Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of ExceptionalismU of Minnesota Press, 2002 - 352 trang In the 1940s, American thought experienced a cataclysmic paradigm shift. Before then, national ideology was shaped by American exceptionalism and bourgeois nationalism: elites saw themselves as the children of a homogeneous nation standing outside the history and culture of the Old World. This view repressed the cultures of those who did not fit the elite vision: people of color, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants. David W. Noble, a preeminent figure in American studies, inherited this ideology. However, like many who entered the field in the 1940s, he rejected the ideals of his intellectual predecessors and sought a new, multicultural, postnational scholarship. Throughout his career, Noble has examined this rupture in American intellectual life. In Death of a Nation, he presents the culmination of decades of thought in a sweeping treatise on the shaping of contemporary American studies and an eloquent summation of his distinguished career. Exploring the roots of American exceptionalism, Noble demonstrates that it was a doomed ideology. Capitalists who believed in a bounded nationalism also depended on a boundless, international marketplace. This contradiction was inherently unstable, and the belief in a unified national landscape exploded in World War II. The rupture provided an opening for alternative narratives as class, ethnicity, race, and region were reclaimed as part of the nation's history. Noble traces the effects of this shift among scholars and artists, and shows how even today they struggle to imagine an alternative post-national narrative and seek the meaning of local and national cultures in an increasingly transnational world. While Noble illustrates the challenges thatthe paradigm shift created, he also suggests solutions that will help scholars avoid romanticized and reductive approaches toward the study of American culture in the future. |
Từ bên trong sách
Kết quả 1-5 trong 83
... defined freedom as a release from the reciprocal relations and responsibilities they identified with feudalism . Native Americans , on the other hand , found fulfillment inside commu- nities , not outside them . European settlers in ...
... defined time as the present as it would look to the future . Noble's question for us is not which of these two sides we support , but why we are faced with such a limited , uncreative , and unimaginative choice in the first place ...
... define American citi- zens , those who had meaningful agency , as white males . Their story of American exceptionalism would not examine the history of women or Native Americans or African Americans because such an analysis would reveal ...
... defined by their shared hypotheses . " As a participant in the postnationalist American studies community , I am concerned that my younger colleagues — and almost all my col- leagues are younger because I was born in 1925 - continue to ...
... defined it as a human creation , comparable to the traditions of the medieval world that the bourgeoisie had rejected in the eighteenth century because they were merely human creations . Bourgeois histori- ans had played a major role in ...
Nội dung
The Birth and Death of American History | 11 |
Historians Leaving Home Killing Fathers | 48 |
The Crisis of American Literary Criticism from World War I to World War II | 89 |
Elegies for the National Landscape | 116 |
The New Literary Criticism The Death of the Nation Born in New England | 139 |
The Vanishing National Landscape Painting Architecture Music and Philosophy in the Early Twentieth Century | 161 |
Ấn bản in khác - Xem tất cả
Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism David W. Noble Xem trước bị giới hạn |
Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism David W. Noble Xem trước bị giới hạn - 2002 |