Cohesion and Dissent in America

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Cohesion and Dissent in America

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Carol Colatrella - Editor
Joseph Alkana - Editor

SUNY Series in American Literature

Price: $53.50
Hardcover - 252 pages

Release Date: December 1993

ISBN10: 0-7914-1717-4
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-1717-1

Price: $31.95
Paperback - 252 pages

Release Date: December 1993

ISBN10: 0-7914-1718-2
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-1718-8

Available as a Google eBook for other eReaders and tablet devices. Click icon below...

Summary

This book addresses one of the most important theories to arise in recent American literary scholarship. Developed over the past two decades, Sacvan Bercovitch's ideas about the relationship of American cultural institutions to voices of dissent have repeatedly posed challenges to pervasive assumptions about American culture and the methods used by cultural critics and literary historians. The contributors to this book respond to different aspects of Bercovitch'
s ideas by exploring a wide range of scholarly disciplines, including American, Chicano, Amerindian, African-American, Asian-American, feminist, comparatist, philosophical, legal, and critical studies. In addition to essays that focus on the theoretical backgrounds and implications of Bercovitch's concepts, this book interrogates the uses of those concepts in the study of American literatures. Works by a variety of American writers are analyzed: the Colonial poet Phillis Wheatly; nineteenth-century writers Hawthorne and Melville; modernists Pound and Eliot; contemporary authors John Barth, Norman Mailer, Arturo Islas, and John Yau; and philosophers William James and Stanley Cavell. This book offers new directions to students of American culture, while it participates in the ongoing reassessment of American cultural and literary scholarship.

"The range of topics represented in the book suggests both the power and problems of Bercovitch's formulation. The final section in particular presents the possibilities offered by Bercovitch's idea of consensus and dissent in understanding the current debate over canon issues. Bercovitch's essay itself is a fine and honest accounting of his ideas that opens room for critique." -- Daniel Reagan, St. Anselm College

Carol Colatrella is Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Joseph Alkana is Assistant Professor in Department of English at the University of Miami, Florida.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Cohesion, Dissent, and the Aims of Criticism
Joseph Alkana

Part I: Cohesion and Dissent in the History of American Theory

1. Discovering America: A Cross-Cultural Perspective
Sacvan Bercovitch

2. Jewish Critics and American Literature: The Case of Sacvan Bercovitch
Rael Meyerowitz

3. Sacvan Bercovitch, Stanely Cavell, and the Romance Theory of American Fiction
Emily Miller Burdick

Part II: Establishing Modernist Traditions at Dissent

4. T.S. Eliot's American Dissent/Descent
Donald Childs

5. Work on Truth in America: The Example of William James
Barry Allen

6. The Orient as Pretext for Aesthetic and cultural Revolution in Modern American POetry
Kathleen Flanagan

Part III: Cohesion, Dissent, and Contemporary Cultural Boundaries

7. "Chaos Goes Uncourted": Joan Yau's Dis(-)Orienting Poetics
Priscilla Wald

8. The Hybridity of Culture in Arturo Islas's The Rain God
Jose David Saldivar

9. Norman Mailer and the Radical Text
Kathy Smith

Part IV: Problems of Marginality in America

10. Problematizing American Dissent: The Subject of Phillis Weatley
Helen Burke

11. Before the Law, after the Judgment: Schizophrenia in John Barth's The Floating Opera
Theron Britt

12. Bercovitch's Paradox: Critical Dissent, Marginality, and the Example of Melville
Carol Colatrella

Contributors

Related Subjects

American Literature
American History
American Philosophy
Comparative Literature
Cultural Critique
Literary Criticism

21944/23239(CFS//FK)

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