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. |
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... social relations . This position depended on denying the modern nature of slavery - its role in creating surpluses vital to the industrialization of Europe and North America , its rebirth after the invention xiv Foreword.
... nature . It is also my argument that many postnationalist scholars are not self - conscious of how their alternative definitions of space represent what Thomas Kuhn , in his book The Structure of Scien- tific Revolutions ( 1961 ) ...
... nature of reality . Members of these communities , accepting the re- ality of these paradigms , then proceed to solve problems defined by their shared hypotheses . Kuhn calls this process of problem solving normal science . But since ...
... nature as exceptional . Every other nation was characterized by an artful group mentality . The universal state of nature imagined by the philosophers of the Enlightenment had contracted to become the foundation of each modern nation ...
... nature to seeing the international marketplace as the state of nature . I will analyze in subsequent chapters the U.S. historians , literary critics , artists and art critics , musicians and music critics , architects and archi ...
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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 |
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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 |