tradition that avoided simplification and that instead portrayed Native peoples in a surprisingly complex light. During the eighteenth century, the British allied themselves with Indian tribes to counter the American colonial rebellion. In response, British artists produced a large volume of work focusing on American Indians. Although these works depicted their subjects as either noble or ignoble savages, they also represented Indians as active participants in contemporary society. Pratt places artistic works in historical context and traces a movement away from abstraction, where Indians were symbols rather than actual people, to representational art, which portrayed Indians as actors on the colonial stage. But Pratt also argues that to view these images as mere illustrations of historical events or individuals would be reductive. As works of art they contain formal characteristics and ideological content that diminish their documentary value.

Author : Cristelle Baskins
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351568957
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Early Modern Visual Allegory written by Cristelle Baskins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book in over twenty-five years devoted solely to allegory and personification in art history, this anthology complements current literary and cultural studies of allegory. The volume re-examines early modern allegorical imagery in light of crucial material, contextual and methodological questions: how are allegories conceived; for whom; and for what purposes? Contributors consider a wide range of allegorical representations in the visual arts and material culture, of both early modern Europe and the colonial "New World" 1400-1800. Essays included here examine paintings, sculpture, prints, architecture and the spaces of public ritual while discussing the process and theory of interpretation, formation of audiences, reception history, appropriation and censorship. A special focus on the medium of the body in visual allegory unites the volume's diverse materials and methods.