American Narratives

Author : Ghassan Zeineddine
Publisher : Wayne State University Press
ISBN 13 : 0814349269
Total Pages : 293 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hadha Baladuna written by Ghassan Zeineddine and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays and poems exploring the diverse range of the Arab American experience.

Author : Ann Brigham
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813937515
Total Pages : 343 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Road Narratives written by Ann Brigham and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2015-06-29 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The freedom to go anywhere and become anyone has profoundly shaped our national psyche. Transforming our sense of place and identity--whether in terms of social and economic status, or race and ethnicity, or gender and sexuality—American mobility is perhaps nowhere more vividly captured than in the image of the open road. From pioneer trails to the latest car commercial, the road looms large as a form of expansiveness and opportunity. Too often it is the celebratory idea of the road as a free-floating zone moving the traveler beyond the typical concerns of space and time that dominates the discussion. Rather than thinking of mobility as an escape from cultural tensions, however, Ann Brigham proposes that we understand mobility as a mode of engagement with them. She explores the genre of road narratives to show how mobility both thrives on and attempts to manage shifting conflicts about space and society in the United States. From the earliest transcontinental automobile narratives from the 1910s, through classics like Jack Kerouac's On the Road and the film Thelma & Louise, up to post-9/11 narratives, Brigham traces the ways in which mobility has been imagined, created, and interrogated over the past century and shows how mobility promises, and threatens, to incorporate the outsider and to blur boundaries. Bringing together textual and cultural analysis, theories of spatiality, and sociohistorical frameworks, this book offers an invigoratingly different view of mobility and a new understanding of the road narrative’s importance in American culture. Choice Outstanding Academic Title from American Library Association

Author : Thomas Myers
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0195363841
Total Pages : 267 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Walking Point written by Thomas Myers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1988-07-07 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing that the unprecedented nature of our first postmodernist war demanded either the revision of traditional modes of war writing or the discovery of new styles that would render the emotional and psychological center of a new national trauma, this study assesses the most important novels and personal memoirs written by Americans about the Vietnam War. Myers examines the work of Tim O'Brien, David Halberstam, Ward Just, Stephen Wright, John Del Vecchio, and others working in the modes of realism, the classical memoir, black humor, revised romanticism, and mnemonic narrative. Drawing on the work of thinkers such as Hayden White, Fredric Jameson, and Michel Foucault--whose understanding of the written text as a battleground of competing historical voices expands any definition of historical text--Myers defines the historical novel as a text that self-consciously and imaginatively shapes lived experience into a readable aesthetic form.

Author : Alan Nadel
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780822316992
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Containment Culture written by Alan Nadel and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alan Nadel provides a unique analysis of the rise of American postmodernism by viewing it as a breakdown in Cold War cultural narratives of containment. These narratives, which embodied an American postwar foreign policy charged with checking the spread of Communism, also operated, Nadel argues, within a wide spectrum of cultural life in the United States to contain atomic secrets, sexual license, gender roles, nuclear energy, and artistic expression. Because these narratives were deployed in films, books, and magazines at a time when American culture was for the first time able to dominate global entertainment and capitalize on global production, containment became one of the most widely disseminated and highly privileged national narratives in history. Examining a broad sweep of American culture, from the work of George Kennan to Playboy Magazine, from the movies of Doris Day and Walt Disney to those of Cecil B. DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock, from James Bond to Holden Caulfield, Nadel discloses the remarkable pervasiveness of the containment narrative. Drawing subtly on insights provided by contemporary theorists, including Baudrillard, Foucault, Jameson, Sedgwick, Certeau, and Hayden White, he situates the rhetoric of the Cold War within a gendered narrative powered by the unspoken potency of the atom. He then traces the breakdown of this discourse of containment through such events as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, and ties its collapse to the onset of American postmodernism, typified by works such as Catch–22 and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. An important work of cultural criticism, Containment Culture links atomic power with postmodernism and postwar politics, and shows how a multifarious national policy can become part of a nation’s cultural agenda and a source of meaning for its citizenry.

Author : Various
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 9780140390889
Total Pages : 388 pages
Book Rating : 4.8X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Colonial American Travel Narratives written by Various and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1994-08-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four journeys by early Americans Mary Rowlandson, Sarah Kemble Knight, William Byrd II, and Dr. Alexander Hamilton recount the vivid physical and psychological challenges of colonial life. Essential primary texts in the study of early American cultural life, they are now conveniently collected in a single volume. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Author : Olaudah Equiano
Publisher : Cengage Learning
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 472 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Captivity Narratives written by Olaudah Equiano and published by Cengage Learning. This book was released on 2000 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume collects a wide variety of works from a uniquely American literary tradition, the captivity narrative. Beginning with an excerpt from Hans Staden's The True History of His Captivity, which influenced the American captivity narrative, this volume presents accounts by early settlers held captive by Native Americans (Mary Rowlandson, John Smith), narratives by African American slaves (Olaudah Equiano, John Marrant), and others. Collected with the real-life accounts are two captivity poems by Lucy Terry and John Rolling Ridge, and several popular tales and legends on the subject.

