This book examines the cultural criticism led by New York intellectuals from the 1960s onwards, considering the influence of such critique on American collective memory and contemporary public culture. With a focus on essays that appeared in Dissent magazine—one of the most important journals of the New York intellectuals—from the year of its launch in 1954 to its most recent issue, as well as representative books on American culture by Daniel Bell and Russell Jacoby, the author contends that post-Sixties narratives constitute a special paradigm of cultural criticism that seek radical possibilities for societal change in the US, based on a use of the 1960s as an index for understanding American cultural and political life. A study of the ways in which narratives can move beyond story-telling to have interpretative and ideological functions as a form of criticism, this book will appeal to scholars of cultural studies and sociology, as well as those working in the fields of linguistics and literary theory.

A study of post-Vietnam American literature and culture focusing on narratives of bodily trauma evident in a wide range of texts by and about other white men.

Please note this is a 'Palgrave to Order' title (PTO). Stock of this book requires shipment from an overseas supplier. It will be delivered to you within 12 weeks. In this first study of Latino/a literature to systematically examine the post-Sixties generation of writers, The Latino/a Canon challenges the ways that Latino/a literary studies imagines the relationship between art, politics, and the market.

Do we determine our actions, or are our actions ruled by the structure of our society? Does our culture create us, or do we create our culture? Within history and social theory there is a fundamental division of opinion between those who explain human action by considering the intentions, reasons and motives of individuals and those who use broader social structures. Structural Idealism presents a theory of social and historical explanation which argues that “idealists” such as Hegel, who champion human agency, and “materialists” such as Marx, who support social structure, have grasped but part of a larger truth. The book contends that we have to explain human actions simultaneously by both the ideas human actors bring to a situation and the way in which previous actions have created social structures that condition those ideas. Through this realization we can see how all forms of knowledge, from the historical roots of modern philosophy to today’s popular culture, both condition and are conditioned by structural ideals. This book challenges our perception of how cultures and ideals are formed, and shows that while structural ideals allow people to co-operate as they work toward goals — their own or those of their community — these images of perfection, so easily accepted as the unalterable structure of our society, can be changed, and are changed, by individuals. Structural Idealism asks us to think beneath the surface of our society, and will be of special interest to philosophers, sociologists, historians and cultural theorists.

In Failed Frontiersmen, James Donahue writes that one of the founding and most persistent mythologies of the United States is that of the American frontier. Looking at a selection of twentieth-century American male fiction writers—E. L. Doctorow, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Gerald Vizenor, and Cormac McCarthy—he shows how they reevaluated the historical romance of frontier mythology in response to the social and political movements of the 1960s (particularly regarding the Vietnam War, civil rights, and the treatment of Native Americans). Although these writers focus on different moments in American history and different geographic locations, the author reveals their commonly held belief that the frontier mythology failed to deliver on its promises of cultural stability and political advancement, especially in the face of the multicultural crucible of the 1960s. Cultural Frames, Framing Culture American Literatures Initiative

How does Edward Said's Orientalism speak to us today? What relevance did and does it have politically and intellectually? How and in what modes does Orientalism engage with new, intersecting fields of inquiry? At the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Orientalism these questions shape the essays collected in the present volume. The "after" of the title does not only guide the contributions in a look on past discussions, but specifically points at future research as well. Orientalism's critical entanglements are thus connected to productive looks; these productive looks make us read differently, but only after we recognize our struggle with the dominant notions that we live by, that divide and unite us. More specifically, this volume addresses three fields of research enabling productive looks: visual culture; the body, sexuality and the performative; and national identities, modernity and gender. All articles, weaving delicate, new analytical and theoretical textures, maintain vital links with at least two of the fields mentioned. Orientalism's role as a cultural catalyst is gauged in the analysis of materials such as Iranian film, 16th and 17th century Venetian representations of "the Turk," Barthes' take on Japanese culture, modern Arab travel narratives, Palestinian popular culture, photography on and of the Maghreb, Japanese queer and gay culture, the 19th century Illustrated London News, theories on migration and exile, postcolonial cinema, and Hanan al-Shaykh's and Mai Ghoussoub's writing on civil war in Lebanon. Authors include: Karina Eileraas, Belgin Turan Özkaya, Joshua Paul Dale, John Potvin, Mark McLelland, Tina Sherwell, Nasrin Rahimieh, Stephen Morton, Anastasia Vallasopoulos, Suha Kudsieh and Kate McInturff.

This book offers a challenge to conventional histories of secularisation by focusing upon the importance of central religious narratives. These narratives are changed significantly over time, but also to have been invested with importance and meaning by religious individuals and organisations as well as by secular ones.

Transnational Latina Narratives is the first critical study of its kind to examine twenty-first-century Latina narratives by female authors of diverse Latin American heritages based in the U.S. Heredia s comparative perspective on gender, race and migrations between Latin America and the U.S. demonstrates the changing national landscape that needs to accommodate an ever-growing Latino/a presence. This book draws on the work of Denise Chávez, Sandra Cisneros, Marta Moreno Vega, Angie Cruz, and Marie Arana, as well as a diverse blend of popular culture. Heredia s thought-provoking insights seek to empower the representation of women who are transnational ambassadors in modern trans-American literature.

American Fiction in Transition is a study of the observer-hero narrative, a highly significant but critically neglected genre of the American novel. Through the lens of this transitional genre, the book explores the 1990s in relation to debates about the end of postmodernism, and connects the decade to other transitional periods in US literature. Novels by four major contemporary writers are examined: Philip Roth, Paul Auster, E. L. Doctorow and Jeffrey Eugenides. Each novel has a similar structure: an observer-narrator tells the story of an important person in his life who has died. But each story is equally about the struggle to tell the story, to find adequate means to narrate the transitional quality of the hero's life. In playing out this narrative struggle, each novel thereby addresses the broader problem of historical transition, a problem that marks the legacy of the postmodern era in American literature and culture.