Author : Kafū Nagai
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780231500241
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Stories written by Kafū Nagai and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2000-03-30 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nagai Kafu is one of the greatest modern Japanese writers, but until now his classic collection, American Stories, based on his sojourn from Japan to Washington State, Michigan, and New York City in the early years of the twentieth century, has never been available in English. Here, with a detailed and insightful introduction, is an elegant translation of Kafu's perceptive and lyrical account. Like de Tocqueville a century before, Kafu casts a fresh, keen eye on vibrant and varied America—world fairs, concert halls, and college campuses; saloons, the immigrant underclass, and red-light districts. Many of his vignettes involve encounters with fellow Japanese or Chinese immigrants, some of whom are poorly paid laborers facing daily discrimination. The stories paint a broad landscape of the challenges of American life for the poor, the foreign born, and the disaffected, peopled with crisp individual portraits that reveal the daily disappointments and occasional euphorias of modern life. Translator Mitsuko Iriye's introduction provides important cultural and biographical background about Kafu's upbringing in rapidly modernizing Japan, as well as literary context for this collection. In the first story, "Night Talk in a Cabin," three young men sailing from Japan to Seattle each reveal how poor prospects, shattered confidence, or a broken heart has driven him to seek a better life abroad. In "Atop the Hill," the narrator meets a fellow Japanese expatriate at a small midwestern religious college, who slowly reveals his complex reasons for leaving behind his wife in Japan. Caught between the pleasures of America's cities and the stoicism of its small towns, he wonders if he can ever return home. Kafu plays with the contradictions and complexities of early twentieth-century America, revealing the tawdry, poor, and mundane underside of New York's glamour in "Ladies of the Night" while celebrating the ingenuity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom of the American city in "Two Days in Chicago." At once sensitive and witty, elegant and gritty, these stories provide a nuanced outsider's view of the United States and a perfect entrance into modern Japanese literature.

Author : Joshua A. Claybourn
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 1640121706
Total Pages : 227 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Our American Story: The Search for a Shared National Narrative written by Joshua A. Claybourn and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019-06-01 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past few decades, the complicated divides of geography, class, religion, and race created deep fractures in the United States, each side fighting to advance its own mythology and political interests. We lack a central story, a common ground we can celebrate and enrich with deeper meaning. Unable to agree on first principles, we cannot agree on what it means to be American. As we dismantle or disregard symbols and themes that previously united us, can we replace them with stories and rites that unite our tribes and maintain meaning in our American identity? Against this backdrop, Our American Story features leading thinkers from across the political spectrum—Jim Banks, Pulitzer Prize–winner David W. Blight, Spencer P. Boyer, Eleanor Clift, John C. Danforth, Cody Delistraty, Richard A. Epstein, Nikolas Gvosdev, Cherie Harder, Jason Kuznicki, Gerard N. Magliocca, Markos Moulitsas, Ilya Somin, Cass R. Sunstein, Alan Taylor, James V. Wertsch, Gordon S. Wood, and Ali Wyne. Each draws on expertise within their respective fields of history, law, politics, and public policy to contribute a unique perspective about the American story. This collection explores whether a unifying story can be achieved and, if so, what that story could be. Purchase the audio edition.

Author : Mark Wish
Publisher : Coolest Stories Press
ISBN 13 : 1737573911
Total Pages : 235 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES 2022 written by Mark Wish and published by Coolest Stories Press. This book was released on 2022-01-10 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America's most talented storytellers share their most courageous, compelling, unputdownable work in a collection made for story lovers. Praised early on by Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk author Ben Fountain and The Weight of Blood author Laura McHugh, COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES is a new annual short story anthology whose guiding philosophy is that a collection of interesting "full meal" short stories could, as one @JustCoolStories Twitter follower put it, "make America cool again." Toward this end, COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES 2022 features a previously unpublished story by the multi-major-book-award-winning author of Blacktop Wasteland S. A. Cosby; the timeless, previously unpublished short story that led Tina Brown to sign Frances Park's When My Sister Was Cleopatra Moon; and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin's heartfelt rendering of married life that apparently was too startling for the editors of several university-affiliated literary magazines. And since interesting storytelling―rather than a list of publishing credits―matters most to story-hungry readers, COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES 2022 also includes a page-turner about dating in Hollywood written by MFA student Megan Ritchie; Brooklyn native D.Z. Stone's very first published fiction, a hilarious love story that celebrates the power of women; a heartbreaking account of adult siblinghood authored by David Ebenbach―among others in this treasure trove of unputdownable, sharply written, sometimes comic, sometimes frightening, always suspenseful stories loaded with twists and turns. "Coolest American Stories 2022 is a helluva lot of fun. These stories bump and brim with rambunctious energy and show that the American short story is alive and well. Many thanks to Mark Wish and Elizabeth Coffey for this breath―or let's call it a gale―of fresh literary air." --Ben Fountain, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk "Extraordinarily rich storytelling from fresh, vibrant voices―Coolest American Stories promises to be an annual force." --Laura McHugh, internationally bestselling author of The Weight of Blood and What’s Done in Darkness "Love short stories? This collection is for you. Not yet sure how to feel about short stories? This collection is definitely for you. Whoever you are, wherever you are: read these stories!" --Lori Ostlund, Flannery O’Connor Award winner and author of After the Parade and The Bigness of the World

Author : Hester Blum
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469606550
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The View from the Masthead written by Hester Blum and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With long, solitary periods at sea, far from literary and cultural centers, sailors comprise a remarkable population of readers and writers. Although their contributions have been little recognized in literary history, seamen were important figures in the nineteenth-century American literary sphere. In the first book to explore their unique contribution to literary culture, Hester Blum examines the first-person narratives of working sailors, from little-known sea tales to more famous works by Herman Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Richard Henry Dana. In their narratives, sailors wrote about how their working lives coexisted with--indeed, mutually drove--their imaginative lives. Even at leisure, they were always on the job site. Blum analyzes seamen's libraries, Barbary captivity narratives, naval memoirs, writings about the Galapagos Islands, Melville's sea vision, and the crisis of death and burial at sea. She argues that the extent of sailors' literacy and the range of their reading were unusual for a laboring class, belying the popular image of Jack Tar as merely a swaggering, profane, or marginal figure. As Blum demonstrates, seamen's narratives propose a method for aligning labor and contemplation that has broader applications for the study of American literature and history.